Unanswered Prayer

One of the challenging questions on God is, “Why doesn’t God answer our prayers?” especially when our prayers are for the well-being of others. It would be good and helpful for people to be healed of cancer, for children to not die as children, for starvation to end, for oppression to cease, etc. If would be good if God would do these things. We’ve asked, why doesn’t he answer?

I’ll let Jerry Sittser speak from his book, "When God Doesn’t Answer Your Prayer" (Zondervan, 2003). These words are coming from a man who lost his mother, his wife, and his daughter in one tragic car accident.

The greatest tragedy of life is not unanswered prayer, but unoffered prayer. F.B. Meyer (19)

Perhaps the question Why doesn’t God answer our prayers? is not even the best question to ask because there might not be a simple, convenient, and obvious answer. It might be too mysterious and lofty for us. Perhaps how we respond in the face of such mystery is more important than whether or not we ever find an answer to the question itself. (22)

Faith is not like a stack of bargaining chips we use in our relationship with God – if we have enough chips, we can pretty much force God to do whatever we want. Faith turns away from self and comes empty-handed to God. Faith doesn’t believe in itself; it believes in God. It doesn’t try to manufacture confidence in itself; instead, it turns to God. Faith implies that we bring nothing to God; it asks everything from God.

. . . When we approach God, we have nothing to use as capital, no commodities that we can trade, no sum of righteousness that we can use to buy answers to prayer. (41)

The heart of true prayer is this cry of desperation. It is the cry of those who, committed to seeing God’s kingdom come and God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven, find themselves in circumstances that show little evidence that there even is a kingdom of God. . . But what is most fundamental is the spirit of our prayers, the cry of the heart to get help from the only one who can meet our deepest need. Desperation is the first and primary condition for true prayer. (48)

Our mission is to pray that God’s kingdom come, and God’s will be done. There is nothing particularly convenient and safe about that prayer. It is bound, sooner or later, to drive us from our places of security. We find ourselves continuing the journey, facing threat and danger and trouble, which has been the experience of God’s people from the day the church was born. We are thrust into action – striving (and thus praying) for the conversion of a neighbor, food for the hungry, justice to the poor, and comfort for the afflicted. Likewise, we feel the desperation that comes when the prayers we need answered, desperately, go unanswered.

. . . There are few experiences more painful than having desperate prayers go unanswered. Hanging at the end of a rope over an abyss is bad enough; having someone cut the rope is even worse. But when God seems to cut the rope, it is worst of all. (53)

Ours is a culture of instant results, instant success, and instant gratification. But “instant” rarely applies to prayer, which is more like planting a tree than sowing a new lawn. It takes time to learn how to pray, to mature in prayer, to see the results of prayer. We can’t be in a hurry. It takes a long time for a seedling to become a sturdy tree. Lack of patience and persistence, so common in our popular culture, inhibits our growth in the art of prayer. Once again, prayer is an epic journey. It unfolds over a huge landscape and over a long period of time. (83)

The point of prayer, after all, is the relationship itself, not the things we get from the relationship. Whatever the reasons for unanswered prayer, surely our relationship with God should be bigger than whether or not God chooses to answer our prayers! (87)

Is the purpose of prayer to receive what we ask for? Well, yes and no. God wants to answer our prayers. But God wants us to know him, too. If anything, that is God’s best answer to prayer . . . Persistence leads to a more mature prayer life. We will begin to see God as worthy of our greatest love and affection, as if a relationship with God were the goals of our prayers and not merely the acquisition of things we want from God. We will stop talking all the time, and we will learn to listen.

I am learning that my natural inclination is to use God, not to love God. I am like a spiritual junkie. I want the quick fix that answered prayer can provide. Once I get what I want, I return to my normal state of spiritual indolence (laziness). Unanswered prayer can actually serve to fan the flame of spiritual desire to know God as the supreme end in life. (89-90)

. . . But, as C.S. Lewis put it, God does not want to make life nice for us, because he wants to make us new. That is his will. When we pray, we should keep that in mind. It is enough to make me think twice about praying at all. After all, God’s will concerns the coming of his kingdom, the doing of his will as he commands it in Scripture. That strikes me as exciting, but also slightly menacing.

I pray with greater caution than I used to. Or, if not with greater caution, then certainly with greater sobriety. I realize what I’m in for. (106)

. . . we can pray according to God’s will by studying the great prayers of Scripture.

It is startling to consider what they don’t say. They say nothing about long life, perfect health, or success in the popular sense – nothing, in short, that even hints of a desire for an ideal life on earth, free of problems and difficulties. Instead, these prayers ask God for a deeper experience of his love, for purity of life, for inner strength, and for knowledge to make good choices. (110-111)

I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Ephesians 3:16-19