Hello Everyone,

There are Five general principles about prayer.

1. God Does Not Promise to Answer Everyone’s Prayers.

The promises apply only to those who are really God’s children.

God is not the Father of all men, God is the Creator of all men, but that is not the same.

God is Father only to those who are born again into the family of God.

2. We Are Expected To Ask for the Things God Has Promised.

“ask and it shall be given.”

James 4:2 “… you do not have because you do not ask.”

An evangelist preacher of the early nineteen hundreds Dr. R.A. Torrey said,

“We do not live in a praying age. We live in an age of hustle and bustle, of man’s efforts and man’s determination, of man’s confidence in himself and his own power to achieve things, an age of human organization, and human machinery, and human push, and human scheming, and human achievement; which in the things of God means no real achievement at all.”

We Are Expected To Ask for the Things God Has Promised ….

3. God hears and answers every prayer. (v. 8)

“For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.”

There are two certainties when we pray.

One is that God hears every prayer.
The other certainty is that God always answers.

This verse says for ‘everyone who asks receives,”

We have the misconception that the only possible answer to prayer is yes. There are two other possibilities. God can say, No or he can say, Not Yet.
God hears and answers every prayer…

4. Sometimes God Gives Us What We Need and Not What We Ask for.

(vv. 9-11)
“Or what man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? (10) Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent? (11) If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!”

Even earthly fathers give good things to their children.

We do not give a child a red-hot chili pepper just because they ask for it.

If this is true of our earthly fathers how much more true it must be of our heavenly father.

Sometimes God Gives Us What We Need and Not What We Ask for…

5. No Prayer Is Ever Wasted.

There is a principle behind persistent prayer and that is that no prayer is ever-wasted effort.

Greater Things Are Still To Come!

Pastor Phil