BIG IDEA:
Prayer: What’s with the silence button?
All believers should understand why God sometimes says “No” to their prayers.
1. It is outside of God’s will.
2. The timing is not right yet.
3. God is testing your faith.
4. God allows people to exercise free will.
5. God is good.
OBJECTIVE: Audience members will be encouraged to keep their hope in God even in the midst of unanswered prayers.
INTRO:
Sometimes the signal between God and ourselves gets broken because of things we have done – that’s what I talked about 2 weeks ago. But sometimes we pray and don’t receive the answers we want, or we feel like we get no response at all, and it is not our fault. We have done all we can do, we’re walking in step with Him – but sometimes we will still pray for something and it will not turn out according to our request. When this happens, what is going on? How can we stay motivated to pray even when the response we seem to be getting is silence? The Bible provides some answers to the question: when it comes to getting my prayers answered, what’s with the silence button?
1. The request is outside of God’s will.
1John 5:14-15 This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us — whatever we ask — we know that we have what we asked of him.
So then, if we ask it of him but don’t receive it we know it is outside of his will.
Luke 22:42 “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.”
Remember in the model prayer Jesus told us to pray “Your Kingdom come, Your will be done”.
The closer we get to God, the more we know him because we’re praying and reading the Bible, and keeping in step with the Holy Spirit, the more our prayers will begin lining up with God’s will.
ILLUS: As a parent I can see what’s coming down the road in my kids lives. When they ask for me to give them something – I can see that, though it is in my power to provide what they ask – it would work against my greater goal of helping them mature into responsible Christian adults. And so, even though it might not make sense to them – sometimes I say no because of the greater good I am working toward in their lives.
As they mature, they will begin to see these principles at work, and will stop asking for things they know will work at odds with the greater goal, because they will begin to see it is for their good that sometimes the answer is no.
2. The timing is not right yet.
Sometimes what seems like silence from God is actually a “Yes, but you’ll need to wait.” God may in fact be working to bring about the answer to your request, but the timing is not right for it to be revealed. We see this in the story of Moses’ calling to deliver the Israelites from slavery under Pharaoh in Egypt.
Exodus chapter 1-2 tell how the Israelites multiplied in Egypt, where they had settled during a famine a couple hundred years earlier. As “refugees” they were easy prey and became slaves to the Egyptian people. And so the people prayed for deliverance. When Moses was born he ended up being raised in the house of Pharaoh, but at the age of 40 he had to flee from Egypt because he had killed an Egyptian man who was beating an Israelite servant. This led to a period of 40 years in which Moses became a shepherd in the wilderness of nearby Midian. We pick up the story at Exodus 2:23-25…
Exodus 2:23-25 During that long period (when Moses was shepherding in the wilderness of Midian), the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them.
Exodus 3:7,9 The LORD said: I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering….And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them.
God was concerned. He heard the prayers. But his plan called for the raising up of Moses to lead his people to freedom from slavery. And that plan took time to bring about. A long time. 80 years just from the time of Moses’ birth!
Why did it take so long? Only God knows that. What we can know is that if our prayers seem like they are not being answered, it could be that God is already working out his plan of deliverance for us, but we are going to have to simply trust him during the time of waiting.
James 5:7-8 Be patient, then, brothers, until the Lord’s coming. See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop and how patient he is for the autumn and spring rains. You too, be patient and stand firm, because the Lord’s coming is near.
If the Lord seems to be saying “wait – I’m working on your answer”, be patient and stand firm. Keep hoping in God, who is able to deliver what you need.
3. God is testing your faith.
Sometimes we may pray for God to do something – and he will politely decline our request. Why? Because he needs us to remember our complete dependence upon Him.
If you need a little help understanding this point, take a look at what Paul wrote in 2Cor 12:7-10.
2Cor. 12:7-10 To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me 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.
Could God have delivered him from his “thorn in the flesh”? Most definitely. So why didn’t he? Because it is when God’s servants are weak, when they endure weakness, insults, hardships, persecutions, and difficulties, that God is able to glorify Himself in and through them.
Sometimes he will allow difficult situations to persist in our lives simply because it is that difficult thing that reminds us of our place in the universe. It is in that struggle that we will be brought to our knees time and again, recognizing our need for God’s strength and power.
I believe God understood Paul and how he might have become conceited if God delivered him of this “thorn in the flesh”. Whatever this thorn was, it limited Paul’s ability to succeed in life and ministry in his own power. It made him weak – so that God’s grace could shine through all the more.
If God has chosen not to grant your request of him, it may just be that he knows you will bring more glory to Him if he does NOT do what you are asking.
4. God allows people to exercise free will.
The way God has set up creation, he has given humans free will, and he does not normally supercede that will. We have to remember this when our prayers for certain people are not answered.
“Lord, make him stop doing drugs.”
“Lord, make her come back to me.”
“Lord, change his mind about You.”
God will not “make” someone change. We can pray for the person to be convinced, to be influenced by their circumstances – but if we are praying for God to MAKE someone do something, we need to realize God has self-limited His powers to bring about that change. People can and do choose to resist his will.
In the same way, we pray an impossible prayer when we pray, “God change me.” He will come alongside us, he will provide the power for us to change, he will encourage us and send support to us. But we will always be given a choice whether we will actually DO what we know is right.
Sometimes the reason we don’t see our prayers answered as we wish is simply because of the free will of other people involved.
TRANS: But even with this knowledge, we have reason for hope in this life. For we have the promise of scripture that no matter what the answer from God is to our prayers, we can rest assured that…
5. God is good.
Rom. 8:28-29 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.
This is the bottom line. Either we believe that God is in charge or he is not. Sometimes as believers things will happen, tragic things that make no sense to us, that assault our sense of justice. When all is said and done, we have two choices. We can trust that God is good and is working all things together for our good, or we can believe that God has abdicated his throne and is powerless to do anything.
One choice will bring hope. One will bring despair.
One choice follows the teaching of the Bible. One does not.
ILLUS: Perhaps the biggest example of this I can think of in our own life was our prayers that God would miraculously enable us to conceive children. We fasted, we prayed, we sought medical help – but always the result was the same.
Along the way however, God began to do something in our hearts. He began to show us that even if we never were able to conceive children, that God had not forgotten us. He heard our prayers – and he wanted to answer them another way. He began to impress upon us that he wanted to use the strength of our families and our faith to provide a life of faith and stability for children who would probably not experience it unless we were to adopt them.
We began to see that, even though God was not giving us what we were asking for, he was still in charge, he was still loving, and he was still good.
CONCLUSION: God will not always give us what we ask for. But He will always give us Himself. And in the end that is far better.
ILLUS: Some of you may be familiar with the name Kay Arthur. She has written several Christian books, and she has her own radio program. She tells about one day, she was getting out of the car, her arms loaded down with books, and not wanting to go into her house. She was a young widow with two children, and it had been a bad day. She was hurting.
As she stared at the grass, her mind went back to a time in her childhood when she had been running through the grass toward her dad, terrified and screaming. He had scooped her up in his arms and given her comfort. She wished that she could be a little girl again. She wished that she had someone to hold her right then.
As she turned to go into her house, she suddenly saw herself in her mind’s eye, a little girl in pigtails, flying down a vast marble corridor. Oil paintings bigger than life hung on the walls. She could hear her little shoes on the marble floor and see the tears that ran down her cheeks.
It was a long corridor. At he end, two huge gold doors glistened in the sunlight which filtered through beveled cathedral windows. On either side of the imposing door stood two magnificently dressed guards holding huge spears and blocking the entrance into the room beyond.
Undaunted, the little girl ran straight toward the doors, still crying, “Abba!” She never broke her stride for as she neared the doors, the guards flung them opened and heralded her arrival: “The daughter of the King! The daughter of the King!”
Court was in session. The cherubim and seraphim cried, “Holy, holy, holy!” and the elders sat on their thrones, dressed in white, wearing crowns of gold, and talking with the King of kings. But none of this slowed his daughter!
Oblivious to everything going on about her, she ran past the seven burning lamps of fire and up the steps leading to the throne, and she catapulted herself into the King’s arms. She was home and wrapped in the arms of his everlasting love. He reached up and, with one finger, gently wiped away her tears. Then He smoothed the sticky hair on her face back into her braids and said, “Now, now, tell your Father all about it.”
Kay Arthur walked into the house, left her books on the table, walked through her house, and knelt by her bedside. Then she proceeded to tell her Father all about it. (Nelson’s Complete Book of Stories, Illustrations, and Quotes, p. 131)
REPEAT: God will not always give us what we ask for. But He will always give us Himself. And in the end that is far better.
PRAY
