Is Impurity Hindering Your Prayer Life?

IS IMPURITY HINDERING YOUR PRAYER LIFE?

The goal of Bible study is to know God. Over the years I have enjoyed getting to know God better through his word. Sadly, I haven’t done as well with prayer. The goal of prayer, likewise, is to know God, yet I have never found praying as easy as Bible study. When I study the Bible I have something before me I can touch and see, but when I pray God is neither tangible to my hands nor visible to my eyes.

In all honesty I am not very good at prayer. I feel guilty about it. I feel ashamed and embarrassed sometimes that I am so lousy at it. But since one of my goals this year is to improve my prayer life, I want to be open to whatever will help me achieve that goal.

Only a few days ago while driving slowly on a snow covered road I believe God graciously gave me something that will help. I turned off the radio and started praying. I hadn’t gotten very far before a Bible verse popped into my head—“If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened” (Psalm 66:18 NIV). I didn’t even know where it was in the Bible, so I had to look it up later in the concordance in the back of one of my Bibles. All I knew while I was driving is that I had remembered hearing a sermon on the verse way back when I was either a child or a teenager. I am convinced that God was saying to me that if I want to see answers to prayer I cannot cherish any sin in my heart (iniquity is another word for sin). The Hebrew word for “cherish” means something like being aware of sin in my heart and yet loving it instead of removing it. This means that if I don’t drive the sin out of my heart whenever I see it I cannot expect God to answer my prayers. God wants my heart to be pure. Therefore, if I am harboring sin in my heart, I should not expect him to answer my prayers. Isaiah 59:1-2 addresses this: “Indeed, the LORD's hand is not too short to save, and His ear is not too deaf to hear.But your iniquities have built barriers between you and your God, and your sins have made Him hide His face from you so that He does not listen” (HCSB). So this means that if I am going to see answers to prayer I cannot tolerate sin in my life. The same is true for you.

Sin’s always the enemy and has been ever since the fall. Jesus came to deliver us from our bondage to sin. It doesn’t make any sense, then, for us to cherish sin in our hearts and yet still expect God to answer our prayers. That defeats the whole purpose of God. So if we want to see answers to prayer we must go to war against the sin in our hearts. The Puritan John Owen described the soul as a garden that must be daily weeded of sin in order for the good plants of righteousness to grow and thrive.

Prayer: Dear God, give us the grace to weed out from our hearts any impure things we find there.