If you stop and take time to really think about it, prayer is an incredible thing. We get to talk directly to God, the Creator of our Universe! If you had a chance to talk to the President, that would certainly be a memorable moment. But every single day, we have the privilege of talking to the King of the World!

Prayer is also pretty strange. When you talk to another person, you can usually see their face and hear their voice. But we learned that God is an invisible spirit – we can’t see him with our eyes. And it’s a pretty rare thing in history to hear God’s voice speaking to us. Reading the pages of our Bibles, it may seem like it happened all the time. But actually, it was only a few unbelievably blessed people who heard from God in that special way.

Because of this strangeness, it may feel like we are talking to ourselves when we pray. We might begin to doubt that anyone is even listening to our prayers. But in our God-breathed Bibles, there are many, many places that remind us that God hears us when we talk to him in prayer. In the book of Psalms alone, we learn that God hears us when we pray six times! For example, Psalm 34:17 tells us, “The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears them; he delivers them from all their troubles.”

When we pray, we are not just talking to God; we are talking with him. We are talking with someone who hears our prayers. This wasn’t true for the other so-called “gods” that some people in the Bible prayed to. Psalm 115:5-6 describes these worthless idols, “They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see. They have ears, but cannot hear, noses, but cannot smell.” When these people made statues of their “gods,” they gave them ears. But those ears couldn’t hear their prayers. They were just statues that these foolish people could talk to. But the Lord God, he’s a God we can talk with, a God who hears us when we pray!

Gen. 17:22; 18:33; Neh. 1:4-11; 2:4; Matt. 6:6; Rom. 8:26, 27