Unanswered Prayer
Article by July 2009
There is a sense in which the whole language of "unanswered prayer" is not completely helpful, even as I have used it as a title for this article. If by unanswered prayer we mean that God does not listen to a prayer or that God ignores a prayer or that God will on occasion miss a prayer or two, in that sense, there is no such thing as an unanswered prayer.
There are other times when what may look like prayer is not prayer at all, such as when the clock reads eight minutes past noon on Sunday and you are sitting in the pew thinking about your quickly browning pot roast and say something like, "Oh, please let him finish soon." Such a request is no prayer at all, and falls outside the contours of our present investigation. Instead, we are considering those times when you go to God with requests, requests that are for His glory and for the good of His people, requests that are sincere, requests that are burdening you, and God does not act in the way that you requested. Or He does not act at all. The request is made, but nothing happens. An "unanswered prayer."
We need to spend a little time thinking about unanswered prayer because this phenomenon can be a soft spot used by the Adversary to unhinge faith. We are susceptible to the temptation to think that prayer does not do anything, to think that it is all a waste of time, to think that the time spent in private devotion at the end of the day could be just as well forsaken. When we have experienced prayers which have gone unanswered, that is a place where Satan can whisper, "It does not matter if you pray. You are so busy today, do you really have time to spend on an activity whose effectiveness is suspect?" How many dry seasons in life, characterized by a lack of praying, have been inaugurated on the heels of unanswered prayer? A little careful thinking is required, and for that, we look to Paul, the great apostle of prayer. I am especially thinking about II Corinthians 12:1-10.
This is a marvelous and maybe a little puzzling passage. If you were a friend of Paul and got a copy of this letter for the first time, you may be tempted to wonder what has taken him so long to get to this kind of revelation. After all, in these verses, he makes the claim that he has already been to heaven!
We have not heard about this previously in his preaching nor read it in his letters. This bombshell comes at the end of the second letter to the Corinthians (at least the second we still have - could this be the third or fourth letter from this man to these folks?). Finally here, some fourteen years after the event, Paul tells us that he has been to the "third heaven." When he uses that language, Paul is not telling us that there are various levels of heaven, but is instead reflecting a first century understanding of the of the sky above them. If you looked up where the birds flew, that was the first heaven. And where the stars were, that was the second heaven. Then, what you and I would consider heaven, that was the third heaven. Such taxonomy was typical of the first century.
Did he encounter John the Baptist or Ezekiel or Moses? He does not tell us. In fact, what he does tell us about his experience is that there is not much he can say other than the fact that he has been to heaven. But because of that great privilege, God inflicted him with a "thorn in the flesh."In response, Paul prayed that God would take it away. But God told him no. Here, in the experience of the Apostle Paul in an example of what we might call unanswered prayer. What to make of this troubling phenomenon?
Deficient Requests
First, there are times when we make a request to God that He does not grant and the trouble lies in the request that we made. That is, there is something about the request itself that is deficient. Now, we did not pray in an intentionally sinfully manner ("Lord, please cause my teacher to have a health crisis which will prevent her from administering the test I am presently unprepared to take"), and yet there are things that we ask for which we really should not have asked. Think of Peter at Caesarea-Philippi. Jesus investigates the word on the street concerning his ministry, and finally Peter says, "You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God." After that you get Jesus' declaration that, "You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church." But immediately following that, Jesus begins to talk about His own death, His atoning work on the cross, and Peter rebukes Him. Peter says, "No, Lord, let's not hear any more about this talk of You dying. You are our leader. You are our friend. We love you. We don't want to hear any more about this talk of death." And you remember that Jesus rebuked him.
Now, Peter was, I think, for the most part, well-intentioned in what he was saying, and yet he did not realize what he was requesting, or at least he did not appreciate the full implications of his request. He tells Jesus that there will be none of this atoning work on the cross, which is nothing less than a personal request to go to hell. If Jesus does not go to the cross, then Peter's sins cannot be forgiven, and so when Peter rebukes Jesus for speaking about such things, he is, in essence, asking Jesus to send him to hell. And Jesus in His mercy does not grant to Peter that which he requests.
Our requests might not be that far off, but surely sometimes we can look back and say, "Thank God for unanswered prayer, for there were things which I asked for from which God in His mercy spared me." And that is one way we might think about unanswered prayer: as a phenomenon stemming from some sort of deficient request.
An Invitation to Continue
A second way would be this--that what looks like unanswered prayer or even indifference on God's part can often times be nothing more than instruction to both wait and to continue praying. The phenomenon feels like the cold shoulder of God, but is in fact nothing more than a divine invitation to continue to ask.
Do you remember to occasion of Elijah's prayer life? It begins with Elijah praying that the rain would stop, and for three and a half years there was no rain. But later he prayer, "Let there be rain."
Now in between there were a host of events including Mount Carmel where Elijah stood up against the prophets of Baal with a contest to see whose god was the real God, which resulted in fire from heaven coming down and completely consuming a sacrifice and an altar and lapping up the water that Elijah had poured over the altar. After this stunning expression of God's exclusive claim to being God, Elijah knelt down to pray that God would again bring rain to the land. And the text tells us that Elijah prayed and he sent his servant out to look for the rain cloud. And the servant answered, "No rain."
Elijah had been on a roll. He prayed for no rain and there was a severe drought in Israel for three years. And he prayed that fire from heaven would come down, and fire from heaven came down and utterly obliterated this sacrifice. But now Elijah prayed for rain and nothing happened, and this, after God explicitly told him that the drought was over (I Kings 18:1).
What to do? He has this promise from God (the rain is coming), but it seems that his once effective prayer life has turned into futility? Will he give up? No, he gets back on his knees and he prays again. And he says to his servant, "Alright now, go out and look for a cloud."And the servant comes back and says, "No rain cloud." And Elijah prays again and again and again and again for a total of seven times, praying for the rain that God promised He was going to send. And on the seventh time, the servant reports, "There's a cloud out there the size of a man's fist". And Elijah says, "Here comes the rain." Here was a man convinced that an unanswered prayer was not the phenomenon of a God uninterested, but an invitation from a God who delights in hearing his people pray.
Different but Better
There is a third to think about God not granting the request which we make. Paul was afflicted with an eye problem or a stomach problem - the commentators are uncertain as to its exact nature - but he was afflicted with this problem. How much harder were the beatings, stonings, shipwrecks, and snake bites with this thorn in his flesh? The affliction made his service to Jesus harder, and so he prayed, "Would You take this thorn which You have sent away from me?" That was his initial logic. The affliction is bad and it would be better for it to go away.
But then Paul goes on to tell us the purpose of the affliction. The affliction was given both as an antidote to pride, but also as an opportunity for God to make His power evident in Paul's own weakness. Here, as Paul reflects on his thorn, there seems to be, if not a complete change in attitude, at least a newfound understanding. When God told him "no," He wasn't doing so in order to keep something good from Paul but in order to give him a different and better blessing than the one for which he had asked.
He asked for the removal of this thorn and yet, with a little maturity and time, Paul is able to say, "You know, I thought it would be better if this thorn went away, but actually it is better that pride's growth has been retarded. It is actually better for God's grace to be sufficient in my life than for this thorn to be removed from my flesh. It is not that God is not good. It is not that God is withholding something that is good. Instead, God is giving me something different, but it is a different that is better".
One reason that "unanswered prayer" is so vexing is that we would rather have the request as we made it rather than the blessings that God would give us in its place. We cry out, "won't you give relief? Won't you take away this pain?" And God says, "I won't do as you've asked, but instead, My grace will be sufficient in that circumstance. My power will be made evident in that weakness."
It takes faith to believe that God's "No" is not one of curse but of blessing. We think our way is better. We think our wisdom is wiser than God's way of handling things. But Paul says, "No, actually it is better to receive the blessing that God would give than the thing you first requested."
Where does this leave us? What do we do when we have wrestled with God in the night, when year after year we go to God with the same request over and over again?
Let me suggest three things:
1. Reexamine the request: is this a God-honoring request? Is this a request which furthers the glory of God? Or have I been undiscerning is asking it, while God has been gracious in not answering it.
2. Rehearse the character of God, and be reminded of fundamental truths about God, about His wisdom, about His goodness, about the lavishness of His love, about His faithfulness, and about His mighty power to save.
3. Repeat the prayer in faith. God delights in repeated prayer.
Jeremy Smith is Executive Editor of Reformation21 and Executive Minister at First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, MS.
There are other times when what may look like prayer is not prayer at all, such as when the clock reads eight minutes past noon on Sunday and you are sitting in the pew thinking about your quickly browning pot roast and say something like, "Oh, please let him finish soon." Such a request is no prayer at all, and falls outside the contours of our present investigation. Instead, we are considering those times when you go to God with requests, requests that are for His glory and for the good of His people, requests that are sincere, requests that are burdening you, and God does not act in the way that you requested. Or He does not act at all. The request is made, but nothing happens. An "unanswered prayer."
We need to spend a little time thinking about unanswered prayer because this phenomenon can be a soft spot used by the Adversary to unhinge faith. We are susceptible to the temptation to think that prayer does not do anything, to think that it is all a waste of time, to think that the time spent in private devotion at the end of the day could be just as well forsaken. When we have experienced prayers which have gone unanswered, that is a place where Satan can whisper, "It does not matter if you pray. You are so busy today, do you really have time to spend on an activity whose effectiveness is suspect?" How many dry seasons in life, characterized by a lack of praying, have been inaugurated on the heels of unanswered prayer? A little careful thinking is required, and for that, we look to Paul, the great apostle of prayer. I am especially thinking about II Corinthians 12:1-10.
This is a marvelous and maybe a little puzzling passage. If you were a friend of Paul and got a copy of this letter for the first time, you may be tempted to wonder what has taken him so long to get to this kind of revelation. After all, in these verses, he makes the claim that he has already been to heaven!
We have not heard about this previously in his preaching nor read it in his letters. This bombshell comes at the end of the second letter to the Corinthians (at least the second we still have - could this be the third or fourth letter from this man to these folks?). Finally here, some fourteen years after the event, Paul tells us that he has been to the "third heaven." When he uses that language, Paul is not telling us that there are various levels of heaven, but is instead reflecting a first century understanding of the of the sky above them. If you looked up where the birds flew, that was the first heaven. And where the stars were, that was the second heaven. Then, what you and I would consider heaven, that was the third heaven. Such taxonomy was typical of the first century.
Did he encounter John the Baptist or Ezekiel or Moses? He does not tell us. In fact, what he does tell us about his experience is that there is not much he can say other than the fact that he has been to heaven. But because of that great privilege, God inflicted him with a "thorn in the flesh."In response, Paul prayed that God would take it away. But God told him no. Here, in the experience of the Apostle Paul in an example of what we might call unanswered prayer. What to make of this troubling phenomenon?
Deficient Requests
First, there are times when we make a request to God that He does not grant and the trouble lies in the request that we made. That is, there is something about the request itself that is deficient. Now, we did not pray in an intentionally sinfully manner ("Lord, please cause my teacher to have a health crisis which will prevent her from administering the test I am presently unprepared to take"), and yet there are things that we ask for which we really should not have asked. Think of Peter at Caesarea-Philippi. Jesus investigates the word on the street concerning his ministry, and finally Peter says, "You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God." After that you get Jesus' declaration that, "You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church." But immediately following that, Jesus begins to talk about His own death, His atoning work on the cross, and Peter rebukes Him. Peter says, "No, Lord, let's not hear any more about this talk of You dying. You are our leader. You are our friend. We love you. We don't want to hear any more about this talk of death." And you remember that Jesus rebuked him.
Now, Peter was, I think, for the most part, well-intentioned in what he was saying, and yet he did not realize what he was requesting, or at least he did not appreciate the full implications of his request. He tells Jesus that there will be none of this atoning work on the cross, which is nothing less than a personal request to go to hell. If Jesus does not go to the cross, then Peter's sins cannot be forgiven, and so when Peter rebukes Jesus for speaking about such things, he is, in essence, asking Jesus to send him to hell. And Jesus in His mercy does not grant to Peter that which he requests.
Our requests might not be that far off, but surely sometimes we can look back and say, "Thank God for unanswered prayer, for there were things which I asked for from which God in His mercy spared me." And that is one way we might think about unanswered prayer: as a phenomenon stemming from some sort of deficient request.
An Invitation to Continue
A second way would be this--that what looks like unanswered prayer or even indifference on God's part can often times be nothing more than instruction to both wait and to continue praying. The phenomenon feels like the cold shoulder of God, but is in fact nothing more than a divine invitation to continue to ask.
Do you remember to occasion of Elijah's prayer life? It begins with Elijah praying that the rain would stop, and for three and a half years there was no rain. But later he prayer, "Let there be rain."
Now in between there were a host of events including Mount Carmel where Elijah stood up against the prophets of Baal with a contest to see whose god was the real God, which resulted in fire from heaven coming down and completely consuming a sacrifice and an altar and lapping up the water that Elijah had poured over the altar. After this stunning expression of God's exclusive claim to being God, Elijah knelt down to pray that God would again bring rain to the land. And the text tells us that Elijah prayed and he sent his servant out to look for the rain cloud. And the servant answered, "No rain."
Elijah had been on a roll. He prayed for no rain and there was a severe drought in Israel for three years. And he prayed that fire from heaven would come down, and fire from heaven came down and utterly obliterated this sacrifice. But now Elijah prayed for rain and nothing happened, and this, after God explicitly told him that the drought was over (I Kings 18:1).
What to do? He has this promise from God (the rain is coming), but it seems that his once effective prayer life has turned into futility? Will he give up? No, he gets back on his knees and he prays again. And he says to his servant, "Alright now, go out and look for a cloud."And the servant comes back and says, "No rain cloud." And Elijah prays again and again and again and again for a total of seven times, praying for the rain that God promised He was going to send. And on the seventh time, the servant reports, "There's a cloud out there the size of a man's fist". And Elijah says, "Here comes the rain." Here was a man convinced that an unanswered prayer was not the phenomenon of a God uninterested, but an invitation from a God who delights in hearing his people pray.
Different but Better
There is a third to think about God not granting the request which we make. Paul was afflicted with an eye problem or a stomach problem - the commentators are uncertain as to its exact nature - but he was afflicted with this problem. How much harder were the beatings, stonings, shipwrecks, and snake bites with this thorn in his flesh? The affliction made his service to Jesus harder, and so he prayed, "Would You take this thorn which You have sent away from me?" That was his initial logic. The affliction is bad and it would be better for it to go away.
But then Paul goes on to tell us the purpose of the affliction. The affliction was given both as an antidote to pride, but also as an opportunity for God to make His power evident in Paul's own weakness. Here, as Paul reflects on his thorn, there seems to be, if not a complete change in attitude, at least a newfound understanding. When God told him "no," He wasn't doing so in order to keep something good from Paul but in order to give him a different and better blessing than the one for which he had asked.
He asked for the removal of this thorn and yet, with a little maturity and time, Paul is able to say, "You know, I thought it would be better if this thorn went away, but actually it is better that pride's growth has been retarded. It is actually better for God's grace to be sufficient in my life than for this thorn to be removed from my flesh. It is not that God is not good. It is not that God is withholding something that is good. Instead, God is giving me something different, but it is a different that is better".
One reason that "unanswered prayer" is so vexing is that we would rather have the request as we made it rather than the blessings that God would give us in its place. We cry out, "won't you give relief? Won't you take away this pain?" And God says, "I won't do as you've asked, but instead, My grace will be sufficient in that circumstance. My power will be made evident in that weakness."
It takes faith to believe that God's "No" is not one of curse but of blessing. We think our way is better. We think our wisdom is wiser than God's way of handling things. But Paul says, "No, actually it is better to receive the blessing that God would give than the thing you first requested."
Where does this leave us? What do we do when we have wrestled with God in the night, when year after year we go to God with the same request over and over again?
Let me suggest three things:
1. Reexamine the request: is this a God-honoring request? Is this a request which furthers the glory of God? Or have I been undiscerning is asking it, while God has been gracious in not answering it.
2. Rehearse the character of God, and be reminded of fundamental truths about God, about His wisdom, about His goodness, about the lavishness of His love, about His faithfulness, and about His mighty power to save.
3. Repeat the prayer in faith. God delights in repeated prayer.
Jeremy Smith is Executive Editor of Reformation21 and Executive Minister at First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, MS.
Is The Thickness of Two Short Planks A Forgotten Divine Attribute?
None of the systematic theologies I own include `being as thick as two short planks' in their treatments of the divine attributes; but it appears that there is a trend today to rectify this neglected aspect of God's being. ...
None of the systematic theologies I own include `being as thick as two short planks' in their treatments of the divine attributes; but it appears that there is a trend today to rectify this neglected aspect of God's being. ...
Celebrating the Death of Meaning
It has been a good couple of months for the celebrating of life at memorial services. First, there was the celebration of Michael Jackson's life and then there was Ted Kennedy, enfant terrible turned elder statesman. Both men, in their different ways, were proof positive that, in modern America, you only need to love your own kids and then at some point die in order to atone for any sins you may have committed against other people's beloved sons and daughters.
It has been a good couple of months for the celebrating of life at memorial services. First, there was the celebration of Michael Jackson's life and then there was Ted Kennedy, enfant terrible turned elder statesman. Both men, in their different ways, were proof positive that, in modern America, you only need to love your own kids and then at some point die in order to atone for any sins you may have committed against other people's beloved sons and daughters.
