A Prayer God Will Answer Every Time, Guaranteed

Anyone who’s worked with teenagers for any amount of time has attempted to answer the question, “Why don’t I feel like God hears or answers my prayers?” If we’re honest, a lot of us have struggled with that same question ourselves. Do our prayers make a difference? Does God even hear them? And if so, how do we know?

While God doesn’t always answer our prayers in the way we’d like Him to (thankfully!), there is one prayer He will answer every time you ask Him, and that’s this:

“Lord, give me an opportunity to share you with someone today.”

God will answer that prayer every time, guaranteed. The question is whether or not we take Him up on it when He presents the opportunity.

A few years ago I was preparing to challenge my youth group with this and, since I try to practice everything in my own life before I expect them to do something, every day I was asking the Lord to give me opportunities to bring Him up in a conversation with an unsaved person.

On one day that week. most of the day had passed and I never saw the opportunity come. It wasn’t until I was sitting down to dinner with my family when the telephone rang. I answered to the friendly greeting of a telemarketer selling me a TV service. My first response is often to politely say I’m not interested, but I felt the Holy Spirit say, “Tim, don’t hang up. This is your opportunity to share me. She is a real person, too, you know.” So I listened to her spiel and even asked her a couple questions, looking for an opportunity to bring God up. I eventually asked a question she didn’t know the answer to, so while she was looking it up I just went for it.

“Hey, by the way, I’m a pastor and I was wondering if there’s anything I could pray for for you.”

Pause… “Wow, I haven’t heard that one before.”

Me, chuckling. “No, seriously, I’d love to pray for you in some way if you’d like.”

We never got back to talking about TV programming. She told me how she grew up Catholic but didn’t attend Mass anymore due to family conflicts and now she was in college, struggling financially just to make it through the semester. With the pressures of college, family issues, and finances, she was very stressed and not sleeping much. She hated her telemarketing job, but it’s the only job she could find, so she worked long hours with potential customers swearing at her and hanging up before she could even say anything.

It wasn’t long before I could tell that she was crying on the other end of the line. I prayed with her, tried my best to give her some kind of spiritual encouragement that ultimately sounded really lame to me. She thanked me, said she felt like she wanted to go back to church again, and we hung up.

I stood by the phone for a second and thought, “Wow, I certainly didn’t see that one coming. Thank you, Lord, for helping me be sensitive to the people around me who need to hear about you.”

Before you start teaching your youth group about evangelism, pray this prayer every day for a week:

“Lord, give me an opportunity to share you with someone today.”

And then take Him up on it. Prepare to be stretched and surprised in awesome ways.

Have you ever prayed this before? If so, how did you see God work in your life? If not, what might keep you from doing so? What might keep your students from praying it?