“I have been praying and praying, and nothing is happening.” How many times have we said or thought that to ourselves? We can start to feel like the heavens are brass, God has taken a vacation, or even that He has completely stopped taking our calls. But what if the problem isn’t God at all? What if, at least for some situations, we are just missing the key to answered prayer?
The Holy Spirit Is the Key
Before I start, I want to say there are no “magic formulas” or special insights I could share with you on this topic. In fact, if someone is offering that, you should probably be wary of deception. No, I’m simply talking about the idea that sometimes we can pray and pray for something without taking time to ask the Lord for His guidance and direction. After all, right now we see through a glass darkly (1 Corinthians 13:12). There is much we don’t know about the physical and spiritual realms and how they interact with each other. Solutions might be staring us right in the face in the Bible. But we have not yet been given insight to know how to apply that information to our situations until God reveals it to us.
An Object Lesson
Recently, I was trying to open my little K-Cup basket to put tea inside. I pulled and pulled on that cap with all my might. I turned it around in my hand, noticing the little hinge on one side, but at that point, I saw no grooves or openings where I could get a grip other than that. All I saw was a lid that would not come off. No matter how hard or how long I pulled at it, I couldn’t get it open.
Just then, I had the thought that I should pray to ask for the Lord’s help. It might seem silly to pray about such a small thing, but the Bible says in 1 Thessalonians 5:17 to pray without ceasing. The Lord is in us and with us. He’s involved in every facet of our lives and always willing to teach us spiritual lessons if we will simply submit ourselves to Him in every area. As soon as I prayed, my eyes focused on a little opening. I put my fingernail in between the lid and the cup, and it opened in a second.
Now that I examine the lid with the understanding of how it works, I see clearly that the lip at the front was meant to be the “pull” for opening the lid. At the time, though, I didn’t see it. It was only revealed to me after prayer.
A Spiritual Example
This next part is a bit more controversial. Some will dismiss it entirely, but it’s my testimony and one that is thoroughly explained in scriptures.
A few years ago, I was having terrible night terrors. I would sit straight up and take a huge intake of breath like a backwards scream. Sometimes it was because something startled me in a dream. Sometimes I would “see” something come at me, fast, from another part of the room, and then put its face right into mine. I called these “scary wakeups” or “scary pops.” The images left me breathless. Other times, I wouldn’t remember anything, but my husband would tell me that I woke up “screaming” again.
This phenomenon bothered me for months, maybe even a year. I prayed so many times for the Lord to make it stop. It was clear that the enemy was attacking me, so I prayed for the Lord’s protection. I asked Him to stand His angels around me to guard me. Prayer after prayer, and night after night, something (or some things) just kept tormenting me. Like that lid that wouldn’t come off my K-Cup, effort and perseverance in prayer were not making any difference in my situation.
The Lord Gave Me the “Pull”
At some point, I must have prayed for the Lord to give me insight because He did. He gave me a dream that revealed that the enemy was legally allowed to attack me because of an unholy soul tie. My husband and I had been sexually intimate before marriage, and the sin tie was underneath the holy tie that was created after we were married. That connection permitted demonic entities to come through that cord, like a little spiritual tunnel, from my (unsaved) husband to me. I broke it in the name of Jesus, and the nightmares stopped. Other problems I had been having with unholy thoughts stopped as well.
It’s Biblical
God created sexual union as something good for marriage, and both Genesis 2:24 and Mark 8:9 speak of those who are intimately joined as “one flesh.” But it isn’t just the flesh that joins, it’s the souls as well. Mark 10:9 says that God “joins them together.” When you look that up in the Strong’s Concordance, it’s the concept of yoking or binding. This isn’t temporary during the act. It’s spiritually permanent, just like marriage is designed to be, until you go through the steps to break it.
In a biblical marriage, it’s a beautiful concept to think of two souls now knit together by God. But when you do the binding yourself, outside of the sanctity of marriage, what you get is a connection that is an open door for the enemy to attack. 1 Corinthians 6:18 says that fornication is a sin against one’s own body. And Ephesians 4:27 says not to “give place” to the devil. In Greek, the word “place” is “topos” which can be physical or figurative, like an opportunity. My sin had given the devil a legal right to be there. Praying for protection from the problem didn’t help. It wasn’t until the Lord showed me what the problem was that I could understand the key to my freedom.
The Consequences of Sin
Of course, the problems we face in life with our physical and mental health, money, relationships, and career aren’t always caused by demonic forces. After all, Job 14:1 says that man is few of days and full of trouble. Some problems are simply a result of our natural, fallen world and bodies. And some seemingly unanswered prayers are just a matter of the Lord’s testing or timing. However, some problems, especially chronic and noticeably generational ones, could be the direct result of permissions given to the Enemy. These are spiritual problems with spiritual solutions. We must be open to what the Holy Spirit shows us about how to fix them.
When I first got saved, for example, I had terrible anxiety and depression and was being treated for seizures. The Lord led me through a series of deliverances and breaking generational curses and soul ties (except the one I missed because I thought that the holy tie would replace the unholy tie). This was all when I was new to spiritual things and had no idea that these were controversial in a lot of Christian circles. I was just following where the Lord was leading with no preconceived ideas.
I knew that I was saved and washed in the blood. But just like when Jesus called Lazarus from the grave, I had to be “loosed” from my grave clothes. I had to deal with the spiritual consequences of sin, unraveling permissions, and taking back the ground that the enemy had seized by legal right. (See my testimony here: The Cure for Depression: Jesus Is My Medicine).
Jesus Paid for Our Deliverance
A lot of people say that Christians can’t have demonic problems. Their understanding of scripture doesn’t allow them to believe that demons have legal rights or that Christians could need deliverance. But in Matthew 15:26, Jesus called deliverance the “children’s bread.” It’s a provision that is available only to those in God’s family. Also, Mark 16:17 says that those who follow Christ will cast out devils in His name. But why cast out devils if salvation does the job all by itself? Certainly, Jesus wasn’t talking about casting demons out of the unsaved. Luke 11:28 illustrates the folly of sweeping a house that will not be defended against more evil spirits.
On the cross, Jesus became a curse for us to take our curses (Galatians 3:13), nailed our debt to the cross (Colossians 2:14), and healed us by His stripes (Isaiah 53:5). He wrote us a blank check for freedom for our minds, bodies, and souls, but we, ourselves, must cash it. That means that until we surrender every single part of ourselves to Jesus AND tell the Enemy to leave (James 4:7), he doesn’t HAVE to go anywhere.
If we close our minds to these spiritual facts in unbelief, Jesus can do no mighty works. We could just keep praying and praying in faith and perseverance to lift the cap off our problems to no avail. Or, we can choose to ask God for the “pull” that would break things right open. He can show us by His Holy Spirit and the Word of God exactly what our problems are if we will submit ourselves to whatever it is He wants to show us, even if it doesn’t line up with the way we have seen things in the past.
The Key to Answered Prayer
“All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.”
2 Timothy 3:16-17
The Bible is the Word of God and equips us for every possible situation in life. But sometimes we might not understand how to practically apply those things until we sit down before the Lord in prayer to ask. After that, we must be open and willing to do what He says. Otherwise, like an impenetrable fortress, we can bombard our problems with prayers like arrows, cannons, and even dynamite, crying out to the Lord for Him to let us out – when all we really need to do is ask Him to unlock the door.
If you believe that the Lord might have led you here to receive freedom from soul ties, click here for instructions: Soul Ties Are Real: How to Break Soul Ties
Interested in articles about spiritual warfare? Check out Spiritual Authority in Warfare. Or, you might like this article about a new way to pray: Make God’s Will My Will: A New Way to Pray. Please sign up to receive my blog in your email inbox. You can find that at the upper right of your screen (or at the bottom on a phone). Also, check out my YouTube Channel where I read the blogs out loud.
