Bottom Line? Prayer is conversation with God. When you have conversation with another person, you don’t do all the talking. You also listen. We praise God, thank Him, ask His guidance, request things for ourselves and others, make confession of our sins and shortcomings, and then we read His Word. We listen to that “still, small voice within,” or hear a sermon, or talk with a Christian brother or sister… in order to listen to what God has to say to us. There IS growth in understanding the effectiveness of prayer.

There is “canceling” prayer where we’re actually asking for the opposite of what we need (without realizing it), and there is “affirming” prayer, which comes with knowing what the Bible says about God’s will and our authority in prayer as Christians. But that goes beyond the scope of these thoughts. Throughout the New Testament, there are statements of what we have already as Christians and our position in the eyes of God. In the whole Bible, there are 7,000 promises of God to us. The only way to pray affirmatively and effectively is to “get serious” about Scripture, God’s Word.