The Effect of Sin on our Prayers

I was listening to Charles Stanley preach on prayer from Nehemiah and he started talking about how sin in our lives can affect our prayers and quoted this Psalm:

He said this:

‘If you hold on to practising some sin in your life and you won’t give it up, the prayers are not answered. People will say often time, I pray and pray and pray and I don’t believe God’s hearing me. Correct. Maybe He’s not. 

Why? Because you’ve got something over here that’s so much more valuable to you than your relationship to God. You’re holding onto something over here that you’re saying to the Creator, to the Sovereign governor and guard and God of this universe before I give you my whole life, before I honour you for who you are, I’ve got this. 

 Do those things have to be big things? No. Anything I cherish, I hold on to, that God has said let it go. You can’t get prayers answered holding onto things that are sinful in the eyes of God.’ 

This is not saying that we need to be without sin in order to have our prayers answered because if that was the case no one would get any answer to prayer!

It is more that if we hold on to something that we know is wrong but keep doing it regardless it may affect the way God answers our prayers.

Matthew Henry says this: ‘If I regard iniquity in my heart, that is, “If I have favourable thoughts of it, if I love it, indulge it, and allow myself in it, if I treat it as a friend and bid it welcome, make provision for it and am loth to part with it, if I roll it under my tongue as a sweet morsel, though it be but a heart sin that is thus countenanced and made much of, if I delight in it after the inward man, God will not hear my prayer, will not accept it, nor be pleased with it, nor can I expect an answer of peace to it.’

Part of Tuesday’s ‘Sermon Snippets’ 
Linking up to On Your Heart Tuesdays