What Loving Others Has to Do with Prayer (Episode 113)

God has not made any of us totally self-reliant. We all need His help in our life. That’s why we must know how to pray effectively. In this episode, Evangelist Frank King addresses how loving others can help us move the hand of God in our favor when we pray.

In John’s first epistle, he talks about the relationship between loving others and God answering our prayers. He says we are to love in deeds and in truth (1 John 3:18). These days, we use the word “love” too loosely. But love must be accompanied by action. Equally important, our deeds of love must be in truth. False pretenses of love, or self-serving motives behind our acts of love may impress people, but they get us nowhere with God.

When we obey God by loving others through deeds and in truth, “Whatever we ask, we receive of Him, because we keep his commandments, and do the things that are pleasing in His sight” (verse 22). This is a conditional promise contingent upon us genuinely loving others.

Every one of us who has been born again has the power to genuinely love others. That’s because the Spirit of God indwells us, and God is love. But still, loving others is a choice. The Holy Spirit empowers us to love, but we can choose to disobey the Spirit.

Loving Others Will Cost You Something

One reason we may choose not to walk in love is because some people make it more costly to love them than we are willing to pay. Genuinely loving others will cost you something. For instance, you reach out to someone who really needs someone to reach out to them. You invest your time and prayer and resources in them. But they repeatedly brush you off. Or the result of your efforts is futile.

The natural tendency is to want to cut your losses when that happens. At times, that may be the right thing to do. But if you make it a habit of shunning everybody you deem as too costly to love, that will negatively affect your prayer life. The resulting dilemma is that you don’t want to pay the cost of loving others, but you need God to hear you when you pray and seek His help.

To be sure, in these last days, loving others will be increasingly more difficult. Jesus said that in the latter days, “Most people’s love will grow cold” (Matthew 24:12, NASB).

But the fact remains that we can’t go about failing to love others and expect to be right with God when we pray.  None of us can afford to allow others to drag us down to a place where we can’t get a prayer through. Having the right relationship with God is not an option but a must. And He says, if you want to be confident to receive from Me when you pray, you must genuinely love others.