Ever Misunderstand God? How To Get Rest and Pray with Confidence

Have you ever been completely misunderstood—even when you were being clear? In today’s episode of Getting Personal With God, I share a personal story about communication gone wrong and how it revealed a much deeper issue: the way we hear matters just as much as what is said.

Using real-life experiences, biblical insight, and Ephesians 1, this episode explores why misunderstanding happens in relationships—and especially in our relationship with God. Many believers avoid prayer or time with God because of shame, low self-worth, mistrust of God’s character, distraction, or feeling like prayer “won’t work.” But Scripture shows God loves you, chooses you, listens to you, and desires a personal, intimate relationship.

You’ll learn how:

• Misunderstanding others mirrors how we can misunderstand God
• Identity wounds distort how we hear God’s voice
• The enemy twists truth to blind our minds
• Jesus modeled emotional maturity by not chasing misunderstanding
• Assuming “best intent” can transform relationships
• Praying Ephesians 1 brings revelation, intimacy, and clarity about who God is

If you want a deeper relationship with God, freedom from shame, and renewed confidence that He loves you and listens to you—this episode will encourage your heart and strengthen your faith.

Mentioned in this episode:
✔ Ephesians 1 (The Passion Translation)
✔ Overcoming shame, guilt, and relational distortion
✔ Growing in spiritual maturity and wisdom
✔ Prayer for revelation and intimacy with God

If today encouraged you, please share this episode and leave a quick review on Apple Podcasts—it truly helps others discover the show.

Special offer!

Prayer changes everything — especially when you’re seeking God for answers to anxiety, depression, relationships, finances, health, or life decisions. 100 Prayers Releasing 100 Cares shares real stories of answered prayer, biblical wisdom for hearing God’s voice, and practical faith tools rooted in Scripture to help you walk in freedom and bold trust in God. "100 Prayers Releasing 100 Cares" Click to order your copy today and begin praying with confidence!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Do you love God but forget to pray? Or feel guilty instead of enjoying his presence? I get it. I've been there. I'm Lenora, mom, Jesus lover, and international trainer. If you're looking to feel closer to God without pressure, receive more from him, and live with greater confidence, grab some coffee and let's talk. If you're carrying stress and want prayer support, I wrote a book to help. 100 Prayers, Releasing 100 Cares. It's filled with real stories, scripture, and prayers for basically every part of life. The link is in the show notes. I think you'll love it. Have you ever been misunderstood? I remember a time as a supervisor, I was coaching one of my team members who was having uh a bit of a difficulty with one of the other team members. And so I was talking to her about how to handle what was going on. And at the end of our conversation, I said, Hey, if you need me to be the bad guy, then switch it to that. And I'll take the heat for the decision that we need to make in this situation. She agreed and they went on and had their meeting. A day or two later, I asked about it. And in recounting what she and I talked about, her comment was, I know you said you didn't want to be the bad guy. And I was like, Well, what? And I was dumbfounded that she had heard the exact opposite of what I had said to her. I had said, if you need me to be the bad guy, I'm the supervisor, do what you need to do. She heard the exact opposite. I don't know how. I was shocked. She thought I said, I don't want to be the bad guy. I thought, oh my gosh, what a rotten thing for a supervisor to say. And I didn't say that, but that was such a loud example to me of how even if you have a direct conversation, you can be completely misunderstood. Someone said to me once, a mark of maturity is to be able to be misunderstood. And you see this in Jesus in the Gospels. How many times people were offended at what he said or twisted what he said, or twisted what they asked to try to make him say something they could use against him. And he always so wisely navigated it, but what he never did is chase after them and go, but I meant, but I meant. Because some people have such a negative thought process that you can't always get what you want. You can't always ensure someone gets you. Someone wants to understand who you are. Along the same line, a great concept I got from some coworkers some years back was when you go into a situation, especially if you're going to try and help fix a problem or be a support, they say always go into the problem assuming best intent. That's a game changer. So don't walk into a situation assuming someone is against you or assuming someone has bad motives. Instead, assume best intent. As a lot of people do have some good motives, are looking for solutions, and you assuming something good to start is a huge key to gaining understanding of the situation and finding a great solution. Now, why am I bringing this up? For one, we just walked through a holiday. I just recorded this right after Thanksgiving, and I'm really grateful that I happen to have a really, really nice Thanksgiving with family this year in particular, partly because I do love them, especially some of them. But I also am continuing to on purpose break free from my own insecurities, my own tendencies at times to hear incorrectly. There's a verse that stood out to me years ago that says, be careful how you hear. Sometimes we blame what somebody said, but the issue is how we hear. Or it can be both, a combination of things. Now, why do I bring this up? Because this podcast is about getting personal with God. And like I mentioned, Jesus was always aware that some people will just walk away. They just would leave and go, yeah, I'm tapping out now because of what you just said. And you know, he never chased after him. He wanted the relationships, but each person has their own free will that God will always respect. Beyond that, scripture also talks about we can be blinded in our minds. So when it comes to getting personal with God, we do have a spiritual enemy that is constantly trying to misrepresent God, twist what God says, and blind our minds to the truth. Plus, the fall of man in general, if you look in the book of Genesis, began when the enemy twisted what God said, and between deception and choice, mankind said, You know what? I want to be God. I want to decide what's right and wrong. I'll be the judge of that. And now we have more than eight billion judges on the earth. We so often each think we have the right opinion, the right perspective. And now, my gosh, we can spew our debates and thoughts and opinions all over the place and cause all kinds of conflict. But that's another story. You know, when I was doing research for this podcast, and I talked to different people about their relationship with God and why they may find themselves avoiding prayer or time with Him to get a closer personal relationship. And it seems we all are a lot alike. And I'm talking primarily about people that probably grew up in church. They actually have a love for God, they want a relationship. But when I had numerous conversations, one of the main struggles came down to really identity pain. They felt shame or guilt and some of the self-esteem issues or self-worth were some of the deepest roots of why we avoid God. We don't think he approves, or we don't like ourselves. So why would God, who made the universe, give a hoot about me? Um, second to that, which ties right into the first one, is a mistrust of God's character. We call that relational distortion. If I think you're a liar, I'm not gonna trust you. If someone told me you're a liar, I might believe them, even if you're not a liar. If someone told me you're often angry, or who knows what I believe about you, that's gonna impact my expectations from you, my likeless to reach out to you, build a relationship, etc. And a third one, people can just get distracted from time with God. They can say, you know, I know I should, but I've got these other priorities and all these things competing for my time, which can certainly be a fact, but guess what? Often that is a coping mechanism. If you don't trust someone, you might avoid them and tell them how busy you are. Oh, I was gonna come, but things got so busy. When the truth is, if you really wanted to go and hang out with friends you just love hanging out with, you typically make the time for it. So other priorities is really a coping mechanism to avoid a relationship you just don't enjoy. Which goes back to if I think you're impatient with me, if you disapprove of me, well, it's easy for me to want to come up with all the reasons why I don't want to spend time with you. Next, similar to distraction is just busyness. And next would be overall, you have an actual low value of prayer. You think I don't pray because I don't think it'll actually make a difference. You don't think God's actually gonna listen or do something about it, or it's just something you should do, but it feels like a waste of time. But guess what? That can be often what's called like a surface level justification because you justify being busy or you believe in the low value of prayer, because again, you don't trust God's character, or you believe something that's not true about him. And by the way, talking to someone who doesn't want to talk to you or doesn't listen well or respond doesn't help how we feel. So all of it can work against us. So I'm gonna read something from Ephesians to you just to tell you God's excited about you. He does listen to you. If you're seeking him, he says, Hey, seek me and you'll find me. But seek me with your whole heart. Seek me with a good expectation. But Ephesians chapter one, I'm just gonna read a couple verses, and I'll use this book and chapter off and on because it's just so good. This is from the Passion Translation, but verse two says, May God Himself, the heavenly Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, release grace over you and impart total well-being into your lives. Total well-being. Did you know that's God's desire for you to have total well-being in your life? And then he talks about every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realm has already been lavished upon us as a love gift from our wonderful heavenly Father. Do you think of God as wonderful? A Father that loves to bless you, and that he sees us wrapped up into Christ? Now it says in verse 4, in love, in love, he chose us before he laid the foundation of the universe. Because of his great love, he ordained us so we would be seen as holy in his eyes with unstained innocence. Again, I have little grandbabies. Oh my gosh, it's so fun to just stare at them. I did that with my kids when their babies just stare at them and go, Oh wow, this amazing little person is mine. And FYI, God wants to have that kind of relationship with you. Back to Ephesians. For it was always in his perfect plan to adopt you as his delightful child. Obviously, I'm personalizing this a little bit to you. Through our union with Jesus Christ, the anointed one, so that his tremendous love that cascades over us would glorify his grace for the same love he has for the beloved Jesus, he has for us. Did you hear that? That's that's big news, big truth. And this unfolding plan of his brings him great pleasure. It gives him great pleasure to adopt you, to love you, and to make you his. And now it talks also about how he canceled our sin through Christ Jesus and all the things he did on purpose, because it was always his purpose to make us his. Now I'm going to jump down to verse 15. Because of this, since I first heard about your strong faith in the Lord Jesus and your tender love towards his devoted ones, my heart is always full and overflowing with thanks to God for you. I constantly remember you in my prayers. FYI, repeat great prayers, ask and keep on asking. Because we have to turn our hearts towards him. He hears. It's us that have to make the shift towards him, trusting him to do what he promises. Anyway, verse 17, I pray that the Father of glory, the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, would impart to you the riches of the Spirit of wisdom and the spirit of revelation to know him through your deepening intimacy with him. We misunderstand God all the time. We think a certain way about God, whether it's a religious way or a way that doesn't want anything to do with religion, because not knowing Jesus at all or being in a really religious environment that tells you be good, but there's no power from God to help you. You're supposed to prove something to him. You know, hate yourself because you're so sinful. Any of those rotten, purely religious approaches to God, it's not respecting him. It is not knowing him, thinking he's abusive, thinking he's a hard God. When the truth is, he's always had a plan to know you. He has sent his son to lay his life down for you so that you could be seen wholly and without blame before him in love. That's what I read earlier. But the writer of this chapter said that he prayed continuously for revelation to get to know God, that the light of God would illuminate the eyes of our imagination. We can imagine rotten things about God, boring things about God, frustrating, who knows what, or not think about him at all. But we're praying and pray over yourself. God, open the eyes of my understanding to know you intimately. Illuminate the eyes of my imagination, flooding it with light until I experience the full revelation of the hope of your calling, your plan for me, and that I would know the wealth of your glorious inheritance you find in me, that you consider yourself rich by having me as your child. So I hope you understand I'm personalizing these verses over myself, and I'm trying to give you an example of something I recommend you do because it's a game changer to get a revelation of what God's like. Because, like I said, we so often misunderstand people. We so often make our own judgments because that was the fall of man. We all do it. So I and we need God give us revelation. And so pray continually for that. And you'll be amazed how God can open up your understanding to Him. And the last piece of revelation we're supposed to ask for is that we would continually experience and get to know the greatness of God's power working through us as we trust in Christ. And it goes on and it just is amazing. So I want to pray for you. So, God, open up our eyes. I ask for the person listening to this, and always for myself, as I do pray, I ask you to give us revelation into the knowledge of you. Help us to grow more intimately acquainted with you so we don't misunderstand you, so we don't avoid you because we believe you're not listening or you don't care. God, open our eyes to how much we mean to you. Help us to recognize you and come under your ways, your authority in every way, so that we can walk out the powerful and blessed lives that you want for your children, like any good parent wants. And if we know how to give good gifts to our kids, how much more do you have amazing power and plans for us and how you teach us to battle through and to win in the name of Jesus in our lives? Thank you, Father. You are faithful. And I ask you to encourage this person listening. I ask you to make yourself known to them, help them be aware of who you are and your goodness. And God set them on fire to know you better. Because you are so good, and your plans are so good. And my right to pray boldly is in Jesus Christ. Amen. Hey, friend, I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If so, would you please share it and leave a quick review on Apple Podcasts? That really helps me reach others. The link to 100 prayers releasing 100 cares is in the show notes, and thanks for listening. I'm back next Monday. Until then, be kind to you. Because then it's a whole lot easier to be kind to anybody else.