CONVICTION

"I pray! Infact, I fast and pray - day and night. I asked God but the challenge still didn't get fixed. In prayers and petition, I made my request known to God but yet the situation is still the same and I trust him, I don't doubt, I believe in him, infact I present my strong reasons to him in prayers but yet I didn't get the job" or people say " tola why is that brother this way, why does he keep failing, why is his life still the same after 20 years of being a Christian with God even though he prays day and night ,even though he doesn't mess around, he doesn't miss bible study and his conviction in God is powerful ".

All this questions I asked once as an unbeliever, in fact I made jest when I see a brother whose prayer life is perfect and communion with God is perfect yet he has nothing to show for it. when I got arrested by God I was really scared, I was really scared of turning out as one of those brothers whose prayers makes the foundation of the house shake but yet no answers and trust me it did really scared me because I thought that was one of the long-suffering of being a Christian and the moment you become one life becomes hard until light flooded my wisdom knowledge and understanding.

We have a lot of Christians struggling today not because they don't pray, not because they don't fellowship with the Holy Spirit but because they talk too much and never listen. 
Prayer is the place of communion with the father, where we mix our hope with supplications to the father, where we tender our request to him. Prayer is a communication process that allows you to talk to God, but we all often forget we are in a communication with the father when we are praying, what we often do is talk, complain, explain and leave his presence without listening to him. How many of us listen to God?  How many of us actually listen to God? Time after time I always tell people "God is not going to come down from heaven to fix the problem" what he does is send people or send you to people or give you strategies and ideas  on how to solve the challenge but you will never get to meet those people or get the perfect solution if you don't listen to him to give you instructions on how to go about it. One of the mistakes we make is we ask God for things like he is a magician and we expect things to always just happen as long as we have talked to him.  There is the place of talking to him, there is the place of listening to him because in his replies ,you get instructions ,and  All your prayers has answers, you only need to be patient enough to let God talk and listen to the instructions he gives.  We are patient enough to  explain our problem to him but we are not patient enough to listen to what he has to say which is the answer to our prayer . The book of proverb repeatedly emphasize the place of instructions so when all you do is talk and talk without letting the other person in the conversation talk , you have only just come to complain and explain and not ready to listen.

Prayer is a conversation between you and God, the challenge won't fix itself,it will take you listening to God and getting instructions from him to know how to solve the challenge.