Persistence in Unanswered Prayer
The Christian life is defined by prayer. Prayer should be, for us, a joyous time in communion with God. It is to be a time for both supplication and thanksgiving, a time for both mourning and gladness. It is to be a time to ask God for healing and a time to thank God for his healing. It is a time for a church community to come together, to lift one another up, and to see the Lord work for our sanctification and, ultimately, his glorification. Prayer is the means of grace God has provided for us to commune with him because of what Jesus has done for us on the cross.
Yet prayer presents some of the greatest challenges for the believer, especially the challenge of many seemingly unanswered prayers. Thus faithful Christians often wonder, Why isn’t God answering me? Why does it seem like my prayers are hitting the ceiling and bouncing back down to me? Is there a sin in my life that I am unaware of and could that be the reason God is withholding an answer?
Every Christian has, in one form or another, wrestled with these questions. The primary characters we read about in the Bible were men and women of prayer. Jesus himself even prayed to his heavenly Father. We also read of the many different saints from church history who prayed without ceasing, and we read in great theological works about the necessity of prayer. These examples impress upon our hearts our need to pray.
Parents Hear their Newborn’s Cry
The necessity and urge to pray became the most apparent when I became a father. My wife and I have a newborn son who is almost two months old. This is our first child. Becoming a father has been the greatest experience of my life. The gift of life is a joyous one, and I’m seeing with each passing day that the responsibility to raise another human being is not to be taken lightly. It is the greatest and highest calling that God has ever placed on me.
I’m learning that the early stage of taking care of a newborn comes with many different demands. Whether changing diapers several times a day or bathing the baby, all these tasks take more time than one initially thinks and make days go by quickly. There are many emotional ups and downs as my wife and I adjust to the task of caring for a young and helpless human.
The instant emotional connection to a newborn creates an extreme sense of vulnerability in the minds of the father and mother. As an example of this, I have found my son’s nonstop crying—especially when everything we’ve done in the past to make him stop crying suddenly isn’t working—to be the most stressful of experiences I have ever gone through. As parents, we rush to our children’s aid when we hear them cry; we want to do everything to comfort them and make them happy. I haven’t had to do it yet, but I know the day is coming when I’ll need to stay up all night with my son to help him feel comforted and safe. Parents’ hearts becomes attuned to the cries of their child, and every sound the child makes, every whimper that comes from their mouth, does not go unheard.
God Hears Our Cry
Parents who are charged with the care of a newborn baby do so with hearts tainted by sin (Rom. 3:23). We are unclean before God, and only the blood of Jesus can make us clean. Our minds and actions are corrupted by the law of sin (1 Cor. 15:56). And yet even in our sinful state, parents are able to understand and comprehend a baby’s cries for help and provide the needed care. How much more is God, who is all perfect, glorious, and without sin, able to understand and hear our cries for help or deliverance? He tells us that he inclines his ear to us (Ps. 116:2) and will provide us the comfort and grace that he knows we need.
Not only is God holy and without sin, but his knowledge is also infinite (Ps. 147:5; 1 John 3:20). Humans, on the other hand, have knowledge that is finite in nature. We do not know everything that could be known. Rather, we are ignorant and arrogant at the same time.
In our sinful, ignorant, finite state, parents know that their child needs to go through some discomfort when bathing and diaper changing to keep that child healthy and clean. If this is the case, how much more does God, who is perfectly holy, know that we need to go through trials and tribulations for our good?
Nevertheless, this truth does not always make it easy to put our child through discomfort. When bathing my newborn son, he very much dislikes the process, and I don’t like putting him through it either. But I know it’s for his health, hygiene, and long-term good. And I’m able to recognize this in my sin-tainted mind. God, in his perfect and infinite knowledge, sees the need for us to go through much larger trials in order to sanctify us and make us lean on him even more. Because God is sovereign, we can take comfort in knowing he is working those trials for our good (Rom. 8:28) and rejoice in whatever affliction we may be going through (James 1:2).
God Calls Us to Pray
In the pilgrimage of the Christian life, our prayers often seem to be unheard. Our cries for help or relief often seem to fall on deaf ears. But God reminds us in the Bible that he does hear. Consider what John says about prayer: “And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us” (1 John 5:14). Peter tells us to cast all “anxieties on him, because he cares for [us]” (1 Pet. 5:7). And the author of Proverbs reminds us that the “LORD is far from the wicked, but he hears the prayer of the righteous” (Prov. 15:29).
In seasons that feel full of seemingly unanswered prayer, we can rest assured knowing he gives us the grace to keep moving forward day by day. And we can take comfort that while we may feel our prayers are unanswered, no child of God has ever prayed a prayer that went unheard.
Johnathan Gerrits lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada with his wife and son. He’s completed a certificate of Theological and Philosophical Studies from Gillespie Academy and writes regularly at Reformed Discourse.