Reflections of Grace - Proverbs 12:59

“The Lord is far from the wicked, but he hears the prayer of the righteous.” — Proverbs 15:29.

While prayer is one of the must fundamental of all spiritual disciplines, the fact is that many Christians struggle with prayer.

Some find it difficult to make the time to sit in quiet and have undistracted prayer time.

Others find the act of prayer itself to be a challenge, wondering if they are praying in the proper manner or if their prayers are being heard.

The solution to the first difficulty is pretty simple and easy—you must make time for prayer. If you don’t have the time, then you remove things from your schedule so that you do have the time.

Luke 5:16 says that Jesus would often go away to quiet places for times of prayer. We too ought to make intentional time for prayer.

One of the things that helps us to pray is to know how much we are in need of God’s grace.

One of the main reasons that the gospel offends sinful men who remain in their hardness of heart is because it declares that they are insufficient to meet their own need.

If we walk through life with the mindset that we can handle all of our own problems and know peace and blessedness by our own power, then we won’t find much motivation to pray.

But if the gospel is always in our hearts and on our minds, then we are constantly reminded that all we can produce for ourselves is judgment. That is what our sins deserve.

Yet that same gospel reminds us that we have a perfect Mediator between us and the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ, who paid for our sins on the cross and who ensures that our pleas and petitions are heard (Hebrews 10:19-22).

That leads me to address the second set of difficulties. When in prayer, the silence can be daunting.

The fact is that God does not speak audibly in conversation with each of us when we come before him in prayer. But that does not mean that our prayers are not received by him with love and care and compassion.

Here again is why the Word of God must be our true guide in prayer. It teaches us what God is like and how to pray for righteous things.

It teaches us how we may be heard, by coming to him through Christ his Son. And it teaches us how to be confident in prayer, assuring us that the prayers of the righteous are both heard (our text above) and effectual (James 5:16).

However, you may say, “That’s just it, I am not righteous—I still sin, though I hate it.” And that is exactly why Jesus came to save sinners. No one is righteous, save for one, the Lord Jesus Christ.

But if your faith is in him, then his righteousness is credited to you and through him your prayers come before the very throne of God. Amen.