When God doesn't answer prayer our way

God doesn’t always answer prayer. Does this statement surprise you? If you are a Christian in America you’ve probably been taught otherwise – surely there is something I can do, say, give up, promise, or repent of that will see my prayers through. “Ask anything in my name”, Jesus said, and yet we are so quick to claim it without fully understanding the context of what he was saying.

So engrained in our minds is this idea that God must answer our prayers, that when someone says “God has answered my prayers!” what they really mean to say is ‘God has answered my prayers with a  ‘yes’ giving me what I asked for’, semantically ignoring the possibility that God’s answer could ever be any different.

The truth is that sometimes God says no to our petitions, and sometimes rather emphatically. But this is hard for many people to swallow, because for many, we directly relate fulfilled prayer to God’s love – “If God really loved me, then He must answer my prayers”, we think. But it is when He fails to respond in the way we’ve anticipated that this attitude of heart backfires, and we are left to fall flat on our faces, feeling unloved and abandoned.

God however, is not surprised by this trap that we set for ourselves, and addresses the issue in the beginning of John chapter 11, with the real life story of Lazarus.

“Now a certain man named Lazarus was sick. He was from Bethany, the village where Mary and her sister Martha lived. 2 (Now it was Mary who anointed the Lord with perfumed oil and wiped his feet dry with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick.) 3 So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, “Lord, look, the one you love is sick.”

Lazarus was one of the followers of Jesus – brother of the famous sisters Mary and Martha, and he had fallen sick. This verse doesn’t tell us exactly what he has, but from the context we know that it was very serious – not a cold or the flu – but a life and death situation. Having failed after doing all they could to try to help and heal Lazarus, they send a desperate message to Jesus – hoping beyond hope that it will make it in time, so that Jesus can rush over to Bethany, and heal Lazarus before it’s too late. But verses 4-7 tells us what Jesus does instead.

4 When Jesus heard this, he said, “This sickness will not lead to death, but to God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” 5 Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.

6 So when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he remained in the place where he was for two more days. 7 Then after this, he said to his disciples, “Let us go to Judea again.”

Didn’t Jesus understand the urgency of their request – surely He must have known that they wouldn’t have bothered him about a cold? But as the text says, instead of responding in the way that Mary and Martha wanted and within their timeframe, Jesus seemingly ignores their request, and stays where he was for an additional two days time.

We have all had moments when we feel like our prayers just maybe haven't been heard. We pray and pray and pray asking the LORD to do something in our lives with the expectation that God will move fast and respond in the way that we expect Him to, but as Mary, Martha, and Lazarus would soon learn, God doesn’t limit His focus to just the details of their lives (as we often do) but is also at work on the big picture.

But for Mary and Martha, as well as for us now, we often feel taken aback by Jesus’ apparently stoic reaction. But before we start to think that Jesus doesn’t care about Lazarus (or about us!), before we begin to draw our own conclusions, there is verse five: “Jesus loved Lazarus”. Put in very simple terms, it was Jesus’ love for Lazarus and his family that caused Him to wait two more days. His love for Lazarus was the reason that he denied their petition. Because as verse four says “this sickness will lead to God’s glory!”

For those of us that know the rest of the story, we can testify that God surely was glorified by the end result – Lazarus dies – and then is resurrected by Jesus himself- and many, many people come to faith in the Son of God through the events that soon followed.

For me, the words that most stand out are those of Martha and Mary (verses 21, and 32),

 “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died”,

They are the same sort of words that often come out of my mouth in moments of angst “God, if you had done as I’d asked, as I’d wanted…”

But Jesus doesn’t respond to their woeful behest harshly, rather, the text says that He was moved beyond words by the trial this family was facing, and began to cry.

“33 When Jesus saw her weeping, and the people who had come with her weeping, he was intensely moved in spirit and greatly distressed. 34 He asked, “Where have you laid him?” They replied, “Lord, come and see.” 35 Jesus wept

Jesus’ reaction to Mary and Martha proves that His love for Lazarus was real; but it is His decision to wait –not to heal Lazarus- and then raise Him from the dead instead proves it is a strong and purposeful love.

God may not always ‘answer’ our prayers (in the way we think or expect), but we can be sure that He listens to them with an open ear and a soft heart, and responds to our needs with the strongest and deepest of purposeful loves. His response to Lazarus’ needs is an encouragement to us today – trust the LORD with all your heart – submit to His timetable and program, and know that He will lovingly guide your life according to His will.

“For I know what I have planned for you,’ says the LORD. ‘I have plans to prosper you, not to harm you. I have plans to give you a future filled with hope.”