Theological debates have gone on about this since the beginning… and they will continue.
Before I give my answer to the question you need to promise to finish reading the whole thing. If you leave before the end, if you decide that you disagree before hearing the whole thing… your faith might get hurt, you might get offended… it wouldn’t be good. I am going to take a few days on this topic… so try to come back.
Does prayer go unanswered?...
The short answer is yes… some prayers go unanswered.
Some prayers get a “no” some a “not now.” And some, they just flat out don’t get answered.
Stay with me on this…
Let us look at scripture for reasons why we wouldn’t get what we asked for… which isn’t an unanswered prayer… but rather an answer we might not want.
“Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume [it] upon your lusts.” James 4:3
How many times have we heard this? Too many, right? And no one wants to hear this when they ask and don’t receive… because it seems almost condemning. How many of us have heard this from someone and can hear the sarcasm, the pride, the “holier-than-thou” tone in their voice.
What they are really saying is, “Well, if you were better… God would give it to you.”
Idiots. God gives because He is good… not because we are.
Amiss. A miss. This concept has been discussed here before… but we’ll revisit it.
I used to be pretty good at making free-throws. 15 feet out from the basket… straight on… not a lot of misses.
Put me out behind the 3-point line… still not bad… but percentages went down.
Out further… not so much.
I needed to be closer. And the same holds true for prayer.
The verse in James doesn’t say that you asked for the wrong thing, though many people have interpreted it like this, it just says that you aren’t close enough to His heart to use what He would give you to glorify Him. Even if you think you would. You would consume it upon your our lusts, which is another way of saying you would use it for your own purposes, the way you wanted to… not the way He wants you too.
I remember praying to win the Publishers’ Clearinghouse. I knew that God didn’t want me to be poor. I knew that His will is for us to be totally provided for. I knew He would give me what I asked for… so I cleared out my desk on Friday as an act of faith and went home and cleaned off the front porch so when the van showed up at the end of the Super Bowl those guys would have a clear walk to my door.
Yeah… not so much. I wasn’t ready for that money. I wouldn’t have used it to glorify God. No matter how good I thought my heart was… the problems that money would bring would be too much for me.
I needed to be closer to Him.
Sometimes, we are too far from Him to hear what He is saying. We can’t receive what we ask for because we aren’t close enough to reach out and take it.
More tomorrow…
SDG
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