Two weeks ago I posed the question, what do answers to prayer depend on and promised that I would continue that topic today.

The first answer that I gave in answer

to the question, what do answers to prayer depend on was that they depend fundamentally, most importantly,

on the death of Jesus Christ for our sins.

The reason that a holy and just God is free to bless us human beings with answer to prayer, though we are sinners and deserve

only condemnation, is that Jesus Christ died for our sins and turned away the wrath of God from us.

Everything beneficial that comes to us fallen creatures was purchased at Calvary.

And therefore all answers to prayer, whether large or small, are gifts of mercy which we do not earn.

We cannot purchase our answers to prayer by anything we do or say they have already been

purchased for us at Calvary all we can do is plead the overflow of mercy.

That was the first answer.

It's fundamental.

If we don't grasp that, then everything else we say will be misunderstood and probably won't even be

distinctively Christian because all religions have prayer. But the second

answer was in order to have our prayers answered, we must be obedient children of our Heavenly Father.

And I argued from numerous Old Testament and New Testament texts that it would be a disgrace to our

Father's Word and it would be harmful to us if God were to go on giving us whatever we asked him

even when we were going on in a rebellious or sinful frame of mind.

And therefore, obedience is a prerequisite for regular answers to prayer.

But I stressed that this does not mean that sinless perfection is required in order

to have our prayers answered and the way that that's easy to demonstrate from scripture is that Jesus taught us to

pray, forgive us our sins, which would be a self-contradiction if in fact we had to

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