The Prayers You’re Not Proud Of

The member of Steven Furtick’s church sent him a raw text: his morning prayer felt grateful but wrong, like he was doing it incorrectly, leaving something out. Furtick uses that confession as the entry point for a sermon about the prayers people are embarrassed to pray—the distracted ones, the vengeful ones, the desperate ones, the "I give up" ones. The central argument is that God does not require polished or righteous-sounding prayers; what matters is humility, not holiness.

The problem with the "righteous person" standard

The key text is James 5:16–18, which tells believers to confess sins to each other and then declares that "the prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective." Furtick identifies why this verse can be paralyzing: people read it and think they must be sinless for God to hear them. He recalls a former leader who taught that God will not hear your prayer if there is sin in your life—a teaching Furtick rejects bluntly. The issue, he insists, is not whether you are holy enough but whether you are humble enough. Righteousness in the New Testament is not earned by being sinless; it is received as a gift through forgiveness. The condition for prayer is confession, not perfection.