You’ve heard of the prayer of faith. I believe there is a mirror image of this prayer, a prayer that is based on flesh. I call it the prayer of unbelief.
The Lord spoke these very words to Moses: “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Why do you cry to me? Tell the children of Israel to go forward’” (Exodus 14:15, NKJV). Essentially, this verse in Hebrew would have read something like “Why are you shrieking at me? Why all the loud pleading in my ears?”
Why would God say this to Moses? Here was a godly, praying man in the crisis of his life. The Israelites were being chased by Pharaoh, and they had no escape. Most Christians would probably react as Moses did. He set out for an isolated hillside and got alone with the Lord, then he poured out his heart in prayer.
When God heard Moses shrieking, he told him, “Enough.” Scripture is not explicit about what followed, but at that point God might have said, “You have no right to agonize before me, Moses. Your cries are an affront to my faithfulness. I’ve already given you my solemn promise of deliverance. I’ve instructed you specifically on what to do. Now, stop crying.”
Beloved, God didn’t change between the Old Testament and the New. He’s a God of love and mercy as Isaiah points out, but he still hates sin because he’s holy and just. That’s why he told Israel, “I can’t hear you because of your sin.”
Consider the words of the psalmist, “I cried to him with my mouth, and he was extolled with my tongue. If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear. But certainly God has heard me; he has attended to the voice of my prayer” (Psalm 66:17–19). The psalmist is saying, “I saw there was iniquity in my heart, and I refused to live with it. So I went to the Lord to get cleansed. Then he heard my prayer. But if I had held on to my sin, God wouldn’t have listened to my cry.”
As we face our own crises, we may convince ourselves, “Prayer is the most important thing I can do right now.” But a time comes when God calls us to act, to obey his Word in faith. At such a time, he won’t allow us to retreat to a wilderness to pray. That would be disobedience, and any prayers at that point would be offered in unbelief.