Martin Luther is a famous figure in the history of the Christian faith. You may know him as the man who broke away from the Catholic church and fathered the Protestant movement. According to tradition, Luther became a priest because of a “prayer bet” he made with God. This story says that as Luther was traveling in the countryside, a huge thunderstorm hit. As the lightning flashed and the thunder boomed, Luther threw himself into a ditch fearing for his life. While he laid in the ditch, he prayed. Hard. Part of his prayer included a deal with God -- if God would deliver him from the storm, Luther would become a priest.
I don’t know if this account is real or just an urban legend, but Luther survived the storm and became a priest.
Maybe you’ve made a “prayer bet” with God. Maybe you’ve prayed one of those “God, if you get me out of this I promise I will…” prayers in your life. Honestly, most of us have at some point in our lives.
But what about when prayers go unanswered? Especially the prayers that seem way more serious than making it through a thunderstorm?
Why is it that we pray for healing, but our loved ones still suffer?
Why is it that we pray for restoration in relationships, but parents still split up?
Why is it that we pray for deliverance from tough situations, but we end up going through them anyway?
When we pray serious -- I really need this -- type prayers but don’t get the answers we are looking for, it can shake our faith and lead to doubt:
Is God really able to do anything about my situation?
Does God even care?
How should we think about unanswered prayers?
In his book, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People, author Pete Grieg writes that we can attribute unanswered prayers in our lives to three possibilities: God’s world, God’s war, or God’s will. While there are probably other reasons or explanations for unanswered prayer in our lives, these three categories really give us understanding and insight, and help us to find our way through our doubts.
God’s Worl
The very beginning of the Bible, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…” (Genesis 1:1). When God created the world, He created systems and order for how the world works. We call these natural laws and they are designed to make the world work. Grieg writes:
“God has intricately established certain governing principles that make the world work best for most people in most places most of the time. The majority of humanity does not experience devastating natural disasters. Most babies are born healthy. Fallen nature still contains far more beauty than ugliness. And so God tends not to tinker with these extraordinarily delicate, complex, and effective rules every time we pray.”
Sometimes we pray for things like a sunny day for our wedding or for our team to win the big game. But what if a fan of the other team is praying that same prayer? Or what happens if every time we prayed for a sunny day, the rains stopped, the clouds parted, and the sun broke through? If every bride had a sunny wedding day, every farmer praying for rain would be praying in vain.
Are there occasions when God suspends or steps outside of the natural order to change a situation? Absolutely. We call those times miracles. But those are the exception, not the rule. This is true even in the Bible. For all of the amazing miracles that are shared in Scripture, there are thousands and thousands of unremarkable days not mentioned. As theologian and author C.S. Lewis writes, “That God can and does, on occasions, modify the behavior of matter and produce what we call miracles, is part of Christian faith.” He adds, however, that “the very conception of a common, and therefore stable, world, demands that these occasions should be extremely rare.” In other words, God isn’t always messing with the world he created and set in motion. There are times our prayers go unanswered because we are a part of a world that doesn’t always work the way we wish that it would.
God’s War
We may not see our prayers answered in the way or time we want them to be answered because we live in a spiritual war zone. In our society, we don’t talk much about the spiritual realm (except in horror movies), but the Bible has a lot to say about it. Jesus Himself said that we have an enemy, Satan (which means “enemy”). Jesus warns us that Satan is constantly battling against God and against us.
The New Testament writers also have a lot to say about the spiritual battle in our world and in our lives. Here are a few examples:
“For we are not fighting against flesh-and-blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in the heavenly places.” – Ephesians 6:12
“We are human, but we don’t wage war as humans do. We use God’s mighty weapons, not worldly weapons, to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and to destroy false arguments.” – 2 Corinthians 10:3-4
“Stay alert! Watch out for your great enemy, the devil. He prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour.” - 1 Peter 5:8
There are times we don’t receive the answer to our prayers because there is a battle going on in the spiritual realm. In the Old Testament book of Daniel, the main person in the story, Daniel, has prayed and prayed for an answer from God but hadn’t received it. Finally, after three weeks of intense praying, Daniel does receive an answer from a “heavenly messenger.” This messenger tells Daniel that his prayers, from the very first day, had been heard in heaven, but a spiritual battle had kept the answer from being delivered for 21 days.
In, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lord the Sense of Evil, author Andrew Delbanco writes,
“We have jettisoned in the West the idea of cosmic evil, or transcendent evil, or supernatural evil. We don’t believe in it. In fact, we don’t like to use the word evil because it implies moral absolutes and value judgements. So we use medical terms. We talk about dysfunction. We talk about pathology. We don’t use moral terminology. But as the twentieth century has gone on it has gotten harder and harder to say that holocausts and ethnic cleansing and serial killing is just bad psychological and sociological adjustment.”
While we want to “trust the science” and find a natural explanation for everything, the Bible tells us that there is a spiritual battle brewing and that the answers to our prayers may be caught up in the melee.
God’s Will
Sometimes the prayers we pray make total sense to us and our will for our lives, but they aren’t necessarily in line with God’s will for our lives. Greig reminds us that, “Jesus only ever promised to answer prayers aligned with his will and purpose.” He never promised to give us anything we want, but He did promise to give us everything that fits His plan and will for us and our situation.
The Bible also tells us that God’s wisdom and ways are much, much, much, higher than ours. We may think we know best, but our knowledge is limited. God sees the big picture. That might seem frustrating, but I believe we can see it as freeing. It is freeing to know that One who knows so much more than I do is the One who is in control.
The Hubble telescope has so far found one hundred billion galaxies in the universe. Doesn’t it stand to reason that the One who made and maintains this vast cosmos will sometimes do things we can’t comprehend? Doesn’t it make sense and that maybe God can be trusted with the patterns and the purpose of our own lives?
I believe that one day we will get to hear the “rest of the story” and find out how a prayer that wasn’t answered the way we thought it should be was actually a blessing.
When we pray, the answer we receive isn’t always the answer we are looking for, or sometimes we feel we don’t get an answer at all. And when that happens, doubt can begin to cloud our hearts and minds. But I believe every prayer is answered. Sometimes that answer is “no” because God has a different plan that will benefit us in the end. At other times, the answer may be “wait” because we aren’t ready or we need to grow into who he has created us to be. And often the answer is “yes” as God provides the right answer at the right time.
If you’ve ever had your doubts about God, faith, Christianity, or the church, I’d love to have you join us this Sunday as we continue to talk about our doubts and God’s purpose in our lives.
God bless,
Pastor Darrick Young