A sermon for Sparrows Church 28/6/25

Today I want to speak with you about prayer.  It is an incredibly huge topic and many things which might go in a sermon on prayer. But I don’t have time to discuss all of these. I can only consider one aspect of prayer today, that is, what do we do when God does not answer?

I could tell you about many of the prayers that God has not yet answered for me.  Some of these would involve spilling the family secrets, which I am not going to do.  However, I can tell you that there are many things I have prayed about for many years.  At least two particular separate things took more than five years to get an answer for.  One is fully resolved and the second one took another three years of prayer to see a significant change in the situation.  Some matters that I am still praying about have been issues for over twenty years.  Right now, there is someone else I have been praying for for over three years.  Not the least of these matters is the salvation of my children – currently two would say that they are Christians and two would say that they are not.  The things I am praying about are very important and consequential to me.  I would not have prayed for twenty years about something trivial.  Yet these prayers have not yet been answered in any positive way.  On a less secret note, I have been praying for an opportunity to open up for me to speak in a church for the last two and a half years or more.  This is the first answer to that particular prayer.

I will go out on a limb and say that it is likely that there are people present here who have prayed and are praying for a loved one, or a personal situation and that problem has not gone away.  It is hardly unusual to find Christians who experience unanswered prayer.  It is a common situation and something which often seems baffling because there are many promises in the Bible about God answering our prayers in the name of Jesus.  I don’t understand why God does not answer prayer or at least why he takes a long time to do so.  His promises are true because God cannot lie.  But we probably all want to know what on earth to do when there is no answer.

I find that beginning at the beginning is usually a good idea.  Consequently, I am going to start by looking at some significant ideas in Genesis 1 and 3.  These verses are foundational because we tend to pray based on what we understand about God and about ourselves.  In fact, how we pray exposes our theology.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1 NIV).  This is, of course, the first verse of the Bible.  It tells us that there is a God and he alone is responsible for all that exists in heaven and on earth.  He is incredibly good and powerful.  He made the earth, the land, the sky and all the creatures that exist on the earth.  This tells us at least two important things about God.

First of all, God alone is able to create out of nothing.  Before Gen 1:1, there was nothing but God.  The word used here for create is a word only ever used of God.  It is not used of humans making something out of created things.  God creates out of nothing.  We can create only out of something that God has already made.  It is very important to know that difference.

Secondly, since God is the Creator of all, he is Lord of all.  This means he is sovereignly in charge of that which he has created.  Nothing is outside of his hand.  If this were not so, there would hardly be any point in praying at all.  Why ask God to do something that he is not capable of doing?  By the same token, since the Creator God is sovereign Lord of all, if he has not yet answered my prayer or your prayer, then he is both capable of doing so and has a sovereignly valid reason for not saying yes to that prayer, at least not yet.

As we get through a few more verses in Genesis 1, we discover that, having made the inanimate parts of creation, then the fish, and birds and land animals, God decided to make humans.  “Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’ So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground’” (Gen. 1:26-28 NIV).

I will say a couple of things about this passage.  Humans are extremely special creatures.  We are not like the other animals on the planet.  Only humans are made in the image and likeness of God.  This makes humans significant and important to God in a way that is far more than the rest of creation.  We are not just animals who walk upright.  We are humans who are created to be in covenant relationship with the Creator.  He gave humans rule over the rest of creation.  We are, therefore, God’s covenant partners.  The task of humans is to rule the planet under God.  We are intended to care for the creation.  The creation belongs completely to God.  What humans have is merely a life-time lease on this place.  If you are entrusted with someone else’s property, you know that you need to act according to their wishes.  For a while I had power of attorney over my mother’s assets because of her declining health.  Those were not my assets so I could not do as I pleased with them.

This is possibly the primary reason why prayer is possible for human beings.  God has entrusted the care of his world to us as humans and we need to live as if he is God and in charge.  We pray so that we can do what pleases God with what he has given to us.  It is part of sharing the rule of God over the world.  Prayer anchors humans to the will of God rather than letting us run amok with our power to rule.  We are intended to commit our lives, our actions, our needs and desires to God, because he is our Creator.

Genesis 1 and 2 explain the way things are intended to be.  But Gen 3 tells us that this is not how things are now.

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God really say, “You must not eat from any tree in the garden”?’  The woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, “You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.”’ ‘You will not certainly die,’ the serpent said to the woman. ‘For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it” (Gen. 3:16 NIV).

The devil offered Eve the opportunity to become like God if she ate the fruit that God had forbidden.  Humans were made in the image and likeness of God, as we saw already in Gen 1:26-28.  But the temptation of the serpent twisted what it means to be like God.  Instead of accepting that the likeness of God is part of God’s blessing on humanity, the devil implied that God is not good because he had denied Adam and Eve something good.  Satan stated outright that God is a liar, who forbade the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in order to deprive the humans of its goodness.  He claimed that nothing bad would happen when they ate it.  Instead, it would be good to eat it and become like God in a way that God never intended.

Eve wanted to eat the fruit in order to know good and evil.  She wanted to be god herself.  Adam followed suit.  Ever since then, humans have a corrupted desire that makes us want to be our own gods.  We want to determine our own good and our own evil.  We want to be powerful and in charge of everything, particularly our own lives.  This has opened the door to idolatry, the idea that there are other gods that might prove helpful in solving our problems.

The creation story emphasises the distinction between God the Creator and human beings as creatures.  In essence, God is God and we are not God.  But in the story of the fall we find that human beings don’t want to respect that difference.  Adam and Eve did not believe that God is good.  In their eyes, God had withheld something good from them.  He must therefore be a God not to be trusted.  Every human being since then has the same fundamental problem.  We want to be our own god and yet we want the God who made us to give us what we need or want.  He is not good in our eyes, so we think we must somehow gain power over him in order to get answers to prayer.

Today, I want to explore this temptation to gain power over God or to manipulate God in order to get our prayers answered.  But before I go into that I want to make clear what the Bible says about how we actually are to pray.  This will by necessity be a very brief version of what prayer is.  The most basic thing we can say about prayer is that it is talking to God.  When we pray, our prayers are directed to God.  Prayer can take many different forms: thanksgiving, praise, petition (that is, asking for something), intercession (that is, asking God to help someone else) or confession of sin.  All of these things are part of prayer because they are done within the context of a relationship with God.  In a relationship with God there is no need for manipulation or power.  We can trust God as our Father and our provider.

How do we come to God?  This is a very important question and we need to be clear about this.  The New Testament explains very plainly that there is only one way to come to the Father in heaven.  Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn. 14:6 NIV).  Paul teaches in Ephesians 2:18 “For through him [that is, Jesus] we both [that is, Jew and Gentile] have access to the Father by one Spirit”.  God, in his mercy, has solved our sin problem by giving us access to his holy presence because of the precious blood of Jesus.  He has put his Holy Spirit within believers so that we are able to come to God through Christ.  There is no secret work around, nor is there a reason for a secret work around.  We are privileged to come to God through Jesus Christ in the Spirit.  But there is no other way.

Keep this basic truth in mind while we consider the temptation that comes to us when God does not answer our prayers or when he delays for a long time in answering.  Most of you have probably experienced those kinds of delays.  I have already told you that many of my prayers have remained unanswered for years.  It can be disheartening to feel like God does not listen.  But just because we may feel that way does not mean that our prayers are unheard.  God does listen to us through Jesus and in the Holy Spirit because he keeps his promises.  We need to remember not to fall into temptation.

So what is the temptation I keep referring to?  The temptation is to try to find the secret to answered prayer.  I am arguing that there is no secret.  But you will not have trouble finding people offering the secret to answered prayer.  A search of the Koorong catalogue will turn up a number of books on this subject.  I am now going to explore four of these supposed means of getting God to answer prayer when he has chosen not to answer.  These all stem in some way from the assumptions that God is not good, he is withholding something good from us for no reason, we can be our own gods and there are other gods that might be able to help us meet our needs and desires.  All of these assumptions are demonic and tied up with the fall in Gen 3.

The first supposed secret to answered prayer that is quite popular is the idea of decreeing and declaring.  In this version of “prayer” Christians make declarations as if their words alone will bring about the situation they desire.  Even if those declarations are based on the Bible, they apparently only come to pass when the person speaks the words in faith.  Decrees assume that Christians have the same kind of power in their words that God has in his words.  But this does not respect the distinction between God and human beings.  God is God and we are not.  God is God and we are not God.  Human words do not have the power to create reality.  The decreeing and declaring phenomenon is not biblical and does not involve relationship with God.  It does not express our dependence on God’s Fatherly care for us and our need for him to be ruler over us.  This is not actually prayer at all.  It exalts the human to the status of a god.

The second supposed secret to answered prayer is a doctrine about filing lawsuits in the courts of heaven.  To quote Robert Henderson, author of Operating in the Courts of Heaven and other books on this topic, “We must know how to be part of the legal process of Heaven that grants God the legal right to fulfill his passion on our behalf in the Earth”[1]  The idea here is that God cannot answer your prayers until you have filed a lawsuit in the courts of heaven.  According to Henderson, God is hindered in his ability to answer our prayers even though he wants to do so.  This doctrine both misuses the Bible and makes God out to be a being who is dependent on his creatures to free his hands to act.  He is not sovereign over the world he has made.  It also exalts human beings to a status higher than we are given as created beings.  Lastly, and most significantly, it denies that Jesus has given us access to God by his shed blood.

The third popular solution to unanswered prayer is breaking generational curses.  I expect that you have heard of this one.  The doctrine of generational curses assumes that bad things will happen to you because of the curses passed down through your ancestors to the third and fourth generation.  There are various lists of things to do in order to break these generational curses.  The problem with this doctrine is that is not biblical.  Only Jesus can break a generational curse.  The curse goes all the way back to Adam and Eve, not just a few generations.  Jesus has broken that curse by dying for my sins and raising me to life.  According to Eph 1:3-14 I am blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.  This has already been done for me and no ritual I go through can do anything helpful at all.  To suggest that you or I can or must break a generational curse to get our prayers answered simply denies the truth of the gospel and assumes power we do not have.

My last example is trickier because it is more subtle.  I have noticed that sometimes Christians who are distressed by circumstances go to someone they consider to be an anointed leader so that that person will pray about their problem.  Now it is absolutely right and good to pray with other Christians and to ask other believers to pray for you.  This is not a problem.  The problem with going to the supposedly anointed leader is an internal belief about who God answers and who God does not answer.  If we do not believe that God answers us because of what Jesus has done for us in his death and resurrection, then we might turn to people who seem more spiritual, more anointed, or more significant as if God listens to them because of their anointing.  This kind of belief is wrong because it is based on a false idea of how we come to God.  It denies that the work of Christ is sufficient for me.

What all these different ways of trying to find the secret to answered prayer have in common is that they are pagan.  They are pagan because they involve the same elements that pagan prayer does.  Pagans seek to manipulate God by charms, talismans, rituals, sacrifices and magic words and phrases.  Did not Jesus tell us to avoid acting in this way?  He said, “And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words” (Matt. 6:7 NIV).  The pagan babbling here is quite possibly a series of special or magical words used to manipulate God to gain favour.

Why do pagans try to manipulate their gods?  Because these gods are not good.  They will not answer prayer without a lot of work on behalf of the worshippers.  This is reason for all the rituals and secret words and magical activities.

What we need to understand is that when we act like pagans by trying to find the secret to prayer we actually are assuming that God is not good, we are gods on a par with him and God needs to be manipulated into giving us what we need and want.  If we believe that God needs to be manipulated, then we are actually placing God under us.  If we can manipulate God then we have power over God.  God is not really God anymore.  We are god instead.  This is how fallen human beings think about God.  This is a long way from the biblical understanding of prayer.

Jesus told his followers not to act like pagans because “your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matt. 6:8 NIV).  God’s willingness to answer us is written over and over in the Bible.  Here are some examples. “Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom” (Lk. 12:32 NIV) “If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” (Matt. 7:11 NIV) “If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Lk. 11:13 NIV) “Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up” (Lk. 18:1 NIV).

If this is the wrong way to prayer and there is no secret to answered prayer, what are we supposed to do when God does not answer for a month, a year, or twenty years?  To answer that question, I am going to look at how Jesus dealt with unanswered prayer.  I can see two examples in the life of Jesus which can show us how to behave in the face of the temptation to look for a way of gaining power over God in prayer.  The first is Jesus’ time in the wilderness and the second is the cross.

After Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River by John the Baptist, he went into the wilderness.  “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry” (Lk. 4:1-2 NIV).  Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness to represent the 40 years that Israel spent in the wilderness after God rescued them from Egypt.  There is an obvious parallel here between the experience of Jesus and the experience of Israel.  However, there was a huge difference between these two experiences in the wilderness.  Jesus trusted God as his Father.  Israel did not.

Let’s look back at Exodus for a minute.  Exodus 16 begins with this: “The whole Israelite community set out from Elim and came to the Desert of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt.  In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron.  The Israelites said to them, ‘If only we had died by the LORD’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death’” (Exod. 16:1-3 NIV).  This event took place immediately after the exodus.  The Israelites had seen the goodness and the power of God as he rescued them from slavery.  But what did they do?  As soon as you can say boo to a goose, they whinge about the lack of food.  Nonetheless, God sent them manna and quail because he is their God.

What was wrong with the Israelites here?  They did not believe that God is good.  There were already clear indications that God is good.  He had promised to Abraham that he would bless his descendants (Gen 12:1-3).  He had warned that they would be oppressed in Egypt and promised that he would rescue them (Gen 15:13-14).  He had shown powerful signs in Egypt in order to get the Egyptians to let them go (Exod 4-12).  God had opened the Red Sea to Israel and yet drowned the Egyptians who followed them (Exod 14:21-31).  His promises are true and he demonstrated his love for his people.  But they immediately decided that God is not good.  They did not pray and ask God for what they needed.  They simply complained loudly and assumed that God purposed evil for them.

Contrast this with Jesus in the wilderness.  The Holy Spirit filled Jesus and he willingly went into the wilderness to obey God.  There was no food there because it is a wilderness.  But he did not complain.  He trusted his Father to provide for him in due time.  There is nothing in this passage mentioning prayer, but we might interpret the fast as probably accompanied by prayer.  It is not unusual for fasting to go with prayer in the Bible.  Then the devil tempted Jesus, but the response of Jesus is nothing like the response of Israel.

“The devil said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.’  Jesus answered, ‘It is written: “Man shall not live on bread alone.”’” (Lk. 4:3-4 NIV).  Do you think that Jesus was not able to turn stones into bread?  I am sure he could have.  He truly is the Son of God.  But he refused to exalt himself as a human being.  As Paul’s hymn in Philippians teaches “Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage” (Phil. 2:6 NIV).  While Adam and Eve wanted to exalt themselves to god-like status, Jesus chose to rely on the Father in heaven.

Had Jesus prayed for food during this time?  We don’t know, but maybe he had and was simply accepting that God had chosen not to answer that prayer for a time.  We know that Jesus did not declare that the stones be turned into bread.  He did not file a lawsuit in the courts of heaven.  He did not succumb to the temptation to look for another way when God did not immediately meet his need.  Instead, his trust was fully in his Father, regardless of whether his physical needs were met.  This is the kind of trust that God asks of us as people who follow Jesus.  Instead of spending energy to find ways to get God to answer, we put our needs in God’s hands and leave them there.  We trust him that he will answer us in his own time because he is a good God who keeps his promises.

The ultimate unanswered prayer for Jesus is one which he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane.  “Jesus went out as usual to the Mount of Olives, and his disciples followed him. On reaching the place, he said to them, ‘Pray that you will not fall into temptation.’ He withdrew about a stone’s throw beyond them, knelt down and prayed, ‘Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.’  An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground” (Lk. 22:39-44 NIV).

We know that Jesus asked for another way than the cross.  Yet God the Father said No.  This then was an unanswered prayer, in that God never said Yes to Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane.  Just like the things I have been praying about for years on end, this had a non-trivial effect on Jesus.  But the effect on Jesus was far more significant than anything that has ever happened to me as I agonised in prayer.  It was far more significant than anything you have ever endured because God has not answered your requests.  Luke says that Jesus was in anguish, sweating drops of blood.  Things have to be pretty intense for someone to sweat drops of blood.  We can see then that Jesus desperately desired to avoid going to the cross.

But notice what he did not do.  He did not decide to take this matter into his own hands by looking for some secret means of getting God to change his mind about the whole save-humanity-by-dying-for-sinners plan.

To better grasp Jesus’ attitude towards God at this point, we need step back a few verses in this chapter.  There we find Jesus celebrating the Passover with his disciples.  Although it is not recorded in the Gospels, history tells us that during the Passover meal, Jews would pray the Hallel Psalms (Psalms 115-118).  The last Psalm Jesus would have sung before he went to Gethsemane was Ps 118.  Let’s read a little to see the gist of it.

It begins with: “Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever.  Let Israel say: ‘His love endures forever.’ Let the house of Aaron say: ‘His love endures forever.’ Let those who fear the LORD say: ‘His love endures forever.’ (Ps. 118:1-4 NIV).  The psalm ends with “Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever” (Ps. 118:29 NIV).

The upshot of this is that Jesus went to the cross fully believing that God is good and his love endures forever.  Unlike Adam and Eve in the first garden, Jesus submitted in the Garden of Gethsemane to God as Father with absolute trust in his truthfulness, goodness and love.  He trusted God in the most profound way through the agony of the cross that came about because of his unanswered prayer.

We have seen the wrong way to deal with unanswered prayer, which is to try to find a way to manipulate God into giving us what we want because we do not believe that he is good.  What, then, is the right way to deal with unanswered prayer?

Unanswered prayer or prayer with delayed answers is hard.  But we are not to go on the hunt for some secret way of getting God to answer us as if he is someone we may manipulate.  Our task is to trust that God is good and his promises are true.  This, however, is impossible in our own ability.  My comfort in this problem is found in this truth.  “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20 NIV).  I cannot live the Christian life in my own strength, but I am dead and Christ lives in me.  His faith is given to me in order that I might live a life as faithful as his own.  He gives his Spirit to us to enable us to live a life of trust in our good Father even when the situation seems to suggest that God is not good.  Let the life of Jesus strengthen us as he dwells in us through his Spirit.  In this way we can pray with confidence in God’s promises while we wait for the answer to prayer that has not yet arrived.

Let us pray.  Read Ps 118 together to affirm the goodness of God.