Sometimes it Seems God Doesn’t Answer Prayer

In the church we often hear the message that God answers prayer.  Sometimes it seems like this doesn’t line up with our life experiences.  We have all struggled with this seeming conflict.  Often we respond to one another with things like, “He answers but He doesn’t always answer yes” or “God is teaching you patience.”  While there is truth in those statements they can leave us feeling empty.  

A clearer understanding of what the real focus and goal of prayer is can help.  Ravi Zacharias was asked about this in an interview regarding his booktitled “Has Christianity Failed You?”.  I find his answer very helpful.  Here is an excerpt from that interview talking about the real focus and goal of prayer (you can find the entire interview here

DD: Given the amazing promises of Scripture and the way the church often proclaims the message that God answers prayer and the desires of our heart if we just have enough faith, it’s difficult to not feel disappointed when our prayers aren’t answered as we had hoped or in our expected time frame. What advice would you give to the person who once held firm, perhaps even rigid, expectations of God, and now struggles with halfhearted prayers and even resignation?

RZ: If we were to draw out the really hard questions of this book, this area would be where probably more people have faltered or have found what they feel is a legitimate gripe against God. It would be easy to dismiss this in the simplistic answers— you know, “God wants you to be patient,” and “Between the promise and the performance is the parenthesis.” The thing is, the parenthesis sometimes seems terribly protracted, so much so that you never see the performance of the promise. I find it amazing how Jesus dealt with prayer and how in the critical moments of his own calling, he stepped aside to pray. I find it absolutely fascinating that the biblical writers tell us how he prayed and what he prayed. If they had been manufacturing a persona of Jesus, they would never have told us the things he prayed for because clearly his prayers were often unanswered. His high priestly prayer, if anything, is one of the huge gaps between prayer and performance. The parenthesis seems to be very long. Nearly two thousand years have gone by since he prayed that we would be one, and you can’t even find us being one in one church, let alone in all of Christendom. So it says to me, as Jesus reminded us in the Lord’s Prayer, that I need to pray much more about my relationship with God and my understanding of his kingdom than with a wish list in front of me. The thing we may be missing most in our approach to prayer is a clear understanding of what communion with God really means. Such an understanding is able to cover a multitude of unanswered prayers and will give us the confidence of knowing that God is with us and that we can depend on him to sustain us with peace and fulfillment and meaning, even at the end of a dark day or in the midst of a dark night of the soul. Through prayer, God is preparing the wineskin to receive the new wine of grace. This is the work of God. If we think his desire is only to give us what we ask for, we misunderstand the process of preparing the wineskin.