John Bunyan’s 5 Hindrances to True Prayer
“If you don’t have a praying people, then what do you have? If you don’t have a people seeking God and they’re not praying, what do you have?”
— Richard Owen Roberts, Behold Your God: Rethinking God Biblically
John Bunyan (1628—1688) was an English writer and Puritan pastor best known, of course, as the author of Pilgrim's Progress.
On his deathbed, Bunyan said to those who gathered around him, “Weep not for me, but for yourselves. I go to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will, no doubt, through the mediation of his blessed Son, receive me, though a sinner; where I hope we ere long shall meet, to sing the new song, and remain everlastingly happy, world without end.”
Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress sold more than 100,000 copies in its first decade in print and has since been reprinted in at least 1,500 editions and translated into more than two hundred languages.
In his little book, Prayer, Bunyan explains 5 biblical reasons it may be that God isn’t answering your prayers.
Five obstructions to prayer
1. When men regard iniquity in their hearts, at the time of their prayers before God. “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear” my prayer (Psa 66:18). For the preventing of temptation, that by the misunderstanding of this may seize thy heart, when there is a secret love to that very thing which thou with thy dissembling lips dost ask for strength against. For this is the wickedness of man’s heart, that it will even love and hold fast that which with the mouth it prays against; and of this sort are they that honor God with their mouth, but their heart is far from Him (Isa 29:13; Eze 33:31). Oh, how ugly would it be in our eyes, if we should see a beggar ask an alms, with an intention to throw it to the dogs! Or that should say with one breath, Pray, you bestow this upon me; and with the next, I beseech you, give it me not! And yet thus it is with this kind of persons. With their mouth they say, “Thy will be done”; and with their hearts nothing less. With their mouth say, “Hallowed be thy name”; and with their hearts and lives they delight to dishonor Him all the day long. These be the prayers that “become sin” (Psa 109:7), and though they put them up often, yet the Lord will never answer them (2Sa 22:42).
2. When men pray for a show to be heard and [to be] thought somebody in religion, and the like, these prayers also fall far short of God’s approbation and are never likely to be answered, in reference to eternal life.
3. A third sort of prayer that will not be accepted of God, it is, when either they pray for wrong things, or if for right things, yet that the thing prayed for might be spent upon their lusts and laid out to wrong ends. Some have not, because they ask not, saith James, and others ask and have not, because they ask amiss, that they may consume it on their lusts (Jam 4:2-4). Ends contrary to God’s will is a great argument with God to frustrate the petitions presented before Him. Hence it is that so many pray for this and that, and yet receive it not. God answers them only with silence. They have their words for their labor; and that is all. Objection: But God hears some persons, though their hearts be not right with Him, as He did Israel, in giving quails, though they spent them upon their lusts (Psa 106:14). Answer: If He doth, it is in judgment, not in mercy. He gave them their desire indeed, but they had better have been without it, for He “sent leanness into their soul” (Psa 106:15). Woe be to that man that God answereth thus.
4. Another sort of prayers there are which are not answered; and those are such as are made by men, and presented to God in their own persons only, without their appearing in the Lord Jesus. For though God hath appointed prayer, and promised to hear the prayer of the creature, yet not the prayer of any creature that comes not in Christ. “If ye shall ask any thing in my name” (Joh 14:14). “And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus” (Col 3:17). “If ye shall ask any thing in my name” (Joh 14:13-14), though you be never so devout, zealous, earnest, and constant in prayer, yet it is in Christ only that you must be heard and accepted. But, alas, the most of men know not what it is to come to Him in the name of the Lord Jesus, which is the reason they live wicked, pray wicked, and also die wicked. Or else, that they attain to nothing else but what a mere natural man may attain unto, as to be exact in word and deed betwixt man and man, and only with the righteousness of the Law to appear before God.
5. The last thing that hindereth prayer is the form of it without the power. It is an easy thing for men to be very hot for such things as forms of prayer, as they are written in a book. But yet they are altogether forgetful to inquire with themselves whether they have the spirit and power of prayer. These men are like a painted man, and their prayers like a false voice. They in person appear as hypocrites, and their prayers are an abomination (Pro 28:9). When they say they have been pouring out their souls to God, He saith they have been howling like dogs (Hos 7:14).