Seize the Moment – Day 1176
Pray with a Cleansed Heart!
Good morning! This is Pastor Jerry Ingalls from New Castle First Baptist Church and today is Tuesday, June 6.
Do you want God to hear your prayers? You might be asking yourself, why wouldn’t God hear my prayers? In Psalm 66:16-19, David praised God for giving heed to his voice in prayer, but he also taught us an important truth about how our prayers can be hindered:
Come and hear, all who fear God, and I will tell of what He has done for my soul. I cried to Him with my mouth, and He was extolled with my tongue. If I regard wickedness in my heart, the Lord will not hear; but certainly God has heard; He has given heed to the voice of my prayer.
Do you fear God? God is holy, and because His perfection sets Him apart from all His creation, there is a chasm that exists between us and Him that cannot be crossed without divine intervention. Isaiah 59:2 makes this clear, “But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear.”
Recently, in my devotion on Psalm 61, I described how there is nowhere you can go for God not to hear your prayers. While you can’t go anywhere in all of creation to prevent God from hearing your prayer, you can hinder the effectiveness of your prayers through unconfessed sin, as David testified in Psalm 66:18, “If I regard wickedness in my heart, the Lord will not hear” (cf. Proverbs 28:9). There are motives of the heart and patterns of behavior that hinder the effectiveness of your prayers (ref. James 1:6-7; 4:3; 1 Peter 3:7). Are you meditating upon wickedness in your heart? Has your heart become a den of iniquity, and your soul a harbor for sin? The key to an effective prayer life is a right relationship with God (James 5:16; Hebrews 4:14-16).
Seize the moment and pray Psalm 66, meditating upon the cleansing of sin through the blood of Jesus (1 John 1:5-10).
God bless you!
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YOUTUBE:
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Videos are posted about a week after the devotion appears in the blog.