Appropriate scriptures from the Bible please?

Question

I have been asked by my home group to give testimony about God, and I wanted to speak on the subject of answered prayer. I can give accounts of the way God answers prayer from my own experience, but would like to draw from scripture as well, which is more important. Does anyone have any good Bible quotations on the subject of how God answers prayer please?

Answer 1

James 1:5-7 Prayer requires faith to work
James 5:17-18 Example of Elijah
John 15:7-8 If we are abiding, we can ask for anything that
is 'fruit' glorifying God.
Matthew 7:7-11 Asking and receiving things good for us

Paul makes some prayers, with spiritual objectives in mind, eg Ephesians and Colossians.

Answer 2

Any of Christ's healings would qualify for the purposes of your home group alongside your own experience, but genuine personal experience, simply told, gives you a more powerful testimony.

"Scientific" surveys and experiments are a meaningless waste of time. No TWO people are the same - never mind a thousand! They have different ages, different states of general health, different stages of development of the given condition, different complicating factors, different mental states, different support levels; some are content, some are angry, some loved and loving, some bitter and resentful; some are afraid, some are prepared to trust their lives to God; some have guilty consciences, some are in a state of grace, some will have other people praying for them quite beyond the scope or 'control' of the experiment.

All of these factors utterly negate any possible "scientific" basis for any worthwhile experiment to take place, even were the assumption to be granted (unlikely, at best) that prayer is operable and measurable in some mechanical way.

If anyone thinks they can confine God within human words or logic then their God is too small!

Answer 3

If you are an intelligent human being, and if you want to understand the true nature of God, you owe it to yourself to ask, "Why won't God heal amputees?"....

....The fascinating thing is that we can prove that prayer has no effect in exactly the same way that we can prove that horseshoes have no effect. We take 1,000 cancer patients. We pray over 500 of them and we leave the other 500 alone. Then we look at cancer remission rates between the two groups. What we find is that prayers have zero benefit. We would see no statistical difference between the remission rates in the two groups of 500 patients.

In other words, we can prove that the belief in prayer is pure superstition. The belief in the power of prayer is no different from the belief in the power of lucky horseshoes.

These experiments have been performed many times, and they always return the same results. For example, this article says:

One of the most scientifically rigorous studies yet, published earlier this month, found that the prayers of a distant congregation did not reduce the major complications or death rate in patients hospitalized for heart treatments.
And:
A review of 17 past studies of ''distant healing," published in 2003 by a British researcher, found no significant effect for prayer or other healing methods.
An article from March, 2006 discusses another study that confirms the same thing:
In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. In fact, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications.....

Answer 4

Here are just a few, all of these prayers were answered.


Judges 16:28 And Samson called unto the LORD, and said, O Lord GOD, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.

Judges 6:39 And Gideon said unto God, Let not thine anger be hot against me, and I will speak but this once: let me prove, I pray thee, but this once with the fleece; let it now be dry only upon the fleece, and upon all the ground let there be dew.

Jonah 2:1 Then Jonah prayed unto the LORD his God out of the fish’s belly,

2 Kings 19:15 And Hezekiah prayed before the LORD, and said, O LORD God of Israel, which dwellest between the cherubims, thou art the God, even thou alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth; thou hast made heaven and earth.

Answer 5

The Bible is full of answered prayers.

Answer 6

2 Kings 20 is a good story of answered prayer... but with not so good results.

Answer 7

not sure if this one will help you but how about daniel 9:20. Acts 10 :31 or how about hebrews 5:7

Answer 8

Answered prayers hmmmm.

Answer 9

Luke 11: 9 & 10. amongst many others.

Answer 10

In Psalm 137, David prays that God will joyfully throw the Babylonians' children off a cliff so all their bones will be broken and God answers his prayer.

Psalm 137

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Raze it, raze it, even to the foundation thereof.
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.