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Apr 08, 2023 06:00am

Does God Hear Us When We Pray?

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“Please listen to me, God! I need your help!”

Many of us have cried out something similar to this in a time of distress or uncertainty. We can relate to king David when he prayed, “Give ear to my words, O LORD; consider my groaning. Give attention to the sound of my cry, my King and my God, for to you do I pray,” (Psalms 5:1–2)!

If we are honest though, there are probably times we have wondered, Does God really hear me when I pray? And if He does, how can we be sure?

God hears everything, even our thoughts in private prayers, because He knows everything and is everywhere—He is omniscient and omnipresent. Jesus said our heavenly Father knows what we need before we even ask Him (Matthew 6:8), and David concurs that God knows all our thoughts from afar (Psalm 139:2).

So, yes, God hears us in the sense that He is cognitively aware of what we are praying. But many of us want to know if He hears us in the sense that he responds, or acts, when we pray. We want to know if God is going to give us what we ask for in prayer.

The Bible says if we pray according to God’s will, He hears us, and we can be sure we will receive the things for which we ask.

“And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him” (1 John 5:14–15).

So, how can we know God’s will? Many of us have tried to decipher the will of God as if we were playing a game of Magic 8 Ball—you shake the ball, ask a question, and the mystical blue liquid reveals a Yes, No, Maybe, or the ever-dreaded Try Again. However, God’s will is not an ambiguous guessing game or a grasping of straws—it can be found plainly in God’s Word.

First Thessalonians 4:3 straightforwardly says, “For this is the will of God, your sanctification.” And again, in 5:16–18 it says, “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”

Also, anytime we are given a command in Scripture, we can be assured it is God’s will for us. In this realm, we have the Ten Commandments, imperatives such as “flee from sexual immorality” (Romans 6:18) and “do not be anxious” (Philippians 4:6), and being subject to governing authorities (1 Peter 2:13–15).

If we pray along these lines—Lord, help me to flee from sexual immorality; Lord, help me to listen to my boss about how he wants this project done even though I don’t agree with him; Lord, make me more like Christ—then we know God will respond favorably to our prayers. However, there are times when God will not listen to our prayers or respond positively to them. Our sin can become a barrier to God hearing our prayers.

The prophet Isaiah spoke of a time like this:
Behold, the LORD’S hand is not shortened, that it cannot save,
or his ear dull, that it cannot hear;
but your iniquities have made a separation
between you and your God,
and your sins have hidden his face from you
so that he does not hear. Isaiah 59:1–2

We do not cause God to become physically hard of hearing or less omniscient, rather he does not hear refers to God not giving his help or rescue, or not acquiescing to our requests.

When we cherish sin in our hearts and allow ourselves to be immersed in it, we are clearly demonstrating that we only want God as our genie—a cosmic vending machine—and we value our sin over obeying him. When our hearts are in this condition, we should not think that God will listen to our prayers. As Bible commentator Matthew Henry said, “We cannot expect that he should countenance us while we go on to affront him.” A countenance refers to someone’s face or facial expression. Used in this sense, it refers to God looking upon us with favor.

God does not look at sin favorably, nor can He. God is holy by definition of His very nature, so necessarily,He must hate sin; it is in opposition to His character. When His children sin (those who have turned from their sins and trusted in Christ for salvation), there no longer remains any punishment for sin because Christ took that punishment onto Himself when He died on the cross. However, God does not reward sin. If we are asking for things through prayer while at the same time harboring unrepentant sin, we often ask wrongly to spend it on our own passions (James 4:3). God will not be party to helping us further our sinfulness.

Other times that Jesus says God may not listen to our prayers are when we pray just to be seen and thought well of by others, or when we use big words or phrases (or popular Christian lingo with no meaning behind it) just to sound intelligent or spiritual (Matthew 6:5–8).

But when we pray the way Jesus modeled to his disciples in the Lord’s Prayer with a reverent, obedient, humble, repentant heart that acknowledges our reliance on God and a desire for His glory and our holiness, God will hear us from heaven and give us grace.

And when we don’t know what to say, we can be comforted by the fact that the Holy Spirit understands our hearts and perfectly prays for us according to God’s will:
Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. Romans 8:26–27