Prayers Don't Work

I've heard this a few times and even thought (too embarrassed to say aloud?) it myself. Then I read a blurb by Anne Graham Gotz where she said that while prayers do work, sometimes the “pray-ers” don’t.

Heavy. But is it true? I think sometimes we give up on prayer because we don’t see an answer. We throw out prayer with the wash. We wonder why we don’t see the power of God in our lives. Is it because we have become too complacent and compromising? We say we believe God’s Word, and we may even say, “Praise God” when we read a passage, but do we act on it?

Anne Gotz says this about 2 Chronicles 7:14, “Could it be that while we eagerly claim the promise of God hearing our prayer and forgiving our sin and healing our land, we have given little attention to the condition attached to it? And what is the condition? We must humble ourselves. Pray. Seek God’s face. And turn from our wicked ways.”

I think that may be why we don’t like reading books by, listening to, or watching videos by, people like Jennie Allen, Mark Batterson, David Butts, Francis Chan, Anne Graham Gotz, J.D. Grear, Kyle Idleman, John Ortberg, Philip Yancey, to name a few, because they convict us of our complacency. We may even stop reading the Bible because we read passages like 2 Chronicles 7:14 and are convicted.

Anne Graham Gotz says more about this in her book, “The Daniel Prayer”.