HURDLES TO ANSWERED PRAYER

Recognizing and overcoming hurdles to answered prayer will protect your prayer potential and give you the right motivation and perspective for prayer.

PRINCIPLES

Six hurdles to answered prayer are—

• Learning about prayer but not practicing it: We gain a false sense of satisfaction when we learn about the Bible and prayer but don’t actually live out what we have learned. It doesn’t matter how much we know; our knowledge will not help us spiritually unless we put it into practice. The best approach to prayer is to pray.

• Mental assent rather that action: Mental assent agrees with God but does not believe God. A variation of mental assent is sense knowledge. This attitude says, I’ll believe it when I see it whereas faith is believing before we see the manifestation of our prayers. James 1:22 tells us that if we think just listening to the Word is enough, we are deceived. We must believe the Word and act on it.

• Hearing the Word but not absorbing it: When we don’t absorb the Word, satan steals it away so that it cannot have an impact on our relationship with God. We absorb the Word by meditating on it, by letting it sink into our spirits. When this happens, the devil can’t stop the Word because God now has something He can use to accomplish His will in our lives.

• Hoping rather than having Faith” There are two ways in which the idea of hope dan interfere with what God wants to accomplish through prayer(1) when we apply the biblical definition of hope (future fulfillment) to present day faith situations and (2) when our hope is not the biblical kind, but is really just wishful thinking.

• Praying for Faith: When we pray for faith, we are praying to believe. Either we believe or we don’t believe. Such prayer is really based on unbelief and therefore will not be answered. Faith comes and increase as we hear, believe, and obey the Word

• Laziness/cares of the World: If we are too lazy to pray, we risk being call a wicked, lazy servant by God in regard to this crucial purpose for our lives. When we allow the concerns of this life to crowd out the practice or prayer, then what we do know about prayer will not bear fruit in our lives.

CONCLUSION

We must be careful not to become complacent in our knowledge of the Word and neglect to nurture it in our lives. However, when we hear, absorb and apply the Word we will bear the fruit of much spiritual growth and answered prayer.

Go to Persecution.com A place to gather and pray for the persecuted church. Read prayer requests from around the world and post your own prayers specifically for your brothers and sisters who are being persecuted. Go to Persecution.com A place to gather and pray for the persecuted church. Read prayer requests from around the world and post your own prayers specifically for your brothers and sisters who are being persecuted.