What Should You Do When Your Prayers Aren't Answered?
Most of us have at least one prayer we've stopped praying out loud. It isn't that we stopped caring. We asked, and then we asked again, and when nothing seemed to change it felt easier to quietly set it down and assume God must have His reasons. Life keeps moving, the week gets full, and that prayer ends up somewhere in the back of a drawer.
I understand that feeling better than I'd like to admit. While preparing for our Night of Prayer this week, I searched the notes app on my phone for the word "pray" and got 244 results. Years of things God had spoken to me, things I'd heard in messages, scriptures that had jumped off the page. Scrolling through them, I ran into a line I'd saved a long time ago: many of us are educated far beyond our level of obedience. That one stung a little, because I had plenty of teaching on prayer stored up. What I needed was to actually pray.
Part of what makes prayer drift is how we picture heaven. We tend to think of eternity as something down the road, a place we'll get to eventually. But the Bible talks about the realm where God is as something present and more lasting than anything we can see. In 2 Corinthians 4:18, Paul says we don't look at the troubles we can see now but fix our gaze on the things that cannot be seen, because what we see will soon be gone and what we can't see will last forever. Paul never pretends his troubles aren't real. He just refuses to treat them as the permanent part of the story. Hebrews 11:3 goes even further and tells us that everything we see came from what can't be seen. If the unseen realm made this one, it makes sense that the unseen realm is where change begins.
That's shifted how I think about praying. I'm not supposed to approach heaven with earth's problems. I'm supposed to approach earth with heaven's realities. Ephesians 2:6 says God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms. That's where every believer is right now, whether we feel like it or not. When I pray from that seat instead of shouting up at a God who feels far away, my problems start to look like what they are: real, but temporary.
Jesus actually gave us the pattern for this. When His disciples asked Him to teach them to pray, He gave them what we now call the Lord's Prayer, including the line "may your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven." Heaven is the pattern, and earth is where we pray it in. We've recited that prayer so often that it can lose its weight, but "your will be done" was never meant to be what we say once we've run out of options. In heaven there's no sickness, no fear, and no lack. Asking for that to show up here is one of the boldest things we could pray.
And then Jesus did something I think we skip past. Right after teaching that prayer, He told a story about a man knocking on his friend's door at midnight, asking for bread, and not stopping until his friend got up. Jesus called it shameless persistence and said to keep asking, keep seeking, and keep knocking. He was clear that God isn't the grumpy neighbor in that story. If we know how to give good gifts to our kids, how much more will our Father give to us? We don't keep knocking to wear God down. We keep knocking because He's good and because there's a real spiritual battle happening in the realm we can't see. Daniel prayed for twenty-one days before an angel told him the answer had been sent the moment he first prayed. Prayer is not overcoming God's reluctance but laying hold of His willingness.
I've seen this up close. Years ago, after my daughter's accident, our church prayed with a kind of heartfelt, keep-at-it prayer that James 5:16 says makes tremendous power available. At every step of her recovery she was further along than she should have been, and I could sense that power in a way I still can't fully explain.
So here's something to do this week. Take the one thing you've quietly stopped praying about and write it down. Find what God's Word says about it, whether that's healing, provision, peace, or wisdom. Then pray it every day this week as His will: "Father, your will is ___. Let it be done in my life, on earth as it is in heaven." Tell one person what you're believing for so they can pray with you. And whatever happens by Friday, keep knocking.
I understand that feeling better than I'd like to admit. While preparing for our Night of Prayer this week, I searched the notes app on my phone for the word "pray" and got 244 results. Years of things God had spoken to me, things I'd heard in messages, scriptures that had jumped off the page. Scrolling through them, I ran into a line I'd saved a long time ago: many of us are educated far beyond our level of obedience. That one stung a little, because I had plenty of teaching on prayer stored up. What I needed was to actually pray.
Part of what makes prayer drift is how we picture heaven. We tend to think of eternity as something down the road, a place we'll get to eventually. But the Bible talks about the realm where God is as something present and more lasting than anything we can see. In 2 Corinthians 4:18, Paul says we don't look at the troubles we can see now but fix our gaze on the things that cannot be seen, because what we see will soon be gone and what we can't see will last forever. Paul never pretends his troubles aren't real. He just refuses to treat them as the permanent part of the story. Hebrews 11:3 goes even further and tells us that everything we see came from what can't be seen. If the unseen realm made this one, it makes sense that the unseen realm is where change begins.
That's shifted how I think about praying. I'm not supposed to approach heaven with earth's problems. I'm supposed to approach earth with heaven's realities. Ephesians 2:6 says God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms. That's where every believer is right now, whether we feel like it or not. When I pray from that seat instead of shouting up at a God who feels far away, my problems start to look like what they are: real, but temporary.
Jesus actually gave us the pattern for this. When His disciples asked Him to teach them to pray, He gave them what we now call the Lord's Prayer, including the line "may your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven." Heaven is the pattern, and earth is where we pray it in. We've recited that prayer so often that it can lose its weight, but "your will be done" was never meant to be what we say once we've run out of options. In heaven there's no sickness, no fear, and no lack. Asking for that to show up here is one of the boldest things we could pray.
And then Jesus did something I think we skip past. Right after teaching that prayer, He told a story about a man knocking on his friend's door at midnight, asking for bread, and not stopping until his friend got up. Jesus called it shameless persistence and said to keep asking, keep seeking, and keep knocking. He was clear that God isn't the grumpy neighbor in that story. If we know how to give good gifts to our kids, how much more will our Father give to us? We don't keep knocking to wear God down. We keep knocking because He's good and because there's a real spiritual battle happening in the realm we can't see. Daniel prayed for twenty-one days before an angel told him the answer had been sent the moment he first prayed. Prayer is not overcoming God's reluctance but laying hold of His willingness.
I've seen this up close. Years ago, after my daughter's accident, our church prayed with a kind of heartfelt, keep-at-it prayer that James 5:16 says makes tremendous power available. At every step of her recovery she was further along than she should have been, and I could sense that power in a way I still can't fully explain.
So here's something to do this week. Take the one thing you've quietly stopped praying about and write it down. Find what God's Word says about it, whether that's healing, provision, peace, or wisdom. Then pray it every day this week as His will: "Father, your will is ___. Let it be done in my life, on earth as it is in heaven." Tell one person what you're believing for so they can pray with you. And whatever happens by Friday, keep knocking.