“And whatsoever we ask, we receive of him, because we keep his commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in his sight.” (1John 3:22)
“Bad living means bad praying and, in the end, no praying at all. We pray feebly because we live feebly. The stream of prayer cannot rise higher than the fountain of living. We simply cannot talk to God strongly, intimately, and confidently unless we are living for Him, faithfully and truly. To have full access to God in prayer, there must be a total abandonment of conscious and premeditated sin.” – E.M. Bounds
Just as we must take a bath every day as we get dirty, we also must confess and repent of sin the moment it enters our lives. We love to read the first part of the verse above which says, “And whatsoever we ask, we receive of him…” To stop there would mean we should get anything we want from God no matter how sinful we are living.
But the verse doesn’t stop there. The next part of the verse is conditional. In other words, we can only expect to receive of him what we ask if “we keep his commandments.”