Did you pray before you were saved? Salvation didn’t introduce you to prayer. Fear introduced you to prayer, because your car was flipped over and you were drowning, or the plane was going to crash and you got into prayer. You didn’t know who you were praying to and you weren’t sure of all your words of prayer, but you were sure you were going to pray to someone. You probably should have said it like this, “If there’s anyone listening…here’s my prayer.”
The question really is, are we saying or doing anything that provokes a divine response from God? Is our worship touching the One we worship? I’ll say it again, “Is our worship touching the One we worship?” When you worship, sometimes your mind gets full of your own thoughts and you’re singing the song. If somebody stopped you and asked, “What did you just sing?” you probably can’t even remember the words you were singing. True? We need to ask ourselves… When we come to church and we pray, or when we’re at home and we pray, or when we are anywhere and we pray, or when we’re worshipping, are we really moving God in this process, or are we just ceremoniously doing something and don’t care if we get the other party involved?
We live in a culture where you can talk to people and you don’t care if they’re listening. You send stuff out on twitter and on all those other forums, and you don’t know if they’re reading it and you don’t know if they’re listening to you. So, we’re very comfortable, today, running our mouth and not sure if we’re having an effect on the one we’re talking to. We do that in marriage. We talk in marriage with no indication that we’ve really communicated.
Are you praying prayers and living lives that reach his heart or his hand? Are there qualifications for God to respond to our prayers? The answer is “yes”. I’m going to tell you some of the qualifications that are involved when we pray and when we worship.
