The Prayer God Always Answers
If words could truly melt your heart, it would be these from my daughter one day lying in bed. “Daddy,” she said, “want to hold my hand?”
One of the great joys of my life is being a father. From playing on the swing to pushing them around in a wagon, being their dad brings me incredible happiness. Outside of my salvation and my wife, those two little girls are the best things that have ever happened to me.
And with two little girls—a three-year-old and a one- year-old—comes early mornings. One of those early mornings, however, came with an extra dose of God’s grace in the form of a request. I get up at 5:30 a.m. every weekday. Then, I wake my wife up at 6 a.m. Most days, our oldest is awake by 6:30 a.m. but on one cold morning, she decided to bless us with her presence at 5:45 a.m.
It starts with a cry. “Mama! Mama! Mama!” she says until my wife opens her door. With eyes wide open, my daughter comes into our room and gets in our bed. When this happens, we let her watch early-morning TV. That morning, it happened to be Monsters, Inc. And here is the best part. As we both lie there in bed, habitually telling Jovi to lower her voice, I look over to see her hand stretched out and she said: “Daddy, will you hold my hand?”
“Yes, of course,” I replied, with butterflies floating around in my stomach. How could I say no to that? Indeed, I cannot—I will not—say no to that. It doesn’t matter if we’re walking across the street, lying down in bed, or in a movie theater. If either of my children ask me to hold their hand, the answer will always be a heartfelt, “Yes!” They need not wonder what their daddy will say to that. No second-guessing, no reluctance, no worry. They will have the utmost confidence that I will always agree to hold their hands when they ask. Always.
The Prayer He Always Answers
Whether it’s with repentance, patience, trust, contentment, and the like, we know that our response to unanswered prayer reveals a lot about what we believe about God. And yet, we must talk about the opposite end of the spectrum.
God does say yes to us. In fact, there are several prayers that God will always—without reservation—say yes to. Just like I will always say yes to my daughter’s request to hold hands, there are many prayer requests God will always answer in the affirmative. Though there are several requests God will answer time and time again, I want to focus on one: praying for our sanctification. Before we focus on our plea to be sanctified, let’s turn our attention to the doctrine itself.
The theological term is sanctification. In its simplest definition, sanctification refers to the process of becoming more and more like Jesus every day.
Sinclair Ferguson, a teaching fellow at Ligonier Ministries and Chancellor’s Professor of Systematic Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, puts a beautiful spin on sanctification by saying, “This is what ‘sanctification’ means: God has put his ‘reserved’ sign on something—temple vessels for example—or on someone who thereby becomes a ‘saint,’ a person reserved for the Lord. He marks us out for his personal possession and use. We belong to him—and to nobody else, not even to ourselves. We come devoted to God” (Devoted to God, 11).
Sanctification, at its foundation, is the process by which Christians—those who’ve been bought by the precious blood of Jesus Christ—become more and more “devoted to God,” as Ferguson writes. Sanctification is progressive, not instantaneous. “Sanctification,” Dane Ortlund writes, “is lifelong, gradual growth in grace” (Deeper, 85). There are two key words here that are significant—lifelong and gradual.
Becoming more like Jesus does not happen overnight, though I am sure we all wish it did. I am not where I thought I would be as a Christian today. When God saved me years ago, I intended to be more holy, more Christlike, more godly than I am now. But I’m not. Not by a long shot.
Sometimes I get too angry; other times I’m a little too impatient. On many occasions my sarcasm comes too natural and my cynicism springs forth too often. I don’t love my wife as I should and my love for the Lord wanes far too easily. In short, I’m less godly than I planned to be now.
Wherever you are in your walk with Jesus—whether it’s been a month, a couple years, or decades—I imagine you feel the same way. We all do. We all get discouraged with our progress. We all are prone to frustration, realizing we are not as godly as we should be. But sanctification takes time. It’s slow, boring, and not easily seen.
If you are experiencing minuscule growth in your walk with Christ, don’t become discouraged, frustrated, or annoyed. There is certainly value in some discouragement simply because you shouldn’t be complacent. However, don’t despair. God is still molding you, still shaping you, still forming you into the image of Christ.
If You Ask, He Will Answer
There will never be a moment in our lives when God says no to us praying to be made more like his Son. That’s part of why we’re still on this side of heaven. God could’ve plucked us all up and we could be in glory now. But that’s not what God planned. He ordained for us to be used by him—and what a privilege that is!
Further, we must not be afraid to pray that prayer. We all want God to make us more like Jesus but much of sanctification comes to us through the avenue of suffering. Much of sanctification may happen via our response to unanswered prayer. At the end of the day, we must not despise our suffering or unanswered prayer, for it makes us more like Jesus. We are made more like Jesus through our pruning. This is the end goal: to be like Christ (Rom. 8:29). Everything that happens to us in this life is used by God to mold us more into the image of his Son. Our suffering is the road to our glorification one day. Remember the example of Jesus in Philippians 2, the great chapter on his humility. Jesus “humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:8).
Jesus experienced the ultimate suffering through his life and death on the cross.
Therefore, God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (vv. 9–11).
Jesus’s suffering on earth is the very path that led to his exaltation in heaven.
In the same vein, our suffering will, one day sooner than we realize, lead to our glorification, our exaltation, our glorious “inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for [us]” (1 Peter 1:4). Therefore, Christian, keep your eyes fixated on the glories of heaven. Heavenly glory won’t take the pain of suffering away, but it will make it worth it. It will be worth it because God will sanctify you in the process.
This is an excerpt from Taking No for an Answer: How to Respond When God Says No to Our Prayers, available now on Amazon.
Blake Long is a Master of Theological Studies graduate from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is married to Shale, and they have two girls, Jovi and Piper. They are members of Sovereign Grace Bible Church in Ada, Oklahoma, where he leads a small group. Blake currently blogs at theology-and-life.com.