What Blocks the Prayer

"Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, so that your prayers may not be hindered." (1 Peter 3:7)

Some prayers do not get through, and it is no kindness to pretend otherwise. Unforgiveness blocks prayer. If you are holding a thing against a person and you carry it into the room with you, it will sit down between you and God and refuse to move. Unconfessed sin blocks prayer, not because God is squeamish, but because a man who will not tell the truth in one room will not tell it in another. Selfish motive blocks prayer, when we ask only for what would feed the very thing that is eating us. Ignoring the Scripture blocks prayer, for you cannot ask a man for help while refusing to hear a word he says.

And then there is one that married men are almost never told. Peter says a husband's prayers are hindered by how he treats his wife. That is the plain sense of it. Live with her in an understanding way, honor her as a fellow heir of the grace of life, or your prayers are obstructed. That is not marriage advice tucked into an epistle. It is a prayer instruction with a warning attached.

So if the line seems dead, do not first assume mystery. Do the humbler thing and check the plain hindrances. Is there someone you have not forgiven, something you have not confessed, a motive you have not examined, a person under your own roof you have not honored? Clear the channel Scripture says to clear, and see whether the silence was never silence at all, but a blockage you had the power to remove.