All ears

 All Ears

 

You want what you don’t have, so you scheme and kill to get it. You are jealous of what others have, but you can’t get it, so you fight and wage war to take it away from them. Yet you don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it.

JAMES 4.2

 

When you call, the LORD will answer. “Yes, I am here,” he will quickly reply.

ISAIAH 58.9

 

In my distress I prayed to the LORD, and the LORD answered me and set me free.

PSALM 118.5

 

Have you ever tried to talk to someone who was distracted? Maybe the person was listening to music or reading something or deep in thought, and you felt like he or she was ignoring you.

But what about God? Does he ever ignore us when we talk to him? When we pray, can we be confident God will listen and respond in some way, or does he sometimes ignore our prayers? We often wonder if prayer can really change anything. But the Bible promises us that God always listens, and it shows us that our prayers have an impact on what we receive from God.

When James said, “You don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it,” he was implying that our failure to pray and ask God for what we need deprives us of what God would have given us if we’d asked. And when Jesus instructed us to “keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for” (Mt 7.7), he was making a clear connection between asking God for things and receiving them from him. So evidently, when we ask, God responds. This doesn’t mean he’s like a genie and he’ll automatically give us whatever we want. But he does promise to hear us and respond — even if his response is not the response we were looking for.

God is happy when we depend on him. So he never ignores our heartfelt requests for his presence and his power in our lives. In prayer, we take a step in his direction, and he comes close to us. Through prayer, not only do we experience God’s activity and involvement in our world, but we also have the opportunity to be involved in a significant way in the work of God’s Kingdom. We can be confident that even though other people may ignore us, God never will.