Christians know the value of prayer more than any other religion. Prayer means direct communication with God. We teach our children to pray before the child can walk. A blind person or a deaf person or a learned person or an uneducated person or anyone can pray except a person who is in coma stage. So basically almost all people in this world know to pray.

Prayer was given to us by the grace of God, because sin removed face to face communication with God. We are not eligible to stand before God, but God through His Grace granted us the opportunity to speak to Him through prayer.

After sin, Adam noticing his hopeless condition went and hid but God Himself came and taught him a way to communicate again with God; this communication introduced by God is what is called Prayer. Successful communication is only when it happens both ways.

As Christians, we know that the Bible talks a lot about prayer. Now we can focus our study only on few limited verses. Throughout the Bible, the word “pray” has been used for communicating between two or more people OR also between man to God. But the word “Prayer” has been exclusively used for communicating between man and God. In Gen 18:3 we see the first usage of the word “pray” between man and God. Where a request for God’s grace(favour) is kept before God; therefore prayer also means keeping our request for God’s grace.

All sacrifices, offerings, meditation etc are various modes of worshipping God. True sacrifice is explained in Psa 51:17 “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise”.

 We notice that the word “prayer” is introduced in KJV only in 2 Sam 7:27 ; which means that for nearly 3000 years the word prayer was probably not used.

It is used exactly when David aims to build a temple for God but God communicates to him through the Prophet Nathan that the temple would only be constructed by Solomon. So as a gratitude to God for allowing a Temple to be built through his generation; David renders his Prayer as told in 2 Sam 7:27 . So here we notice, that David prays as an answer to God’s communication. We also notice here that a third person is introduced between God and David because David’s hand had shed too much blood. At the same time, we learn that God had directly appeared to King Solomon (1 Kings 9:2 ) and communicated to him God’s intent to build a temple. God communicated directly with Solomon only before Solomon started committing deliberate sins.

In the same way, if we also keep ourselves away from various sins God would definitely communicate with us.

So to conclude, let us understand that a successful prayer is always a two way communication and similarly most often prayers are initiated by God (for e.g. Adam).