The Missing Half: Why Your Prayers Feel One-Sided and What to Do About Itნიმუში

Prayer is designed to be a dialogue, which means it includes both talking and listening. Yesterday, we covered the talking part. Today, let's tackle what might be the bigger challenge: listening to God.

I wonder - what is the noise level of your life right now? For many of us, there's always something on. The TV is playing in the background, we turn on music the moment we get in the car, and we put on headphones when we walk or exercise. There is always noise.

Yet Scripture shows us the profound value of silence, waiting, and listening. Jeremiah writes in Lamentations, "The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the person who seeks him. It is good to wait quietly for salvation from the Lord."

However, I've discovered that if your life is consistently loud and busy, you'll struggle to hear God. You'll spend most of your prayer time just talking to Him.

There's a decisive moment in 1 Kings 19 where Elijah asks God to reveal Himself. A great wind came, but God wasn't in the wind. An earthquake shook the ground, but God wasn't in the earthquake. A fire blazes, but God wasn't in the fire. Then there was a still, small voice—like a whisper. And out of that, God spoke.

Consider what Elijah's experience teaches us. God is far more likely to whisper to us than He is to shout over the noise of our lives.

So let me encourage you to create moments of silence in your day. Notice I didn't say "hours"—jumping from no silence to hours is like trying to take a motorcycle over the Grand Canyon. Start small.

Perhaps if you're a young parent, it means taking a moment to go into the closet and close the door for two minutes. Maybe you drive to work in silence, then reward yourself with music on the way home.

Beyond these small steps, you also need to examine your expectations. Many times, we're not looking for God to speak to us, so we don't find it. We're not listening for God, so we don't hear Him.

Our world has become so impatient with silence that an app recently launched, called "Text With Jesus." The app allows you to select a biblical figure and receive instant AI responses. We're so unwilling to endure silence and waiting that we create apps to give us immediate answers from "God."

What if God's timeline is different than ours? What if listening to God requires us to endure some silence?

In his book, Experiencing God, Henry Blackaby taught that God speaks in four ways: through Scripture, through prayer, through people, and through circumstances. Scripture is always our filter for interpreting everything else.

Sometimes we pray, asking God what we should do, but there's already an answer in His Word. Other times, God speaks through people. I've had God speak to me, but He sure sounded like my wife! God can speak through circumstances, revealing our next steps.

And remember - God wants to reveal Himself to us through prayer. Jeremiah 33:3 NIV records God saying, "Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know." Proverbs 3:5 NLT tells us, "Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take."

Tomorrow, we'll discuss bringing all of this together and taking practical next steps toward genuine dialogue with God.