Prayers Not Working? Unlock the Breakthrough God Wants to Give You
Excerpted from Radical Healing.
You cannot manipulate God. He sees the heart and is moved by faith. Therefore, our prayers must have faith.
When we pray, we must believe that it is God’s will to do what we are asking Him to do. We cannot ask God to heal us if we are not sure that it is His will to heal us. We cannot pray for someone else’s healing if we believe God may be teaching them a lesson and is possibly causing the sickness to test them. These words from preacher Jesse Duplantis live rent-free in my mind: “You cannot have what you speak against.” Before I pray for something, I have to know that it is God’s Word and, therefore, His will. Your prayers do not have to sound super spiritual or be long. Short and straightforward prayers can be extremely powerful.
What Prayer Is
First of all, prayer is pure. It needs to be aligned with your heart, not just your head. It is more important that your prayer is honest than to just say the right words. We can’t allow room for internal contradictions, which is what causes cognitive dissonance. Instead, you must be single-minded. James 1:6-8 (NKJV) speaks directly to this:
But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind. For let not that man suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.
The Bible teaches the power of agreement, and in this scripture, it is saying that the first person you need to be in agreement with is yourself. Why? Because you can want something in your head but believe something different in your heart. This problem occurs because you are a three-part being. God is saying that you are more powerful when you are lined up inside and lined up with His Word. This is another form of a three-cord strand that cannot be easily broken (Ecclesiastes 4:12). Many people easily break because they’re not even in agreement with themselves. They want to be in agreement with the Word but they’re divided inside, and we know that a house divided against itself will fall (Mark 3:25).
So, an honest prayer is more powerful than a prayer with the “right words.” Remember the man in Mark 9:24? He was honest. He said, “I believe, but help my unbelief.” That is also a prayer.
Remember that in its simplest form, prayer is talking with God. God already knows everything, and He’s not an ATM machine, wishing well, or genie in a bottle. He is a relational God who wants to walk with you daily.
Proverbs 3:5-6 says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take.” In other words, God is inviting you into a daily relationship where you can ask Him about every decision, big and small. Unlike many of the important, busy people in society who wouldn’t give you the time of day, God has all the time in the world for you. Sadly, many religious believers live and pray in a way as if to say, “God, just give me a map or a rulebook, and I’ll see You in heaven.” However, Jesus invited His disciples to follow Him step by step. The same invitation waits for you today, and prayer is a way to accept it.
So, the first step to healing is to pray from and for your heart. Jesus gave the disciples a prayer that demonstrates this perfectly. Today, we call that template the Lord’s Prayer, and it’s found in Matthew 6:9-13.
Our Father in heaven, may your name be kept holy. May your Kingdom come soon. May your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. Give us today the food we need, and forgive us our sins, as we have forgiven those who sin against us. And don’t let us yield to temptation, but rescue us from the evil one.
Again, the power is not in words but in the faith and heart connection you put behind them. As you say each sentence, get honest with God about your life. Talk to Him about where you feel stuck or are hurting. Roughly half of the prayer emphasizes praying from the heart, and the other portion asserts the importance of praying for your heart.
Pray from the Heart
What I mean when I say “from the heart” is don’t babble on and make sure you have the right motive as instructed in Matthew 6:5-7. Jesus told us how not to pray right before He gave us this powerful and simple prayer model in Matthew 6:9. He was giving us an example, a template, which included:
Permission to address Him as our Father, wow! How you see God determines your ability to receive from Him. Jesus wanted to make sure you knew that you were not begging from a distant God but talking with your perfect Dad.
Worship and gratitude unto God. This would help us keep the right perspective regardless of what we’re praying for and how difficult of a situation it may be.
The reminder that we are agents of heaven and our assignment includes occupying till He comes, bringing heaven to earth, and representing our Father and Jesus to this world.
Instructions to ask for our needs and the things we desire even when He already knows.
Keeping a repentant heart. God knows we will fail and mess up sometimes, and although those sins are paid for and covered by the blood of Jesus, we still need to repent, not because we’re unsure of whether or not He’ll forgive us (He already did) but because it means we’re turning around and acknowledging we fell short and we’re doing something to not fall into that again.
A reminder of our job to keep our hearts free from offense so that we don’t stay broken. Remember that forgiving others doesn’t make them right, it makes you whole.
Praying for protection.
“Our Father in heaven, may your name be kept holy.”
For Jesus, prayer began with worship. In the same breath, Jesus acknowledged God’s authority and recognized the intimacy of their relationship. Before Jesus, nobody dared to call God “Father” or even knew they could.
Jesus pioneered our relationship with God. Now, we can confidently pray from our hearts, knowing that He hears us and answers us with the kindness and wisdom of a perfect Father. When we address God as Holy Father, we are saying, “God, You know me better than I know myself. I need You to search my heart for the things that I don’t even know are there.”
“May your Kingdom come soon. May your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.”
Next, Jesus prayed in a way that aligned His desires with God’s desires. “May your Kingdom come, may your will be done” involves caring about what God cares about. To be candid, praying for the whole earth can seem like the opposite of praying from our hearts. We can say the words, but they feel distant. We can personalize this part of the prayer by replacing “on earth” with specific areas of our lives. For example:
May Your will be done in my daughter’s school as it is in heaven.
May Your will be done in my local government as it is in heaven.
May your will be done in my coworker’s life as it is in heaven.
This prayer gets to the core of our assignment on earth: to occupy territory and express the Kingdom of God in every area of life.
Jesus was perfect, but we are not. We have desires that do not align with God’s will. This portion of the Lord’s Prayer can serve as an invitation to humble ourselves before God and pray for His desires. We can pray for our hearts—that our desires will become like God’s—so that we can truly pray from our hearts in alignment with God’s will.
“Give us today the food we need.”
What do you need today? What do you want but feel like it’s too insignificant to ask God for? Jesus empathized with our humanity and God’s will to take care of every one of our needs. Many people stagnate in their healing process because they stop at this part of prayer and never talk to God about what is actually bothering them. Even though they meditate on their desires often, they do not invite God into their deepest needs. Remember, God values a short, raw, and vulnerable prayer more than a spiritual-sounding, elaborate prayer detached from your heart. As C.S. Lewis once said, “We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.”
“And forgive us our sins, as we have forgiven those who sin against us. And don’t let us yield to temptation, but rescue us from the evil one.”
In the conclusion of His prayer, Jesus demonstrated how to cultivate our hearts through prayer. Every day, we do three things: experience temptation, sin, and come into contact with people. People have the propensity to hurt or disappoint us. We can become offended when they do, and offense is a breeding ground for unforgiveness.
Sin, shame, and offense can stick to our hearts, and falling into temptation can become habitual. So, as Jesus showed us, praying for our hearts is essential. These kinds of prayers can cleanse us from our sins, free us from unforgiveness, and rescue us from the enemy.
Many times, we pray for our needs, wants, careers, friends, family, government, and global issues. These are great things to pray about. However, how often do we direct our prayers toward our own hearts? When was the last time you prayed for your soul? As much as we pray about external issues, we need to pray about internal issues as well, especially because every issue flows from the heart!
So, if God knows everything we need, why do we pray? When it comes to our hearts, praying is a way for us to agree with the Holy Spirit. When we say, “Amen,” we are literally declaring, “Let it be so,” to God’s will for our lives.
Praying for our hearts can be uncomfortable because it involves taking a hard look in the mirror and being vulnerable. We all have parts of our hearts that do not line up with the Word of God, and they affect our actions more than we think. My wife and I pray Proverbs 30:8 from The Passion Translation every day, and it is an audacious prayer: “Empty out of my heart everything that is false—every lie, and every crooked thing.”
When we started praying this way, we saw effortless, spontaneous breakthroughs happen in different areas of our lives. Suddenly it was easier to stay humble, be selfless, and take responsibility without feeling shame or condemnation. If people tell me that they want a better marriage, I encourage them to work on their hearts. Most marriage issues aren’t marriage issues; they are personal issues rooted in the heart. When people choose to deal with these “heart issues,” their lives naturally improve.
Proverbs 30:8 gives the Holy Spirit permission to course-correct every place that is crooked, right down to the slightest of distortions. There are dark corners in our hearts that we can’t see without the light of God. We all have sins of ignorance that can keep us from whole- hearted healing. We are quick to notice the external results in our lives that we do not like—the anger, the addiction, the sickness, the struggling bank account—but we do not always recognize the heart issues that caused these external results to spring up in the first place. That is when Ephesians 1:18 comes into play as another great prayer to adopt:
I pray that your hearts will be flooded with light so that you can understand the confident hope he has given to those he called— his holy people who are his rich and glorious inheritance.
When light floods your heart, everything is exposed. The lies, sins, and issues you did not previously notice appear in plain sight. So, when you pray, “Lord, flood my heart with light,” you will gain understanding, confident hope, and revelation.
