Key Hindrances To Prayer
Lead To Many Unanswered Prayers

Hindrances To Prayer

Let’s face it; because of hindrances to prayer, there are many unanswered prayers in the world today.  When we pray and we do not see an answer to that prayer, our faith, belief and expectation for future prayers is at risk; this diminishes our prayer effectiveness.

When answered prayer is not a normal experience for us, we then tend to have low expectations of answered prayers in the future.  That hinders fervency in our prayers, perseverance in our prayers and our belief in the effectiveness of future prayers.  Guess who has won then. The enemy.

What Are The Hindrances To Prayer?

A key question is “What are the hindrances to prayer?”  This is a big, but important question; it is to big to be adequately covered in this article, but I will try to summarize some major hindrances. 

Ponder the following hindrances in your own life.  This was a valuable study for me personally to go through.  As I did this study, some of these hindrances in my own personal prayer life were revealed and I am benefiting by studying those areas in more depth.  I believe you can benefit also.

Areas of Hindrances to Prayer

1. Being an Obedient Child of God:  We need to be His child, fall under His authority and obey His commands.  This does not mean we have to be perfect for prayer to be answered, but it does mean we have to be submitted to Him with all our heart.

2. Sin:  God does not answer those who love the sin in their life so much that they are unwilling to give it up.

3. Lack of Faith:  Faith is believing that we have received that for which what we have prayed.  This does not mean giving “lip service” to saying you believe you have received it.  It means really believing with all your heart that you have received it – knowing that you know.

4. We Do Not Ask:  Most of us are in the habit of planning and doing things in our own strength with our own mind and our own abilities and we never get around to asking God specifically for what we need.  We are self-sufficient and think we can do it ourselves.

5. We Ask With The Wrong Motives:  God does not answer prayers when we ask to satisfy our own selfish desires and fulfill our own selfish motives.  God will permit only Himself to receive glory – not us.

6. We Do Not Pray God’s Will:  God will not answer any prayer that is not according to His will. Learning God’s will requires studying His word in the Bible; He has revealed His will through His word.

7. Unforgiving Spirit:  Forgiveness of our own sins depends upon how we forgive those who have sinned against us. An unforgiving and judgmental attitude is a major cause of unanswered prayer.

8. Lack of Praise, Thankfulness, and Love:  The language of the Kingdom of God is praise, thanksgiving, and love.  The language of the kingdom of darkness is complaint, criticalness, judgmentalness, jealousy, greed, divisiveness, selfishness, immorality, and the like.  Often we have the language of the kingdom of darkness in our heart and not the language of praise, thanksgiving and love.

9. Failure to Resist Satan:  Satan knows that you can accomplish more through your prayers then through your work, therefore he does not want you to pray and will do all in his power to hinder you and discourage you and cause you to doubt.  Our battle is against spiritual forces of evil in the unseen world and to fight this battle we must put on the armor of God found in Ephesians 6:10-13.

10. Not Waiting On God:  if we do not receive an answer to our prayer, we are not to stop praying, we are to persevere until we do hear from God.  We have no way of knowing what is going on in the spiritual realm that may be causing a delay in answers to our prayers.

11. Refusing To Do Our Part:  as a servant of the Lord, our satisfaction must be in seeing His work done.  That means we must we willing to put hands and feet to whatever God sends us to do.  So many people in churches today pray for new converts, then they open the door to the church and look out but the Lord doesn’t blow the new converts into the building, so they shut the door and pray some more.

12. Family Relationships:  When we fail to abide by God’s rules for family relationships, our prayers are hindered.

13. Lack of Time:  We must set prayer as a priority.  Satan and the world will constantly try to create obstacles to our time for prayer.  We make time for those things in our life that are important to us.  To be able to communicate with the God of the universe, for the created creature (us) to be able to communicate with the Creator is an awesome thing and God knows our priorities.

14. Not Praying In Jesus’ Name:  All authority has been given to Jesus and He in turn has made it available to us.  We need to understand what it means to be able to operate in the authority of the Name of Jesus.  When our youngest daughter was asked to call her older brothers to dinner, they often would not come for her.  But when she was told to tell them that “Dad said to come to dinner” they came.  Jesus gives us that same right to use the authority of His name in prayer.

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