How God Answers Prayer 5
We have considered the first two of five ways that God answers prayer. To review, method one was by answering prayers exactly as they are prayed. Method two was to answer the prayer in kind by providing something of equal or greater value. Under the strictest of terms, the following three methods are just subcategories of the first two methods. However, they are important enough to be discussed separately.
We are carrying two themes throughout this series that are also worthy of review before we consider the third way in which God answers prayer.
First, we stated in the beginning that God answers every prayer we utter. He may not answer it in the way we expect. We may not recognize the answer. But God will answer the prayers of his people. Part of the goal of this series is to become better students of prayer that we would not miss the grace that God lavishes on his people through answered prayers.
Secondly, we said that our prayers and our persons are accepted before God on the same terms, namely the atoning work of our Mediator, Jesus Christ. Prayer that does not begin, continue, and end at the Cross is prayer that is destined to go astray. The only reason a holy God should request, entertain, and answer our prayers is because of the blood of Jesus. We cannot pray a prayer good enough to be answered without it passing through Christ.
We hold both of these truths firmly as we continue towards the end of this series. Now we’ll consider the third way that God answers prayers of his people.
God sometimes delays his answer to our prayers in order to grow our faith, exercise our patience, test our love, or enlarge our desires for mercy.
- God sometimes delays an answer to grow our faith. My favorite quote from A. W. Tozer is his definition of faith: “Faith is the gaze of the soul upon a saving God.” He, like Hebrews 11, defines faith as a spiritual vision that sees God and his promised benefits. This vision, however, is far from 20-20. Our ability to see and believe in the promises of the gospel varies due to many factors both within us and without us. According to Hebrews 11:1, you cannot posses faith and the thing for which you hope. Faith is the trust that you will one day obtain the thing for which you hope. In his good work of sanctification, God is increasing that trust for the thing for which we hope, namely himself. The increase of that hope is the increase of faith. Often God’s delay in answering prayer is particularly designed to increase our faith. He denies the thing hoped for so that we are pushed to trust in God’s goodness to provide for us. We seen an example of this in Matthew 15:21-28. In this passage Jesus appears to be harsh in denying a gentile woman her request for the healing of her daughter. In the course of his apparent denial he also likens her, and other gentiles, to “dogs”. The woman however will not be dissuaded. She responds in humility, “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” Jesus answers, “O woman, great is your faith! Be it done as you desire.” In the watershed of Jesus’ gracious response we see what he was after in his initial denial of this woman’s request, he was after growing her faith. She was pushed to trust that Jesus was who she thought he was, a compassionate healer, a man who was both powerful and merciful.
- Sometimes God delays an answer to exercise our patience. We see all through Scripture that in addition to faith, God is forming patience in his people (Romans 8:24-25). If faith is seeing the thing promised, then patience is the endurance to press on toward it. At its heart, patience is a declaration of value. If we are willing to be patient for something, we are declaring its value to be greater than the suffering we endure in the waiting. That is what God is about in his people when he increases their patience. He gives them a view of his own holiness and glory that causes the believer to say, “God is worth it.” Communion with the Lord Jesus Christ is worth it. The glory of God to be revealed in the thing for which I pray is worth the wait. God will often delay his answer to increase your patience and show you that thing for which you pray is of inestimable value because in it is revealed the will and glory of God.
- Sometimes God delays an answer to try our love. Consider Abraham and his near sacrifice of his own son Isaac. As Abraham was about to bring the knife down upon his beloved boy–son of the promise–God spoke through the angel, saying “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” God tested Abraham’s love by delaying his answer to the very last minute. In essence, God was asking Abraham, “Do you love me more than my blessings?” This is the question of Christian love. As we read in Romans 1, sin is loving the creature rather than the Creator. We have a sinful habit of loving God’s lavish grace more than we love God himself. To counteract this, God will often delay an answer to try our love. He will ask in the delay, “Do you love me even when I do not provide that for which you ask? Do you love me more than my blessings?” Thomas Manton put it this way, “We love his benefits more than we love God, when we delight in him only when he doth us good. But when we can delight in him even when our desires are delayed, and nothing appears but tokens of God’s pleasure, this is delight indeed.”
- Sometimes God delays an answer to enlarge our desires. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Often God will delay an answer to increase our desire for the thing for which we ask. Consider that the majority of the psalms were written under this premise. Consider how many of the psalms are gut wrenching cries for God’s help. God’s good delays cultivated these intense emotions of longing. The psalmists learned to desire their answer through the absence of that answer. “As the deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God” states the psalmist in Psalm 42:1. Water becomes inestimably precious to the man parched from thirst. So does God withhold that for which we ask to increase in us a capacity to enjoy his blessings all the more. Manton again says, “To enlarge our desires, that we may have a greater income of his mercy, as a sack that is stretched out holds the more. God will have the soul more stretched out when he means to fill it up with grace.”
We now conclude with a few reflections.
- Prayer and piety are intrinsically linked. Prayer can serve as both as a thermometer and a thermostat. Prayer serves as a thermometer when it gives and accurate measure of our ongoing trust in our Lord Jesus Christ. Prayer serves as a thermostat in delayed answers to prayers, helping to increase the warmth of our heart for the promises of our good God. Delayed answers to prayer are used by God to deepen our relationship with him.
- See God’s mercy in delayed prayer. We often are quick to attribute delayed answers to prayer as God’s judgment on us for sin. Instead we should say, “God is mercifully dealing with me on the terms of what I need most and not on the terms of what I want most.
- Knowing that God delays answers to prayers should be an encouragement to continue praying. We are also prone to give up praying when we do not see the answer to a prayer. Seeing that delay can often be better for our souls than an immediate answer should give us a greater motivation for persevering in prayer. Be encouraged that no time in prayer is wasted time in prayer, though the answer may be long in coming.
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