Believers are not educated with the truth but, they are trained expeditiously to pray. If anyone turns a deaf ear to my instruction, even their prayers are detestable (Proverbs 28:9) says the Scripture. When we do not know the truth of the Word of God in its real sense, our prayers are not prayer at all. First of all, we need to understand that prayer is a form of unceasing conversation with God to hear and absorb His instructions. Then we should know that prayer is not to receive what we desire but what God desires. Many a time we are frustrated because our prayers appear to be unheard and unanswered. James is citing a reason for the unanswered prayers as follows:
When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.
James 4:3 (NIV)
What Prayer Actually Is
I know that you can do all things; no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
Job 42:2 (NIV)
If nothing can be thwarted, then what exactly is prayer for? Most of us have been taught, without ever saying it out loud, that prayer is a way of changing God’s plan — a kind of holy negotiation, a list we hand over like a grocery order and expect delivered by evening. We believe that if we pray hard enough, fast long enough, or wake early enough, we can move Him to act differently than He otherwise would have.
That understanding of prayer is simply not true, and holding onto it is what leaves so many believers disillusioned when the answer does not come. Jesus Himself said:
“Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”
Matthew 6:8 (NIV)
If He already knows what we need before we ask, prayer cannot be primarily a transaction where we inform Him of our needs so that He will act. So why did Jesus pray at all — and why so often alone? After feeding five thousand people, He did not stay to enjoy the moment or build a following on the miracle. He withdrew to be with His Father. He was not petitioning; He was staying close, talking, listening. That closeness is what prayer was built for — not a transaction, but a relationship. Jesus modelled this even in how He instructed us to pray:
“But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen.”
Matthew 6:6 (NIV)
That kind of quiet, private, ongoing conversation with the Father has largely disappeared from how we practise our faith. We have replaced it with formulas — pray at this hour, in this posture, with this group, led by this preacher — as though prayer were a technique to be perfected rather than a relationship to be lived in. And when the technique doesn’t produce the result we wanted, we conclude that we did not pray hard enough, or that God is distant, when in truth we misunderstood what we were doing from the very beginning.
The Danger of Praying to Get Our Own Way
When prayer becomes a way of pursuing our own will rather than seeking His, we open a door to being deceived — because there is always someone eager to give people exactly what they are asking for, whether or not it is good for them. Crowds gather around voices that promise miracles on demand and healing guaranteed the moment it is spoken, because it feels like power. But God does not work by fulfilling our will; He works by fulfilling His will for our long-term good and our eternal life. That difference is everything, and it is worth being sober about, because Scripture itself warns that in the last days, deception will come “with all kinds of power, false signs and wonders” (2 Thessalonians 2:9).
This is also why the parable of the persistent widow in Luke 18 has so often been misread. On the surface, it appears to endorse the idea of “wearing God down until He answers”:
Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up… “And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”
Luke 18:1, 7-8 (NIV)
Read in its proper place, right after the disciples had just asked Jesus about His second coming, this parable is not really about pestering God until He gives us what we want. It is about persevering in faith while we wait for His justice to be fully revealed at His return — praying not to bend His will toward ours, but to remain faithful, alert, and unashamed until He comes. If He delays, He delays only so that more might come to repentance, not because He lacks the power to act today (2 Peter 3:9).
Jesus Prayed to Know the Father’s Will
There is one more layer to this that we often miss. In Gethsemane, Jesus prayed, “not as I will, but as You will” (Matthew 26:39). Many of us borrow that line as a kind of safety net — “God, whatever happens, not my will but Yours” — without ever actually seeking to know what His will is. But Jesus did not say that phrase blindly. He said it out of an intimate closeness with the Father, in which He already understood what the Father’s will was, and surrendered to it with full awareness.
We cannot borrow the language of surrender as a substitute for actually knowing His will. The fruit of that phrase comes only when we have first drawn near enough to Him to understand His purpose — not before. That nearness is what prayer is truly for: not merely to make requests, but to know Him well enough that our will begins to align with His even before we ask.
Jesus taught His disciples the very essence of prayer: staying close to the Father and asking Him not to lead them into temptation, while further asking Him to protect them from succumbing to evil. Jesus taught them this and then gave them the chance to apply it in a crucial moment, when their faith was on the verge of failing. From this, we should understand that prayer is a continual conversation with God — one that helps us grasp His will, guards us against temptation, and keeps us away from evil.
What We Have Already Been Given
We should be well aware of all that has already been given to us by our Father God. If we are ignorant of this fact, our prayers become mere rhetoric and reluctance, bringing forth nothing. Our daily provisions — spiritual as well as material — God has given us all of them even before we ask, because He already knew what we need. Even before we realised that we were perishing, for the wages of sin is death, Father God saved us from eternal death by atoning for our sins through His Son. Despite God’s gracious work, many believers still ask Him to forgive their sins, exposing their disbelief in salvation already accomplished — a doubt that invites the devil to use them for his own purposes. Furthermore, we reject or remain ignorant of what God has already given us, yet we are eager to ask for things that work against His will in our lives.
Much of our anxious praying comes from believing we still need to secure things that God has, in fact, already given us. Paul makes this plain:
And you also were included in Christ when you heard the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation. When you believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession — to the praise of his glory.
Ephesians 1:13-14 (NIV)
The Holy Spirit was given the moment we believed — not at a convention, not through a special anointing service, not because we fasted long enough to earn it. Before we knew to ask for salvation, before we understood our need for it, God had already acted on our behalf. This should free us from a great deal of striving. We are not summoning something from God that He is withholding. We are simply learning to walk in what has already been placed in us.
Jesus explained this to us in simple terms through a parable, concluding:
“If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
Luke 11:13 (NIV)
This parable is not about asking, but about the assurance of Father God giving us the Holy Spirit. Jesus is not teaching us to ask for the Holy Spirit; rather, He is assuring us that God will provide the Holy Spirit to all who believe and confess what Father God has done for us. For mere asking, praying, fasting, or attending anointing sessions will not yield His Spirit — only simple faith and obedience will.
In a nutshell, prayer is our life — not a provision to make emergency calls to save our souls. When we truly understand that prayer is our breath, we will not dare hold our breath at any cost, because we know very well that the moment we stop breathing, we die. Likewise, when we stop our conversation with God, our soul dies. Eve is the clearest example: she stopped conversing with God but eagerly turned to converse with the serpent instead, and that conversation brought her into eternal death. Let us never stop praying — our breath that keeps the soul alive forever, in the image of God’s original creation.
The Jordan Valley 
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