Does Prayer Work? Will God Answer My Prayers? Free Christian Counseling's Pastor Roland Answers Questions

When we are little children, our prayers are innocent and fervent. We pray for things we want or what we don't want to happen. We are close to God at that time, though we didn't know it.

Our childhood memorized prayers are beautiful and sincere.

But when we get older, we grow farther from God, often without meaning to. We get caught up in worldly affections, and we are taught or even forced to study. We learn to gobble up intellectual words and parrot them back for approval or perks.

We learn to mouth insincere words to please others or go along to get along. We learn that the shallow and insincere words fool others and we grow prideful and contemptuous.

We are placed in teasing and cruel environments where we begin to resent others for their falsity, cruelty or violent tease. We are introduced into the animal world of drugs and carnality.

And so it comes to pass that we begin to grow distant from God. And the interesting thing is that the very practices we are taught to employ are the very ones that may actually distance us from God. Practices such as rituals, wordy prayers, guided visualizations, emotional music and displays, and prideful religious study are ineffective distractions at best, and wicked deception leading many astray at worst.

Let's take, for example, wordy prayers. Such a practice--especially if it is rehearsed--tends to get in the way of intimate realization of God. A soul is closer to God if it wordlessly yearns with all its heart to do what is right and at the same time realizes that it does not even know what the right is.

We are closest to God when we sense our own inadequacy, but instead of resenting it and looking for some external answer, we turn our mind and heart to God and silently cry out for help. This is the sincere cry of the soul, and God answers.

This wordless nonverbal desire to do what is right is so sincere that the person cares more about what is right than its own comfort or saving face.

Unfortunately, our wordy prayers are more often pitiful cries of our ego after we have planned and schemed ourselves into a corner. It is not sincere because the ego is not crying out for truth, the ego wants to save its skin or get out of trouble. It wants to come out not losing worldly favor or benefit.

The spiritual person who walks in the Light does not even sometimes know how to pray or what to pray for. God already knows what we need before we even ask.

That is why proper meditation is actually a centering exercise. We tend to get pulled into thinking, planning and scheming. Our thoughts are vain and our imaginings are mostly about love and hate, sex and violence, glory and revenge.

Proper meditation permits the soul to separate from the seductive thought stream. In the rarefied atmosphere of Reality, the soul sees things as they are. Mostly it sees its own wrong and lack. It realizes its inability to make itself good.

So close to reality is the soul that it is distanced from temptation. Close to God, such a soul already has all it needs. Good will come to pass without effort.

During the time that we labored in the dark, sin and corruption entered. Which fact is now evidenced by the kind of thoughts and images that now inhabit your imagination. Thoughts of glory and revenge, sex and violence, love and hate; then doubts, compulsions and a mental prison of negative thoughts.

You need to learn how to be objective toward those rabid thoughts (not really yours) and the sin that has made a home in you. Only when the soul learns to separate may it cling to and identify with the Good and stand aloof to the vile images and thoughts that it now is foolishly struggling with and foundering in.

If you wish to learn the simple art of gaining distance to thoughts and emotions, we have a meditation to help you. It is free.