One of the greatest hindrances to powerfully effective prayer is our innate arrogance. For a Father who prizes humility and promises to give it an overabundance of grace {Jms. 4:6}, arrogance is a killer. It rips the heart right out of prayer.

Probably nowhere is this exemplified more personally and pointedly than in the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax-Collector in Luke 18. It is a Parable of Grace ...where one man gets precisely what he asks for-- nothing, nada-- and the other goes home justified before the God he couldn't even raise his eyes to.

Why? Because "everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted," v. 14. And that, my friends, is a fact.