Why Doesn't God Hear Me?

Why God’s Hearing Depends on Sincere Prayer and Repentance

It's a question I hope to answer just in the short time that we have in the Word of God before we go to prayer. From Psalm 66, which I'll read in its entirety in a moment, from Psalm 66, the question that might be answered for you is, why doesn't God hear me?

Why does God not hear me when I pray? Another way of putting that question is, if I am praying for that which pleases God, health, He heals all your sicknesses, I'm praying according to God's Word and yet I or a loved one still has cancer, why has God not heard me?

I pray for greater strides in sanctification and yet I still keep stumbling. It does not God's Word commend sanctification as something that would please Him. And on and on we can multiply that question.

The question before us is, why doesn't God hear me? Why does God not answer my prayers when I pray from the heart according to that which would please Him, according to His Word? If you've ever had that dilemma, if you've ever had that question, if you've ever had that struggle, wondering why you're going on and on and on and praying properly and yet not seeing God working in you to answer that prayer, well, Lord willing, I can give you some answer from Scripture and perhaps some comfort even today.

I'll read Psalm 66. I'm going to read it in its entirety, but just so you know, when I get to verse 16, which I'll call out to you when I get there, verses 16 to 19 are really going to be the core of what I have to say.

So the rest of it we're going to go very quickly through. And then verse 20, the doxology at the end of it. So please stand as I read Psalm 66 to you. Shout for joy all the earth. Sing the glory of His name.

Give to Him glorious praise. Say to God how awesome are your deeds. So great is your power that your enemies come cringing to you. All the earth worships you and sings praises to you. They sing praises to your name, Selah.

Come and see what God has done. He is awesome in His deeds towards the children of men. He turned the sea into dry land. They passed through the river on foot. There did we rejoice in Him who rules by His might forever, whose eye keeps watch on the nations.

Let not the rebellious exalt themselves. Selah. Bless our God, O peoples. Let the sound of His praise be heard, who has kept our soul among the living and has not let our feet slip. For you, O God, have tested us.

You have tried us as silver is tried. You brought us into the net. You laid a crushing burden on our back. You let men ride over our heads. We went through fire and through water, yet you have brought us out to a place of abundance.

I will come into your house with burnt offerings. I will perform my vows to you, that which my lips have uttered and my mouth promised when I was in trouble. I will offer to you burnt offerings of fattened animals with the smoke of the sacrifice of rams.

I will make an offering of bulls and goats. Selah. Come and hear all you who fear God, and I will tell you what He has done for my soul. I cried to Him with my mouth, and high praise was on my tongue.

If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. But truly, God has listened. He has attended to the voice of my prayer. Blessed be God, because He has not rejected my prayer or removed His steadfast love from me.

Please be seated. Well, let us go to Him in prayer and then attend to this word that I've just read to you, Heavenly Father. Again, we come before you as your people, seeking, Father, your grace and your blessing upon us as we look once again to your word.

Prepare us even now, through this word that is soon to be preached, for the prayer that is to come, that you will hear us, Father, that we will know that surely the Lord has heard us, that you have not rejected our prayer, because we come to you praying in the good name, the holy name of our Lord and Savior, your Son, Jesus Christ.

Bless us because of Him, Father, we ask in Jesus' name, Amen. So what do we have in Psalm 66? Psalm 66 is unnamed. We do not know who wrote this psalm. We do not know the specific occasion that brought this psalm into his mind and from his pen by the Holy Spirit's direction into scripture.

We know from the psalm of what I read to you that really it's a call to worship. It's a great call to worship, and if you noticed as I read it in sections there, most of your Bibles have it divided up very nicely, where the first four verses call all the earth to come before God and worship Him.

Sing or shout for joy to God all the earth, sing glory, sing the glory of His name. Say to God how awesome are your deeds and so forth. All the earth, all that He has created is called and invited, if you will, to come and sing praises to His name, to call out His glory.

And he narrows down very quickly in verse 5 to Israel's specific experience of God. In other words, if those first four verses are all the earth called to sing God's name, to call out His glory, then we focus down, it narrows down so quickly, come and see what God has done, His awesome deeds towards the children of man.

But this one nation of the children of man is Israel. He turned the sea into dry land. Of course, they crossed the Red Sea as the Egyptian army, the mightiest army in the world at the time, was chasing them and the sea closed in on them.

And Israel, having crossed on dry land, was able to see the destruction of their enemies. This is what he's talking about here. And he rules by his might forever, and that's why he says, let not the rebellious exalt themselves.

Do not exalt yourself against a God who can do this and who does do what he's able to do. He speaks of going through the river on foot. This is after they crossed the Red Sea and the Egyptians were destroyed.

They're on the east side of the Jordan, and they're going to go into the promised land after 40 years of wandering. And what did the Jordan do? In the fear of God, it parted in two ways. And once again, Israel walked through a river that came out dry on the other side and took that land.

Come and see what God has done. This God that all the earth is called to rejoice in. But let me tell you what this God has done in history. As I like to put it, in time and space, he's made not just himself known, but he's made himself known through what he's done for the children of men, for this one nation.

And not just Israel, because he says in the next verse, Bless our God, O peoples, let the sound of his praise be heard, who has kept our soul among the living and has not let our feet slip. For you, O God, have tested us, you have tried us as silver has tried, you have brought us into the net, and you have laid a crushing burden on our backs.

You let men ride over our heads, we went through the fire and the water, yet you have brought us out to a place of abundance. Now, what is he speaking of here? As we get to this, to the end of the psalm, which is where we're going to focus, and why God hears or doesn't hear.

This is God's working among men. This is God's working in history. This is him saying, if you look at God of all the earth and what he does for all the earth, he acts consistent with this nature through all the children of men.

Israel just being an example of that. He speaks about having been tested, about the crushing burden laid on their backs, men riding over them, yet having been brought to a place of abundance. We all go through trials in this life.

And the trials that he's speaking of here is Israel's history, I believe. And Israel's history of their constant turning away from God and to other gods, you can read this depressing cycle in the book of Judges, where constantly you see this, and it's through in other places of scripture, but Judges makes it most clear, does it not?

Where the people turn to the Asherahs, to the other gods, they take on the ways of the peoples around them, and God brings judgment upon them. He tests them, as it were. And they cry out to God, and God forgives them.

And then they forget that, and they go back to their old ways, and they're brought under judgment again. And under this judgment, the burden on their backs, as it says in verse 11, they cry out again for help.

And God in his mercy, as he has so often for every one of us here, once again forgives, restores, gives you another chance, if you will, to put it in 21st century terms. So, from all the earth, to this one nation and their experience with God, it's a call to worship.

What he's giving here is testimony. He's calling the nations to worship, and if we go very quickly through this, and I really do want to get to my verse 16, so I am going fast, I understand that. He says, I will come into your house with burnt offerings, and here is the worship.

I will come into the temple. I will bring the burnt offerings, I will bring the sin sacrifices, I will follow the law, I will come into your house with burnt offerings, I will perform my vows to you, I will do that which I promised to do.

I took vows before God, I will accomplish them. I remember that he's calling out to all the people who he has brought into this assembly, that which my lips have uttered and my mouth promised when I was in trouble.

I will offer to you burnt offerings of fattened animals with the smoke of the sacrifice of rams, I will make an offering of bulls and goats. So this is all the background I want to give you on this psalm.

Again, we don't know the specific occasion of the psalm, we don't know if it was David or Moses or any of the other inspired authors of the psalms who wrote this one. We do know that he was in some trouble, whoever this one is.

And I'll point this out and then we'll get into verse 16 here very quickly. He says, I will perform my vows to you, that which my lips have uttered and my mouth promised when I was in trouble. When I was in trouble.

Do you go to God when you're in trouble? We have no idea what kind of trouble this really is or was for him. Was he in trouble because of enemies? Was there a rebellion against him like David had with his son Absalom?

Really not given any hint about that. So I want you to keep in mind what it says here, that my mouth promised when I was in trouble. And how often do we find ourselves in that kind of trouble and we say, oh Lord, just help me this one more time.

And I won't do this again. If you've ever gotten a letter from the IRS, boy, that'll make you really quickly say, oh Lord, help me now. And I won't fail to tell honestly, you know, they have ways of finding you out.

For all of you who haven't had rough experiences with the IRS, let me tell you that there's a lot of millions of people in this country and they know how to find every one of you. And how many times have we been in that kind of trouble where something we did, something you did, probably intentionally, rose back to the surface and we call out to God and we say, oh Lord, my mouth is going to make a vow.

I make a promise. I'm coming with burnt offerings and I promise you now that I'm in trouble, just get me out this one time. Just forgive me and I will mend my ways. And how soon we forget as that previous cycle that I was speaking of.

That's the context that I think we have for the psalm. That's the hint we have that brings us so quickly to verse 16 and answer this question. Why does God not answer my prayers? Especially when it's not something I cheated on my tax return, not some obvious intentional sin, things that should be according to his word.

Why does he not answer my prayer? He says, come and hear verse 16, all you who fear God and I will tell you what he has done for my soul. I cried to him with my mouth and high praise was on my tongue.

What did he do for his soul? I think it has to go back to this verse I just read about the promises he made. His lips uttered, my mouth promised when I was in trouble. In these last few verses where we're going to put our time, put our concentration, he's going to speak about cherishing iniquity in my heart.

And so the trouble, I believe we can connect those two. The trouble he was in and he made promises to God because of it. And now the iniquity in the heart, if I had cherished it, it was some kind of sin.

It was some kind of personal failure that brought out this praise because of knowing God's forgiveness. If I cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. In the New King James, in the King James, it says, it keeps it, it makes it current.

If I cherish iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. And we need to take this verse apart a little bit to understand because what he's saying is, if I had done this, the Lord would not have done that.

If I cherished in my heart the iniquity that I had when I was in trouble, if I cherished, if I hung on to it, the Lord would not have heard. And we can turn around, turn around and say, if I do not cherish iniquity in my heart, the Lord will hear, which is how the psalm ends on a very high note.

If I cherished iniquity. The word cherished is a very important word. In the Hebrew, it's ra 'a, ra 'a, and ra 'a means simply to see, to see something. But it also means to provide for what you see. And I'll just give you one example of how that's used is in Genesis 22, when Isaac is about to be sacrificed by his father, Abraham.

Abraham is going to sacrifice, according to God's command, your son, your only son, whom you love. And God sees, God ra 'a, that Abraham is in need of a substitute for Isaac. The knife is up, it's going to be coming down.

You recall that the Lord calls out and says, it's not just, hey, Abraham. He says, Abraham, Abraham, do not lay your hand on the boy. For now, I see that you fear God. So God ra 'a, God saw the need. Do you know what happened next?

We're in Genesis 22. God provided for what he saw. And the word provided is the same exact word as to see. And that's when Abraham looks up and he sees the ram with his horn caught in the thicket. There was the ra 'a, the provision for what God saw, ra 'a, the need for.

And so with just that one example, he says in verse 18, if I had cherished, if I had ra 'a, iniquity in my heart. So what does it mean to cherish or to ra 'a, iniquity in my heart? I think it means to provide for iniquity.

What he's speaking of here, if I had done this, if I had done this, if I had provided, if I had made room in my heart for the very iniquity for which I'm going to God for forgiveness, he would not hear.

Now, doesn't that make sense? Now why would God want to forgive a sin when that very sin is being provided for in the heart? Go to God and we say, oh Lord, help me to not be a violent man by making that person stop getting me so angry.

Oh Lord, help me to be more honest by giving me more money, that sort of thing. Providing for the very sin with which we go to God. He says if I had done that, the Lord would not have heard. If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, this is how we have it translated here, and that's a good translation.

But think of it this way, when we go to God, and think of these prayers that we've been bringing to God for a long time, and we've not seen the answer, health, a loved one's health, employment, all sorts of things.

I don't say here that when you find that particular iniquity that is being provided for by you, that all of a sudden God's going to answer your prayer and everything's going to be loved. That's not what we're saying.

What's being looked for here is the sincerity, the integrity of coming before God with a heart that is sure that when I have iniquity A, that has led to the hard situations that we had before, you've tried us as Silver has tried, you've brought us into the net, you've laid a crushing burden on our back, you let them ride over our heads.

When sin A is being confessed, sin A is not being provided and cherished. That's what is happening here. He says, if I had done this, the Lord would not have heard. To listen. It's another one of those Hebrew words that has different nuances of meaning depending on how it's used.

And I'm just going to give you one example of this. The word listened is the Hebrew word shema, shema. It's in the opening of the great shema, as we call it, the one Jesus cited that leads to the great commandment.

Shema here, shema Israel, the Lord, our God, the Lord is one. Shema means to hear, listen, Israel, said Moses, listen to me, but it also means to heed, to obey as the rest of Deuteronomy would confirm.

The Lord would not have shema, the Lord would not have heeded. So in this case, we have the Lord having listened to him, having shema, having heeded because the iniquity had been addressed. He had repented.

He had gone to God with integrity of heart. He had gone to God and confessed what it was that needed to come forth. How often, though, do we make provision for our favored iniquity, even while we pretend to pray against it?

Oh, Lord, forgive my violence against the wife of my youth. Won't you please make her stop making me mad? Then I wouldn't be forced by her into sin. And the other examples I gave would be like asking the Lord to cause police cars to have flat tires so we can get away with robbing a bank.

So I ask you, do we provide for iniquity? In what ways do we provide for iniquity? Well, one way is to focus on other people's sins. You ever hear that sigh of relief when somebody else's sin is public?

Like that famous preacher or pastor who goes into moral failure and we look and say, oh, that's oh, that feels so bad for him, oh, that's so terrible, oh, look at him, look at him, look at him. And even within churches and people who aren't so famous, just what is it?

The attention is going to be on them. All eyes are off of me. I don't have to worry about anybody peering in. I don't have to worry about a brother sitting down with me and looking me in the eye and saying, how are you doing today?

And I get to say, great, and he keeps staring at me as if his eyes can draw the sin right out of me. No, because it happened to someone else, and someone else now has the publicity. You know, Augustine, who died in the mid -400s, wrote on this verse, and I want you to hear this because I think this is one of the ways that we make this provision.

Consider now, brethren, how easily, how daily men blushing for fear of men do censure iniquities. He hath done ill. He hath done basely. A villain that fellow is. This perchance for man's sake, he saith.

See whether thou beholds no iniquity in thy heart, whether perchance that which thou censures in another thou art meditating to do, and therefore against him dost thou exclaim. Not because he hath done it, but because he hath been found out.

You know the expression, she protesteth too much? That's what it is. It's that Shakespearean thing where Queen Gertrude saw the actress so overweening her own self-declared fidelity and love, it was too much to be believed, and so it is with us.

And what sins do we exaggerate? What sin do we exaggerate? His. She got exposed, not me. All the attention is now elsewhere. You know this morning we started with Judah, or excuse me, Genesis 38. I'll get this right.

We started with Genesis 38 and Judah. And do you remember what he did when he found out about his daughter-in-law, Tamar, being pregnant? He said, Burn her! Let's get this taken care of, that lousy sinner.

Why? Iniquity in his heart. Now, he didn't know he was the one that made her pregnant. Not yet. And yet, he had something in his conscience, it seems, that made him so quick to judge her. It made it so convenient that all eyes are on her for her moral failure.

She did something wrong. Oh yeah, let's look at her. As a matter of fact, I'll lead the way, and we'll all take care of that. That's what it means to protest too much. Verses 16 -19 in the whole psalm where he says, When I was in trouble and I made the promises, has the flavor of a particular sin.

Has the flavor of a singular sort of thing, and I can't absolutely prove that, but when he calls the assembly to hear what the Lord did for him, he seems to have in mind this particular deliverance from a particular evil.

He does not, as other psalms do, give a litany of Israel's sins when he was talking about Israel's history. That's one reason I believe this. And the word for iniquity is singular. Now iniquity can encompass an entire inventory of all kinds of sins, but he could have easily used the plural.

So what I'm getting at is, the sin that had he regarded in his heart was a single thing. And I want to suggest to you that when you look to your heart and you find sin in it, that the working of the Lord, in my experience anyway, is that he brings to your mind that one thing for you to work on.

That iniquity. It doesn't say you're all done in life and you're now perfect. We don't preach perfection here. We preach progress. Always reaching out for the prize of God, the upward calling in Christ Jesus.

God is not a blunderbuss. Do you remember what a blunderbuss is? I think it was back in the 1400s or 1500s when they first invented the shotgun, and they had that thing with that barrel that went out like a sprout.

And it would be filled with all kinds of things. Shot and gravel and dirt and just anything to blow things away. It was a scattergun. It would hit you with everything they could. God is much more surgical than that.

That iniquity that he's trying to uncover, that iniquity that he wants you to expose to him, is usually just that one thing. Again, it's not the only thing. It's not the last thing you're ever going to have to deal with.

Far from it. John assumes in 1 John 1 .9, which I quote so often, if we confess our sins, his faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness, but I would suggest to you it's one at a time.

God doesn't just tell you that you've got so many things wrong with you. You're just a lousy sinner. James says that we have means of grace for uncovering that one sin. It's a shameful thing to confess our sins, isn't it?

Too often we don't think of it as a means of grace. And how do we hold that sin within? How do we make provision in our heart for that sin? I would suggest to you again, one way is we just don't trust each other.

James under inspiration of the Holy Spirit says, confess your sins to one another. We all agree with that. We should confess our sins to one another, right? It says it very plainly. You don't have to be a Greek scholar to take that one apart.

The English is really, really good. Confess your sins to one another. And then what do we do? I say, okay, well, to which one another do I confess my sins? Now, I can't pray in this prayer circle because there's women and they might hear this and that'd be inappropriate.

This one's too young to hear that. And I don't know this guy well enough. So okay, I know what I'll do. I'll go home and I'll confess my sin between me and God. Okay, after dinner, no, after family worship, okay, when I've got a big day.

So after I get up in the morning, okay, get up in the morning, go to work, okay, after the game and you get the point after and after, and then by the middle of the week, it's sin. What sin? I don't have no sin.

It's all forgotten. That sin that we maintain in the heart, that sin we make provision so often is just that very sin that we need to confess. James says in James 4 .1 .3, what causes quarrels and fights among you?

Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly to spend on your passions.

So your passions are at war and you ask because you want to spend what you get on your passions. Is that not the very definition of making provision in the heart for the sin? It should never be so. It should never be so.

What holds us back? What keeps us providing for that one sin? Well, perhaps it's shame. Shame to admit my sin. We easily say that I'm a sinner just like you, but do we just as easily say, as we confess ourselves to be sinners, do we just as easily say, this is my sin.

This is what I've regarded in my heart. Here is my iniquity for which I've made provision to do again and again and again. So I say to you, brothers and sisters in the Lord, we all sit together at Jesus's feet.

And if we want to draw a picture of what it means to sit together at Jesus's feet, think of his pierced feet. Think of the feet and the arms or the hands that were pierced to put him on the cross and bring an end to sin.

Think that way when you pray with a brother or sister. Not just that we're all sinners together. But a sin that needs to be confessed, a provision that needs to be taken away. If I cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.

This doesn't say that God all of a sudden grants everything we ask for when we confess properly. That would be a matter of works, and that's not what it's saying. Speaking of integrity, speaking of his sincerity before God, is speaking of being honest with him and with each other.

We're going to go into our prayer meeting fairly soon. We're going to have a time of confession. We make the confession general. Is this the time to confess deep, personal, intimate sense? I'm not going to say it is or it isn't.

I'm going to say that too often we fail to confess our sins to each other because we just can't find the right form, we can't find quite the right place. I'm going to suggest to you, myself included, that I'm going to cherish that.

I'm going to provide for that sin by not confessing it, by not putting it forth. He goes on and we'll close in a moment. But truly, God has listened. He's attended to the voice of my prayer. Have you prayed to God about sin?

You know, in Jesus Christ, we have forgiveness of our sins. How many times did he say, your sins are forgiven you? You know, I was just reading that this morning before church even started. And it strikes me when someone was healed, like the man in Mark 5, and he said, I tell you, take up your mat and walk.

Was he able to walk because his sins were forgiven? I don't think so. I think Jesus told him to take up his mat and walk so that the healing would confirm that Jesus has authority to forgive. God's ear is not really closed.

God hears our prayers. That God has answered this and not answered the other is not because of the length or the eloquence of your prayers. And honestly, once you find that sin that you've made provision for in your heart, again, I must make sure you understand.

It doesn't mean that all of a sudden God's going to answer your prayer. You may still have to grow and stretch in other directions that that providence would bring to you. His loving kindness, though, his loving kindness for those who are in Christ, Jesus never ends.

Even for we who don't get our answer to the prayer and the specific reason in line with the psalm would be because we've regarded something in our heart. What fear holds us back from discouraging our sin?

Is it fear that keeps that provision? It could be a lack of faith. It could be a lack of faith. And with this, I'll close and we will go to prayer here very soon. But what I mean by that is, do we really believe that God has forgiven and will continue to forgive?

Is forgiveness just a concept? Is this something we have in the scriptures? You say, OK, it says it there and I believe it. But have you experienced God's forgiveness? Do you know in your heart of hearts, in integrity and sincerity before God, that he really does forgive sin?

He's faithful and just to forgive us our sins. He's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Do you really believe this? Because if you don't, you're going to hang on to it.

You're going to continually make provision for it. But you must know that God in his son, Jesus Christ, by the faith you have in him, truly does forgive sins. He also says that when we sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous.

Do not cherish iniquity in the heart, in that new heart that God gave you. That heart that God gave you, that's a heart of flesh, not a heart of stone, a heart that can believe and repent and trust that the forgiveness is not just a philosophical concept, not just something theologians came up with to be clever.

A true, real, life changing forgiveness that truly comes from the one and only God because of his son, Jesus Christ.