I get a little impatient with super-spiritual saints who leave the impression that they have a deeper understanding of prayer than most. They teach that if other believers just understood God’s Word better or had more faith in prayer, their requests would be answered and they would never suffer illness or poverty again.
They seem to ignore the fact that Jesus was poor and the Apostle Paul struggled with a thorn in the flesh all his life. Paul prayed for God to remove the pain but his petition was not answered affirmatively.
God is not a cosmic genie who promises to answer our every request if we just believe strongly enough in His power. There are qualifiers to prayer. Someone said that God answers prayer four ways, “Yes,” “No,” “Wait,” and “You’ve got to be kidding me!”
The following are seven Biblical reasons why God doesn’t answer our prayers as we request.
1. Unconfessed sin “Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear. But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear” (Isa 59:1-2).
2. An unforgiving spirit “And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive him, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins” (Mark 11:25).
3. An unbelieving heart “But 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).
4. Improper motives “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).
5. An alienated marriage relationship “Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect as the weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers” (1 Peter 3:7).
6. An anemic effort “So Peter was kept in prison, but the church was earnestly praying to God for him” (Acts 12:5). “Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years” (James 5:17).
7. The Sovereignty of God “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion. It does not, therefore, depend on man’s desire or effort, but on God’s mercy” (Romans 9:15-16).
These principles are on my mind because of the recent death of Kristen Sauder, whom I wrote about recently. Thousands of Christians prayed for Kristen to be healed of cancer. They not only prayed, they fasted and prayed. The elders anointed her with oil and prayed.
While Kristen lived a few months longer than doctors had projected, her condition continued to deteriorate and she died at age 45. Those seemingly unanswered prayers left many perplexed as to why God doesn’t always answer such intensified prayers affirmatively.
Considering the number of righteous people who prayed with intensity and with pure motives for Kristen Sauder to recover, I can only conclude our prayers were not answered simply because it was not in the will of God. As I mentioned in my previous column, that doesn’t make sense to us, but God’s ways are not our ways.
Job challenged God’s fairness and asked why so many horrible things were happening to him when he had lived a righteous life. God finally responded by asking Job where he was when the world was created. Could he explain the formation of a baby in the womb or summon the lightning to appear in the sky? God didn’t give any clear answers as to why Job was hurting so much, He just reminded Job that He was God and Job should trust him to work things out in the end.
J. Vernon McGee once said, “God designed and directs this universe. We’re here at His disposal. He owes us nothing.” Then he added, “Frankly, if you don’t like the way He’s running things, go off and start your own universe.”
The Lord is not that harsh. He gave us ample evidence of His love by coming to earth and suffering and dying for our sins. He gave us proof of His power by raising from the dead. So we have good reason to believe that, “All things work together for good to those that love God and are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28).
God blessed Job at the end of his life with twice as many blessings as he had at the beginning. The lesson from the book of Job is that, as a contemporary Christian song says, “When you can’t see His hand, trust His heart.”
God doesn’t promise that all our prayers will be answered just as we express them. He does promise that He hears our prayers and in the end all will be made right. In the meantime, ours is not to understand or explain, but to trust and to wait.
