Northside Church - Sydney
Can I Keep Believing? Week 2: …when my prayers go unanswered?
He'll be listening to another great message from Northside Community Church. A good friend of mine is a surgeon at one of Sydney's top hospitals and he's a non-believer. So we have many a great conversation over Thai food and it was a particular night where I said to him, after he'd finished all these studies, he'd been admitted into the College of Surgeons, I said, "Wow, you must feel like you know a heap about medicine now." And he said, "Well, it's a bit of a mystery because he says time and time again, I see people who, for all logic, should be going downhill to certain death and they pick up out of nowhere and come good. At the same time, I see people who should be going well, turn the other way and go bad and it's totally unexplainable." He says, "I'm just a human plumber." And then he says to me, he says, "Look, I've either got to be stupid or totally naive to not acknowledge that there must be some greater force or power in this universe." That's from an unbeliever, prayer, crying out to God like we heard from the Psalms really is a window to the origin of your soul. And whether you're a believer or not this morning, I put it to you, you see it in the news stories, you see it in the person that got trapped somewhere and they don't believe and they come at it and they're saved and they said, "I've been praying to God all night and I was saved." And why is it that as part of the human condition that when we come to a time of deep crisis and distress, prayer seems to be the default. Verse one to three is any read so well this morning, Asaph the psalmist. Asaph was like David's ghost writer for the songs. He was a songwriter. Asaph writes, "I cried out to God for help. I cried out to God to hear me. When I was in distress, I sought the Lord. At night, I stretched out untiring hands and my soul refused to be comforted." And then verse four he goes even deeper and he says, "You kept my eyes from closing. I was too troubled to speak." You know what he's saying there? He's saying, "I am at the point where I don't even know if I can summon the strength or even the inclination to want to pray in the first place." Have you ever felt like that? That's a rhetorical question because my heart is burdened this morning. This is not an easy one to preach because some of you I know for sure as part of our pastoral work as a team, some of you are burdened by the fact that you've been praying for job situations and the prayer remains unanswered. Some of you are praying for children that have gone astray and they haven't come back yet and that prayer remains unanswered. Some of you are praying for marriages that are on the rocks at the moment and the prayer remains unanswered. Some of you are praying for the possibility of children this morning and the prayer remains unanswered. Some of you are praying for a relationship that is yet to materialize and the prayer remains unanswered. Some of you are praying for a health concern at the moment and the prayer remains unanswered. What do we say to that? Look, in my own life, in my own life this morning as a young guy and as a relatively short time as a Christian, look there's been many a time, there's been many a prayer, none more so than the time when at a hospital all of 800 meters from here, I sat beside my dying mother. And for the whole afternoon there was that many, I claim it in the name of Jesus's, there was that many incantations, there were that many desperate pleas, there were that many verse fours, I don't even know if I want to pray at the moment. That many prayers and visions that if God would only restore her, she could meet her grandkids and we could have life together and this disease called alcoholism won't take a life and the prayer remain unanswered. And so in my relatively short time as a Christian this morning, I've come to realize that unanswered prayer is in fact a fundamental part of the Christian life, it's just how it is. And so it's in that rawness, it's in that rawness this morning that we ask, can I keep believing, can I keep having faith, can I keep trusting God when my prayers go unanswered? And what do we do when every one of those unanswered prayers, and I don't know if you've ever felt like this, every unanswered prayer pushes you ever closer to that cliff edge that is your faith in God, that threshold that you go, if I just got one more Lord, that's it. What do we do with that? I've got a short answer and I've got a longer answer, my short answer straight up this morning for you is I don't know, I actually don't know. My longer answer, well it's just I guess the approach, could we have the approach of my friend James, could we have an approach this morning that says I'd be either stupid or naive to ignore the fact that there is a greater power in this universe, whether you believe or not this morning, a greater power that does hear your prayers even if they go unanswered. And if we approach prayer that way then perhaps, just perhaps as the great preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon said, "Perhaps then unanswered prayer can become a search warrant for your soul." This morning a search warrant for your soul, every unanswered prayer, hell, here's the first way, unanswered prayer offers you perspective. Look at verse 7 and 8, "Will the Lord reject forever? Will He never show His favor again? Has His unfailing love vanished forever? Has His promise failed for all time? Has God forgotten to be merciful? Favor, love, promise, mercy, the psalmist. The psalmist is going right to who God really is. The psalmist is going to who God knows God to be. But the psalmist cry out there is just a cry that we always cry when unanswered prayer happens and that is, "Will my prayers even work?" It's sort of like when you tap the TV remote, "Is there batteries in this thing?" How do we even know that our prayers are going to work? But it's not so much about whether or not the prayers are going to work. It's the perspective on how do you see who you are praying to? Unanswered prayer shows us that our deepest needs are on the inside, not the outside. But our deepest problem is really a matter of perspective. It's not our circumstances. It's our perspective is the reason why we're worried. Our perspective is the reason why we're anxious. Our perspective is the reason why we're upset about our circumstances. And there has to be a healing of this perspective if we're going to approach God the right way in prayer. You're thinking, "What do you mean a healing of perspective?" I call it the Fisher and Pikel Principle, Fisher and Pikel Principle, or the washing machine principle. But I've got a Fisher and Pikel washing machine. And I have these moments where I think that there's been a 6.1 magnitude earthquake in the corner of our house because all sorts of banging starts to happen. And the whole foundations of that house itself begin to rock. And I race in thinking that something is literally about to explode. And then it starts giving me all sorts of weird lights. And the washing machine itself is crying out the God for help because it is in all sorts of disarray. And the reason being is that the laundry, my washing has, it's gone off center. And in the spin cycle, it's thrown itself so far out that it's about to self-destruct. Now the Bible says, "When you worry and you're just so deeply worried about something and you want to run and say to God, 'Give me this, give me this.' You've got to remember that God is the most important thing, not the request itself. But what's happened there, if you're constantly focused on that request, you've dissented yourself. The laundry's out of whack and you could possibly self-destruct. There has to be a healing of perspective. And there are lots of perspectives we can have in prayer. Lots of perspectives of God. Some of us think God's a vending machine. If I've been good at church this week, I've put my two bucks in and I'll have F3 and out will flow my prayer request. Other people see God as a boss. I've done my time, Lord. And as my employer, you should know what it is that I require and I have been good and are faithful and my prayer request becomes my timesheet. There's my paycheck. Deliver. And that's what the religious person does. Other people see God like a hard drive. I gave you my prayer request once. That's all I need to do. You should have stored it in your little ... You should have tricked God like a computer. You should have stored it there. I gave you my request once. I need not pray for it again. You should give me the answer. But that would be like saying, 'Well, yeah, I told my wife I loved her once in 1967. It doesn't work like that, does it?' You've got to keep telling your wife that you love her. You've got to keep in relationship and that gives us a hint in terms of the right perspective on God. The right perspective on God comes from passages like James chapter 1 where it says every good thing comes from God. It's saying in James 1, 'God gives liberally and begrudges us no good thing.' Which means that there is not a good thing that you have ever asked for that God has refused to give you. Every good thing comes from Him. Even in Isaiah 65, it says, 'Before they call, I will answer.' He already knows in advance the good things that you need and can't you see we've got an incredible picture here of a father like a dad running with presence behind his back up to his children and just desperately looking down and waiting for them to ask. You see, the right perspective says that God does and He will and He wants to bless you through prayer. The loving father that wants to pour this out upon you, that prayer does work. The prayer is required that you need to ask, says, 'Jesus all the time.' And so in other words, God is your loving father, that's who we pray to. And C.S. Lewis says it like this, 'For up till now we've been tackling the whole question in the wrong way and on the wrong level.' The very question does prayer work, puts us in the wrong frame of mind from the outset. Prayer work, as if it were magic or a machine, something that functions automatically. Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons, ourselves and the utterly concrete person, God. Prayer in the sense of petition, which is asking for things, is a small part of it. Confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration, its sanctuary. The presence and vision of enjoyment of God is bread and wine. And prayer God shows himself to us, that he answers prayers, is merely an overflow. Not necessarily the most important one from that revelation. And here it is. What he does is learned from what he is. What he does is learned first from what he is, unanswered prayer in the first instance like the Psalmist is to go back, verse seven to nine, and it offers us the search warrant to go back and see who God really is. Well, that's a smack in the face, isn't it? In the midst of that pain and tension that we have. But unanswered prayer is one of the best ways for you to get a perspective on yourself and a perspective on who God is. Because if you go and pray and prayers unanswered and you say, 'Lord, okay, it didn't happen', that's your will, then that's one thing. But if you pray and you go and say, 'Lord, you didn't give me this, and so therefore I can no longer be a Christian, I can no longer have faith. I can't keep believing.' Thank God showing that your laundry is off center. Brude it, Brude it, you know, that the buttons are screaming at you, that something is not right in your life. And so unanswered prayer gives you an opportunity like ASAP to get a perspective on who God is. Is he a vending machine? Is he a boss? Is he a hard drive? Or is he a loving father this morning? A dad who just desperately wants to pour the presents out upon you. He's a loving father desperately wanting to give you prayers and answers to those prayers. And so we see that unanswered prayer allows you to get some perspective. Here's the other thing, unanswered prayer when you get the search warrant for the sola out. Unanswered prayer you see is a paradox. Like if our perspective is correct, the prayer works and the God does answer prayers. And it makes no logical sense because the truth is God's our heavenly Father, who not only hears prayers, but not only that, that our prayers do change the very course and the action of history in the world. It does work. That's all through the Bible. But the paradox is that A prayer changes the world around us and so therefore you should ask God for things. But the paradox is that prayer doesn't change the world around us every time. The God only gives to us according to his will and not ours. The prayer changes things, but prayer doesn't change things. Well what's going on here? The trouble for many of us is that we see it's got to be one way or the other. We see that look if God's controlling everything then I've got no reason to pray. But then on the other hand I want every prayer answered on demand. But I lack the wisdom and the capacity to know what the right one should be. And so that's where the paradox comes down. Both truths are true. I can pray knowing that my prayer will change the course of history and there's way too many biblical examples for that. Joshua prays in the walls of Jericho, fall down, has a cry and two kings was going to die and he prays to God and God says he can live for another 15 years. Daniel prays and the lions decide to go on a diet for the night. Jesus prays and Lazarus walks out of the tomb, albeit a little bit smellyer than he was a few days before. The disciples pray and a man is healed on the steps of the synagogue and they get in a whole heap of trouble as a result. The Bible's clear God answers prayer. There's way too many examples and that's the tension because in your life there might have been prayers. There have been prayers that have been answered in the past but he's not answering this one. But there's also lots of reasons why God says no to our prayers, why he won't do anything. He might not be asking God enough. Matthew 4 says, ask, seek, knock half the time, we're not asking God. Maybe your relationship with your wife's not right, 1 Peter 3, it says that hinders your prayers. Maybe there's a sin in your life, a hidden sin in your life, Psalm 66 verse 18 says if I cherish sin in my heart the Lord would not have listened. Maybe there'd be faith or doubt. You know James chapter 1, he or you who doubts is like a read in the wind. Maybe you're a baby, maybe you lack maturity, maybe you lack the very things in your life, the capacity to receive the prayer in the first place. It's like trying to put a fire hose into a brown paper bag in order to carry water. Maybe you ask with impure motives as it says in James 4. Now look, I skip over these deliberately. You know that some preachers, they'll have a whole sermon that would be their six point sermon. You've got unanswered prayers in your life is because there's sin in your life, because you lack faith, because you're too immature. But I think it's so much more nuanced than that. And I think, look biblically, that there's elements of truth in that. So search warrant, we must look at that, we must not get caught up on that because the paradox of prayer is that we see that our prayers have a safety catch on them. They've got a safety switch, and what do you mean safety catch? There was this comedy set sketch on Comedy Central where there's this dad with his son at one of these American gun shows. And his little son is terribly upset, runs up and says, "Dad, why won't you buy me armor piercing bullets?" He was terribly upset with his father because of the gun show. The father wouldn't buy him armor piercing bullets for his gun. Now, the fact that the kid had a gun, that was not the funny bit. The fact was that the father says, "Well, no, son, not until you're ten." Now, it's funny, here's why. It's totally irresponsible. And the principle is this, that all mechanisms of great power have to have a safety catch on them. I mean, nuclear launch codes, driver's licenses, medicine bottles with the safety catch. All powerful things, good things, if placed in the wrong hands, or immature hands can hurt people. And the Bible says, "Prayer is like a million atom bombs going off." That is the power that is at your fingertips here. And then, if that's a case, wouldn't it be just as irresponsible as the gun show dad? That if your heavenly father placed every prayer request into your hands every time you wanted it? I mean, have you ever looked back on your life and seen some of those moments when you've earnestly and sincerely wanted stuff that you were sure that that's what you needed your time and your life, and if you had have got it, it would have been absolutely disastrous. I've seen friends, I've seen family members that have received inheritances in times in life where they lacked the maturity and the wisdom to handle it and it almost killed them. And so, in that way, there's a safety catch on all of this. That's the paradox of prayer. There's a safety catch on this. And so, look at the paradox of prayer biblically as we finish this point off. Last example, you know, John the Baptist is in jail and his disciples pray that he gets released and he gets beheaded. Peter on the other hand is in jail and a whole heap of the crew pray for him and the prayer is so answered that he knocks at the door and whilst they're praying he's knocking at the door and one of the girls runs to the door and it's like, "I can't believe it." We're just praying about you. It's exactly the same prayers, "Get me out of jail once beheaded, one gets freedom." What is that? It's in the Bible. Sometimes God sends his angels and sometimes God doesn't and there are lots of ways to say that prayer really does change things and yet God says, "Don't worry. There's a safety catch. You're not going to stuff up my creation." We are intimately involved in his creation, but we can't stuff it up. He's saying, "How could I? I'm God and you're not, therefore there's a safety catch." And so you think in this morning, "Well, that's great. How does that offer me any comfort?" Sometimes he answers, sometimes he doesn't. Unanswered prayer finally is backed by a promise. It gives you perspective. It's paradoxical. It doesn't make sense half the time, but there is a promise associated with it. That's the Star Trek principle. There's a famous episode that was back in about the 1960s called "City on the Edge of Forever." It was like the penultimate episode of series one of Star Trek. It's where Dr. McCoy accidentally gets sent back in time into the 1930s. He's in New York just before the Second World War and he becomes friends with Edith, a social worker. And part of the problem arises when McCoy inadvertently alters the course of history. You see, Edith was supposed to die in a car crash, a wonderful lady. And Spock and Kirk have to go back and have to try unwinding, see what McCoy has done. And what happens is, you see, Edith was supposed to die in the car crash, but because she doesn't, she goes and starts a peace movement which actually delays America's involvement in the Second World War so much so that the Nazis eventually win the Second World War and all of the world is plunged into horror and darkness. And so it's the job of Spock and Kirk to go back to actually make sure that she dies. Can you imagine a situation where the course of history itself hangs on the requirement of a bad thing happening to a good person? I'm being cheeky. You know where I'm getting at. You know, there was a garden, a dark and a horrible garden a couple of thousand years ago just outside the walls of modern day Jerusalem. And where we have to remember that there was one in the Bible who also copped an unanswered prayer against 70 Jesus Christ. God himself had an answered prayer and he says, "If it's possible, Dad, let this cut past from me." What do you mean, "If it's possible," he's saying, "If there's a possibility, if there's some other way to do this salvation thing, if there's some other way to save the world, if there's some other way to do this," he said, "I'd like to get out of this, please." He was turned down, "Why was it a lack of faith?" Here's the six point, was it the lack of faith? No, Jesus prayed in faith already, he had perfect faith. Faith was his job, "Oh, yeah, but was it some hidden sin?" It must have been some hidden sin in his life. Come on, Paul says he who had no sin became sin so that we might become the righteousness of God. There was not an ounce of sin in his body. Okay. Well, maybe he was a spiritual baby. Maybe he had a bit more growing up to do. Maybe he didn't have the capacity to handle this. No one had a connection to God like this God. No one had the spiritual maturity that this guy had. Jesus is constantly saying at one point that he's so mature that the work that you see him doing is actually the work that God is doing. That's how tight the connection was. "Oh, was it the wrong motive? Was he saying if this did his fleshliness get in the way and he just wanted to get out of it?" I was kidding, Dad. Was it the James 4 approach? No, he asked perfectly. He says, "Not my will, but your will be done and still God said no." He was praying the same way that we might pray. He was praying the same way that you might be praying this morning, "God, if it's possible, let this horrid situation pass me by. Please, God, I am begging you." It didn't. Why is that? Maybe it's because in his humanness, Jesus like us lacked the knowledge to see, lacked the knowledge to see in that dark night, in that garden that in three days time a glory and a power and a history-altering event is going to occur in his life. It would explode. You see, in that moment in his humanness, Jesus didn't fully understand the plan that was under way for his life. Jesus didn't know that this horrible thing that was about to happen to him, this horrible moment in darkness would change the course of history, and so that prayer of submission, not my will, but your will, Dad, but yours, Jesus held on to the promise that comes to you this morning in unanswered prayer, and here it is. That God will always answer your prayer with either what you want or what you would want if you know what God knows. The promise is God will answer you with what you want or what you would have wanted if you know what God knows about your life this morning. There is a plan in place, friend, if you were desperate, if you were desperate, if you were in the darkness, if you were in the garden this morning, there can be and there will be resurrection in your life. And there is a plan in place, I always said the guys, Ephesians 1, you know, you can choose whatever direction you want to swim in a tsunami. And God is a great tsunami, his kingdom is a great tsunami, Ephesians 1 said there is a plan in place that will have its way and will have its day, and we are now the community of the now, but not yet, and in the now we have that model of Jesus Christ in his darkest hour, and in your darkest hour, and your loneliest hour knowing that it will not last forever. In other words, God always gives you what you want, or he is going to give you better even though it looks worse at the time. And so I ask you this morning, are you crying out like the psalmist, are there unanswered prayers in your life, two simple things I will leave you with, one is confronting and one is comforting, I will get the confining one over and done with first and foremost. Here is the test, the confining one is the test, the litmus test, I am always saying that the litmus test is what you put in your pool to see you have got the right chlorine levels, measure it against the side of the bottle to make sure that you have got your right acidity levels. The litmus test for you this morning is, it says, if you are crying out, God unless you give me X, unless you give me X, then I do not know if I can believe. If you are saying that to him this morning, then it may be that X, that X is your real God, and not God himself. That that X is your source of peace and happiness and joy and comfort in life, that is your real source of comfort. That I must have this to be happy or peaceful or joyful in life. Where the Bible says everything to the contrary, that God must be that, and I guess you ask well how do I make God my peace and my happiness, my joy and my comfort, well here comes the comforting one, the comforting one this morning is that God was willing to swallow his own medicine, that he too understands the tension of an unanswered prayer. He too understands the tension that in the garden Jesus lived verse 1 to 3 of Psalm 77 where it says, I cried out to God for help, I cried out to God to hear me. When I was in distress, I sought the Lord at night in the garden, I stretched out my untiring hands, and my soul refused to be comforted, he says, I am at the point of sorrow. In the garden Jesus had none answered prayer just like Asa, maybe just like you this morning, and little did he know that in the darkness and in the coldness and in the loneliness that the plans and purposes of God were soon to explode into his life, and it can be the same for you this morning. Can I keep believing even when my prayers go unanswered, you know, my short answer was I don't know, you're gonna have to do time with God this morning, each and every one of us gets pushed at times in our Christian life closer and closer to that cliff edge. But the biblical truth of unanswered prayer this morning is that God will always give you either what you want or what you would have wanted, if you know what he knows about your life this morning, may you find peace, may you find comfort in that, may you wrestle with that this morning as we struggle with this topic of unanswered prayer, let's pray. [BLANK_AUDIO]