God answers our prayers when our hearts are clean and pure

Quintus Heine

Matthew 5:8 Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

The third condition that allows us to expect God to answer our prayers is purity of heart. Andrew Murray speaks of "complete surrender”. Sören Kierkegaard speaks of "continuous God-centeredness". The Bible uses the word heart to indicate our nature, the place from which all our thoughts, desires and attitudes come. JI Packer stated that the pure and clean heart is "A heart that searches for and serves God in all things without wavering and totally rejects all alternatives that oppose it."

A pure heart: Before we ask God for anything we need to carefully examine our own hearts and motives. Psalm 139:24 says, See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. No wilful sins or sins we indulge or hide must be concealed in our hearts. Psalm 66:18 we read, If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. The idea is not that we need to be free of sin before we can pray, then no one would be able to pray. The intention is that we must not knowingly hide our sins from God and think he does not know about it. God asks for a pure heart.

A sincere heart: God does not listen to the requests of an insincere heart. If we do not approach God with sincere motives, we are like children who try to deceive their parents while the parents can clearly see what the children have up their sleeves. This means that we must clean our hearts every day of our own sin, our sinful thoughts and self-righteous motives. We must therefore pray sincerely with hearts full of love for God and our neighbour.

We must, however, be warned that our striving for purity should never be used to buy God as if the more we give of ourselves, the more God will answer our prayers. If this is your motive, your heart is already no longer pure. It is part of the prayer process to pray not only with words, but with your whole life!

Prayer: Lord, help me to purify my heart every day before you! I ask that you will make me full of your love so that I can have a pure heart! Amen.