He Didn't Answer My Prayer
Pat Steeves · Tidal Church Moncton · May 22, 2022 · I Can't Believe in God Because... series
Pat Steeves explores why prayers seem to go unanswered, naming wrong motives, broken relationships and lacking faith, then turning to Paul's thorn in 2 Corinthians 12. Prayer is about knowing God, and when He says no, His grace is enough for today.
More from Pat Steeves · The I Can't Believe in God Because... series
Transcript
[0:00] Listen, here's the deal. Long weekend, too. Just wanted to ask you guys this question right off the bat. Somebody may know or may not have heard already, but Pastor Joel's out of town. He's at a district conference. So what do you say we just kind of cut right to the last song, we miss the message, and we go home early? Who's in? You know, I know my kids would be like, "Seriously, Dad?" But we can't do that because I'm actually very excited that we are wrapping up a series that we have been in for several weeks entitled, "I Can't Believe in God Because..." It's, so maybe this is your first Sunday, or you've just jumped in, but I just want to recap for everybody this journey that we have been on. And so we're just gonna pull up these weeks that, again, maybe you want to check out a podcast, watch them on YouTube. But we started off. Joel started off with "The story just doesn't make sense."
[0:59] And week two, Jeremy MacDonald just knocked it out of the park with "Christians just seem so anti-science." And I've heard so much feedback on week two. You're gonna want to watch that if you haven't. "The claims of Jesus just seem crazy." I've heard people say that, and here's what you've got to know, is a lot of the content that came out of these series was because of you, because we have sent a survey. How many of you guys got a survey a couple months ago about this series? Many hands. And based off of your feedback, we came up with a lot of the content and thoughts around this. And then Margot Bandy on Mother's Day, didn't she do amazing? Margot Bandy?
[1:44] "My upbringing brings me down." Why? "Are there just so many religions?" was last week, and today is "He didn't answer my prayer." Now, how many of you would say that you have prayed a prayer and you know, you got your prayer answered? How many you know, I know there's some of you, you're like, "She's sitting right beside me," right? And there's some of you that are saying, you know what? I'm thankful that God didn't answer my prayer, right? You're looking back, right? But here's the deal, is prayers. Prayers are so powerful, but yet can be so confusing.
[2:31] And in all seriousness, is that prayers? I've seen God do some incredible things. Just a couple years ago, I was filling in in youth ministry, and we did a series on healing, and with teens, and this was online. We've seen the power of God show up and heal students, people, young people experiencing God for the first time, like online, like it would just be like, "Wow, I didn't believe this was actually possible." But on the flip side of this, I've seen some prayers go unanswered.
[3:17] And I couldn't seem to figure out why that things didn't happen the way that I would have liked. And for some of you that may not know my story, but I actually grew up in church and I remember, yeah, you know, as a teenager, I remember this one individual in our church that was like, he was so giving, so generous, always helping. And I can remember this so clearly, I remember him praying that he would get a promotion at work. And I remember a few weeks or months later, he didn't get the promotion and because of that, it impacted his faith, his belief in God, and he actually, I recall, like, he stopped going to church when things didn't turn out the way that he would hope.
[4:14] I also recall a family member had an accident, and we were praying for healing for this individual. I mean, we were doing all the things that we thought we should do, and praying Scriptures and reading books on faith, and you know what happened? Things actually got worse. And I remember thinking like, "Really, God? Like, why?" I just want to share those stories because I just want us to be real honest for a moment, that even though sometimes we can come to church and we can move past those things. My prayer is, in this service today, that maybe God might show us some things that have happened a week ago, months ago, or years ago, that happened in our life that have caused our faith to maybe be reduced, or to go backwards, or for us to not have as much faith. And so my prayer is, as we lean into this conversation, that God would show you maybe some areas that unanswered prayers seemed to set you back. I also want to just say this because I think it's so important.
[5:41] Some of you may be new to church. And as pastors and, as you know, churches, sometimes we haven't really prepared people on how to handle when things don't go the way we would like. And so we're left on our own to try to figure out our doubts and disappointments, which can often take us, you know, away from church and derail us. And so I want to say this to you. I heard my friend Mike Miller say this. He said this, he said, we can love God and not always like Him.
[6:28] I want to give you permission that we have family, and we have friends that we love dearly, but we don't always enjoy them. It's not fair to say I know that people that love me so much don't always find me, so likable. And so I just want to give you permission that God can handle your doubts. God can handle your disappointments. And from there this morning, I want to lean into this conversation on why it seems like my prayers did not get answered. You guys ready for this? You ready for this? Let's fasten our seatbelts and let's jump into this.
[7:14] Last week in this conversation, and I want to set a bit of a groundwork. Okay, a base and kind of set a foundation. My wife, she's, I think she's up here. She's gonna find this part so funny. All right, we're gonna set a foundation for you. And I want us to say this: when it comes to prayer, when we look through the Bible and we look through the history of the Bible, rude awakening, okay, it doesn't center around me or it doesn't center around you. Who does the story of the Bible center around? God. Right. It's, we often think in this self-centered culture and society that we are in that everything revolves around us, but when it comes to prayer, we need to understand that it actually also centers around God.
[8:18] All right, and so I want to understand this when it comes to just a few things on what prayer is not. Okay, next slide here, but prayer. All right. God does not exist to serve us first and foremost. All right, we got to understand this, that God does not exist to serve us. We exist to serve Him. And if we can understand this foundational framework and take the focus off of us and say, "This is not our story, this is actually the story about Him." Second thing that prayer is not. Prayer is not... The purpose of prayer is to get to know God so that we can do His will.
[9:13] This is so important for us to understand that God does not exist for us, we exist for Him. We just need to lay a foundation and begin to get perspective on what our prayers are all about. All right. So God is not for us. All right, so we need to be for Him. The history of the Bible, we are not the main character. Sorry. So I want us to look here at Scripture. Okay? Because I wanted to hit this point, okay, to make sure that we understand.
[10:00] When in 1 John... Okay, prayer can be confusing, and I will... It says this, it says, "And I will do whatever you ask in My name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask Me for anything in My name, and I will do it." I just wanted to hit this point real quick. And I know that Joel's away, but Joel has taught us this, that we just can't take one scripture and build a belief on just one verse. All right, Joel always looks at the culture, and we look at history, and we look at what's going on, and sometimes as Christians or as believers, we'll read a scripture like this and say, "You know, whatever you ask in My name, you ask Me for it, and I will do it," and sometimes it can cause a lot of confusion when it comes to our prayer. So Pastor Joel, if you are listening, we just want you to know just how much we appreciate you and your teaching that you give each and every week.
[11:12] Can you guys just give just a big warm applause for Pastor Joel? So that's not what prayer is all about. So here's what we want to look at, what prayer is, okay. So what prayer is all about? The purpose of prayer is for us to get to know God. It's all about relationship. And I know that we live in a culture and a society where we have, you know, Uber Eats, right, and we have SkipTheDishes, and we can literally go on our phone and push a button and order something, and minutes later it shows up at our door, right? And I want to say this, that our relationship with God is not a button to be pushed, but a relationship to be pursued.
[12:17] And here's what's so important about this. Is when we talk about prayer, we think of prayer in the context of making requests and asking God for things, don't we? Often when I think about prayer, it's like, "What can I get?" Right? God does not exist for me, I exist for Him. And when we can change the foundation of how we view prayer, I believe that it will greatly impact the results of what prayer is all about. Prayer is all about relationship.
[13:05] Right? I don't know about you, but if you've ever found yourself in a relationship and you enter that relationship with it being all about you, it's not going to work out very well for you, right? In the context of prayer, I'm taking a little bit of time here because I really want to shift how we view and how we think about prayer, that it's not about me. It's about God, and the more we get to know God, the more we conform. We conform to His will and not our will. All right. So we've laid a little bit of base groundwork here for what prayer isn't and what it is. Now I want us to look at four possible ways why our prayers seem to go unanswered.
[14:04] Okay, I want us to look at Scripture in four ways that I feel like Scripture can show us, potentially, how our prayers didn't go the way we want. Okay. So let's look at this. We're gonna go to James 4:3, and number one is wrong motives. Now I know that's no one here. Right? Like no one has the wrong motive, but I just want to show this Scripture verse and then we'll talk about it. It says this, it says, "When you ask, you do not receive because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your own pleasure." Now again, I know that's no one here. No one has ever prayed for more money or more hair or, you know, to lose weight or to gain weight, right?
[14:56] But some of our prayers, we have the wrong motive. All right. Number one. Number two. Scripture is pretty clear on this, on broken relationships and that our relationships matter to God. Let's look at this Scripture verse here just for a moment. I just want to see how important this is. In Mark 11, verses 24 and 25. Sometimes we think that our relationships don't matter and how we treat people, but I think that the Scriptures is kind of clear here, and I just want to jump in. "Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer," okay, this is what we're talking about, "believe that you have received it, and it will be yours."
[15:49] It's like, "Oh, I like that verse, right? I got that one." Okay, I believe it. Yeah. Okay, good. All right, and then the next verse? Okay, like, why does it have to be there? Okay. "If you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive your sins." Our relationships and how we treat people matter to God. This makes a whole lot of sense to me as a dad. All right, how many of you have kids in the room? Okay, or we all can go back to a time when we were a kid ourselves, and if you had siblings or a friend, you probably got in an argument and were fighting in the backseat of the car. Okay, like my kids do, and it's so fascinating that, you know, you tell them to stop, and then you raise your voice, and then it's like, "Okay, if you do that again.
[16:53] All right, you do that again, you're going to your room when we get home." Does that sound familiar to anyone? All right, so you just, like, lay down the law, okay. And kids are hilarious. Not 10 seconds later. "Dad, can I have a friend over?" It's like, are you kidding me? Like, I've almost lost my mind because I've had to tell you so many times, and now you're asking for something. Like, I get that, and I feel like part of that scripture is that we ask God for things and He's like, "You've got some relationships to fix up.
[17:42] You've got some people that you're not, like, super nice to, and you've got to kind of deal with that," right? Third thing. Some things we're talking about, why God didn't answer our prayer. Number three: Lacking in faith. This is such a big one for so many reasons, and I could spend so much time, but I'm literally just kind of, you know, going through this, but I want us to look at this passage of scripture here in Mark. Okay, and a little bit of context. It's Jesus' disciples. Scripture says there's, like, nine of His disciples, and they're all in this conversation.
[18:29] And there's some scribes, and they're having an argument because somebody brought this young boy that was having seizures. The scripture says that he was demon possessed, and this father brought. He brought him to the disciples to pray for healing. And Jesus walks in on the scene, and scripture says that He actually had just come from being with the Father. He was just spending some time in prayer. Remember how we talked about that foundation is all on relationship first? Okay, He had been just with the Father. Says that, actually, His appearance was glowing, like, that's an intense time with God.
[19:17] But He walks in on the scene, and He's like, "So, boys, what's going on?" And so they explained to Him, "We prayed for this boy, but it just doesn't seem like anything changed." And so the story begins where the father looks to Jesus, and he kind of asks this question. He says, "But if You can do anything, take pity on us and help us." "If You can," said Jesus. Jesus said, "Everything is possible for the one who believes." We're talking about faith, and our faith matters to God. Our faith matters when it comes to prayers.
[20:05] Immediately the boy's father exclaimed, "I do believe. Help me overcome my unbelief!" I want to say this, that our faith, when it comes to prayer, when it comes to asking God for things, our faith matters greatly to God. And I want to just put out a little caution and a warning, and this is something that I've learned from, especially for those, like me, that have grown up in church for a long time. Sometimes we can actually put our faith. We can put our faith in, faith in the Bible. We can think that, well, I know this scripture, and I can quote this verse, and I can sing this song, and we almost put our faith in just knowing the scripture.
[21:05] And it can often lead us to some dangerous areas. I can, for example, I can remember when it came for, we were going through pre-marriage course. Pre-marriage. How many has ever gone through that pre-marriage course? It's like, right. It's like, I highly, highly recommend it, but here's the deal is, I remember them asking, "Well, what happens if you get into this situation, or what happens if this person gets sick, and all this?" And I was like, "You know what? I'll just pray and believe God, and that'll be it. He'll fix it." What happens if not? And so sometimes we can just put our faith in, "Oh, this is what the scripture says, and that's what everything's just gonna be." Okay. God wants us to put our faith in Him.
[21:57] Before we move on, I just want us to look at these three things right here: wrong motives, broken relationships, and lacking in faith. These three areas that scripture sort of talks about are the reasons why sometimes prayers don't go the way we want, is for these three reasons, but I want you to know this: One way that we can kind of fail-proof ourself from these is by having a relationship with God, by spending time with God, is a way that we can understand if our motives are right. Are you guys with me? When we spend time with God, that's going to be pretty clear.
[22:43] God, is this my will or is this Your will? Secondly, when we spend time in relationship and connection with God, He's going to bring out some areas in our life that, like, "You need to kind of change that attitude. You need to maybe ask forgiveness." Right. Those things are going to naturally surface. Lacking in faith: when we spend time with God, we know this. Our faith increases. Why am I saying all this? Because I want us to be able to see and hear stories where we prayed, and we hear testimonies that God is doing some amazing things. That's what I want our church to be, right?
[23:40] And so I want to invite each and every one of you to a prayer opportunity that we're having this Tuesday night online at 8 p.m. And maybe you're here and you're like, "You know, I don't know a whole lot about prayer. Not sure how that works." Or maybe you're saying, "I've, like, actually been really discouraged when it comes to prayer enough. Just kind of given up on it." Or maybe you're like, "You know, I want to just join with other people in prayer." I want to invite you even right now. You can text the word "pray." And we'll send you a Zoom link, and I'm believing that we can join together on Tuesday night and just experience something powerful as we come together. We're gonna have some pastors on with us and some of our prayer team, but I wonder what God might do as we just come together with our disappointments, or we come together for a reason of saying, you know, "I just want to take an hour and spend with God." And so I invite you to do this last thing that I want to kind of start closing our time here. Is the fourth reason is maybe God just has something different.
[25:01] And I want us to look at 1 Corinthians, at a story of Paul. Paul is a pretty incredible guy. If you've been around church, you've heard about Paul. He wrote over one third of the New Testament. If you have a coffee mug, if you have a bumper sticker, if you have a tattoo of a scripture verse, most likely it was Paul that wrote it, okay? Paul experienced God on a level that I don't know if it's safe to say that maybe most people haven't or maybe never even did. Paul was shipwrecked, he was abandoned, he was left for dead. He was all in when it came to a relationship with Jesus, when it came to knowing God. Paul, just, he was up here.
[26:01] And in this first of scripture, it's a scripture that I've heard often in church where Paul was asking God to remove what scripture calls this thorn in the flesh, and theologians and scholars have debated for years, you know, what exactly was this that Paul asked to be removed? And you know, some people say that it was, you know, he had bad eyesight, or it was a speech impediment, or it was migraines, and you know, one person said that it was a person. How many have ever had a thorn in the flesh that's a person, right? But regardless, scripture says that he had asked three times. And I don't know if that's just three prayers, but I feel like it was three real seasons where he was like, "God, would you remove that from me?" And scripture says that nothing changed, that that still was part of his life, whatever that was.
[27:03] And so I want us to just look at this, because again, when we think about our doubts, our disappointments, when it comes to prayer. "I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But He said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness.'" And as I read that this week, I, you know, I thought that God sometimes doesn't answer the way that we would like.
[27:49] I've personally experienced this. Been through, you know, the last couple years have been very, very difficult, where I've personally just been saying, "God, really? I know You can. So why don't You?" Listen, anybody ever said that? Like, "God, I know that You can heal." I feel like I have the right motives. Okay, I don't feel like I'm lacking faith. I feel like I'm in right relationship with people. But as I read that scripture, I kind of, that grace is sufficient. And so I want to give you hope and me hope today that maybe what God is saying is, "It's My grace is sufficient for you today.
[28:42] I'm gonna give you My peace. I'm gonna give you comfort. I'm gonna give you what you need today." And instead of us asking the question, "Why, God?" I felt God say this to me this week. We need to rephrase the question and say, "What, God? What can I learn about myself in this season? What can I maybe be doing for somebody else? God, what do You want to teach me?" Do you guys see the difference? When we just simply say, "Why, God? I know You can," it often not just leads me into continual doubts, discouragement.
[29:31] And so I want us as believers to say, you know what, I'm gonna flip the question and say, "God, what can I learn right now?" And I want you to hear Him say, "My grace is sufficient for you. I will give you strength for today, for what you need." And in closing, I believe that we have two options. And again, without going into real personal detail, I have wrestled with this whole topic today. When I have just seen things not go the way that I know they could, I've really wrestled with that.
[30:17] And I've stood in places like this and I've spoken to, you know, young people with passion and said, you know what, God is good. And you need to put your faith in Him. And inside, I was just wrestling with God. "Why are You doing something?" And in that season, I learned two options. Two options. I could continue questioning. I could continue doubting and why. And as I went down that path, I noticed that my attitude started shifting in a negative direction. I noticed my passion for God was not like it was.
[31:05] And I was like, that's where this is going to take me. And somewhere I had to make a decision to say, you know what, God, I don't understand, but I believe. I believe in You. I believe that Your grace is sufficient for what I need today. And I had to make that shift to say, "God, my faith is in You." And as I began to do that, my attitude began to shift, that passion began to come back. So I want to leave you with this question: What will you do? Will you choose to believe? Will you choose to believe in God, that His grace is sufficient for you today?
[32:04] I want to invite you to stand right now. Sing, as a declaration that you choose to believe in God today. Let's sing this song together.