While God wants to answer our prayers, and is never gets tired of doing so, He expects us to fulfill our part in this Divine-human partnership. For one, sins, misdeeds and unrighteousness seal up God’s ears to our prayers. They form a barricade between God and us, so that, He will not hear when we cry. This should call for self-examination.

Your desires are no match to the great possibilities of prayer, if you can take away gossip, backbiting, murmuring, lying and any other sin, as they hinder the answers to your prayers. It is a wonderful thing to pray and fast. But if you will reap the full benefits of fasting and prayer, you will need to eschew bitter quarrels, arguments and malice. It is not every problem that comes from witches and wizards. It is not every problem that comes as a result of yokes/curses or from ancestral spirits.

When the children of Israel sinned and were bitten by serpents in the desert, the serpents were not seen as the handiwork of witches and wizards, but as punishment coming from the Lord because of their sin. When leprosy came upon Miriam, she did not attribute it to any herbalist or an evil spirit, but saw it as punishment for her sin of gossip and backbiting against the man of God, Moses. The solution to your problems, sometimes, may not be in the breaking of yokes or in going for a deliverance ministrations. The solution may just be in being genuinely sorry for your sinful conducts, and turning away from all such lifestyle.

Many people have public victory, but private failure. Publicly, they are able to conquer Goliath; privately they are not able to conquer the lusts of the flesh. The Lord is looking for righteousness in your lives, publicly and privately. If the miracle you are seeking from the Lord is very important to you, if you want to be able to pray and bring down answers from heaven, then you will need to get rid of sin and become righteous.

Righteousness gives us boldness in prayer. It gives us the power to pray more than we can ever get from fasting, prayer formula or other man-made methods. You cannot force God to do anything for us by either fasting or by flattery. If you are living in sin, you can deceive men and women, and get what you want by flattery, but you cannot by it, cause God to forget holiness.

Holiness is the nature of God. You cannot flatter Him to the point that He will forget that deliberate disobedience to His commandments is going to hinder answer to your prayers. If you want to reverse negative things in your life, then you need to live righteously. When you live a righteous life, you do not need someone else to break a spiritual yoke for you. Righteous living gives authority to your word to remove every mountain in your life.

• Further reading (King James Version): 2Chronicles 7:12-14; Isaiah 1:3,4,15,16-19. Isaiah 59:1,2; 58:3,4; Zechariah 7:12,13; Proverbs 28:9; Psalm 66:18; 2 Samuel 12:13-20; Jeremiah 7:8-11,16; 11:9,10,14; 14:7,10,11. Genesis 18:19; Exodus 33:11,17; 1 Kings 18:36-39; 2 Kings 20:1-6; James 5:16.