Lynn Jones: The problem of unanswered prayer

By Lynn Jones

Garth Brooks once recorded a song about a distinctly theological problem. The song tells about the time when he was in high school, fell madly in love with a girl in his class, and prayed to God every night that she would fall in love with him. 

It never happened. Time passed, and he married someone else. Then, several years later, he and his wife saw his old flame at a hometown football game. When he saw her, she was not quite the angel that he had remembered. He could tell by the way she looked at him that she was not very impressed with what the years had done to him either. As she walked away, he looked at his wife and then silently thanked the Lord for not answering the prayer that he had prayed as a boy. He concludes with a chorus that proclaims, “Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.” The title of the song is “Unanswered Prayer.”

You may never have offered a prayer like that, but all of us have prayed about some things that we wanted very badly. Often those prayers were unanswered. At the time, we may have felt deeply disappointed and perhaps even a little bitter about not receiving the answer that we wanted. Time, however, has a way of changing our perspective on the matter.

One day James and John came to Jesus with a request. They said that when He came into His kingdom, they wanted Him to give them the left-hand and the right-hand seats in the kingdom. Jesus did not grant their request. And it was a good thing that He did not. Soon Jesus was nailed to a cross in Jerusalem. By His death on the cross, He came into His kingdom. Had He granted the request of James and John, at that moment they would have been dying on the crosses on His left-hand and on His right-hand.

As Paul carried out his ministry, he was dogged by a recurring problem. He called it his “thorn in the flesh.” We are not sure exactly what it was, but it brought great suffering and difficulty in his life. So, Paul prayed about it. In three periods of prayer, he asked the Lord to take it away. God did not answer the prayer. Instead of taking the thorn away, God said, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” In retrospect, Paul was thankful that God had not answered the prayer by taking the thorn away. He said, “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.”

The poet Tagore wrote, “Lord, thou hast saved me by thy hard refusals.” Or, as Garth Brooks put it, “Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.”

Lynn Jones is a retired pastor who lives in Oxford. He does supply preaching for churches in his area and often serves as an interim pastor. Jones is also an author, has written two books and writes a weekly newspaper column. He may be contacted at: kljones45@yahoo.com.