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Dealing with Unanswered Prayer
When
God Seems Silent
Yvette
As the days and
months and years and decades go by and still our prayer for a spouse (or
something else) goes unanswered it is natural to wonder what is going on with God.
If you, like me, take
to Google and search the words ‘unanswered prayer’ you will find over 6 million
results!
Clearly this is a
topic that is on many people’s minds.
However, despite all
the wisdom out there, including a great song by Garth Brooks, when we, like
Hannah, have poured out our hearts year after year and still see no answer in
sight it is undeniably hard to remain hopeful.
So many nights I
cried out to God, where are you? Why don’t you answer my prayer? Why do you
answer the same prayer for others, but not me?
Why does it feel like
I am the only one, or at least one of the few for whom you stay silent?
In times of prolonged
waiting and unanswered prayer it can feel like God has disappeared, that He is
uncontactable, that He is just silent.
Fortunately, or
unfortunately, we are not the first people to feel like God is sometimes
silent.
In the
Bible we read several accounts, including Job (Job 13:24) who asks the Lord ‘Why
do you hide your face and count me as your enemy.‘
And the
Psalmist who cries out in Psalm 13:1-2 ‘How long, O Lord? Will you forget me
forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take
counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day?‘.
The struggle with
unanswered prayer and the silence of God is as old as the book of Genesis.
In
modern times C.S. Lewis, after the death of his beloved wife, describes his
experience with God as ‘A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting
and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.’
So, what is our
response to unanswered prayer to be?
If there seems to be
no answer, if the door seems slammed shut and bolted tight, if God seems silent
what should we do?
Job
cried out ‘If I only knew where to find Him,‘ he, like us, longed to
hear from God.
What hurt Job the
most seemed to be not that he had lost everything but that God was silent and
nowhere to be found. It is the silence that hurts me the most too.
When God seems to be
silent in the face of our raging, desperate, pleading prayers that we offer up
year after year, decade after decade how do we make sense of this?
It can all feel so
hard and so incomprehensible, until we turn to the Bible to find that there was
one time where God truly was silent, and that was at the cross.
As
Jesus hung there for our sins He cried out ‘My God, my God why have you
forsaken me?’
And no answer came,
no last-minute reprieve, He died, alone and seemingly abandoned by His Father.
But why?
So that we never
would be! He was forsaken so we would be accepted, he was abandoned so we would
never be alone.
He was rejected and
sacrificed so that we would be reconciled to our Heavenly Father for all
eternity.
If anyone knows how
the silence of God truly feels, it is His Son, Jesus.
We may feel like God
is silent and has pulled back but the reality is that God promised in
Deuteronomy 31:6 that He would never leave us or forsake us.
And the death and
resurrection of Jesus made this possible!
There
is a wonderful song from Bethel Music called You Came and the chorus says ‘You
came and I knew that you would come.’
Do we really dare to
trust that God will show up for us, that He will turn up?
Do we dare to believe
His word which says that Those who trust in the Lord will not be put to shame
or in your distress you called and I rescued you.
I
sometimes find it hard. When silence envelopes me and situations seem to remain
unchanged, I am more likely to listen to the voice of the tempter who whispers,
‘give up, you are only going to look like an idiot when God doesn’t live up
to His end of the bargain.’
Or ‘Is
there really a God, I mean where is He now, you’ve been praying so long and
nothing and silence, can you really trust Him?.’
Such seductive words,
it is so much easier in the silence to run from our waiting than go through it,
so much harder to sit with the Lord and simply wait on Him.
It is far easier to
lower our expectations and not ask God for much or at least not for anything
that might not happen.
To not get our hopes
up so that we never risk being disappointed but in doing so we never allow
ourselves to enter the realm of the miraculous.
In our waiting on an
answer to our prayer we are stepping out of the realm of the possible and into
the realm of the impossible. We are living by faith and not by sight.
By continuing to hope
and continuing to believe for something that every natural instinct and
scientific explanation screams will never happen, we step off this temporal
plane and into the eternal one.
We are declaring that
what is real is not what we see but what we believe.
We are uncomfortable
but by enduring this discomfort we are building spiritual muscles and we are
saying, we will not be moved, not by silence or by noise.
We declare we are
standing on the Word of God and say with the saints through all the ages that
we will not be disappointed.
In the silence that
sometimes surrounds us, keeping the faith is like planting a standard, a flag
for the Lord on the battlefield while the battle rages around us.
It is the cry to
rally to the flag of the Lamb, to keep on resisting the temptation to give up,
to give in, to lie down, to walk away.
One day though, one
day we will be vindicated, one day every person on earth will see the living
God and every knee will bow before Him (A wonderful song declaring this is The
Lion and the Lamb).
And there will be no
more seeming silence, no more apparent unanswered prayer but there will be the
joyous sound of rejoicing like we have never experienced before.
Hebrews 11 is perhaps
the most wonderful treatise on faith and waiting on the Lord that you will ever
read.
And I would recommend
that you haven’t read it before to read it now or read it again and ask the
Lord to speak to you through it.
When we wait on the
Lord in faith we are in the most amazing company of saints and what a privilege
that is!
Unanswered prayer
tests our faith in God, it is a fire that burns through superficial beliefs and
earthly comforts, it cuts to the quick of our relationship with God.
Because it is when
our prayers are unanswered that we have to ask ourselves some tough questions
about why we believe in God and who we believe God is.
It is easy to believe
in God and praise Him when things are going well and prayers are answered and
life is comfortable, but it is quite another thing to do this when a huge
question mark hangs over us.
When faced with
prolonged, unanswered prayer we have to decide that we either trust God or we
don’t, but we no longer have the luxury to be lukewarm, to have a halfhearted
relationship with our Father.
It forces us to be
all in or all out and if we go all in, we I am convinced that we will start to
feel a strength and resilience that carries over into every area of our earthly
lives.
Jesus said blessed
are those who do not see and still believe. The more we do not see and still
believe, the more blessed we are. Don’t ever forget this.
In the Bible there is
never a situation where God lets someone down in the long run.
In the Old Testament
God always delivers, always provides and always saves those who come to Him.
In the New Testament
we see Jesus heal all who come to Him, provide for His disciples and tell us
that He has come so that we might have life and have it in abundance.
Even though there are
trials and persecutions in the early church at no point do we read that people
felt that God did not come through for them.
Even Paul, who
suffered considerably and ultimately died for his faith, proclaimed in Romans
8:18 that all his trials were as nothing compared to the surpassing glory of
knowing Jesus.
To put it simply God
always comes through, He is as good as His word and though it may seem that He
is silent, the truth is He is always at work and He will not let us down.
As you go out today,
see your unanswered prayer as the best faith builder in the world.
If God feels silent,
just keep talking to Him, keep praising Him, cry out to Him and rest in Him.
Read the Word and
declare with Paul in Romans 8:28 that all things, all things, all things work
together for the good of those who love the Lord.
Not some things but
all things, not a few things but all things and trust that He is answering your
prayers, in His way and His time.
While it may feel
like He has disappeared He is with you.
Jesus’ death on the
cross meant that we are no longer separated from God, hence the words, NEVER
will I leave you, NEVER will I forsake you.
Hold this truth in
your heart as you continue to wait on Him and I know He will not let you down.
God bless you richly
today.
If you have any
unanswered prayers that you would like prayer for please let me know and I
would be so happy to support you in prayer.
Or if you have any
testimonies of God answering a long standing prayer, please share that too!!
AUTHOR: YVETTE
I am a
beloved daughter of God who has been working in a senior position in the Middle
East for the last 20 years. I am originally from rural Australia and addition
to being very close to my family back home I also have a beloved Maltese
terrier called Milly. Over the last 10 years I have been on a journey of faith
and discovery about what it means to be a Christian woman who is single and
over 35. Some of my experiences have been good but some have not been so great.
Most of all I discovered that when I went online looking for some kind of solace
and encouragement there was very little to be found for single Christians over
a certain age. What advice there was typically lacked substance and/or was
written by married people and so lacked the authenticity and empathy that come
from a lived experience. This blog is my attempt to address this lack and to
give hope to others of you who like me are still waiting but want to do so with
hope. God bless you all richly x
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