Prayer began in a garden, and it began as a conversation. God walked with Adam in the cool of the day, and the two of them talked together. That is all prayer has ever been: two parties speaking and listening. Everything written about it since, including everything I have written, is commentary on that.
What broke the conversation was not that God went quiet. Man handed over his birthright, and with it he handed the enemy a set of titles he has used ever since: prince of the power of the air, god of this world, accuser of the brethren. When you tell me your prayers are hitting the ceiling, I believe you. But that is not God’s silence you are hearing. It is the racket of a kingdom man put himself under.
That is why I cannot teach you prayer as a technique, and why you should be suspicious of anyone who offers to. Prayer is a restored relationship, and the restoration cost the blood of Jesus Christ. He has delivered us from the power of darkness and translated us into the kingdom of His dear Son. He did not merely improve our standing. He moved us. The conversation in that garden was not patched up. It was bought back, and the price was the cross and the empty tomb. Everything I am going to say to you rests on that, and not one word of it works without it.
How Does God Speak When You Pray?
Most people who tell me they cannot pray mean they cannot think of enough to say. They have understood half of it. The other half is listening, and it is the half almost nobody is ever taught.
God seldom speaks in an audible voice. He speaks through His Word. He speaks through a sermon. He speaks through some remark a friend makes without any idea what he has just done. He speaks through a thought that comes up inside you that is wiser than you are. The trouble is hardly ever that He is not speaking. The trouble is that we have never trained ourselves to expect it, and so we talk straight over the top of Him.
Two things will change that. Expect Him to be speaking. Then test what you hear against the Word, because the same Bible that tells you God speaks also tells you to try the spirits.
→ God Is Talking. Are You Listening? takes this further, with six keys to hearing from God.
What Do You Do When the Answer Does Not Come?
Every collapse I have seen in a person’s prayer life comes back to this one point, so I want you to settle it now, before you need it.
God is not a man, that He should lie. He has set His word above His own name, which is to say He has staked His reputation on His promises being good. Every word of God proves true. He is a shield to all who take refuge in Him.
You will need that most on the day the answer has not come and the circumstances have hardened. That is the moment when guilt, anger and bitterness can take over. Guilt tells you that you did not have faith enough. Anger tells you He let you down. Bitterness poisons everything you touch for years afterward. All three begin with the same quiet conclusion: God did not keep His word.
He did. Trusting Him when you have nothing but His word to go on is not naivety, whatever the world calls it. It is the thing that sets Him free to work, because He has chosen to work through the prayers of people who believe Him.
→ Why Did My Prayers Fail? deals with unanswered prayer honestly, and with what the enemy does to you while you are grieving.
What Is Your Part, and What Is God's?
Abraham learned this before he was even Abraham. God said go, and he went. That is the man-side. God said He would make him a nation. That is the God-side. Do the man-side, and God will do His.
Then came twenty-five years of nothing at all. Sarai stayed barren. Abram reminded God that it takes children to make a nation. God answered by renewing the promise: his seed would be as the dust of the earth and as the stars of the sky. Still no child came.
At ninety-nine, with his wife long past the age of bearing, he was told to start calling himself Father of Many Nations, and she to call herself Mother of Nations. They began calling things that were not as though they were. He fell on his face laughing. She laughed behind the tent door. And it was counted to him for righteousness, and he was called the friend of God.
There are five places along that road where our own prayers die, and I want you to know them by name: failing to do the man-side at all, losing patience when the answer is slow, helping God along with a scheme of our own, quitting when it starts to look impossible, and talking the whole thing down with our own mouth.
→ How Not to Kill Your Prayers walks all five in detail, and publishes 17 September 2027.
Can Your Own Words Cancel Your Prayers?
You can undo in one sentence what you spent an hour building. You are snared by the words of your own lips. The tongue holds death and life.
Now this is not superstition about positive thinking, and I do not want you hearing it that way. It is that faith and speech are joined. “I’m only telling it like it is” sounds like plain honesty and works like unbelief, because Abraham’s kind of faith calls the things that are not as though they were. Believing comes before seeing rather than after it. You will have to be willing to look a fool. Abraham was.
→ Persistent Prayer is the practical companion: how to keep going when a prayer has to be prayed for years.
How Do You Know You Are Praying God's Will?
You cannot claim a promise and refuse the will attached to it. People go to the Scriptures hunting for a verse that will justify a decision they have already made, instead of going to find out what God actually says on the matter. Then they tell me they prayed about it and God did not stop them.
He does not need to answer you twice. He has put His will in writing.
So back your praying with the Scriptures that give you the right to pray it. Find out what the Bible says about healing, about provision, about joy, and pray that. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. The surest way in the world to have more faith is to put more of His Word in front of yourself.
→ Well, What Did You Expect? takes up expectancy, and what we are actually expecting when we pray.
Why Prayer Is Not a Formula
There is a way of praying that is really an attempt at control: the right formula, the right words, the right ritual, and God is obliged to act. There is no such lever, and I am glad there is not. You cannot coerce God.
The truer picture is a channel between God and the need, and what matters is how wide and how clear you keep it. Resentment narrows it. So do jealousy, stinginess and self-seeking. Praise and thanksgiving widen it, which is why giving thanks in the middle of trouble is not denial. It is engineering.
Glenn Clark, whose teaching runs all through the Camps Farthest Out and all through what I have taught, kept driving at who we are. Most of our failure in prayer comes from not knowing it. We carry the name of Jesus Christ and still pray as though we were begging at a stranger’s door. That standing was bought for us. We did not achieve it, and we do not lose it by having a bad week.
→ Golden Nuggets of Prayer from Glenn Clark, on Rockwell Break-a-Bean, gathers the best of it. It publishes 23 April 2027.
What Happens When People Pray Together?
A toe sees the world differently from a nose, and neither one can do the other’s work. Bring that many different people into one room and you would expect disagreement. And you get it, right up until the group settles on one starting place: thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Underneath that, the disagreements stop mattering. What kills a prayer meeting is never difference of opinion. It is the slide into lecturing, teaching, sharing views and debating. Every one of those can be a good thing, and not one of them is prayer. The promises attached to real agreement are extravagant: if two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven.
→ Unity In Prayer and When the Prayer of Agreement Turns into a Prayer of Disagreement cover the ground and the hazards.
Where Do You Start?
Find yourself a place. Susanna Wesley pulled her apron up over her head, and her children knew to leave her alone. Write your prayers down, and write the promises beside them like checks waiting to be presented at the window. Say them out loud until they have travelled the distance from your head to your heart, which is the longest eighteen inches in the world.
Then keep the conversation going through the day. It was never meant to be an appointment.
None of this is a method for getting things out of God. It is the ordinary daily life of people whom Jesus Christ bought back: people who have been moved out of one kingdom and into another, who carry His name and the authority that goes with it, and who have found out for themselves that the God who raised Him from the dead has not lost one ounce of power since.
He works miracles still. His Word was true, it is true, and it will still be true when everything else you were counting on has been proved otherwise.
More on prayer: Good News! · Sanctified Patriotism
Still to come in this series: How Not to Kill Your Prayers · Golden Nuggets of Prayer from Glenn Clark · How to Ask for Prayer · Listening Prayer: How to Hear God’s Voice · The Covenant of Praise and Worship · The Lord’s Prayer as a Pattern for Prayer · When You Minister to the Lord, God Becomes Big and Your Problems Become Small. Each will be linked here as it publishes.
