Unanswered Prayer
The question put into the mouth of the unbeliever by Job, is perfectly legitimate and reverent if properly asked: «What profit should we have if we pray unto Him?” I was somewhat appalled — and that really suggested this chapter — by receiving from a prominent Christian man a letter in which he confesses that he has given up praying. He went so far as to say that God had utterly failed him at the mercy-seat. The letter was signed by the writer’s name, and he cast himself upon me in sympathy, asking me to approach God in his behalf. It set me anew inquiring: ‘* What profit shall we have if we pray unto Him? “and, “What is the cause of unanswered prayer?” This question I pray that I may in some measure answer, purely upon the lines of Bible teaching.
For the sake of brevity and unity I confine myself to suggestions from the Epistle of James. That Epistle, in its five chapters, has more direct teaching upon the causes of failure in prayer than any other single book in the New Testament. It has three references to prayer — in the first chapter, the fourth, and the fifth.
In the first chapter we have a hint of two causes of the lack of power in prayer — the lack of faith and the lack of patience. In the fourth chapter two causes additional — selfishness in motive, and worldly alliance. In the fifth chapter we have likewise two causes of failure, found in the lack of importunity, and in not maintaining the level of faith in waiting for answers. This is very comprehensive, but all we can do is to outline the subject as presented in this Epistle. Let us be intensely busy at business questions. These are no theoretical matters that we meditate upon, but the intensest business that the child of God can set himself to understand; for the secret of prevailing power in prayer lies at the bottom of everything else in the Christian life. There is no subdued sin without it, no relief from darkness without it, no relief from the sin and crime of unbelief without it.
Three great facts confront us at the beginning. The multitude of God’s promises; the unequivocal universality of His promises; and the undeniable fact that the majority of prayers are not answered.
The multitude of the promises is overwhelming. There are nearly three thousand promises in the Psalms, and the Bible has more than thirty thousand in it. If you add all the indirect promises, there are nearly double that number. The largest number of those promises are addressed to the praying soul.
As to the universality of the promises, there are seven universal terms in the Bible — “whosoever,” “whatsoever,” “wheresoever,” ‘♦ whensoever,” “any,” “all,” “every.” All these universal terms are applied to prayer. It is marvellous that, with these promises facing us in the Word, and the universal terms in which they are couched, we should be obliged to confront that third and awful fact — that the majority of prayers have no perceptible answer — that the cases of answered prayer are the exception and not the rule. 1 cannot say what I do not believe, and I candidly believe this statement is true.
There have been various ways of trying to account for this. Some have said that the promises to the prayerful are addressed, especially in the New Testament, to the apostles and disciples of that day. “If two of you shall agree” — you, apostles; “This confidence have we in Him” — we, apostles. This theory is mischievous! You can take the power out of the whole Bible by limiting its application in that fashion.
The second way to account for it has been that prayer is of the order of the supernatural, and hence belongs to the age of miracles; and the age of miracles is past. Very convenient for unbelief and disappointed suppliants, who know nothing of the secrets of prevailing prayer!
The third cause suggested is that the Church of God has run into a period of apostasy, and the Holy Ghost has withdrawn, and it is a time of God’s silence.
But over against all these paltry, insignificant, and, in some respects, God-insulting philosophies and excuses, stands the patent fact — some people pray and get answers. Müller, of Bristol, raised the great monument of two generations past to a prayer-hearing God, and that monument still stands, and is not worn away by an acid atmosphere either. It is as bright and strong and glowing as ever. People said when Mialler died:
“Very few people know Mr. Wright “; and when Mr. Wright died, ‘• Nobody knows Mr. Bergin.” But, blessed be God, some people know God, and the work is going on just the same as ever, and some of the most marvellous interpositions of God have come since Mr. Muller and Mr. Wright died. The last report shows the same prayer-hearing God watching over a larger number of orphans than have been in that great group of orphan houses for ten, twelve, or fifteen years past. And they are doing what nobody else ever did — advertising for more orphans — not for more funds, but for more children to take care of in the name of the living God.
Look at the teaching of the Holy Spirit through the Apostle James. Sixteen words in that fourth chapter, are, in my opinion, the greatest words ever written in rebuke to prayerless souls.” Ye have not because ye ask not. Ye ask and receive not because ye ask amiss.’’ Write those sixteen words in burning capitals, and let us look at them.
I have already referred to the fact of how little prayer there is; it is awful and appalling. Three things face us in the destitution of prayer: first, the insignificant time given to prayer; second, the narrow range of supplications; and, third, the little heart that enters into them. “Ye have not because ye ask not.”
But let us look at asking amiss. In the first chapter are two difficulties in the line of profitless prayer to which, first, reference is made: “Let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea, driven with the wind and tossed. For let not that man think that he shall receive anything of the Lord. A double-souled man is in all his ways unstable.” Here are the two difficulties — a lack of faith, and a lack of patience.
Lack of faith is virtually making God a liar. Let us look at the fact exactly as it is. If God promises to the praying soul, in unequivocal terms and in a multitude of forms, absolutely sure answers, then to doubt God’s promises is to make Him a liar; and no blessing can come to any man that impugns the veracity of God. But the faith must be a patient faith that knows how to wait. Here is one of the most remarkable similes in Scripture — “The man that wavereth is like “— not the wave of the sea, but (Gr.)” the surge of the sea,” the foam on the top of the wave, “driven with the wind, and tossed.” At the seashore when the wind is blowing, you see two motions — one to-and-fro, that you call “fluctuation “; one up-and-down, that you call “undulation.” The Apostle James refers to both motions. “Driven with the wind” is fluctuation; “tossed” is undulation. The peculiarity of a wave is that it cannot stay anywhere; wherever it gets it falls back. If it gets ahead it recedes, and we call it a receding wave; if it gets up it goes down, and we call it a falling wave; and a double-souled man is exactly like it — mere foam, for foam is most easily moved up and down, and to and fro, of anything about the water.
The difficulty is that, if a man who has no proper faith is propelled ahead, back he goes to his other and former standards. Or if he is lifted up in ecstasy and exaltation, he cannot stay there, down he goes; he is in the trough of the sea five minutes afterwards, just like the surge of the sea, fluctuating and undulating, with no power to hold on. There can be no prevailing prayer without this power to hold on. Hundreds go and commit a thing to God one minute, and take it back the next. They are afraid that God cannot take care of it for any length of time; they must give God their aid. When God revealed to Abraham that in his old age, when
Sarah was past bearing, they should have a son of promise born to them, we are told in Gen. XV. 6 “He believed in the Lord, and He counted it to him for righteousness.” A great triumph! But look in the beginning of the sixteenth chapter, and see how long the triumph lasted. Abraham made an iniquitous connection with Hagar, an Egyptian maid, and that child born to him was one of the greatest curses that ever came on the earth. Why could not he have left it sublimely where faith committed it, to the miracle-working God? Even the father of the faithful failed at the crisis. In the crisis of David’s kingdom, when Ahithophel was counsellor, and he and other conspirators went over to the side of Absalom in the rebellion, David had no man to cope wiih Ahithophel, and he prayed: “O Lord, I pray Thee, turn the counsel of Ahithophel into foolishness.” Why did not he leave it there? Read on. As David was going up he met Hushai, the Archite, and said: “You pretend to be a traitor, arid go over to Absalom’s side, and make believe you are faithful to him, and watch and see what Ahithophel says, that thoji mayest turn for me the counsel of Ahithophel into foolishness.” That is the trouble with us, that we commit a thing to God in a sublime act of faith one moment, and the next moment we take it out of God’s hand, and put it in man’s hand, or try ourselves to take care of it — just like the surge of the sea, up and down, to and fro, never staying anywhere.
In that fourth chapter we see two other obstacles put before us. “Ye ask and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.” Lusts there do not necessarily mean vicious, sensual, abominable desires, but simply the carnal desires of self-indulgence, as when a man asks for money because he wants the gratification money brings; or for pleasures of the appetite, because he wants his stomach to be satisfied and gratified; or for rewards of ambition, because he wants to get on and hold the sceptre of influence over men. How many things we forfeit because they are asked for in a wrong spirit, because self is at the bottom, instead of God being the object in all. You can even ask for spiritual blessings, for the anointing of the Spirit, because you want to have all eyes turned upon you as an anointed man or woman, in order that somebody may say: “See how holy that man or woman is,” or “What remarkable power goes with this. or that person!” You never get the anointing when it is sought in that way. Let us observe that, if God gave us some things that we asked for, they would be a great curse to us, and not a blessing. Remember Kibroth-hattaavah in the 11th chapter of Numbers. “The graves of those that lusted.” The people, complaining and murmuring, said: ‘* We are tired of this disgusting manna: give us flesh to eat.” God said: “I will give you flesh, and you shall eat it till it come out at your nostrils;” and “ere the flesh was chewed, the wrath of the Lord came and slew the fattest of them.” They got fat in the body, but lean in soul. He gave them their request, but sent leanness into their souls. Do you want that God should send leanness into your soul in sending fatness to your body, feeding your carnal and starving your spiritual nature? If that is not what you want, be careful that you do not ask from selfish, lustful motives. Agrippina, the mother of Nero, asked of her gods that they would set her son upon the throne; and the first thing he did when set upon the throne was to plan the death of his own mother. Hezekiah, when told that he should die and not live, turned his face to the wall, and began reciting his good deeds before the Lord, and pleaded for life, and the Lord spared him fifteen years. But they were years of disgrace. He stripped the gold from the doors of the temple of the Lord and gave it to the enemies of God, and he lived long enough to beget Manasseh, who was the greatest curse that Judah ever had. He was the Ahab of Judah i and the afflictions and captivity of Judah were mainly owing to the sins of Manasseh. How much better if Hezekiah had died when the Lord gave him notice — better for him, for Judah, and for the whole world! Look out for selfishness of motive in your praying. That is one reason why God keeps you waiting until He refines away your carnality, and gets you up on the high spiritual level in which you can pray in the Holy Ghost.
“Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Whosoever, therefore, will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.” Think of a woman, married to an honourable, upright, and holy man, walking through the streets in broad daylight, arm in arm with one that is attempting to supplant him, and then going to her husband for any special favour! When God sees you walking arm in arm with the world that crucified Jesus, and identified with the world
o before men, how can He hear your prayer? Your prayers are an insult. All alliance with the world implies the predominance of the carnal, and the carnal can never pray acceptably. All power in prayer depends on a vision of the Eternal, on Communion with the Eternal, on the atmosphere of the Eternal, and, if you are engrossed and absorbed in the temporal, how can you breathe the atmosphere, or have a vision of the Eternal; how can you lay hold upon the powers of the age to come? There is no difficulty in accounting for failure in ten thousand cases, because the prayers are those of essentially worldly people, who know almost nothing of coming into real touch with the Eternal Spirit of God.
In the last chapter, additional lessons are taught with regard to the secrets of prevailing power in prayer and of the lack of it. “Elijah was a man of like passions as we are.” Thank God for that! He got under a juniper tree, as you and I have often done; he complained and murmured, as we have often done; was unbelieving, as we have often been. But that was not the case when he really got into touch with God. Though “a man of like passions as we are,” ‘’he prayed praying.” It is sublime in the original — not “earnestly,”
but “he prayed In prayer.” He kept on praying. “He prayed earnestly that it might not rain,” and for three and a-half years — they might have had showers and dews, but no searching rain — it rained not. “And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit.”
What is the lesson here? You must heep praying. Come up on the top of Carmel, and see that remarkable parable of faith and sight. It was not the descent of the fire that now was necessary, but the descent of the flood; and the man that can command the fire can command the flood by the same means and methods. We are told, that he bowed himself to the ground with his face between his knees — that is, shutting out all sights and sounds. He was putting himself in a position where, beneath his mantle, he could neither see nor hear what was going forward. He said to his servant: “Go and take an observation.” He went, and came back, and said — how sublimely brief! one word — ‘’Nothing!” What do we do under such circumstances? We say: It’s just as I expected 1” and we give up praying. Did Elijah? No he said: “Go again.” His servant again came back, and said: “Nothing I” “Go again.” “Nothing 1” “Go again.” “Nothing!”
By and by he came back, and said: “There is a little cloud like a man’s hand.” A man’s hand had been raised in supplication, and had left its shadow on the heavens, and presently down came the rain; and Ahab had not time to get back to the gate of Samaria with all his fast steeds.
That is a parable of Faith and sight — faith shutting itself up with God; sight taking observations, and seeing nothing; faith going right on, and “praying in prayer,” with utterly hopeless reports from sight. Do you know how to pray that way, how to pray prevailingly? Let sight give as discouraging reports as it may, but pay no attention to these. The living God is still in the heavens, and He hath done whatsoever He hath pleased. Even to delay is a part of His goodness.
Look still further. Elijah kept on the height of the mountain till he got the answer to his prayer. Do you know what it is to maintain the high plane and level of faith till the answer comes? What great mistakes are made 1 When the Lord lifts us up to a high level of faith and expectancy, we offer prayer on that level; but we hasten to get down to the carnal level, as if we supposed that answers could be given to the prayer of faith on any other than the plane of faith! I have had no idea impressed on my mind from the Word of God in connection with prevaiHng prayer more inspiring and rebuking than this: That answers to the prayer of faith can only be received and recognised on the plane of faith. Get up into the heavenly levels to talk with God; He is not coming down to the carnal level to talk with you; He wants you to stay there till He has given you His answer. Hence the typical significance of Elijah staying up on the mountain, sight, over and over again, taking observations until the answer of God had come. It is a great thing to keep praying, and in a frame of holy expectation till the blessing comes.
It pays to stay there waiting on God. Monica, the mother of Augustine, besought God for many years that Augustine might not go to Rome, because Rome was then, as now, the centre of all the iniquity of the Continent. Augustine was a profligate, and she felt that his going to Rome would ensure his rapid ruin, and she besought God not to let him go. He did go to Rome. Did she give up? Not at all. She said:” If the Lord does not grant me what I ask, He will grant me something better.’
His going to Rome was the means of his coming into contact with Ambrose, of Milan, and that was the means of his becoming converted, and afterwards a great leader and defender of the faith, one of the fathers of the early Church. So that God, in refusing the literal request of Monica, fulfilled her heart’s great desire.
What a great blessing my late friend, Dr. Moon, of Brighton, has been — the projector of the great Moon System to help the blind to read the Word of God, the best of its kind ever devised. When twenty-three years of age, he was struck with total blindness. He besought God, when the symptoms were coming on, that He would deliver him from this calamity. He was an educated, cultivated man, at the beginning of his true service of God and man. But the blindness continued. What did he do? It is one of the sublime things in history. He looked up to God,, and said: “My heavenly Father, I thank Thee for the talent of blindness. May I so invest that talent that at the coming of the Lord Jesus He may receive His own with usury.” Is not that sublimely, and ecstatically heavenly? The Lord soon taught him that He had permitted the blindness that he might minister to the millions of blind people in the world; and Dr. Moon used his inventive faculties and devised this system, containing only a very few characters in combination. According to recent accounts that system has been utilised in nearly live hundred languages and dialects. So that, when this man went to heaven a few years ago, he must have found thousands who had gone to heaven through reading the raised characters by which he made it possible to commune with the Word of God. By taking blindness as a talent from God, and using it for God, he accomplished far more for God and man than he ever could have done if he had followed out the devices and desires of his own heart.
The love of God quite as often withholds as grants. Hence the necessity of trusting God to do His own way. He always gives what we ask, or something better. He consults our wants, not our wishes, like a wise and loving Father. His delays are not denials. Delay may discipline faith, teach us patience, and fit us for blessing. Moreover, there are blessed indirect answers to prayer. Prayer is answered most emphatically when God keeps you praying, when God keeps you in a tender state, when He leads you to trust Him absolutely in the absence of all outward signs of answer. The sublimest triumph of prayer is to trust God absolutely when you do not get any sensible answer whatever. There is no other triumph of prayer so great as that. We should all like to live by faith and sight together; but somehow they are incompatible.
May I sum up what I conceive to be the teachings of the Word of God, by what I call the twelve levels of prayer and answer. The first four levels are the levels of vain praying; the next four, the levels of prevailing prayer and the next four the levels of Divine answer.
Down at the very bottom is the level of known sin. “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.” When sin is enthroned and enshrined in the heart, prayers are worse than vain. The second level is selfishness, when you are asking for self-indulgence, self-gratification, something terminating upon yourself, not the glory of God. The third level is the level of form. •’This people draweth nigh to Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me.” God does not care a farthing for prayers which have no heart in them. The mere externals of worship. He says, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting “— or, as it ought to read: “I cannot away with iniquity and the solemn meeting” — “I cannot have the two go together.” The fourth level of vain praying is the level of unbelief, where there is no expectation of receiving, no faith in God as the Giver.
Above those levels we rise to those of prevailing prayer, and the lowest is that of spiritual desire. You want something, and it is right that you should, and you ask simply from the impulse of a strong yearning. Perfectly right! “Ask and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you.” A higher level is that where you appreciate the Fatherhood of God and your relation as His child, and set up a child’s claim to a Father’s blessing. The desire is emphasised by your conscious relation to God as His child. The third level is that where you appreciate your position as a disciple in Christ, and claim in the name of Jesus Christ what you dare not claim in your own name. You have felt desire, you have added to it a consciousness of filial relation; and, to that, the consciousness of the disciple’s relation, unknown except as we touch the fourteenth chapter of John — the first time that Christ ever spoke about praying in His name, and between the fourteenth and sixteenth chapters seven times repeated. He said, in the sixteenth chapter: “Hitherto have ye asked nothing in My name.” Up to that time no Old Testament saint or New Testament saint had ever prayed in His name. The fourth level is where the Holy Spirit working in you, unhindered, groans after God. This is the highest level of prayer, indicated in Rom. viii., where we are told that the Spirit Himself groans within us unutterably. No words will express it, but God hears and cares far more for that than for any words, however well framed.
We come now to the levels of answer. The lowest is where you get what you ask in the way that you ask, like Eliezer, who made the specific request that the maiden who should give the camels drink might be the one appointed for Isaac; and, while he was praying, Rebekah came and did what he asked; and he does not seem to have been surprised, which is a delightful feature. He did not say: “It is a wonderful answer!” Rather let us wonder that God should not do what we ask, or as we ask.
The next level of prayer is where the answer does not come at the time, or in the way, perhaps, that we expect, or is both delayed and disguised. In the case of Elijah on Mount Carmel it was delayed. The most marked instance in the New Testament is the Syrophenician woman. She was under the ban of the curse; she did not belong even to the “lost sheep of the house of Israel;” she had not a promise to take hold of. “He answered her not a word.” Then, when He did speak, He refused, and reproached her with the only, apparently reproachful term He ever used. But look at the logic and wit of her importunity! She said: “You call me a little dog, and make that a reason why I should not have the children’s bread. I make that a reason why I should have it, for the little dogs under the table do get the crumbs” — the only time that the Lord Jesus was refuted and confuted out of His own mouth. Of course, He had to give her the blessing. She made His argument against it a reason for it, and it is a most remarkable case. He seems to have gone all the way from the lake of Galilee to the shores of the Mediterranean, and back, just for the sake of that woman, for there is no record of any other act performed on the way to and fro. He went to meet this woman whom He treated with silence, and then with refusal, and apparent reproach; but He gave her what she asked, and it is not irreverent to say He could not help it.
Notice, again, that sometimes the answer is denied, and here is yet a higher level. But compensation comes with the denial, just as in the instances of Monica and Dr. Moon. Paul (2 Cor. xii.) prayed about what is described as a “thorn,” but Paul would not have made such a fuss over a thorn: it was a “stake in the flesh,” and he prayed to God that it might be taken out of the way. Probably he thought it was affecting his usefulness to men. The Lord distinctly denied the request, but more than made up for the denial with overwhelming grace; and said: “My strength is made perfect in weakness;” not merely, “Your weakness shall be made an opportunity for the display of My strength,” but, more than all, the only way to make God’s strength perfect is for us to get into a perfect condition of destitution of soul.
The last and highest of all the levels of answer is where the answer is not only delayed, not only disguised, not only apparently denied for a time, but after your praying, God seems to preserve an absolute and obstinate silence. No answer comes, you live and, perhaps, die, and never get an answer; but you have not a doubt of the prayer-hearing God. I asked Mr. Muller a short time before he died if he had asked anything of God that had not been granted, and he told me he had prayed sixty-two years, three months, five days, two hours — with his mathematical precision — for two men to be converted, neither of whom was converted, and there were no signs of it. I said: “Do you expect God to convert them?” “Certainly. Do you suppose that God would put upon His child for sixty-two years the burden of two souls if He had no purpose of their salvation? I shall meet them in heaven certainly.” Shortly afterwards he died, and I was preaching in his pulpit, in Bristol, and referred to this occurrence. As I was going out a lady said: “One of those men was my uncle, and he was converted, and died a few weeks ago.”
I have read of a most godly man who spent forty years in one church, and agonised in prayer for worldly people in his congregation, who resisted all his efforts to bring them to Christ. He not only prayed for them, and preached the Gospel to them, but lived before them in a remarkable way. A saintly man, moving up and down in the community with the fragrance of God upon him. But he died without the sight; there was not a man of them all brought to Christ during his ministry. But when he died, and his body lay in the coffin, and the funeral service was being held, those men were brought to Christ in the presence of that dead body — a remarkable instance of God answering prayer in a wonderful way, after it was impossible for the suppliant soul to see on earth the triumphs of prayer.
Our sight is good for nothing. Sometimes it is too far sight, sometimes it is too near sight, but never accurate. Let God judge for you. Bring your cause and commit it to Him, leave it in His hand, go away from the throne of grace with absolute repose in the fidelity of a prayer-hearing God. Do not let unbelieving disciples, and that father of liars, the Devil, rob you of your confidence that God is true. Believe Him, trust Him, reckon upon Him, rest in Him; and if you do not see the answer, believe that He will show you the answer, though it may be after many days.