Psalm 66:18 (NASB)
18 If I regard wickedness in my heart, The Lord will not hear;

Psalm 66:18 (MSG)
18 If I had been cozy with evil, the Lord would never have listened.

Psalm 66:18 (ESV)
18 If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.

Psalm 66 is a psalm about answered prayer. When you get to verse 18, it clearly tells of a condition for which God will not listen to our prayers. The NASB translation uses “regard”, which is better understood when you read the Message or English Standard version.

It has taken me a lot of years to understand the connection between known sin in my life and God’s willingness to listen to my supplications. It is so easy to not see the sin in our lives or to deceive ourselves into thinking that it really isn’t a sin.

What has made the difference has been accountability from other men in my life. It seems that it is easy for women to seek out other women that they can be accountable to, yet for many men (me included) it is easier to be an island. Easier to rely on my own counsel.

If you dig deep into the lives of the great men of God over the centuries, more often than not, they had other men in their lives that could hold them accountable. Even Jesus, who was fully man and fully God, sought out the counsel of His Father. It is how God wired us. We need others that we trust to speak the truth that we often won’t or don’t want to see in ourselves.

We live in a society today that lives on false beliefs and half-truths. We need partners that can bring our lives back into focus and on the right track.

When we do, it makes our prayer lives so much more fruitful.