Have you noticed that sometimes when we pray, God responds just the way we want?  God doesn’t seem to contradict anything of our prayer.  Nor does God challenge us in prayer, that is perhaps because we like the pharisee are not praying to God, but to ourselves.  We hear what we want to hear.  This is a danger about how we can relate to God in prayer.  However, it is more like a monologue with our own mind.  In prayer we often devolve in platitudes and sometimes we end up talking with ourselves just like the  pharisee.  There was another problem with the pharisee as well, he just got up and left without waiting for a response.  In prayer we need to wait for a response, and it may not always be what we want.  The response may come to us in prayer in our minds, in our thought.  But that response needs to create a sense of inner peace.  It feels right because it is not given for our convenience.  Sometimes the response will not be exactly what we want to hear but what we need to hear.  In prayer we may get a response, but it may be  different than what we had hoped. Also we need the  spirit of discernment to know what comes from God and what is coming from the enemy and what is coming from our own minds.  Prayer though begins when we wait for a response. Sometimes there will not a response in prayer right away but we need to wait. If we get a response right away, we must examine it before we act on it. After due diligence another way to verify the prayer is by seeking counsel from others.  God will also respond through others, without even elaborating too much about the said      prayer, someone who is trustworthy can verify  this is a genuine response from God.  Finally, God responds with the circumstances of life, what some people may call coincidence.  God may be putting things in place so that his divine will may be carried out.  God responds to prayer by putting us in the right place and in the right time.  The key in all of this is to wait for a response, because when we do, we can be more confident  God is acting in our lives, and we are not just talking to ourselves.  Wait for it, it will come, and when it comes the response will be very generous and more than we ever expected.