The God Who Hears Us Before We Speak
“As I was praying, Gabriel…came swiftly to me at the time of the evening sacrifice. He explained to me,
‘Daniel, I have come here to give you insight and understanding. The moment you began praying, a command was given. And now I am here to tell you what it was, for you are very precious to God.’”
Daniel wasn’t just snuggling a teddy bear in his pajamas, kneeling next to his bed and praying night-night prayers when Gabriel showed up at his house with a message fresh out of eternity.
Daniel was wearing a pokey burlap sack and had sprinkled himself with cinders.
His soul was in pain over a prophecy he had read.
He was pleading with God for mercy, both for himself and for Israel.
If you read Daniel 9, this prayer posture is completely warranted, culturally anchored and beautiful.
Yet though Gabriel came specifically to answer Daniel’s pleas, it wasn’t the outward work he put into this prayer time that triggered the appearance of an angelic messenger. It wasn’t the repentant sackcloth, the hours spent praying or the application of spent embers that ensured God would answer Daniel’s cries.
It was simply God’s loving favor and attention toward Daniel that caused God to hear him, and hear him fast.
“The moment” Daniel began to pray, God responded. And Gabriel plainly says why in verse 23: “for you are very precious to God.”
Even though I’ve been a Christian for a couple decades at this point, I am guilty of forgetting that God is so assiduous in His care for me that He hears my prayers as loud and clear as He says He does. After all, I’m not Daniel and I’m not about to receive an epic vision regarding the end of the world from the archangel Gabriel.
This forgetfulness of God’s willingness to listen to me is nothing less than completely foolish. It’s all up and down the Bible that God loves to hear us pray and He is absolutely and attentively listening. For those of you who don’t believe me, here’s this.
Per usual, a lot of times I pray like I’m one of the people that Jesus used as an object lesson of what NOT to do:
“When you pray, don’t babble on and on as the Gentiles do. They think their prayers are answered merely by repeating their words again and again.” (Matthew 6:7)
His logic is found in the next verse. God already “knows exactly what you need, even before you ask Him.” If you are trying to get God to hear or respond to you by doing XYZ, you’ve approached prayer all wrong from the start.
He heard you before you asked.
He heard Daniel “the moment” he spoke in God’s general direction.
Any distance that is assumed to be there on God’s part when we pray is simply a figment of our unbelief. If God hears our prayers before we speak them, then that is some next level intimacy right there. It would be the saddest thing to live our whole lives missing out on the closeness of our loving God, especially when He has spoken so clearly of its overflowing availability to us in the Bible (Psalm 23, Psalm 139, Matthew 28:20, etc.)
“Any distance that is assumed to be there on God’s part when we pray is simply a figment of our unbelief.”
So here’s what I’ve been doing differently since reading this passage in Daniel. I start my prayers, long or short, by first believing God hears me the moment I speak and that He already knows my prayers before I say them.
I now start my prayers, not with words, but with belief.
And I talk to Him, saying my concern or request or anything else once, assuming He hears me the first time.*
Though praying to an unseen God takes an assumed level of faith, not repeating myself while I pray takes even more. When I talk to my children, I say the same thing to them several times, usually in some sort of elevated octave, because their behavior in general shows me that they usually are not listening to me. It takes a lot of trust to say something only one time to any being… God, kids, adults. When I say something only once, I am demonstrating a belief that the hearer respects me enough to actually, fully listen.
When one person truly listens to another, they are placing the immense value of their full attention on the person speaking. God is trying to help us understand that the gift of His full attention is fully ours just for talking to Him (which is pretty incredible, if you think about it). God wants us to see Him as the God who understands us so well that He only needs to be asked once.
This pre-loaded faith in God’s sharp hearing puts me in a much better state as I bring my requests and concerns to Him. Suddenly I have gone from just wanting to get some things off my mind, to an elevated belief in His generous intimacy and careful regard for my life. At that point… what was I praying about again? Who cares with such a God as this close by. Oh yeah. I remember what I was praying for now. But suddenly that big problem I was about to ask God to deal with seems less looming, less powerful, less likely to be the end-of-the-world disaster it appeared to be only moments ago. I am then able to find freedom from all my piddly needs and requests, which leaves time and space to be with Him on a more worshipful plane.
“God is trying to help us understand that the gift of His full attention is fully ours just for talking to Him”
Daniel dusted his sackcloth-clad body in ashes because his soul was in pain and his outward actions reflected that. But that’s not why God paid any attention to Him. God listened closely to Daniel because He loved him. Period. And Jesus is quick to point out that it’s the same with us (refer to above Matthew 6 verses). God heard the mighty, sackcloth wearing, prophetically gifted Daniel the same exact way He hears you or I: instantly, lovingly, graciously, perfectly.
We may have the tendency to repeat ourselves and cry out passionately in prayer and wear our proverbial sackcloth and have “all the feels.” This is 100% human and understandable and sometimes helps ground us in the pain it takes to pray deeply. I go on long runs and pray until I’m bawling like a blubbery baby because that’s where I’m at sometimes. But when we do that, we need to remember that those things are on our end and they are for our sake, not His. Though He understands our feelings, God doesn’t need a performance from us to hear us. All he needs to see is our intent to talk to Him and He promises His full, divine attention.
And if we are honest with ourselves, perhaps we will find that the full, loving closeness of such a God as this was all we really wanted or needed from our prayer time in the first place.
*Note: This does not go against the other advice Jesus gives where He says, “Ask, and keep asking” in Luke 11:9-10. The difference is motive. Jesus spoke against repetitive prayers motivated by the desire to get God’s attention in Matthew 6:7. In Luke 11, He is encouraging a persistent prayer life marked by the belief that our needs can and should be met only by Him. As He says in Luke 18:1, He wants His people to “...always pray and not give up.”
This post originally published 5/2021 on CasAndersen.com