Why Doesn't God Answer My Prayers?

“Faith is to believe what you do not see, the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.” – St. Augustine of Hippo

Have you ever been told by someone that if you have enough faith, everything you ask for in prayer will be given to you? And conversely, if you don’t receive everything you ask for in prayer, it is because you lack the necessary faith?

People who say one or the other – or both – of these things have a fundamental misunderstanding of God’s word. As a result, they often mislead themselves and countless others into following the false prosperity gospel where “name it, claim it” is the guiding principle.

Let’s try to put faith into the proper perspective.

Jesus told His disciples in John 7:7 to “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” And in Matthew 17:20, Jesus told His disciples that “if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.”

But something must be missing in our understanding of these passages because at first reading – and a superficial understanding – it sounds like God is a magic genie who is available 24/7 to grant our every wish. However, a closer look at verses like James 4:2-3; 2 Corinthians 12:8-10; and Isaiah 55:8-9 provide some much-needed clarity.

In the James passage, he starts by saying that “you do not have because you do not ask” but then he adds “You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you might spend it on your own pleasures.” In other words, our impure motives often interfere with God answering our prayers.

Then in 2 Corinthians, Paul tells his readers that he prayed three times for God to remove his “thorn in the flesh”, but each time God said no because, He told Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness.”

And then in Isaiah 55:8, God states that “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways.” A verse later He adds, “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways, And My thoughts than your thoughts.”

In other words, there are many reasons other than a lack of faith for why God doesn’t always answer our prayers, at least not the way we would like. We might ask with the wrong motivation and out of selfish desires; or God might want to keep us humble and dependent on Him so that He gets the glory and not us; or He simply has reasons that are too great for us to fathom and comprehend.

Here is how Charles Spurgeon, the “Prince of Preachers”, summarizes this seeming contradiction…

“There is a limit to the doctrine of the prayer of faith. We are not to expect that God will give us everything we choose to ask for. We know that we sometimes ask and do not receive because we ask wrongly. If we ask for that which is not promised—if we run counter to the spirit that the Lord would have us cultivate—if we ask contrary to His will or to the decrees of His providence—if we ask merely for selfish gratification and without a concern for His glory, we must not expect that we will receive. But when we ask in faith, without doubting, if we do not receive the precise thing for which we asked, we shall receive an equivalent, and more than an equivalent, for it. As one remarks, ‘If the Lord does not pay in silver, He will in gold; and if He does not pay in gold, He will in diamonds.’ If He does not give you precisely what you ask for, He will give you that which is tantamount to it, and that which you will be happy to receive in its place.”

Makes sense to me!

- Rev. Dale M. Glading, President