Why pray? Why pray when so many of my prayers go unanswered? - GotQuestions.org Podcast Episode 5

Hello, thanks for being here everybody, and good to see you.

So today we're going to be talking about prayer, and some of the most frequently asked questions we get about prayer, how

Christians should view prayer, how Christians should view unanswered prayer, because those are the type of questions we're asked about most often.

Typically, the question we would get is almost always, why didn't

God give me what I asked for? And some of these are very painful emotional ones.

I asked God to heal my mother, father, child, etc., and he didn't.

Why didn't God answer my prayer? Others are the more selfish variety. I asked

God for insert some materialistic thing, and he didn't get it. All of these make, to a certain degree, the same mistake of treating

God like a cosmic vending machine, or some people use the term like a genie.

Well, if you just ask him for anything, God is obligated to give that to us.

And there are some scripture verses that seem to talk about it, that if you ask anything in Jesus' name, he will respond.

Or if you ask anything according to God's will, he will grant that request. So those are some of the things we want to talk about today.

But my focus today, I just want to talk about the value of prayer. There's been several times in my life where I've prayed for something and God has answered in the most concrete and obvious ways that it's, at least to me, undeniable that God was the one to answer that prayer.

And let's talk about one that was related to GotQuestions specifically. It was probably about 15 years ago, shortly after GotQuestions started doing translations into other languages.

And so we're looking for translators. We want someone to translate into Chinese or Arabic, et cetera.

Well, someone had suggested that we translate into the language known as Afrikaans, which is similar to Dutch.

It's spoken primarily in South Africa. So I was searching and searching and searching, could not find a translator for that language.

Well, I believe it was my wife who said, well, Shay, have you prayed about it? Ask God to provide a translator.

And I'm like, no, I haven't. So I said a very simple prayer,

Lord, we could really use an Afrikaans translator. Could you provide someone who could do that for us?

And either one or two days later, I received an email from someone saying, hey,

I've been using your site for a few years now. I love it. You guys are very helpful. I just wanted to give you a word of encouragement.

And I have no idea why I'm telling you this, but I live in South Africa and I speak

English, Afrikaans, and some other South African dialect or language.

So does that mean anything to you? And I was just like, wow.

Well, thank you, God, for a very obvious answer to prayer to the point that the person who was answering my prayer request didn't even know why he was volunteering that information.

So he served as our first Afrikaans translator, did an amazing job for a few years. And to me, it was mind -blowing.

And whenever I have any doubts whether God's listening, whether God answers prayer,

I always go back to that one. And there's a few other examples, but to me, that's the clearest and most powerful example that God does answer prayer.

So let's not forget that. And many people give lip service to the importance of prayer.

They, oh, every time we have a meeting, we need to begin in prayer or pray before meals. But to treat prayer like a living, breathing relationship between us and God, as if you're actually communicating with a person who views you as a valuable relationship and wants to communicate with you, wants to even at times give you the things he asked for.

So let us never treat prayer as just something that's rote. We memorize something, say it to God as if it's some magic formula that will obligate

God to give us what we ask for. But prayer is a living relationship with a personal being who loves us intimately.

And to me, that's the attitude we should have towards prayer. And sadly, it's something that a lot of us forget.

We treat prayer as something we have to do. Maybe we pray before we go to bed, like I said earlier, before meals, et cetera.

But no, prayer, in Philippians where it talks about we are to pray continually, well, obviously it doesn't mean down on our hands and knees with our hands folded, eyes closed, praying to God all the time.

No, prayer is a continual conversation we have with God throughout the day.

Whenever something comes to our mind, like, Lord, what should I do about this? Or, Lord, thank you for providing that.

It's just as if we were having a conversation, going on a walk for somewhere. This person is beside us, we're having a conversation.

It's not off and on, it's continual. So hopefully we'll get a chance to jump into some other commonly asked questions about prayer.

But for me, just the power of prayer that God really does answer prayers, and also the fact that it's a continual conversation.

It's something that we should not neglect, that God not only makes itself available to us 24 -7, 365, but he actually wants to hear from us.

So that is something we definitely cannot and should not forget. Amen.

And Shea, the anecdote that you just shared, that testimony of that answered prayer reminds me of what somebody said to me once a long time ago, but I've never forgotten it.

And that is, we should be praying with such specificity that in order for the answer to come,

God has to intervene so that we know that answer is from God. And that forces us to pray in faith.

It forces us to pray depending on the Lord and the answers that he is going to give.

That's a great testimony that you had. Thank you for sharing that. I'd like to share a few items of what the

Bible says about prayer and why we should pray. I mean, you can look in the

Bible very briefly, just the most cursory overview of the Bible. You're going to find a lot of people praying.

You're going to find a lot of instruction about prayer and commands to pray even. And so why we should pray from the

Bible? Here are some answers to that question. First of all, we pray because it's an act of worship.

We honor and glorify the one who is worthy of our honor and our glory.

We thank him. We adore him. We commune with him because those who are in a relationship will communicate.

If you could imagine that sometime I just stopped talking to my wife, and let's say

I go for a full week, a full seven days without speaking to my wife a bit, no communication whatsoever.

I don't try to use hand gestures or anything to communicate with her. I basically just ignore her for one week.

At the end of that week, she would think, and rightly so, that there was something terribly wrong with our relationship because the communication was not there.

And we have a relationship with our heavenly father through Jesus Christ. And what would it be like if for an extended period of time we just stopped talking to him?

We stopped communicating to the Lord, our heavenly father. There would be obviously something wrong with our relationship.

God created us to be relational creatures. He made us to communicate.

It's how we're wired. It's part of being created in the image of God. And that's what prayer is.

It's communication with our heavenly father. So that's one of the reasons we pray, to worship him and to commune with him, to have that fellowship with him.

Another reason that we pray, biblically speaking, is it's an act of obedience.

We are simply put commanded to pray, pray without ceasing in 1

Thessalonians 5, 17. The prophet Samuel considered it a sin if he would fail to pray for the people that he was ministering to.

We have several commands in scripture that involve prayer.

We need to pray. Prayer is also an act of intercession for others.

We don't just pray for ourselves. We pray for other people as well. We lift up their needs.

When Jesus gave us that model prayer, he taught us to pray this way. Give us this day our daily bread.

All through the Lord's prayer, it's plural. It's never singular. We're not praying for, Lord, give me my daily bread, but it's give us our daily bread.

We're including others in this as well. It's an act of intercession. There are several people that we are told specifically to intercede for.

All rulers, ministers, pray for Jerusalem, we're told in scripture.

Pray for friends, fellow countrymen, the sick, those who persecute us even, and then all men.

Now that's a partial list, but that last thing on the list, all people, pretty much covers it all.

We intercede for others. Also, we need to pray because it's an act of becoming like Jesus Christ.

If we're going to be like Jesus, then we're going to have to pray because Jesus was a man of prayer. I did a sermon series a while back at my church on the book of Luke.

Wonderful book. I love it. It took about two and a half years to get through the book, and what a ride it was.

One of the things we really noticed all the way through the book of Luke is how many times Jesus prayed. There are 11 different instances in Luke in which

Jesus is said to pray. He prays before big things happen. He prays after the big things happen.

He prays for himself. He prays for his disciples. He prays in front of his disciples.

He prays alone. He prays sometimes instead of sleeping. He prays at other times instead of eating, showing that prayer is more important than both of those things.

He prays earnestly. Hebrews 5 says he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears.

He prays perseveringly. Matthew 26, verse 44, in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prays three times repeating the same thing.

That's perseverance. He prays believingly. In John 11, verse 41, as Jesus is standing in front of the tomb of Lazarus about ready to raise him from the dead,

Jesus starts his prayer this way by saying, Father, I thank you that you have heard me.

That's a prayer of faith. And then Jesus prays submissively again in the garden of Gethsemane in Matthew 26, not my will, but thine be done.

Jesus was a man of prayer, and all of this is instructive. I love the fact too that Jesus is still praying.

He prayed on earth, and now he's praying in heaven as he intercedes for us in front of the

Father. So whether he was on earth or in heaven, he prays, and we should be following that example.

I like that you're tying a lot of this, Kevin, to Jesus as a person.

I think that's a very important thing to remember is from my experience, a lot of times when we speak to people about prayer, there's the tendency to forget that it's like you made the analogy to having conversations with a spouse.

This is a person that we're communicating with. We're not typing instructions into a computer, and we're not just babbling into the void.

So when we talk about questions like the one Shay was bringing up, why didn't God answer a particular prayer?

Knowing that we are communicating with a person, with somebody who has intellect and will and preference and all those different things that come into being a person, all those things matter.

They make a difference, and I think that's one of the reasons why it's unfortunate that we've decided to use the term unanswered prayer as a reference to not having what we would have preferred the outcome to be.

And I understand why people use that term, but at the same time, if my son, for example, asks me for something and I don't give it to him and I say, no, not right now, that's not an unanswered request.

I gave him an answer, and the answer was no. And that doesn't make it easier when God doesn't do things the way that we would want him to.

But I think it's important for us to keep a focus on remembering that God is not the cosmic genie.

He is not the vending machine. And simply because we ask doesn't mean that he's literally obligated to just do whatever we want.

Two things that come up to my mind when it comes to people having serious doubts about prayer. One of them,

Shay, you alluded to the idea of grandiose requests, mountains being thrown into the sea, ask for anything in my name and I will give it to you.

Those things are really easy to take out of context, but I think one of the important things that we can look at as a simple way of understanding is that, first of all,

Jesus makes a point, I think it's John 15 -7, where he talks about the way that God will guide you.

When you're really in tune with God and his will, your prayers are in tune with his will.

Such that God's not obligated to give you something that's outside of his will. I think what

Jesus is saying is if it was God's will for that mountain to go into the ocean and you prayed that way, that is exactly what would happen.

I think we also have to remember that we don't see any evidence in the Bible or in extra biblical history that the early church prayed those kinds of,

I guess we could call them superhero prayers. We don't have examples of people in the early church reacting that way.

In other words, I think it's pretty clear that the early followers of Jesus understood what he was talking about when he brought up these ideas of prayer and what it means.

I think in the modern day that also applies to what happens when we try to study prayer from a scientific standpoint.

That's not a totally unreasonable thing to try to do. But there again, we have to remember that we are not talking about a machine.

We're not talking about a lever or a pulley or something like that. We're talking about a person. Just because 50 people come up to me and ask me the same question or make the same request does not mean

I'm going to give the same answer every single time. In fact, it would be strange if I did.

It would make more sense if my response to people is based on things like my relationship to that person, what kind of communication

I have with them, whether or not what they're asking is in accordance with the things

I think and the things I do. I certainly appreciate that there's a lot of questions about prayer that are not easy.

When we go to God and we ask for things, there's a lot of requests that we make to God that are heartfelt.

There's pain there. And God knows that. He understands that. Psalm 22,

Psalm 73, the beginning of Habakkuk, we see people not just crying out to God, but saying,

I don't understand you. I don't know what you're doing. I don't get this. I don't grasp this. But I think in all of that, we do have to remember that he's

God and we're not. And when we pray and when we approach prayer, we have to remember that that's what we're doing.

We're communicating. We're talking to the God of the universe. We're not ordering a servant around. We're asking somebody for something.

And I think those perspectives can help, at least from an intellectual standpoint. They may not help our hearts very much, but at least intellectually, it can help us understand why prayer doesn't always go exactly the way we would prefer it to go.

So kind of tying what both you, Jeff, and Kevin have talked about. So Kevin talks about the importance of prayer, the biblical commands to pray.

And what we've learned at GodQuestions is one of the biggest hindrances to people praying is they feel like their prayers have been unanswered.

So one way that people will approach that is to try to address it from God answers every prayer.

Sometimes it's yes. Sometimes it's no. Sometimes it's wait. And while there's a lot of truth to that, it's not always quite that simple.

There's an absolute yes where God answers exactly how we ask. There's a yes, but maybe not exactly how you asked.

There's a no, or there's a no, but here's something even better.

There's a wait a little while, wait a long while. There's all sorts of nuance you have to add into that.

The powerful thing about prayer is that, like you said, we're talking to a real person.

We're talking to a real person who knows us far better than we know ourselves. So would we want a person with that type of knowledge to give us something that would end up being very bad for us, similar to, like what you said, a son asking his father for something.

The father knows more than the son in that situation. Sometimes the father knows, you know, giving my son this would be a really bad idea.

So we need to approach prayer with the same attitude that God knows better than us. So sometimes, well not sometimes, all the time, if God says no, it's because he knows best, and he knows that what we ask for is not -

Right. I think we also have to remember that God has a perspective of time that is drastically different from ours.

My wife and I were just having a conversation yesterday talking about the idea that it's easier to look back and see the way

God has done things in our lives and have an understanding for why he did them, when in the moment at the time, you just can't understand it.

You know, we were talking about a situation where from her perspective, it was God saying, no, I'm not going to give you what you want.

And he wasn't giving her what she wanted in that moment when it came to this particular situation.

However, now, several years later, we're both able to look back at that and say, oh, okay, now

I see. Now I understand why. Yeah. His understanding is unsearchable.

Book of Isaiah says, you know, God sometimes does things even when nobody prays for them.

That is, he has something in his mind that he wants to do, and he's going to do it whether or not anybody gets around to ever praying for it.

That's his providence. That's his guidance, his governance of the whole universe allows him to do that.

But there are other things that God does that are contrary to prayer.

That is, people pray and God does not answer that prayer in the way that they would want.

And that goes back to his omniscience, his foreknowledge that if I give you this thing, is it really going to be the best for you?

If that answer is no, then he's going to withhold that thing. But then there are also some things that God does only in response to prayer.

I'm thinking specifically of James 4 and verse 2, which says, you do not have because you do not ask

God. That's an amazing verse. You don't have because you don't ask

God. So there are some things that we might have, but if we fail to pray for them, we won't have them.

It's mind -boggling how this works together with God's providence, how this works together with his omniscience, his sovereignty.

I don't know. I don't have all the answers, but that truth is presented in Scripture.

We can trust this, that there is a perfect harmony between God's sovereignty and human prayer that we might not be able to understand, but it exists.

That harmony exists. And God is sovereign. He will glorify himself.

His plan will be accomplished. Amen, Kevin. That's a great reminder.

You have not because you ask not. How much are we missing out on in the

Christian life because we just haven't asked God for it? Recognizing the answer sometimes might be no, sometimes might be wait, but it never hurts to ask.

One misconception I think it's important for us to talk about is because we get so many questions about it, is what does it mean to pray in Jesus' name?

For many people, this is the ultimate magic formula. If I just end my prayer with, in Jesus' name, amen, that means

God will answer my prayer. Praying in Jesus' name means praying for the types of things that will honor and glorify

Jesus, things that Jesus would want you to be praying for, things that you would pray for as Jesus' representative.

That ultimately, that's what it means to do something in someone's name. For example, if I was to do something in Jeff's name,

I would be acting as his representative. That doesn't mean Jeff would approve of everything I'm doing, but no, in this one act,

I've been authorized to serve as Jeff's representative. A good analogy for that, that I want to throw in there, a good analogy

I think for that is if we think of classic movie type tropes or cliches, it's more in cartoons now where some police officer will yell, stop in the name of the law.

That used to be something that you would hear in comics and things like that. When the police officer says, stop in the name of the law, the presumption is that he's actually got the authority to tell you to do that.

If I'm ordering a cheeseburger and a police officer is in line behind me and he doesn't think

I should do that because he thinks I should eat more healthy foods and he says, stop in the name of the law, don't order that.

I have absolutely no reason whatsoever to listen to what he's saying. Why? Because the law doesn't actually let him do that.

Just using the, in the name of doesn't give him a blanket ability to say that. But if he says something like don't speed or put that weapon down or anything else like that, well, now the law actually gives him authority to say that.

So yeah, what you're saying is true. We have to remember that praying in Jesus name was never meant to be a mantra or a spell.

If you're asking for something that's explicitly against what that name stands for, you have no reason to expect

God to grant that request. Yeah. In fact, it's actually offensive to ask for something in Jesus name that actually contradicts his character and his will.

So yeah. And then the other verse I mentioned earlier, if you ask anything according to God's will, he will hear an answer.

And how do we know what's in God's will? Well, that's a whole other episode right there. But searching the scriptures, praying according to God's will, we can know we're praying according to God's will if what we're praying for matches what scripture says, how we are to be living our lives, what we are to be doing with our time and resources.

So praying according to God's will is praying for the things that God wants to happen in that sense.

So it's another misconception that, well, this is clearly God's will. Is it?

You need to search the scriptures to make sure what you're asking for is God's will before you seek to claim that your prayer request was according to God's will and therefore should be answered.

So those are the two biggest scriptures that people will raise with us when they're struggling, and understandably so from a lack of answered prayer.

Now, just as we began the episode with an example, I thought maybe I'd share just one more in closing.

It's a little more personal one. So I came to Faith in Christ in my late teens.

I was attending a local youth group. And like in most youth groups, there was a lot of romantic relationships going on that really at that point probably shouldn't have.

Well, there was one girl in particular that I was exceedingly interested in, one could even say infatuated with.

And for whatever reason, the relationship just wasn't working. She wasn't interested. And it was extremely frustrating.

So I was praying, praying, and praying, asking God to, I guess, in a sense, make this girl like me.

And it just wasn't happening. Well, I remember in my second year of college,

I was still interested in this girl, even though she was back home in Colorado. And I had a missionary who was there for a missions conference at the

Bible College I was attending, stay in my dorm room. And he was asking me if I had a girlfriend.

I told him no and started talking about this girl back home. He's like, you know what, Shea, if you've been praying for this girl to be interested in you for a couple of years now, and it hasn't happened, maybe it's not

God's will. And I was like, well, how would I know? I was like, what I want you to do tonight, or just in a sense, place this prayer request on the altar.

Say, God, if this is not the woman for me, please make that abundantly clear.

Well, I woke up the next morning and all my interest in her as anything other than a friend had disappeared.

It was the strangest thing, but I definitely was not expecting that. I went to breakfast in the school cafeteria, and a friend of mine and his, who

I thought was his girlfriend, were not sitting together. And I looked at him, and I was like, hey, why aren't you and Melissa sitting together?

And he said, oh, we broke up. Well, I've now been married to Melissa for approaching 25 years.

So that was another answer to prayer that I knew from the moment, the second he said that we broke up, that I was like,

Melissa is the answer to my prayer request. And so I wasn't even praying for it. I was praying for something completely different.

And God, by me surrendering that, by me recognizing maybe I don't know what your will is, maybe

I don't know what's best for me, by surrendering that to God and changing my attitude, God was able to give me what he had wanted all along.

And absolutely no regrets about that. And happily married to Melissa now.

So that was another powerful example of answer to prayer in my life, just kind of illustrating some of the things we talked about, that sometimes the things we ask for are not what's best for us.

So we need to trust God and allow him to - That's a good word. I think Garth Brooks might have written a song about your experience.

Oh, we'll have to talk about that later. No time for Garth Brooks songs in today's episode.

So yeah, I hope this discussion prayer will be encouraging to you, encouraging you not only to pray, to pray more often, to pray in a more personal and intimate way with God, but also to trust

God that the way he chooses to answer our prayer requests is for our best.

Because God's sovereign. He is omnipotent, omniscient. He knows everything about everything.

He knows what's best for us. And he responds to our prayer requests accordingly. So again, thanks for tuning in.

Hope you enjoyed the show. And more importantly, I hope you learned a little from us today. But I know we've learned from each other and just in having the conversation.

if you've got questions, the Bible has answers. We'll help you find them.