Sermon Illustrations on Unanswered Prayer — page 2

Not Just the God of the Good Times

Job 1:20

Some of us have constructed a God of the good times. When our prayers are answered and life is going our way, we say, “God is good.” Does that mean when our prayers are unanswered and the job doesn’t come through, or the disease doesn’t go away, does this mean God is no longer good? If your God is only good during the good times, then your God is not the God of the Bible.

A few years ago Rev. Ray Pritchard’s oldest son and a few friends survived a terrible crash in the family’s van. All of them ended up in the hospital and they could easily have been killed. During a Thanksgiving morning worship service Ray’s wife stood and said something like this:

“We are very grateful that God spared our son and his friends. Many people have said, ‘God was certainly good to you.’ Ray and I believe that with all our hearts. But I want to say that even if our son and his friends had died, God would still have been good whether we understood it or not.”

Pastor Pritchard says he believes every word of that is true, but he was unnerved when she said it. As he gave it more thought, he concluded that faith is not a feeling based on our circumstances. True biblical faith chooses to believe that God is who he said he is and that he will do what he said he will do.

Sometimes you choose to believe because of what you see, often you believe in spite of what you can see. Many things in life remain mysterious and unanswerable. But if there is no God, and if he is not good, then nothing at all makes sense.

Ray concluded: “I have chosen to believe because I must believe. I truly have no other choice. Along with millions of believers across the centuries I have learned through my tears that my only confidence is in God and God alone.”

Not Just the God of the Good Times

Job 1:20

Some of us have constructed a God of the good times. When our prayers are answered and life is going our way, we say, “God is good.” Does that mean when our prayers are unanswered and the job doesn’t come through, or the disease doesn’t go away, does this mean God is no longer good? If your God is only good during the good times, then your God is not the God of the Bible.

A few years ago Rev. Ray Pritchard’s oldest son and a few friends survived a terrible crash in the family’s van. All of them ended up in the hospital and they could easily have been killed. During a Thanksgiving morning worship service Ray’s wife stood and said something like this:

“We are very grateful that God spared our son and his friends. Many people have said, ‘God was certainly good to you.’ Ray and I believe that with all our hearts. But I want to say that even if our son and his friends had died, God would still have been good whether we understood it or not.”

Pastor Pritchard says he believes every word of that is true, but he was unnerved when she said it. As he gave it more thought, he concluded that faith is not a feeling based on our circumstances. True biblical faith chooses to believe that God is who he said he is and that he will do what he said he will do.

Sometimes you choose to believe because of what you see, often you believe in spite of what you can see. Many things in life remain mysterious and unanswerable. But if there is no God, and if he is not good, then nothing at all makes sense.

Ray concluded: “I have chosen to believe because I must believe. I truly have no other choice. Along with millions of believers across the centuries I have learned through my tears that my only confidence is in God and God alone.”

The Instant Fix

Galatians 5:22

An airline pilot made a pretty hard landing. He greeted passengers as they departed, but no one complained. The last passenger off was a sweet older lady. As she shook the pilot’s hand, she calmly asked, “Was that a landing or were we shot down?”

The Computer, the Internet and E-mail have us spoiled. If you have a modern normal speed computer, you have come to expect instant news, instant information and instant mail. We have become “instant” people. At peak times, however, the Internet seems to get as slow as an elephant’s gestation period. That is when we discover whether or not we have any patience — I don’t have a lot — I just give up and come back to the computer later.

Whether or not we are patient probably depends somewhat on our genes, so what can we do to develop more patience? Please tell me — I’d like an instant fix, so would you. With tendencies that we inherit through our genes, we should not be saying, “O well, that’s the way I am, and I can’t do anything about it.” That’s a wrong attitude! It’s a matter of self-determinite will and simultaneously invoking the Grace of God in helping us deal with it. We can work on it.

The ultimate test of our patience is how we deal with unanswered prayer. That’s a tough one, but we can do no more than to commit it to God and continue praying. In Galatians 5:22 (nlt) we read this: “When the Holy Spirit controls our lives, he will produce this kind of fruit in us: love, joy, peace, PATIENCE, kindness, goodness, faithfulness.” I just discovered our problem — read the first seven words of this verse again!

The Gospel Bears Fruit -- Even If We Don't See It

Acts 2:41

This story, my story, changed my view of success.

Allan and Helen Christopherson married June 4, 1960, in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Canada. With only an eighth-grade education, Allan supported his young family cleaning beer storage tanks at Molson’s brewery. His salary package included only one benefit -- free beer. As with many at the plant, alcoholism was the trajectory of his career.

Then one weekend evening in 1967 my parents hired a babysitter and drove their black 1958 VW Beetle to the Orpheum Theatre. For $1.20, and by a “fluke,” they watched the movie “The Restless Ones,” produced by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

The plot soon captured their attention, and they were engrossed in the human struggle flickering before them. Then they experienced a far more personal internal struggle.

In a final scene Billy Graham’s preaching emanated from a car radio, and my dad clasped my mom’s hand as they wrestled with the conviction of the living Christ.

The film soon reached its conclusion, and a middle-aged man, in suit and tie, strolled center stage. If anyone wished to respond to Christ, he said, they could come pray with him. He patiently waited. No one came.

But God wasn’t finished.

In the comfort of their car outside the Orpheum, Allan and Helen surrendered their past, present and future to Jesus Christ. Immediately God led Allan through faith steps: quitting his job at Molson’s, learning a new trade (welding) and eventually meeting a quiet and intense man God would use to change our family.

His name was Jack Conner, and he would help my dad, the beer-barrel-cleaner-turned-welder, see his place in God’s mission in Canada. That movie screening of The Restless Ones and my dad’s friendship with and discipleship under Jack Conner are two reasons my sister and I have a heart for missions.

Pastor Conner expected barbers and carpenters and schoolteachers and accountants and welders to carry the Good News. Soon, new churches were dotting the maps of towns, villages and native reservations.

Fast-forward 35 years. My father was invited to be on an interdenominational leadership team to host a Franklin Graham Crusade in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

This is the crescendo.

The chairman of the initiative made some introductory comments and then made a request: “I would like us to spend our first few moments celebrating what God has already done through the ministry of the Grahams. Would two or three of you in this room want to come to the microphone and share?”

My dad’s heart began to race. He sensed God saying, “Share your story.” Yet his flesh said, “You’re just a welder.” Before he knew it, he stood and was speaking about that day in 1967 and “The Restless Ones” at the Orpheum Theatre, about a skipped altar call and an encounter with Christ in a VW Beetle. He told about the church they’d found and those two small children who were now spending their lives starting new churches in Toronto and across Chile. “I do not know how many hundreds of lives are now in the Kingdom because my wife and I went to the movies that day,” he added.

Silence filled the room. Then an elderly man slowly made his way straight to my dad. Tears streaming, he stammered: “Hello Allan, my name is Tom Dice. I am a retired family counselor in the area. I want you to know something, Allan. God asked me to bring that movie to Prince Albert. I rallied my friends and colleagues, and we really expected great things to happen. Night after night we played the movie and night after night I stood before the audience and asked them to respond to Christ. Night after night I went home very disappointed. Until this day, to my knowledge, nobody ever responded. I thought my project was a failure. I wondered if I had heard God right in the first place. But I did hear Him, Allan. Now I see that it wasn’t a failure.” He embraced my dad and said, “Now I see. Praise Jesus, now I see.”

Pastors, I hope you also see that you serve a God whose Gospel bears fruit, even if you can’t see it. I stand as evidence of this.

The Gift of Knocking

Luke 11:11

Just type the word “prayer” into an internet search engine as I did the other day and you’ll find almost 100 million different articles, sites, books, and periodicals on prayer! Prayer is surely one of the most important of our Christian disciplines. Indeed, we are exhorted to pray “without ceasing” in Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians “for this is God’s will” for us (1 Thessalonians 5:17-18b).

And yet if we’re honest, prayer is one of the most difficult disciplines of the Christian life. We all struggle with prayer -- not only with what to pray and how often to pray -- but also with whether or not we believe that prayer makes any difference. Phillip Yancey’s book PRAYER: DOES IT MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE? attempts to address many of these questions about prayer. Why does God seem silent so much of the time to our prayers? Why does God seem to answer prayers so inconsistently? And when God does answer our prayers, why do we so often receive a resounding “no” for the answer?(1)

If these questions aren’t difficult enough, Jesus’s own bold statements about prayer make us all the more confused. After all, wasn’t it Jesus who proclaimed, “I say to you, ask, and it shall be given to you; seek and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and the one who knocks, it shall be opened.” Likewise, Jesus promises that like our earthly fathers, God longs to give us what is good in response to the asking, seeking, and knocking of prayer (Matthew 7:7-11).

Luke’s gospel narrative makes explicit what Matthew’s gospel keeps implicit about God’s ultimate answer to prayer. In the parallel passage found in Luke 11:11-13, Jesus tells his disciples, “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?” You see, according to Jesus, the goal of all prayer is to have more of the Holy Spirit at work in our lives. The Holy Spirit is the ultimate “good gift” that God gives in response to our asking, seeking, and knocking.

So, too, prayer is about our relationship with God. The more we grow in our relationship with God, the more we’ll want of God. Hence, God promises to give us more of the Holy Spirit -- in and through all the circumstances of life -- as the deepest answer to our prayers.

The Bible speaks of the Holy Spirit as the “comforter,” the one who comes alongside of us (John 14:16, 26). This is the same Spirit the apostle Paul tells us “intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words,” and “intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (Romans 8:26b-27). Therefore, when we face difficulties, when our prayers seemingly go unanswered, we have the promise that we don’t ever face life’s difficult circumstances alone, but God longs to come near to us and to come alongside us with the comforting presence of God’s Spirit. M. Craig Barnes former pastor of the National Presbyterian Church adds, “Sometimes life gets overwhelming, and we realize we could use a little help. So we pray for our health to get better, for our marriage to work out, for success in our work that has taken a turn for the worse. There is nothing wrong in praying for these things, but they are not what our salvation is about. Don’t expect Jesus to save us by teaching us to depend on the things we are afraid of losing! He loves us too much to let our health, marriage, or work become the savior of our lives. He will abandon every crusade that searches for salvation from anything or anyone other than God. So he delays, he watches as we race down dead-end streets, he lets our mission du jour crash and burn. To receive Jesus as Savior means recognizing him as our only help. Not our only help for getting what we want. But our only true help.”(2)

God’s promise to be present with us through the power of the Holy Spirit is God’s eternal answer to all our prayers. It is God’s “yes” even if God answers our specific requests with “no.” Ultimately, as we grow in Christian discipleship, God wants us to find comfort, not in dependence on the things of this world, but in God’s presence with us and alongside us through the Holy Spirit.

Through the power and presence of the Spirit, God longs to be the very answer to our prayers. As we are filled with the Holy Spirit more and more, may our prayers reflect Christ’s own priorities: Ask, and the Holy Spirit will be given to you. Seek, and you will find the Holy Spirit with you. Knock, and the door of God’s kingdom will be opened to you. For how much more will our heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit, to those who ask?

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1. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006.

2. M. Craig Barnes, WHEN GOD INTERRUPTS (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 124-125.

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55 Sermon Illustrations on Unanswered Prayer