How do you ensure your prayer is acceptable to God?
In his book on prayer, Jacques Ellul makes the point that many people don’t pray because they don’t have their prayers answered. Or at least, not answered very often. In other words, if there are no results, then why do it? This infers many people take a pragmatic approach to prayer; God is merely the cosmic genie who will grant the petitioner’s wishes merely because it has been requested. Rub here to get immediate results.
The problem, according to Ellul, is that “we no longer seek through prayer a conformity of our will with God’s will, which makes our speech true, hence efficacious. We seek, rather, to achieve direct results, without bothering about the truth or the special will of God, or with our own obedience.”[1]
Our results-oriented climate leads many pray-ers to expect immediate answers to prayer, even though it is often taught God answers prayer in his own good time. This may be so, but Ellul suggests that prayer has been diverted. Now, prayer is “taken seriously only in terms of the results which it promised to bring about.”[2]
In other words, no results so people stop praying. But this only leads to the question: What, then, is prayer that will will get results? What is prayer that is acceptable to God?
Perhaps our prayers remain unanswered because they are unacceptable to God. Then the question: What are the true conditions of acceptable prayer?
We all long for direct instructions from God. This seems a little easier than trying to make decisions when we are uncertain of our knowledge and the outcome. This story, then, might interest you.
I worked with a client in San Antonio, Texas. A Christian couple, they had moved from Florida about six years earlier to start a business. Initially they moved in with her sister, then with his.
But things were not going well. So the husband decided to return to Florida, leaving his family in San Antonio long enough for him to reestablish life there. He was getting read to depart within a few days.
Then came the knock at the door. A stranger.
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