Does God Answer a Sinner's Prayer?

God answers sinners who pray for forgiveness of sin, those who are drawn by the Spirit who are weary and burdened by their sin.

 

"....would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote his breast, saying, God, be thou merciful to me a sinner. I say unto you, This man went down to his house justified rather than the other......" Lu 18:13,14

 

good answer!

God only obligated to hear and respond to his children, all others are "Bastard"

 

Charles Spurgeon, "The Ravens' Cry"

"After awhile, as I expected, they fell to their usual amusement of calling names. They began to say what rank Arminianism this was! And another expression they were pleased to honor me with, was the title of “Fullerist”—a title, by the way, so honorable that I could heartily have thanked them for appending it to what I had advanced! But to say that God should hear the prayer of natural men was something worse than Arminianism to them, if, indeed, anything could be worse!

They quoted that counterfeit passage, “The prayer of the wicked is an abomination unto the Lord,” which I speedily answered by asking them if they would find me that text in the Word of God, for I ventured to assert that the devil was the author of that saying, and that it was not in the Bible at all. “The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination unto the Lord” is in the Bible, but that is a very different thing from the “prayer of the wicked.” And moreover there is a decided difference between the word wicked there intended and the natural man about whom we were arguing. I do not think that a man who begins to pray in any sense can be considered as being altogether among “the wicked” intended by Solomon, and certainly he is not among those who turn away their ears from hearing the Law, of whom it is written that their prayer is an abomination.

“Well, but,” they said, “how could it be that God could hear a natural prayer?” And while I paused for a moment, an old woman in a red cloak pushed her way into the little circle round me and said to them in very forcible way, like a mother in Israel as she was, “Why do you raise this question, forgetting what God Himself has said! What is this you say, that God does not hear natural prayer? Why, doesn’t He hear the young ravens when they cry unto Him? And do you think they offer spiritual prayers?”

Straightway the men of war took to their heels—no defeat was more thorough—and for once in their lives they must have felt that they might possibly err! Surely, Brethren, this may encourage and comfort you! I am not going to set you just now to the task of finding out whether your prayers are natural or spiritual—whether they come from God’s Spirit or whether they do not—because that might, perhaps, discourage you. If the prayer proceeds from your very heart, we know how it got there, though you may not. God hears the ravens, and I do believe He will hear you, and I believe, moreover, though I do not now want to raise the question in your heart, that He hears your prayer, because—though you may not know it—there is a secret work of the Spirit of God going on within you which is teaching you to pray.

But I have mightier arguments and nearer the mark. When the young ravens cry, they cry alone. But when you pray you have a mightier One than you praying with you! Hear that sinner crying, “God be merciful to me a sinner”? Hark! Do you hear that other cry which goes up with his? No, you do not hear it because your ears are dull and heavy, but God hears it. There is another voice, far louder and sweeter than the first, and far more prevalent, mounting up at the same moment and pleading, “Father, forgive them through My precious blood.”"

 

He answered mine and I was born again and Angels rejoiced. Should I say apparently or should I believe what God says?