Thankfully God Often Doesn't Answer My Prayers
I think we have all had a conversation like this:
"...So what prayers has God answered lately?"
"Ah, it's so frustrating! I've been praying and praying for x.
It's a good request, i'm sure…but no obvious result".
What more can we say in such a circumstance? It is hard to understand why God is so often unresponsive to a godly prayer request.
There are some reasons which are not commonly discussed but are genuinely very helpful to look at. They have certainly challenged me greatly.
But first, let me cover off a couple of reasons that you probably already know well.
- We need to pray according to God's will, not according to our own sinful desires (James 4:3), and if we don't know God's will we should add a hearty "let not my will but yours be done".
- We must pray persistently such as the man who needed bread from his neighbour in the middle of the night and so knocked and knocked on his door (Luke 11). We must be constant in prayer (Rom 12:12), without ceasing (Eph 6:18; 1Th 5:17).
But, if we know our prayer is the will of God (because we see his promise to do it in the Word) and we are praying persistently, perhaps even with fasting to really flag our distress, then why are our prayers often not answered?
1. God is not the problem.
First and foremost we must address the sin that can arise in our hearts because of unanswered prayer.
"The LORD is upright;
he is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in him" (Psalm 92:15).
If we subconsciously have bitterness creeping in, if we are unhappy at God for his answering "no" to our prayers, then we are in the wrong. We must never say God is up to no good and that we know better than he does.
Sin also causes us to pray less, to love him less and so degrades our relationship with him.
Instead, let us humble ourselves completely under his majesty. Let us meekly read his word to find out why our prayer is unanswered.
2. Our life may be the problem
If you abide in me, and my words abide in you,
ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you (John 15:7)
Abide in me? What does that mean? Does Jesus mean if I abide in Christ all my prayers will be answered?
If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love (John 15:10).
If we are disobeying Christ's commandments, we are not abiding in him, and we will not have our prayers answered.
We are not innocent butterflies who deserve our prayers to be answered. Often I can be caught in a sinful attitude or practice for days, weeks or even years on end. We are not nearly as holy as we think we are. If we sin all day but spend 10 minutes in prayer in the morning, God sees our hypocrisy and will not bless our prayers with a "yes". We are unruly children and God is a wise parent.
Even our Christian culture really doesn't like this. There is a requirement here, and we hate someone telling us we don't meet the standard. It's judgmental!
Someone may respond: "How dare you be so legalistic so as to say God won't answer my prayer! God is so merciful he would answer even the worst person's prayer. God doesn't treat us based on how good we are."
Well, judge for yourself from some more verses whether prayers require a level of righteousness.
Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way…
so that your prayers may not be hindered (1 Peter 3:7).
If one turns away his ear from hearing the law,
even his prayer is an abomination (Proverbs 28:9).
The effective prayer of a righteous person has great power (James 5:16).
The LORD is far from the wicked, but he hears the prayer of the righteous (Proverbs 15:29).
If we are living unrighteously in these ways and more, God doesn't just say no to our prayers, he even detests to listen to them, viewing them as abominations.
In general our culture feels entitled to the best blessings despite often offering God the worst, but let us remember that we are prone to sin, and look inwards at ourselves,
Let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:28-29).
Only then should we dare to approach the throne in prayer.
This is not buying blessing from God, as if even the most pure hour of our lives could gain us credit: "all our righteous deeds are like filthy rags" (Isaiah 64:6).
If we miraculously manage once in a blue moon to be truly virtuous in patience, generosity or sacrifice, then that moment is still detestable to God because our pride is inevitably inflated.
No, we cannot buy God's blessings.
Imagine we sinned and sinned more and more, while still claiming, yes we are Christian. What if God kept answering our prayers. Imagine God answers 'yes' to our prayers, perhaps to a better job, or health of a loved one, or church growth. God answers "yes" to them all despite our increasing sin. In so answering such prayers, God would not reign in the sin, nor discipline us, but would actually affirm and propel our wickedness further down that prodigal road.
In fact, we all are struggling on this road. The notion that we have "arrived" at Christ-likeness is foolish pride. We need God to regularly answer "no" to our prayers. We need his flat rejection of our requests. We need to wake up to our sin and turn back to him. It is for our own good that God says "no" to our prayers.
3. A lack of faith.
If we do pray rightly, let us be encouraged that God definitely will grant our request!
this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. 15 And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him (1 John 5:14-15).
I can squirm a little uncomfortably as I read that verse, maybe you can feel the same doubt about this bold promise. Here lies a problem. We lack the faith to believe God will answer with a yes. Faith is required to receive a "yes".
Perhaps we see all around us prayers unanswered, so we believe our eyes instead of the Lord. We pray for our family or colleagues to be saved but we see them unchanged. So we lose faith and we stop praying for them. Or if we do keep praying, we water down our prayers and thin out our faith.
Spurgeon put it like this:
"You may have heard the story of one of our first students, who came to me, and said, "I have been preaching now for some months, and I do not think I have had a single conversion."
I said to him, "And do you expect that the Lord is going to bless you and save souls every time you open your mouth?" "No, sir," he replied. "Well, then," I said, "that is why you do not get souls saved. If you had believed, the Lord would have given the blessing." I had caught him very nicely; but many others would have answered me in just the same way as he did. They tremblingly believe that it is possible, by some strange mysterious method, that once in a hundred sermons God might win a quarter of a soul.
They have hardly enough faith to keep them standing upright in their boots; how can they expect God to bless them? I like to go to the pulpit feeling, "This is God's Word that I am going to deliver in His name; it cannot return to Him void; I have asked His blessing upon it, and He is bound to give"
We lack faith because we believe our eyes over the Lord.
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1).
The author of the letter to the Hebrews then lists that great record of people through scripture who had faith and therefore received God's promises.
Think of Noah having faith that the most unlikely thing would occur, that the world would be entirely flooded and his family and all kinds of animals would survive by this boat.
Think of Abraham and Sarah. How impossible at the age of 100 to have a child, and to receive a whole land and be father of descendants more than the stars.
We must have faith or we will not obtain the promise. The promise we must trust is this:
"Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.
Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! (Matthew 7:7-11)
To conclude, we can be thankful that God says "no" to many of our prayers, it is a wake up call to our sin and lack of faith. He answers "no" out of His good desire to purify us so that we shine more and more brightly with holiness for his glory. Only when we abide in him, in obedience through faith will our loving Father gladly grant us our requests.
- Rory O'Shea
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