The Prayers God Doesn't Hear

I was halfway up a steep hill on the outskirts of Drayton Valley, sweating, legs complaining, with a Scripture scribbled on the back of my hand.

Many of my clearest moments with God haven't come at a desk. They've come with my lungs burning on a run. I'd been chewing on the same verse for twenty minutes, chanting it in time with my feet hitting the pavement like a song stuck on repeat.

If we ask a-ny-thing according to His will He hears us

A hundred times. Then a hundred more.

Somewhere around the eight-hundredth time — because I can be slow — one small word came up off that verse and hit me.

If.

If we ask?

I said it out loud, right there on the hill. "Lord, what if I don't ask according to Your will? Are You saying You won't hear me? Do some prayers just go unheard?"

And the Holy Spirit answered me almost before I finished asking:

Steve, most of the people asking why their prayers aren't being answered should be asking why their prayers aren't being heard.

It stopped me in my tracks. Which was convenient, because I needed a break from that hill anyway.

I want to be careful here, because that sentence can be heard wrong.

God is everywhere and He knows everything. There's no corner of the world where you can get away from His awareness. In that sense He hears every word out of every mouth, including yours and mine.

But there's hearing and there's hearing.

You already know the difference. You listen to dozens of voices every day and most of them slide right past you, and then somebody speaks and you lean in without deciding to. Everybody's words reach your ears. Not everybody gets your attention.

Scripture says the same thing about God, and it says it more bluntly than we're comfortable with:

If I regard wickedness in my heart, The Lord will not hear. — Psalm 66:18

We know that God does not hear sinners; but if anyone is God-fearing and does His will, He hears him. — John 9:31

The LORD is far from the wicked, But He hears the prayer of the righteous. — Proverbs 15:29

And this one, from Peter — in the New Testament, I might add, for anybody about to file this under Old Testament law:

For the eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous, And His ears attend to their prayer, But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil. — 1 Peter 3:12

Attend to. That's not passive hearing. That's leaning in. That's readiness to act.

Which means not everybody has God's undivided attention. Having a ticket to heaven for when you die doesn't mean heaven is jumping to attention while you live.

Here's the one that ought to settle it.

He was heard because of His piety. — Hebrews 5:7

That's said about Jesus. The word behind "piety" carries the sense of reverence — godly fear, submission.

If anybody was ever going to get a pass on the submission requirement, surely it was the Son of God. He didn't get one. Scripture says plainly He was heard because of something. Not because of who He was. Not because He knew the right words. Because of the way He lived before His Father.

That offends my natural mind, and I think it's supposed to.

I've lived on both sides of this.

From about nineteen to thirty-eight, I was a Christian who flatly would not surrender. I was spiritually lazy. I drank too much, ate garbage, smoked like a diesel in January, and kept most of it hidden from everybody but God.

Every so often, usually after a good sermon, I'd try harder for a few weeks in my own strength. Never long enough to see anything.

And I want you to notice what did not happen during those twenty years. God never left me. I never once doubted He loved me. He was patient and merciful the entire time.

I just didn't see much when I prayed. Few healings. Little breakthrough. Nothing you'd call fruit.

You can be loved by God, part of His family, on your way to heaven — and living a powerless life. Most Christians are.

Paul said that in the last days people would have a form of godliness while denying its power.

I've wondered for years why anybody would deny something so obviously worth having. Here's my best answer: because we don't want to pay for it.

If I'm not willing to live the kind of life that carries power, I'd honestly rather not know that life exists. Nobody enjoys feeling like they're missing something. I can be perfectly proud of a hundred pounds of silver — right up until I find out I could have had a hundred pounds of gold.

It's easier to settle for a small life when you don't have to admit you chose it.

So we rewrite the theology instead of the life. It's easier to say the power isn't for today than to admit I'm not willing to pay for it. It's easier to say "I guess it wasn't God's will" than to say "I wasn't willing to count the cost."

God didn't stop moving. We stopped yielding.

The church doesn't have a power problem. It has a surrender problem.

Now let me give you something you can actually do with this, because I don't want to leave you with a diagnosis and no doctor.

Study your breakthroughs.

When something remarkable happens — a healing, a door opening, unexpected favor, money showing up you can't explain — I don't just celebrate it. I stop and ask a question most people never ask:

Did I do anything right?

Not to take the credit. To find the door.

What happened just before the miracle? Was I fasting? Had I finally forgiven somebody? Had I obeyed on something hard? Did I sow a seed? What caused my faith to spike?

God isn't moody, and breakthroughs aren't random. When something remarkable happens around you, it's very often because something happened in you first. That's worth knowing. That's worth repeating.

If you stumble onto treasure in a field, draw yourself a map so you can find your way back.

One more thing, and then I'll let you go.

Surrender and obedience are not the whole story.

I preached like they were for a few years, because after I started marinating in the Word and saying yes to God, I saw so much break loose that I couldn't imagine there was anything else to it.

But there's a hole in that theory, and here it is. If quitting your vices were the guaranteed key to a powerful life, then every well-behaved Christian in every pew would be walking in miracles.

They aren't. You know decent, clean-living, Bible-reading people whose prayers don't seem to carry any weight at all.

So something else is going on. There were two other decisions I made early — almost without noticing — that mattered more than I understood at the time. My wife spotted them years before I did and kept telling me to preach on them.

That's what the next part of the book is about…

This is an excerpt from my book, Dependently Wealthy — the story of how a broke, insecure preacher who knew nothing about business learned to live the kind of life heaven leans in to hear. Available in paperback and audio on Amazon.