Week 3 – When God’s answer is “Sorry, but no”

Do you ever feel like a broken record when you pray? Is there a plea on your heart that you come to God with again and again?

 

I had a family member who fell down the rabbit hole of alcoholism for many years and I must have prayed for her almost daily for 20 years. I prayed as she brought her children down with her, I prayed when she was hospitalized. I prayed my gratitude when she went to rehab and then prayed my frustration when she fell back into her addiction again. I was 300 miles away from her and prayer was my only weapon against this insidious enemy. I knew that God could heal her and bring restoration into her life if it was his will.

But he didn’t.

She passed away at 42 years old and my prayers were never answered in the way I had hoped.

 

Sometimes I wondered if I didn’t pray in the right way – maybe I said the wrong things. Maybe I didn’t pray hard enough or long enough.

 

Jesus was a broken record, too. He prayed that God might take this cup of suffering from him not once, but three times in Matthew chapter 26. The same prayer. And guess what? God didn’t take his cup away, either.

 

You don’t need me to tell you that things don’t always turn out the way we want them to. Sometimes the very humans involved in our prayers simply won’t cooperate. Sometimes our prayers are rooted in what we want, not what God wants. And sometimes God just has a much bigger and better plan, even if it does involve pain. 

But prayer is more than jamming our wish into a bottle and sending it out to sea. Prayer is coming to God, talking to him like a friend, leaning on him as a child leans on her Father and trusting that His plan always beats our plan.
 Prayer is acknowledging that God can take even tragedy and death and make something beautiful out of it. 

Jesus’s death and resurrection are the greatest example of this. Jesus prayed that he might not have to go through with the brutal suffering and death his was facing, yet his crucifixion was the ultimate sacrifice made on our behalf that changed everything. Without Jesus’ sacrifice and God’s will being done, we would have never truly understood the depth of God’s love for us. We would have have never seen God’s mighty power in raising Jesus’ lifeless body from the dead. We would have never known a Savior so powerful that even death could not hold him, and we could never have paid the price for our sins on our own.

We can’t know God’s will. We can’t know how he’s going to take something ugly and destructive and make it into something beautiful one day. But prayer gives us the opportunity to come to God with our trust that he can and he will. We give him our prayers wearing a hefty dose of trust on our sleeves.

 

This is the transforming power of prayer. As we pray like broken records, we develop a muscle of trust, our faith is strengthened and we begin to want what God wants more than what we want.