Why Doesn't God Answer My Prayers?

The sermon text for today is from Matthew chapter 7 verses 7 through 11 and 2 Corinthians 12 verses 7b through 10.

Matthew 7:7–11

Listen as I read God's word.

Ask and it will be given to you.

Seek and you will find.

Knock and the door will be open to you.

For everyone who asks receives.

The one who seeks finds.

And to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?

Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake.

If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him?

Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me.

Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me.

But he said to me, My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.

Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on 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.

Here ends the reading.

Hope you are doing well this morning.

If I've not yet had the chance to meet you, my name is John, and I serve as the lead pastor here at Elmwood.

Uh, if you're newer to Elmwood, uh, once again we want to say welcome, whether you just randomly found us online or whether someone you know invited you uh to be here with us today.

Uh, we're just so grateful that we get to be uh with you and that you would share a Sunday morning with us.

Uh if you are newer, there's uh something that I want to let you know is coming up.

Uh Sunday, October 5th, right after the service, is going to be what's called the welcome party.

This is gonna be like 20 minutes long, it's gonna be real short, it's just a time to connect with other people who are newer to Elmwood.

And so if you're new to Elmwood in the last uh couple months or even in the last year, and you've never been to one of these welcome parties, uh, this is a great chance for you just to get to know some people, get to meet our staff and some of the church leadership.

Um, and there's gonna be cupcakes.

So, if nothing else, come for the cupcakes.

Uh, we would love to have you there with us.

Uh also, if uh you would be so kind as to RSVP for that.

Uh, we would love to know how many people we are expecting.

And the easiest way to do that is to uh either scan the QR code or to go to the web address you see here, and there's a link you can click on in the digital bulletin that allows you to RSVP uh for that.

So it's coming up in just a couple weeks here.

So I want to invite you to that.

As we come to uh these passages of the Bible this morning, let me invite you to join me in a word of prayer.

God, we thank you that you are the same yesterday, today, and forever.

In the midst of all the things that change and shift in our world, uh you do not change.

And we're grateful for that.

God, we thank you that you are a prayer hearing and prayer-answering God.

We ask, Lord, that as we look at these passages and think about that subject this morning, we ask that you would give us uh eyes to see and ears to hear and hearts that are willing to receive what it is that you have for each one of us.

God, we know that each person is here today, not by accident, but because there's some way that you are at work in their life.

And so, God, we come to you with expectation this morning.

We come with expectation and hope and longing for what it is that you will speak to each one of us this morning.

So by your spirit, please provide each one of us exactly what we need.

And it's to you that we look for these things.

We ask it in Jesus' name.

Amen.

I just now realized the batteries on this thing are dead.

My clicker's dead, so I'm gonna ask Chris.

I'm just gonna like wave you down when I need a slide change, okay?

Pay attention.

Chris can do the slides.

In my first ministry, there was a young couple who was pregnant with their first child.

I can't remember exactly what month she was in, but I do remember that she was far enough along to notice when she stopped feeling her baby move.

She was rushed to the doctor, and they discovered that the baby was wrapped up in the umbilical cord.

And so they did an emergency C-section, and in doing so, they brought little Sophie into the world.

Sophie's body had all of the involuntary functions, like breathing and a heartbeat, and hand movement, and even opening and closing eyes and crying, things like this.

But her brain had been badly damaged from the lack of oxygen.

And all of the tests that they did showed that even though she had involuntary functions, she had no brain activity whatsoever.

As you can imagine, our church was heartbroken.

And we prayed, and we prayed and we prayed for little Sophie and for her family.

For weeks, we asked God for a miracle, but nothing changed.

And in the end, her parents ended up making a decision that no parent should ever have to make, which is to remove little Sophie from the interventions that were keeping her alive.

Why didn't God answer our prayers?

A question like this is deeply personal for each one of us.

Because we know exactly what it's like to pray for all kinds of things.

We know exactly what it's like to pray for healing for ourselves or for someone that we love.

We pray for healing from chronic illness or from cancer, from terminal illness, from anxiety, depression, any number of different things.

We know exactly what it's like to pray for God to intervene in our circumstances, to make a way in situations where it seems like there is no earthly way.

We know exactly what it's like to pray for a relationship to be healed and to be restored.

We know what it's like to pray for God's provision.

Maybe it's financial provision.

Maybe it's the provision of strength to make it through another day.

Maybe it's the provision of wisdom for circumstances and situations that are very difficult and complex, and you don't know what to do until you ask God for wisdom.

We know exactly what it's like to pray for things like that promotion or for the open door to an opportunity that is in front of us.

Some of us know what it's like to pray asking God to provide a spouse for us.

Some of us know what it's like to ask God to provide children of our own when we're wrestling through and dealing with infertility.

We know what it's like to pray that friends and family and coworkers and classmates and the people that we know would come to know Jesus and be changed by him.

Some of us know what it's like to pray for our children, or for our parents, even, or for other people in our life who followed Jesus at one time and have walked away.

We know what it's like to pray for those people to come back to the faith.

We know exactly what it's like to pray for all kinds of things, and we all know what it's like for those prayers to go unanswered.

Why doesn't God answer our prayers?

This is not a theoretical question for you.

I know that.

It's not a theoretical question for me.

For as long as I can remember, I've lived with chronic illness.

Some days my symptoms are manageable, and some days they border on intolerable.

My illness affects every single part of my life, every relationship, everything.

I've prayed, I've been prayed for, I've been prayed with, I've been prayed over, we've gathered the elders to pray, and nothing has changed.

So why hasn't God answered my prayers?

We're in a series of messages called Asking for a Friend.

And what we're doing is we're exploring questions that you have submitted.

These are questions that either you have or someone in your sphere of influence, you know they have that question, and you want to wrestle with it.

You maybe want to pass this message along to them so they can hear some ways to think about it.

And uh what we're doing today is we're looking at this question that is so deeply personal to so many of us.

Why doesn't God answer my prayers?

Now, admittedly, as we think about this question, there's so much that we don't know.

And maybe the least helpful way to approach this is to try and speculate about all the things that we simply don't know.

So, what I think is a better use of our time today is to look at these two passages from the Bible and wrestle with unanswered prayer and respond to this question by looking at two things we do know are true.

So we're not going to spend our time focusing on speculative things that we don't know.

We're gonna spend our time looking at two things that with absolute certainty we do know to be true.

So as you wrestle with unanswered prayer, remember first, his wisdom is higher than our own.

His wisdom is higher than our own.

The pain that we experience because of unanswered prayer is uh very often associated with two things that we know to be true about God: that he's powerful and that he's good.

We know this to be true, that he wants only what is good for us, and he's capable of anything.

And so whether we uh think about it in logical terms like this or not, we all intuitively feel and intuitively ask the question, okay, if he wants only what is good for me, and if he's capable of anything, why doesn't God answer my prayers even when they are for things I'm convinced are good things?

Now it's true that he wants only what is good for us, and it's true that he's capable of anything, and a third truth that we have to remember as we think about unanswered prayer is this He knows what is best.

He is committed to accomplishing our good, he's capable of anything, and he knows what is best.

His wisdom is higher than our own.

And here's what that means.

Very specifically, it means in his wisdom, there are times where he chooses not to give us what we are convinced is good.

There are times where in God's wisdom, he chooses not to give us things that we are absolutely convinced are for our good.

Now, you may have heard those texts being read this morning, and you may have felt a little bit of a tension between them.

You may have felt like, uh, really these two passages are in the same Bible?

Where on the one hand, you have Jesus saying, Ask and you'll be given, seek and you'll find, knock and the door will be open to you.

And then on the other hand, you have Paul, who wrote that letter to the church in Corinth, and he says that he has this thorn in his flesh, this physical affliction, and he pleaded with God to take it away.

And the same Jesus who said, Ask and you'll receive, said to Paul, No.

My grace is enough for you.

And these two things seem to be sort of a contradiction, don't they?

We won't be able to make sense of how these two things can be in the same Bible until we see and understand that Jesus' words here in the Sermon on the Mount as he teaches us about prayer.

His words here are not an unqualified, unconditional promise to every believer, everywhere, for anything they ask.

Jesus is not intending to give us a prayer blank check.

Jesus is not saying that the Father has unconditionally promised and guaranteed that anything we ask, whenever we ask, He will give to us.

Not only does that distort, I think, what Jesus' intention here is in this passage, but if we're honest, we don't actually want that to be true.

Just think about this with me for one moment.

I, for one, am so grateful that God's answer to many of my teenage prayers was a resounding no.

You laugh because you know exactly what it's like.

Because you can think back to a time in your life where it's like, I was convinced.

I urgently pleaded with God for this thing that I so desperately wanted, that I needed, and years later, or decades later, or maybe weeks later, you're like, I'm so grateful that God said no to me.

And he didn't just give me whatever I wanted.

You see, what all of our prayers have in common is that they are limited to our human wisdom in that moment of time.

Every prayer we ask is prayed within the confines of what we know to be good and wise at that moment in time.

But we are limited in our scope of wisdom.

We don't always know what is actually and ultimately for our good.

And so Jesus here, he taught us, as he's teaching his disciples about prayer, he framed this whole teaching about prayer in relationship to our God, uh to God as our Father.

And that's really important for us understanding what Jesus is getting at here.

Again, just think about this with me for a moment.

Anyone who spent any time around children, you don't have to have kids of your own to know this.

Anyone who has children or has spent time with children knows that they are very quick to ask for all kinds of things.

They ask for stuff all the time.

And because of their emotional and cognitive development, they simply don't know what is best for them.

Oh, they know what they want, and they ask you for it, and they're so convinced this is the thing I need.

And we know this to be true.

Any good parent will tell their children no when it is something they know is not going to ultimately be for their good.

Think about this the opposite direction.

When you see a parent that gives their kid anything and everything they want, a parent that bends and bows to the whims of all their children wants, we look at those parents and we're like, uh, that's not good parenting.

You're doing damage to that child by giving them what they want when they want without any qualification.

And this is part of what Jesus wants us to have in our minds as we think about prayer and as we relate to God as our Father.

He knows what is best.

God wants only what is for our good.

God is capable of anything.

And as our heavenly Father, He knows what is best.

I'm gonna read from you a brief quote from a book by a pastor and scholar named John Stott, who wrote a short little commentary on the book of, on the Sermon on the Mount, rather.

And I thought he put this in just like a really, really helpful way.

He says this.

So then if we ask for something good, he grants it.

If we ask for things which are not good, either not good in themselves, or not good for us or for others, directly or indirectly, immediately or ultimately, he denies them.

And only he knows the difference.

Thank God he answers prayers.

Thank God he also sometimes denies our request.

You see what he's getting at here?

He's getting at the wisdom of God and how his wisdom is higher than our own.

Anything we ask that is not actually and ultimately for our good, his answer is always no.

And the reason he answers those prayers no is because he loves us.

He loves you enough to sometimes say no to the things that you ask because his wisdom is higher than our own.

So sometimes in his wisdom, he chooses not to give us what we are convinced is good.

And then on the flip side of this, there are times where in his wisdom he chooses not to remove what we are convinced is bad.

He chooses not to remove things that we think are bringing harm to us.

So in 2 Corinthians, that passage you heard read just a few moments ago, we see that Paul, the one who wrote that letter, is describing how 14 years earlier he was given these unbelievable and indescribable revelations of God's glory.

And these revelations that he received were the kind of thing that could make someone become very arrogant.

The kind of thing that could make someone say, Well, I must be really important if God would pull back the curtain and invite me to see and experience what so many people never get to experience, I must be really important.

You people must not be very important if you haven't received these spiritual experiences that I've had.

And it's the kind of thing that could have made him very arrogant.

And he tells this church in Corinth, he says, in order to keep me from becoming arrogant, in order to keep me and prevent me from becoming conceited, I was given by God a thorn in my flesh.

Now we don't know exactly what this thorn in the flesh was, but we know it was some kind of physical ailment.

This was a thorn given to him in his flesh, in his body.

And if you read his other letters to the other churches, you can see places where he talks about his physical illness.

And he talks about these problems he has with his body.

And he says, this thing was given to me in order to prevent me from becoming conceited.

He goes on to say that three times he pleaded with God, he pleaded with the Lord Jesus to take this thing from me, remove this thing from me.

And the reason why he asked for God to remove that from him was because in his mind, in his wisdom at the time, he thought, well, this thorn in my flesh, this ailment that I have, is harming me and preventing and hindering the advance of the gospel.

And so you can imagine him praying, saying, Jesus, if you want this ministry that you've given me to flourish, you have to remove this thing from me.

If this thing stays in my life, it's harming me, it's hindering the message that you've given me to announce, God, you have to take this away from me.

And he pleaded with God to remove it from him.

And Jesus' loving and his compassionate response to Paul was no.

He says, My grace is sufficient for you.

My grace is enough for you.

My power is made perfect.

My power is made complete.

Not when you are strong.

Not when your body is whole.

My power is made perfect when you are weak.

When you feel your weakness, that is when my power is most at work in you.

Your weakness, Paul, displays my glory and displays my power in a way that your strength never would.

So no, I will not remove it from you.

This thing that you think is bringing you harm, is damaging you, is hurting you, is actually the thing that I have given so that my purpose is in you might be completed.

I've given this to you, and there's a purpose behind this.

There's a purpose for this thing being in your life, so no, I will not remove it from you.

And Paul's response is not what many of ours probably would be, which is begrudging acceptance.

Listen to how he talks about this.

He says, Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weakness.

Do we tend to put weakness and gladness in the same sentence ever?

He says, I will boast in my weakness so that Christ's power may rest on me.

That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weakness, in insults, and hardships and persecutions and difficulties.

For when I am weak, then I am strong.

My weakness displays the power and the glory of God in a way that my strength can't.

And what Paul knows here, having pleaded with God and having heard his response, he knows that there are times where God will choose not to remove something that we are convinced is bringing us harm.

And when you take Matthew and you take 2 Corinthians and you put these two passages together, what we see is that there are things we think that will lead to our good that may actually lead to our harm.

And there are things that we think are leading to our harm that are actually leading to our good, and only God knows which is which.

Only He has the wisdom to see and know and understand which is which, because His wisdom is higher than our own.

So there are times He chooses not to give us what we are convinced is good, there are times He chooses not to remove things that we are convinced is for our harm, and it's because He knows.

He knows.

His wisdom is higher than our own.

Secondly, the second thing we know to be true is this His heart is for our good.

God's heart is always and forever for our good.

So again, drawing on the imagery of a father and a child, Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount says this.

Which of you, if your son asked for a bread, would give him a stone?

Or if he asks for a fish, would give him a snake?

If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him?

Jesus wants us to know as we as we think about the subject of prayer.

Jesus is insistent that we know that he is a loving and generous Father who delights to give us every good thing that we need.

Every prayer we pray is filtered through knowing that is that rock solid, bedrock, absolute, for all time and eternity thing that is true.

He is a loving and generous Father who will give us every good thing.

We know this is true, of course, because we can look to the cross.

And as we look to the cross, what we see is that God didn't just give us good things.

God gave us the best and the greatest thing.

He gave us his son.

In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus labored in prayer.

And he labored in prayer on our behalf.

He labored in prayer on your behalf.

He was urgently and repeatedly asking the Father to save him, to rescue him from the suffering and the agony that he knew awaited him in just a few hours, as he would be tortured and executed.

And Jesus' prayer was take this cup from me.

God make some other way for this to happen.

But not my will be done.

Your will be done.

And Jesus modeled for us that in those most urgent times of prayer when we are convinced of what we know we need, we model our prayers after Jesus, who in the Sermon on the Mount taught us to pray as we prayed this morning, your will be done.

And taught us to pray in the Garden of Gethsemane, not my will be done, but God, what you want to be done.

And friends, it was because Jesus' prayer went unanswered that you have been saved.

If you're here today and you're a follower of Jesus, it is because Jesus' prayer for deliverance went unanswered by the Father.

The Father's answer to Jesus was no.

We are rescued because Jesus submitted himself to the will and to the wisdom of the Father, which Isaiah says was to crush him.

The cross has proved once and for all that his heart is for our good, that he loves us.

The cross shows us the lengths to which God was willing to go in order to accomplish our deliverance and our salvation.

And if God was not, if God was willing to give us his own son, won't he also give us all things?

We know that we know that we know that we know that God's heart is for our good because he's proved it and demonstrated it at the cross.

And so we take these two truths.

His wisdom is higher than our own, his heart is for our good, and we filter all of our prayer through those two things that we know for certain are true.

And at the end of the day, what this means, when we know that his wisdom is higher than our own, when we know that his heart is for our good, it means we can trust him.

It means we can entrust ourselves to him.

We can trust him because he's trustworthy.

He's proven it to us.

And the reason that I did that, I did it on purpose.

Uh, the reason I did it was because that's what we feel.

We feel like our prayers are unanswered.

Uh, but can I just tell you why if you're a follower of Jesus, you should remove the phrase unanswered prayer from your vocabulary.

And the reason is he will answer every single one of your prayers.

Sometimes, in God's mercy and in his compassion, the answer is yes.

And so we pray for healing, we pray for provision, and in that moment, right then, right there, God breaks in and provides the thing that we've asked him for, and we should delight in and celebrate when we see God answering those prayers for us.

Sometimes the answer is yes, because God loves us.

He wants to pour out his good gifts on us.

And sometimes, in his love and in his mercy and in his compassion, his answer is no.

Because he knows.

His wisdom is higher than our own.

He knows that this thing that we're so convinced is for our good may not actually be for our good.

And so he answers it in loving and tender, he says no.

Sometimes the answer to our prayers is yes, sometimes the answer is no, sometimes the answer is later.

Sometimes it's later in this life.

Where what God wants for us is to wait, and he wants us to trust, and he wants us to know that like the thing that you think you most need is not the thing you're praying for.

The thing you most need is to know the one who is with you in your waiting.

What you most need to know is me and my presence and my compassion and my love for you in the midst of what feels like unanswered prayer.

And God knows there are times where that is what we need.

And so he says, later.

And then at some point in life, God answers that prayer, and we get to look back and celebrate that God answered it and celebrate all the ways that we were able to experience Jesus in ways we never would have had he answered that prayer right away.

And we can see that in his waiting and in his delay and in his timing, there is good for us in that.

He answers according to his wisdom, according to his will, according to his timetable.

Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes the answers no, sometimes the answers later in this life, and sometimes the answer is new creation.

Every single prayer that you pray.

The reason we pray in the first place is because our world is not the way that it should be.

The reason we pray is because our lives are not the way that we should be, and so we cry out to God and we ask for Him to do something about it.

And the good news is that all of those longings in your heart that overflow into prayer will one day be answered in full, in completion, when He returns to make all things new.

And so for that reason, we should rid ourselves of the language of unanswered prayer.

There is no such thing as unanswered prayer if you're a follower of Jesus.

The answer might be yes, it might be no, it might be later, it might be new creation.

But for those of us who are in Christ, the promise is he will return and make all things new.

And this is what we know.

His wisdom is higher than our own.

He knows what's best.

And so we entrust ourselves to him.

We trust him because he is trustworthy.

We've already mentioned this this morning, but if you are here today and you need prayer for something, there's gonna be a few people down front after the service who would love to pray with you for any need that you might have.

But if you're here today and there's a need that you have, and you're sensing that God wants you to pray with someone about that, we have people that would be so happy to pray with you.

So if you need prayer for anything, please don't leave here without letting someone love you and serve you and minister to you by praying for you.

Each week we come to the communion table.

And as we come to the table this morning, we are reminded that Jesus is the one in whom all our prayers are answered.

As we look to the cross, what we see is that his wisdom is higher than our own.

Because the cross is confusing to us in our own human wisdom.

We think, why would God do it that way?

Why did God rescue us by sending his son to suffer and die for us?

That doesn't make sense.

And it's because his wisdom is higher than our own.

And we look at the cross and we see his heart is for our good.

We see that he loves us, that he gave himself for us.

And as we come to the communion table today, we get to remember and celebrate that Jesus is the one in whom all of our prayers are ultimately answered.

I want to invite you to take just a few moments for silence and for a confession, and then we will come to the communion table together.