2 Unanswered Prayer
UNANSWERED
PRAYER
Whatever you ask in My name, I will do it,” Jesus promised. In fact, Jesus repeats this promise three times in different words in John 14, 15, and 16. “And I will do whatever you ask in my name” (John 14:13a); “Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name” (15:16b); “My Father will give you whatever you ask in my name” (16:23b). Jesus evidently really meant business. That is a wonderful, astounding claim.
But the problem is that this promise just does not seem to be unqualifiedly true. Often preachers may exhort us to lay hold of the promise in our personal lives, to believe it, and claim it for ourselves. But the problem is that we can’t believe the promise because it is simply unbelievable in its unqualified form. For if we are ruthlessly honest with ourselves, every one of us knows that sometimes God does not answer our prayers.
Indeed, sometimes He cannot answer our prayers because Christians are praying for contradictory things. When I was a student at Wheaton, I heard about two guys who were both in love with the same girl. Each one was praying that God would turn her affections toward him so that he might marry her. Now clearly the prayers of at least one of those young men was going to be unanswered. God couldn’t answer them both because their prayers were contradictory. Or imagine two Christian athletes playing on opposite sides in the Super Bowl or in the World Series. Each would naturally be disposed to pray that his team would win, and yet both prayers could not be answered, for the two athletes would be praying for contradictory results.
But on an even more everyday level, every one of us has experienced unanswered prayer. We have asked God to do something, something we think will glorify Him, and we have prayed in faith believing—and God didn’t come through. Sometimes unanswered prayer of this kind involves cases of prayer for healing. One church I knew of prayed for the miraculous healing of one of its members. The people really believed God and were expecting a miracle. But the man died. Many people were deeply shaken in their Christian faith; they had asked God in faith for something in Jesus’ name and He did not do it. Perhaps Jesus’ promise was not true after all—maybe the Christian faith was not true after all.
And it’s not just Christian laymen who confront this problem. Christian spiritual leaders also experience unanswered prayer. I once heard Cliff Barrows say that his partners on the Billy Graham team had long ago ceased to pray for good weather for their crusades—indeed, some of their best crusades had been held in the rain. In his seminars Bill Gothard tells one incredible story after another about how God brought in the money to pay the bills, but he also admits, “In all fairness to God, He did not always come through in the nick of time.” In other words, some prayers went unanswered.
Now someone might say, “But you can’t use human experience to qualify God’s promises!” But the problem with this response is that the Scriptures themselves give examples of unanswered prayer. Think of Paul’s so-called “thorn in the flesh”—a physical ailment he asked God three times to remove (2 Cor. 12:7). But God did not remove it. Paul also asked the Roman church to pray that he might be delivered from the unbelievers in Jerusalem on what turned out to be his final visit there (Rom. 15:31). But he was not delivered; instead we read in Acts 21 of Paul’s arrest in Jerusalem and the imprisonment that eventually led to his martyrdom. So even the Scriptures themselves give examples of unanswered prayer. It is not unqualifiedly true that whatever we ask in Jesus’ name we shall receive.
But this is very troubling. For Jesus promised that whatever we asked in His name we would receive. So is His promise empty? Worse still, how can Jesus be God if He makes empty promises? How does one solve the problem of unanswered prayer?
First, let’s look at inadequate solutions to this problem that are often used by Christians today. One solution is simply to deny that prayer ever goes unanswered. This is the most radical solution, and yet it is sometimes espoused by well-meaning Christians. For example, when my wife, Jan, and I were on Campus Crusade staff at Northern Illinois University, our movement was infiltrated by certain Christians who believed that physical healing was included in the atonement of Christ, and thus no Christian ever needed to be sick. Just pray to God and He will heal you!
Well, the result of this was that some of our students were throwing away their glasses, claiming that they were healed, even though they couldn’t see any better. I remember confronting one of them by asking, “Are you healed?” He said, “Yes, I am.” So I said, “Well, can you see any better?” “No,” he admitted. “So then how are you healed if you can’t see any better?” I asked. “Because my faith isn’t strong enough,” he said. “I am healed, but I just don’t have faith to believe it.” And so these poor, nearsighted students were going around trying to study and attend classes without their glasses, claiming that they were healed but that they lacked the faith to believe that God had answered their prayers. I wonder what those Christians would say about someone who died from cancer despite prayers for healing: that he really was alive and well but just appeared to be dead because he lacked the faith? What those Christians needed was not more faith but some common sense!
A less radical but nevertheless inadequate solution often proposed is that God always answers prayer but that His answers may vary between yes, no, and wait. Thus, a prayer that receives a negative answer is not really an unanswered prayer. God did answer, namely, by saying no. But this solution is just playing at words. What we mean by unanswered prayer is prayer that receives a negative answer. Jesus promised that whatever we ask in His name we shall receive. It does nothing to solve the problem for someone to say that God did answer your prayer but said no, for the promise is that he will always say yes. So the problem remains the same, just under different words, namely, How can there be negatively answered prayer?
A third inadequate solution that Christians sometimes use is to rationalize things away so that they can say God answered prayer after all. Once I was at a meeting where prayer was offered for God to help a seriously ill man get out of the hospital. But the following day the man died. At our next meeting the speaker who had led in prayer the night before announced the man’s death and proclaimed triumphantly that our prayers had been answered. “We asked God to take him out of the hospital, and, praise the Lord, He has!” Well, this sort of rationalization strikes me as basically dishonest. It was clear that the intent of our prayers the night before was that God would heal the man. Rationalizing away a negative answer to prayer is to view God as a great genie from Aladdin’s lamp who fulfills the technical language of our requests but misses the intent altogether, so that we wind up with something totally different from what we requested. That is not the God of the Bible. Why not be honest and admit that God just did not answer the prayer?
So I think the proper solution lies in a different direction. I do not think that Jesus’ promise is empty, but I do think that it must be qualified. It is not true simply and without qualification that you will receive whatever you ask in Jesus’ name. The promise must be qualified in certain ways in accordance with the teaching of the rest of Scripture.
Now qualifying the promise may sound distressing to you, but let me point out that there are precedents for doing so. Other teachings of Jesus also have to be qualified in light of different Scriptures. Take Jesus’ teachings on divorce, for example. In Mark 10:11, Jesus makes the blanket statement, “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her.” No exception is allowed. But in Matthew 19:9 Jesus says, “I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery.” Here the former statement is qualified: there is an exception which permits divorce after all, namely, marital unfaithfulness on the part of a spouse. Now I’m suggesting that Jesus’ promises about prayer also need to be qualified in this way. Implicit in Jesus’ blanket promise are certain important qualifiers, and if those qualifiers are not met, one cannot claim the promise.
What are some of these implicit qualifications to Jesus’ promise? Many of them can be classed under the heading “Obstacles to Answered Prayer.” Let’s look at some of them.
1. Sin in our lives. The most basic and, I think, prevalent obstacle to answered prayer is unconfessed sin in our lives. Jesus’ promise naturally presupposes that the person praying is a Christian living in the fullness and power of the Holy Spirit. A Christian who is living in unconfessed sin or in the power of the flesh can have no confidence that his prayers will be answered. The psalmist said, “If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened” (Ps. 66:18). In what must be a terribly convicting verse to us married men, Peter writes that husbands should live considerately with their wives, bestowing honor on the physically weaker sex, in order that their prayers may not be hindered (see 1 Pet. 3:7). Think of it: not treating your wife right hinders your prayers! Jesus’ promise assumes that the believer is abiding in Christ, keeping His commandments, walking in the light, filled with the Spirit, and loving the brethren. When you think about this, it’s only by God’s grace that any of our prayers are answered!
2.Wrong motives. Many times our prayers go unanswered because our motives are wrong. Too often, our prayers are motivated by selfishness—a sort of “Gimme, gimme, gimme” attitude centered wholly on ourselves. Jesus had promised, “Ask and it will be given to you” (Matt. 7:7), but James explained to his readers, “When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures” (James 4:3). Prayer that is totally self-centered does not fall under Jesus’ promise.
I remember once reading a tract on why there is no revival in the church today. One of the reasons was depicted in a cartoon labeled “A Modern Saint Struggles with the Forces of Darkness.” It was a picture of a man kneeling by his bedside contending with God in prayer: “Oh Lord, please give us that new color television set! You know how much we need it. Please, Lord, please, help us get that color TV!” The correct motive for our prayer requests should be God’s glory. Hence, in the Old Testament one often finds prayers based on the desire that God would do some act for the sake of His name. It was Jesus’ prayer that God would glorify His name (see John 12:28). This should be our motive in prayer: to request things of God, not that our selfish desires might be satisfied, but that His name might be glorified.
3. Lack of faith. Jesus Himself made clear that only believing prayer can be assured of an answer. He told the disciples, “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours” (Mark 11:24). Here the promise is qualified such that prayer must be accompanied by faith. If you have faith that God will answer your request and you do not doubt, then He will answer it. By contrast, the man who is ridden by doubts cannot have any confidence that his prayer will be answered. Thus, James says, speaking of someone’s prayer for wisdom, “When he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does” (James 1:6-8).
Of course, this statement raises all sorts of difficult questions about how one acquires that kind of faith and how such a faith can be sustained in the face of unanswered prayer. I’m not going to try to treat such questions now. Let me just note that Jesus also said that the faith required need not be great, but that mighty things can happen as a result of faith as small as a grain of mustard seed (see Luke 17:6); and let us also remember that faith is a gift of God. We can always pray, “Lord, I believe! Help thou mine unbelief ” (Mark 9:24, KJV). In any case, my main point here is that one more qualification must be introduced into Jesus’ promise: we must pray in faith.
4. Lack of earnestness. Sometimes our prayers are not answered because, quite frankly, we don’t really care whether they are. We casually pray in the prayer meeting for some request and then forget all about it. We hardly ever think to ask later how that prayer was answered. We don’t really care. That’s why, when Jan and I were involved in raising financial support for our ministry in Europe, we were pretty unimpressed when someone said, “I’ll pray for you.” Usually what that really meant was, “I’m not interested enough to support you financially.” But if that’s true, then I honestly doubt that he’s interested enough to pray earnestly, either.
Unfortunately, Christians have the idea that prayer support is a lesser commitment than financial support, when in reality precisely the opposite is the case. It doesn’t take much effort to write a check every month or so and never think of it again, but it’s tough to pray earnestly and regularly for a missionary or Christian worker. It is precisely this earnest prayer, however, this serious, heartfelt, get-down- to-business-with-God prayer, that God attends to. Read the great prayers of the Bible and ask yourself if those people were earnest or not. A beautiful example is Hannah’s prayer for a son in 1 Samuel 1. She was so intense in her prayer, so oblivious to everything going on around her, that the priest at the house of the Lord thought she was drunk! But of course the supreme example was Jesus Himself, a man who would continue all night in prayer to God, who literally wore the disciples out by having them pray with Him. Read Jesus’ prayers in the Gospels and ask if this man was not earnestly involved in His praying. Our prayers may often go unanswered because we really care so little.
5. Lack of Perseverance. Closely related to earnestness is perseverance in prayer. Our lack of persistence may be one reason our prayers are not answered. We give up so easily. We pray once or twice, and then we’re through. Some Christians will tell you that all you have to do is pray once about something, commit it to the Lord, and then relax and trust Him to take care of it. But I think I can say confidently that this is not the teaching of Jesus. Think of the parable of the friend coming at midnight to borrow some bread from his neighbor (Luke 11:5-8). The neighbor won’t get up out of bed at first, but because his friend keeps pounding at the door and won’t go away, he gets up and gives him the bread. How much more, says Jesus, will your heavenly Father give to you!
Or think of the parable of the widow and the judge (Luke 18:18). The unrighteous judge did not want to grant the woman’s request, but she kept pestering him so much he said he would grant her request or else “she will wear me out by her continual coming” (18:5b, RSV). The point of the parable, says Luke, is that we “should always pray and not give up” (18:1). If we want something bad enough, we should beat a path to heaven’s door and make its portals ring with our continual pounding. In Jan’s and my own experience, some of our most dramatic answers to prayer—like getting a two-year fellowship from the West German government to study the evidence for the resurrection—have come as a response to prayers offered morning and evening over a period of several months.
I recently experienced a dramatic, unexpected answer to persistent prayer. Even since I became a Christian the evening of September 11, 1965, I have prayed that my unsaved parents would come to faith in Christ. Every day in my devotional time, five days a week, for over thirty years I prayed for their salvation—to no avail. It wasn’t that they were hostile to Christ; they just didn’t seem to feel any need of Him in their lives. Jan and I had shared the gospel with them several times and tried to live exemplary lives before them and spoke often of what God was doing in our own lives, but without any positive movement on my folks’ part. I often wondered why God did so little in answer to my prayers for them. I would pray that He would bring someone or some influence for the gospel into their lives, but nothing much ever seemed to materialize. I figured that maybe God thought that He had already done so in giving them a son and daughter-in-law who were involved in Christian work. But I wished He would do more. So on and on I prayed, but frankly without much hope in the end of ever seeing a response to my prayers. A year ago last summer Jan and I were visiting my parents’ home near Sedona, Arizona, where they had moved because the dry climate was beneficial for my father’s Parkinson’s disease. Jan said to me, “You’ve got to speak to your Dad one more time about receiving Christ. Given how advanced his disease is, you may not ever have another chance.” I knew she was right, but my heart really wasn’t in it. It seemed such an exercise in futility. But I sat down with him in the living room and with a certain sense of awkwardness said, “You know, Dad, we really can’t be sure how much longer you’ve got. You really need to be thinking about what happens when you go into eternity.” His response floored me. “I don’t really think there’s any evidence for life beyond death,” he said. I was flabbergasted! Here was a man who was about to die of a debilitating disease. You’d think he would be grasping at straws, any hope of immortality, no matter how implausible! Instead he was talking about evidence! On the one hand I must confess that I felt a sort of grudging respect for such disbelief. Here was in a sense unbelief with integrity: he wasn’t going to believe just out of desperation. He wanted evidence. On the other hand, I also felt angry because he had never bothered to look at the evidence when he able to do so, and now he was so diminished in his capacities that he couldn’t possibly investigate the evidence! I said, “Dad, I’m one of the world’s leading experts on the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection. I’ve been studying it for years, and you know the books I’ve written on the subject. His resurrection from the dead is the evidence for life beyond the grave and the basis for the Christian hope in eternal life. And I’m telling you, as an expert, that the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection is very good. Unfortunately, you’re too sick now to look at that evidence for yourself. So for you to come to Christ you’re going to have to make two steps of faith. First of all, you going to have to trust Christ. Secondly, you’re going to have to trust me.”
He said he would think about it, and we left it at that. It was the same old brush-off, I thought. Then some weeks later Jan and I got a call at our home in Atlanta. It was my mother. “Your father’s been thinking about what you told him,” she said, “and he’s ready to make that decision.” You could have knocked me over with a feather! I couldn’t believe my ears. All those years of praying for precisely this, and could it now really be? It didn’t seem to be possible; it was unreal! But we explained to her that on a particular page of one of my books which they owned there is a prayer of invitation to ask Christ into one’s life as Savior and Lord. We explained to her how to pray through that prayer with my Dad and asked her to call us back once it was done. I couldn’t believe this was really happening, but the next day she called us back. “We prayed the prayer together like you said. It took a long time because of your father’s Parkinson’s,” she explained. “But we did it twice. I just want to be sure we’re both going to the same place!”
I had received the marvelous answer to my persistent prayers. I also learned something through that experience. I realized that there had grown up in my heart an unknown root of bitterness toward God because of His seeming unresponsiveness to my prayers for my parents. All those years He seemed to be doing nothing. But now I came to appreciate what I, as a philosopher, had known intellectually for some time: that God may be at work providentially to accomplish His purposes in ways that we cannot even detect. He knew all along how to best answer my prayers, and I had only to be patient.1 Don’t give up too soon in your prayer for something. Show God that you mean business.
These, then, are some of the obstacles to answered prayer: sin in our lives, wrong motives, lack of faith, lack of earnestness, lack of perseverance. If any of those obstacles hinders our prayers, then we cannot claim with confidence Jesus’ promise, “Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it” (John 14:13a, RSV).
But, of course, this isn’t the end of the story. For the frustrating thing about unanswered prayer is that on occasion none of the obstacles just listed seems to impede the way, and still God does not grant our request. We may have confessed all known sin in our lives, prayed out of a desire to glorify God, and prayed in faith with earnestness and perseverance, and still God doesn’t come through as Jesus said He would. Indeed, it is precisely when all those elements are present that the experience of unanswered prayer is apt to be devastating and demoralizing.
There is, however, one final, important qualification of Jesus’ promise that needs to be made: our request must be in accordance with God’s will. The apostle John makes this clear in 1 John 5:14-15: “This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of him.” It may well be the case that sometimes our prayers are not answered, not due to some fault of our own, but simply because God knows better than we do what ought to be done. Our perspective and wisdom are limited, but God’s is the viewpoint of omniscience. He knows, as we do not, that sometimes it is better not to grant our requests.
Notice that John says our confidence is that if our prayers are in accordance with God’s will, He will answer them. Therefore, we should always temper our prayers with the attitude “If it be Thy will.” Now very often you hear it said that to pray “If it be Thy will” is a sort of namby-pamby, Milquetoast kind of prayer that shows a lack of boldness before God. I don’t think the Scripture supports that assertion. John says that our confidence is not that God will answer our prayers, but that He will answer our prayers if they are in accordance with His will. Our degree of confidence that He will answer our prayers is proportional to our degree of confidence that they are His will. If we aren’t sure our requests express His will, it is entirely proper to say, “If it be Thy will.”
The decisive vindication of this way of praying is that this is the way Jesus prayed. In the Garden of Gethsemane He asked that God would avert the crucifixion, but then He added, “Yet not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). To ask for God’s will is an expression of humility and submission to God. It is to acknowledge that He knows better than we do, and that we want His will even more than we want our request. When Paul prayed that God would heal him of his thorn in the flesh, God declined his request, saying, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9a). Paul’s response? “I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest upon me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (12:9b-10). Paul wanted to be healed, yes, but even more he wanted God’s will for his life. Our attitude should be the same.
If we want our prayers to be answered, we should pray in accordance with God’s will. But how do we know what sorts of things represent His will? Well, perhaps the best way to discern that is to read the prayers of the Bible to see what great men of God prayed for. I think we might be a little surprised. Read the prayers of Paul in his epistles, for example.
In Ephesians, Paul prayed:
that God would give the Ephesians a spirit of wisdom in the knowledge of Himself;
that they would know
the hope to which they had been called;
the riches of God’s inheritance in the saints;
the greatness of God’s power;
that they would be strengthened through the Holy Spirit in the inner self;
that Christ would dwell in their hearts by faith;
that they, being rooted in love, would have the ability to know Christ’s unfathomable love, so that they might be filled with all God’s fullness.
In Philippians, Paul prayed:
that the Philippians’ love would abound more and more, coupled with knowledge and discernment, so that they would approve what is excellent and be pure and blameless at Christ’s return, filled with the fruits of righteousness.
In Colossians, Paul prayed:
that the Colossians would be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that they would lead a life worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to Him, bearing fruit in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God.
In the letters to the Thessalonians, Paul asked:
that the Lord would make the Thessalonians increase and abound in love toward one another and toward all men, so that they would be established unblamable in holiness at Christ’s return;
that the Lord would comfort their hearts and establish them in every good work and deed.
And in the letter to Philemon, Paul prayed:
that the sharing of Philemon’s faith would promote the knowledge of all the good that is ours in Christ.
Are those the kind of things we pray for? Why not?
I suspect that very often we are simply praying for the wrong things. What we desire is not what God desires, and so our prayers go askew. Our prayers will be answered only as our desires are brought into line with His.
Now two objections might be raised at this point. First, it might be said that we have so qualified Jesus’ original promise that it has suffered death by a thousand qualifications. For there is an enormous difference between saying, “Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it,” and saying, “Whatever you ask in name, if you have no uncon-fessed sin in your life, and your motives are pure, and you have faith, and you are really in earnest, and you persist in asking, and, to top it all off, if it is God’s will, then I will do it.” I feel the force of this objection, but in the end I do not think it will stand. For I feel sure that when Jesus made that original promise, He naturally presupposed the qualifications we have just listed and would agree to them if we could ask Him today. Indeed, most of those qualifications come from His own teachings, as we have seen.
As for the stipulation concerning God’s will, His blanket promise is not incompatible with this qualification. For example, John, who in 1 John 5:14 makes the qualification that prayer should be in accordance with God’s will, made just a few paragraphs earlier a blanket promise almost like the one Jesus made: “Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him” (1 John 3:21-22). Thus, in the course of a single letter John says that if our lives are pleasing to God, we receive whatever we ask (3:21-22), and that if we ask anything according to His will, we receive whatever we ask (5:14). John did not think the qualification in 5:14 nullified the promise made in 3:21-22. Why should Jesus have thought any differently?
And when you reflect on it, it would be a recipe for disaster for God to simply give us whatever we ask. For we would always pray to be delivered from any suffering or trial, and yet we know from Scripture that suffering builds character and trials perfect our faith. If God gave us whatever we asked, we would be immature, spoiled children, not men and women of God. On the other hand, I think John may also be saying that as we keep Christ’s commands and grow into His likeness, our wills come to coincide more and more with God’s will, so that we can have confidence that whatever we ask we shall receive. But even the most Christlike saint, even Christ Himself, because of our limited perspective, must sometimes pray, “Not my will, but Thine be done.”
A second objection is to say that when we pray, “Thy will be done,” Jesus’ promise to answer our prayers becomes unfalsifiable. That is to say, there is no way to tell if His promise is really true, for anytime we pray for something and do not receive it, we can always say, “It wasn’t God’s will”! Therefore, the promise seems empty. But this objection betrays a lack of understanding as to how we know that our Christian faith is true. Our confidence in the truth of Christianity in general and Jesus’ promise in particular is not based on the evidence of answered prayer. Our confidence in the truth of our faith is based on the witness of the Holy Spirit, confirmed by reason. Prayer is one of the dimensions of the life of faith, not of apologetics. The Christian life is a walk by faith, and it is strictly irrelevant whether God’s promises are falsifiable or not. The point is, we think Christianity is true (or presumably we wouldn’t have become Christians), and so we place our trust in God’s promises. Consequently, the objection is based on a misunderstanding of the basis of Christian faith.
But if there are no objections to this understanding of prayer and God’s will, there is still a real danger here, which I have experienced, namely, timidity in prayer. That is to say, because we are uncertain of God’s will in a specific situation, we do not know what to pray for. So we are afraid to ask God for something, lest we be praying outside of His will. If a friend is sick, should we pray that God heal him or that God give him courage and faith in his suffering? If we are unemployed, should we pray for a job or for an attitude of contentment as we learn to be abased? If someone is going through a trial, should we pray for deliverance or for steadfastness? We can be so cowed by not knowing what to pray for that we cease to pray, which is certainly not God’s will. What are we supposed to do?
Well, praise be to God, there is a ministry of the Holy Spirit especially suited to this problem! Paul addresses precisely this problem in Romans 8:26-27: “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will.” We may not know what to pray for, but the Holy Spirit takes our prayers and translates them, as it were, into accordance with God’s will before the throne of grace. With such a divine intercessor, we can pray boldly, even within our limited perspective, confident that the Holy Spirit is interceding according to the will of God. Therefore, be bold in your prayers and ask Him forthrightly for what you, using your spiritual wisdom and discernment, think best. That was also Paul’s procedure. He boldly asked God to heal him, and he frequently asked the churches to pray for his deliverance from his persecutors, though in the end God had a different will for Paul. Pray according to your wisdom and your heart’s desire, and trust the Holy Spirit to intercede for you according to the will of God.
In conclusion, I think it is obvious that this discussion has enormous practical implications for our lives. For although we have concentrated on unanswered prayer, since it is problematic, it is clear from Jesus’ promise that unanswered prayer ought to be the exception, not the norm, of our prayer life. For the Christian abiding in Christ, answers to his prayers ought to be his regular experience. Now, how about your prayer life? Are you just muddling along in the Christian life, never seeing God really work in response to your prayers? When was the last time you moved the hands of God through prayer?
If you are not satisfied with your prayer life, maybe it’s time to take inventory of the obstacles to answered prayer in your life. What is that unconfessed sin, that area of uncleanness in your life you’ve been rationalizing away or hiding from God? What room in your heart has not yet been opened to Christ and yielded to His lordship? Have you been praying just for selfish things that you might spend your passions on them? Or are you really seeking God’s glory? Are you really believing God for answers to your prayers? Or have you become so accustomed to lack of answers that you’ve been lulled into a spiritual lethargy that expects no answer and so gets no answer from God? Do you really care whether He answers or not? Do you go to God with an intense, burning desire to have your requests from Him? Do you pray once and forget about it, or do you come to God again and again? Do you wrestle with God, saying with Jacob, “I will not let you go unless you bless me” (Gen. 32:26b)? In a word, do you pray because that’s what Christians are expected to do, or do you mean business with God?
If you do mean business, let me make this suggestion: set aside some time tomorrow—or even today—to take inventory of the hindrances to prayer in your life. Repent, ask God’s forgiveness, and start anew. Make out a prayer list of specific people and things to pray for on different days of the week, and then set aside time to pray each day for these. Be specific, and put a red check by each request as it is answered. As you see God work, your faith will increase as you learn to trust Him for more.
If you already have a vital prayer life but have been troubled by certain unanswered prayers, you need to trust God for His perfect will. Reflect on His omniscience and His goodness. If you ask Him for bread, will He give you a stone? (Matt. 7:9). If you ask for a fish, will He give you a scorpion? (Luke 11: 12). God will give to you what His good and acceptable and perfect will decrees. You may not always get what you ask for, but God knows best what will serve to advance His kingdom. You can trust Him for His answers. Prayer is hard work. But the promises of prayer are great. Let us therefore strive to lay hold of those promises.
1 During the editing of this book, my father went to be with the Lord.