Does God hear me when I pray?

Question

Accepted Answer

Yes — and the Bible doesn't state it as a hope. It states it as a description of how God is built. Listen to the posture David describes: "I love the Lord, because he hath heard my voice and my supplications. Because he hath inclined his ear unto me, therefore will I call upon him as long as I live." — Psalm 116:1–2 (KJV) Inclined his ear. God leaning in. Brad DeLong, preaching a sermon simply called "God Hears You," tells it from a father's side of the wall: sitting in his office, he heard a cry from a sanctuary full of people and babies — and knew within seconds that it was his own two-year-old daughter, and whether it was fear, pain, or hunger. "A father recognizes his own child's cry above every other noise," is his point, and he is up and moving toward his children before he's even fully awake in the night. If a human father's ear is wired that way, DeLong asks, what do you think your heavenly Father's is like? David's testimony is the same shape: "I sought the Lord, and he heard me, and delivered me from all my fears" (Psalm 34:4). The righteous cry, and the promise is not that God might hear: "The righteous cry, and the Lord heareth, and delivereth them out of all their troubles." — Psalm 34:17 (KJV) Now the follow-up, because you may be asking it already: If He hears me, why does it feel like He hides? Taylor Little preaches a whole sermon on Isaiah's strange sentence — "Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself" — and his turning point is the garden. After Adam and Eve failed, they hid; and God came walking in the cool of the day, calling them out. "We did not know the pattern of how God had a relationship with Adam and Eve until they failed," Little says. The hiding, in other words, runs our direction. He came looking then. He comes looking now. Sometimes, Little adds honestly, the distance is disobedience — God waiting on the last thing He already told us. But hiding is never indifference. And if you've prayed a long time with no visible answer, hear Daniel's case before you conclude your words went nowhere. Daniel prayed and fasted twenty-one days and got resistance instead of an answer — until the messenger arrived with this report: "Fear not, Daniel: for from the first day that thou didst set thine heart to understand, and to chasten thyself before thy God, thy words were heard, and I am come for thy words." — Daniel 10:12 (KJV) From the first day. The hearing happened at the beginning; the arriving took three weeks. Those are different events, and confusing them is where most doubt about prayer is born. Roger Spaugh's teaching adds the steady note: God's word is a roadmap he returns to daily — the hearing is not in question, so the praying doesn't stop. Your words were heard the day you prayed them. Keep calling on Him, as David put it, as long as you live.