Why do some of our prayers seem to go unanswered—temporarily, long-term, or forever? How do we keep praying when answers are delayed or don’t look the way we hoped? In this episode, we tackle one of the hardest questions in the Christian life: understanding God’s responses to prayer when they don’t match our expectations. In this episode, we examine:
✓ What does “ask anything and it will be yours” really mean? (Mark 11:24, John 15:7)
✓ The difference between prosperity gospel and biblical prayer
✓ Why faith isn’t about “believing hard enough”
✓ Four reasons God delays or denies prayer requests
✓ How to trust God’s character when prayers aren’t answered
✓ The supernatural work happening behind our prayers
✓ Praying with persistence through long seasons of waiting If you’ve ever felt discouraged by unanswered prayer, this episode will help you pray with faith and hope—even in the waiting.
— 📚 RESOURCES MENTIONED: — Every Woman A Theologian website: https://phyliciamasonheimer.com — Verse-by-verse Bible studies:
- Amos & Micah: https://tsfqr.com/Amos
- 1-3 John: https://tsfqr.com/13john
- Galatians: https://tsfqr.com/Galatians
- Revelation: https://tsfqr.com/Rev
- Leviticus: https://tsfqr.com/Leviticus
— Books:
- Every Woman a Theologian: https://tsfqr.com/EWATbook
- Every Home a Foundation: https://tsfqr.com/Every-home
- Stop Calling Me Beautiful: https://tsfqr.com/Beautiful
- Kids’ Resources: https://tsfqr.com/EWATkids
📧 QUESTIONS? Email: phylicia@phyliciamasonheimer.com
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Transctiption
He invites us to pray. He commands us to pray. Why does God care about that? Why would he care about me praying? Because he wants your cooperation. He wants you to be a part of what he’s doing in the lives of other people. Welcome back to Verity Podcast, friends. I’m Phylicia Masonheimer, your host, and we are in the middle of our series on prayer. Every episode in this series was a question submitted by one of our listeners, so thank you so much for sending those in. We took the most popular of those questions, and that’s how we built out this prayer series.
If you’d like to listen back, you can check out our previous episodes in this series on YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, or your favorite podcast app. Today we’re talking about God’s answers to prayer, or rather, why do some of our prayers go unanswered? Maybe temporarily or for a very long time or forever? Why are there certain things that we pray for that we don’t see a fulfillment of? And, and how do we understand that? How do we keep praying for things when answers are delayed or they don’t look the way that we wish? Well, as usual, we’re going to start in scripture, but before we get there, I want to thank you so much for subscribing to our YouTube channel, subscribing to iTunes. It helps other people find Every Woman a Theologian and Verity Podcast. And also, thank you so much for supporting us by shopping in the Every Woman a Theologian bookstore. This is how our ministry is supported. We’re supported through the sales of our Bible studies and our books, and you can check those out at phyliciamasonheimer.com. We’re known for our verse-by-verse Bible studies. We have 5 of them on Revelation, Leviticus, 1st through 3rd John, Galatians, and Amos and Micah.
But we also have a series of multi-sensory Charlotte Mason inspired Bible studies on Women of the Bible, Proverbs, and the Gospel of John, and then dozens more resources as well. So you can head to phyliciamasonheimer.com to check those out. Mark your calendars for March 2026 when we will be launching our spring products. And in this launch, we have a focus on prayer. So everything we’re talking about in these episodes is going to come to you in brand new resources during the March 2026 launch. All right, let’s dive into what scripture says about prayer and its answers. That’s the best place to start. We’re going to look at several different passages here, kind of talk through them, and then I have 4 main points for you as we wrap up this episode and kind of get through what it means for us to understand God’s answers in unanswered prayer.
So let’s start with Mark 11:24. This one’s probably the most basic, well-known passage on this topic. I’m going to pull up the full context for us, but Mark 11:24 specifically, just that verse, says, therefore I tell you— Jesus talking— whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. Now, in my previous episode on deliverance prayer, we touched on prosperity gospel, which is the idea that if you command something in prayer, if you say the right words, if you’re praying well enough in the spirit, then you will receive anything that you ask for. That could be a car, it could be a new job, it could be a spouse, it could be a baby— any of those things. If you command it with the right verbiage or pray hard enough, then you can actually make things happen. It’s very close to manifestation. It’s a form of the prosperity gospel.
So when we hear a phrase like this right from Jesus’ mouth, this can be really alarming because we’re going, oh my goodness, if Jesus is saying this, ask whatever you want in prayer, believe you’ve received it, and it will be yours. How do we understand this? If the prosperity gospel isn’t biblical? So let’s look at the whole context of this passage. This is getting close to, um, the time when Jesus is going to be crucified. And this entire section in the New International Version is labeled, Jesus Curses a Fig Tree and Clears the Temple Courts. So he’s about to cleanse the temple. And verse 15 says, on reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple courts and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple courts. He says, you know, my house has become a den of robbers.
It should be a house of prayer. The teachers of the law want to kill him at this point, verse 18, and then Jesus and his disciples, verse 19, go out of the city and see this fig tree that Jesus had cursed earlier. And the fig tree is completely withered. Peter remarks on it. He says, look, Lord, this fig tree is completely withered. Verse 22, Jesus says, have faith in God. Truly, I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, go throw yourself into the sea, and does not doubt in their heart, but believe that what they say will happen, it will be done for them. Therefore, I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you’ve received it and it will be yours.
And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins. There’s a lot there in this passage, but I wanted to make sure that you understood what was going on contextually around this particular verse. So let’s talk about Jesus’ posture here. So he curses this fig tree, which wasn’t bearing fruit, and then it completely withers. His disciples see it after the cleansing of the temple and are astonished that this tree just completely gave up the ghost after its interaction with Jesus. And they ask him about it, and he uses this phrase. He says, truly, I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, throw yourself into the sea, and does not doubt, it will be done for them. This phrase regarding the mountain, that faith moves mountains, this phrase is a Jewish phrase, and the mountain represents difficulty, like an insurmountable difficulty.
It would have been a well-known metaphor for the disciples, definitely not something shocking or new for them to hear said. But Jesus is saying that if you want a mountain to be removed, if you want to overcome, the one who does not doubt but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them. Therefore, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that it’s going to happen and it will be yours. This is really a hard passage for people, um, who— especially those coming out of the New Age movement where manifestation is very popular. But at the time that you’re watching this episode, our previous episode will already be out on praying God’s will. And I’m so glad that this is how our episodes happened to come out. This is actually— I didn’t plan that. I wish I could give myself credit for that, but I didn’t.
We did the episode on God’s will, and now we’re doing the episode on God’s answers to prayer. And truthfully, you cannot separate these two topics because what’s in view here is not that you are praying for this mountain to be removed out of selfishness. You’re asking for whatever you particularly want, for your— to spend on your own pleasures, to focus on your own experiences and your own desires, but that what you are praying, the things you’re asking for, are aligned with God’s heart and God’s will. And so if you haven’t listened to that episode yet, go back and listen to it because it’s so important to understand the context of what it means to pray in God’s will to understand Mark 11. So when Jesus says, I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe you’ve received it and it will be yours. This isn’t manifestation. This isn’t like, well, I, I am believing that I’m going to be wealthy. I’m believing that I’m going to be super rich.
I’m believing that I’m going to have a baby. I’m believing that I’m going to find a spouse. Some of these things are, are good, decent things that truly glorify the Lord. But just because we believe that they will happen doesn’t mean they will happen. What’s in view here in Mark 11 is praying in God’s will, having a heart that is submitted to God’s will. Jesus was able to wither the fig tree, one, because he’s God, but two, because that fig tree was representative of the fruitless lives of the Pharisees. And it was a teaching moment, a visual moment for his disciples, for him, and for him to use as kind of an echo of what happened in the temple courts. You have it in the cleansing of the temple, the fruitless lives of the Jewish leaders that he condemns and he cleanses, you know, physically the temple.
He goes out of the city. Here is a visual of what happens to the fruitless life. It withers. And then out of that, Jesus teaches his disciples. So in withering the fig tree, Jesus is not doing this just because he’s mad at the fig tree for not having figs. He is doing this out of the righteous will of God, in alignment with the will of God. What he’s praying, what he’s commanding, is completely aligned with the Holy Spirit’s intention in that moment. And when we are praying, that is what we should be doing.
So we’re not commanding things for convenience sake. And I wanted to start with this passage because I think people get really disappointed when they pray and they ask and they put these requests to the Lord, and then it doesn’t look the way they thought it would look. How do I understand Mark 11 if this isn’t changing? And a lot of that comes back to faith and long-term trust, which we’ll get to in a second, but also understanding the will of the Lord and alignment with the will of the Lord as the basis for what we’re praying. The next passage is 1 John 5:14-15. This is the confidence that we have towards him, that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we’ve asked of him. So this is, this is a little like John, the way he writes in 1 John. He just, he moves so fast and he’s kind of building on each sentence one after the other.
So here’s how he built this argument. He says, We have confidence in God that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. If we know He hears us in what we’re asking, we know we have the requests we’ve asked of Him. So our confidence is, if we’re asking according to His will, He hears us. And if He hears us, we know He’s going to answer us. He’s going to answer us. Once again, looking at this passage and looking at our human experiences, we start to go, Well, I haven’t, I haven’t gotten what I asked for. I haven’t always gotten what I asked for.
I haven’t heard back from God. This hasn’t occurred. I haven’t seen, you know, the answer to my prayer. So what, how do I navigate a passage like this? We’re going to get there. John 15:7, Gospel of John. If you abide in me, Jesus talking, if you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you. Are you seeing a trend here? This is now 3 verses that we’ve looked at where it’s just plain and simple, ask whatever you wish and it will be done. So there’s got to be something more to this, to our understanding of this, than meets the eye if in our experiences we do ask whatever we wish, we even ask according to God’s will, and things are not being done.
For us. Let’s look at Hebrews 11:6. Without faith, it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. So this passage is talking about the basis of prayer, which is faith. And in the context of Hebrews 11, they’re looking at the different individuals in the history of the Christian faith all the way through the Old Testament who have put faith in God and have pleased him by their faith. But that faith meant that they would draw near to God. They believe he exists, and they don’t just believe he exists, they also believe he rewards those who seek him. This is the difference between demonic belief, like intellectual belief Jesus existed in the world, and faithful belief.
So the demons believe God exists. They believe he exists, but they do not believe that he rewards those who seek him in the sense that they themselves ever submitted to that. They actually rejected that. They turned away from God and chose to seek themselves. And so true faith believes God rewards those who seek him. It’s a seeker’s heart. Who draws near to God and puts faith in him. Now we have a couple other passages here that we’re going to look at throughout the rest of this episode, but I want to pause with those four, specifically those first three that are so explicit that if you ask, he will answer, because that rubs up against our experience as Christians.
I have some personal experience with this. Um, many of you know from watching our testimony video on, on YouTube, on this podcast, that in 2024 we had 2 miscarriages. One was in January, one was in June. And the January one just took us by surprise because I had never struggled with secondary infertility that I knew of before. And now looking back, we know that it had been going on for quite some time, but we didn’t really know what to do in January. But in June, when I found out I was pregnant, we immediately asked people to pray for us, to join us in prayer for this baby’s life. And this pregnancy lasted longer than the one in January, but it also ended in miscarriage. And I will tell you that that was a very hard, dark time.
Why did God not answer the prayer that I prayed for that child’s life? But then fast forwarding to 2025, January 2025, when we found out we were pregnant with Oliveira, once again I’m praying for this child’s life. People around the world, our family, praying for this child’s life. But in the back of my mind is this feeling, this, this knowledge that Asher, who was also prayed for, did not live. How do I understand that? How do I understand that one child of mine died— two, actually, but one specifically that we were praying would live, and another child lived? That is one of those moments where your faith is put to the test. And in that year, our faith was put to the test in so many ways. It’s all in our testimony video. But I just wonder, you know, how many of us have that specific situation, that specific struggle, a specific thing you can call to mind that you were praying for that highlights for you this issue, this question: Why didn’t God answer my prayer? Or why did God say no? So we’re going to get to the point that we talk about this, that God always answers, but sometimes the answer isn’t what we expected. So let’s actually talk about that first point.
That was my very first point. God always answers our prayers, but sometimes his answer is no or wait. And in the loss of Asher, and I, and I focus on Asher over Josiah, who was our first miscarriage, um, because he specifically was the one that we prayed over because we knew that we were at risk of miscarrying, you know, that’s— there’s this struggle of, of, you know, God said no, he said no. And through my pregnancy with Oliveira, I really struggled with what if God says no again? And so praying for her life felt risky, it felt strange, it felt hard at times because I’m thinking, what if the answer’s just no? What if it’s just later on? What if it’s not as early as it was? And, and, you know, all the way up to her birth, there was that subtle anxiety there. So we’re looking at Mark 11:24, and in this passage, Jesus says, therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you’ve received it, and it will be yours. This promise of God’s answer to the prayer made in faith was made to disciples, not to the multitude. That’s the first thing I want to, um, point out. So in Mark 11, Jesus is talking to his disciples.
He’s not talking to a big crowd. He’s saying to you who closely walk with God, you can ask anything. And I think that’s because his disciples for the most part, will be seeking to be in alignment with God’s will. So it goes back again to that humility, that submission to God’s will. Disciples pray towards and out of God’s will. People who don’t know the Lord generally don’t do that. They’re often testing God or doubting God. Now, I believe God still hears the prayers of unbelievers.
That’s how so many— that’s how we— that’s how many people become believers. It’s they call upon the name of the Lord. They respond to the call of the Spirit and they say, “Lord, save me,” and that is an example of that. But in this context, Mark 11 is directed to the disciples. There’s a quote here. I took it from David Guzik’s Enduring Word Commentary, but he’s quoting Warren Wiersbe here. This is such a helpful clarification, so I’m going to read you this quote: “Nor should we interpret Mark 11:24 to mean, if you pray hard enough and really believe, God is obligated to answer your prayer no matter what you ask. That kind of faith is not faith in God.
Rather, it is nothing but faith in faith, or faith in feelings. So what Wiersbe is saying here is that what Jesus is talking about in Mark 11 is not forcing yourself to an emotional belief or forcing yourself to feel more faith, which is why he says that kind of faith is faith in faith or faith in feelings. It’s not faith in God. So what’s being said here in Mark 11 by Jesus is not that God is obligated to answer our prayers no matter what we ask. Like, Lord, I would just really love to have a house triple the size of my current one. He’s not a genie in a bottle. That’s not how he is. He’s a personal God, and he’s an all-knowing God, and he knows what is best for us.
So God always answers, but sometimes the answer isn’t what we want because his will transcends our own, his knowledge, his power transcends our own. And sometimes there are things that we just won’t know the answer to this side of heaven. We won’t know why the answer was no until we see him. And I, I wrestle with this. I wrestle with this. The truth of the matter is, if Josiah and Asher had not passed away, Olivera would not be here. Physically, she would not be here because I would never have become pregnant with her. So God knew something I did not know.
He knows something I don’t know. He knew something about their makeup. And I’ll do another episode about this at some point, but I truly believe my unborn children are with the Lord. They’re with the Lord in heaven. I have no question about that. So there’s some reason he chose for them to be with him instead of, um, Oliveira and why she’s on the earth. And I’m using my own personal story as an example here. For you, this could be someone who is ill and you prayed for them to live.
They did not live. Why was God’s answer no or wait? We don’t always know why. But we do know that our faith, the faith that’s the basis of our prayers and our interaction with God, is not faith in faith or faith in feelings. It’s faith in God. And it’s faith in a God who is good and all-powerful and all-knowing, and that he is so kind and so loving and so patient, we can trust him when he says No, I want to read you a section from Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost for His Highest, one of my absolute favorite devotionals. The name of this particular chapter is Thinking of Prayer as Jesus Taught, and I’m going to read the whole section because I think it’s so powerful. Quote, Jesus never mentioned unanswered prayer. He had the unlimited certainty of knowing that prayer is always answered. Do we have, through the Spirit of God, that inexpressible certainty that Jesus had about prayer, or do we think of the times when it seemed that God did not answer our prayer? Jesus said, “Everyone who asks receives,” Matthew 7:8, yet we say, “But, but…” God answers prayer in the best way—not just sometimes, but every time.
However, the evidence of the answer And the area we want it may not always immediately follow. I want to pause there because there’s more to this section. He’s saying that God always answers. He’s always going to answer. But the evidence, the visibility of the answer is not always immediate. We don’t see it yet, but he is answering. And he follows up with this question. Do you expect God to answer prayer? And I think this is a part of our problem.
We don’t expect him. We, we kind of lob these prayers up like, I don’t know if you’re actually going to answer. And Chambers is saying here, you should expect that he’s answering. And that’s what these 3 verses that we read at the beginning all said. He’s going to answer. He’s going to answer. But what it left off was that the answer may not look the way that we wish. Continuing this quote, the danger we have is that we want to water down what Jesus said to make it mean something that aligns with our common sense.
But if it were only common sense, what he said would not even be worthwhile. The things Jesus taught about prayer are supernatural truths he reveals to us, end quote. And I think that’s a really important point that we like to think about prayer in our natural common sense way. We want to think about prayer in the natural world, but God is teaching us something that is supernatural and that there’s a supernatural reality to it. There’s something that we don’t see that’s happening, and that’s why it takes faith. So my very first point here is God always answers, but sometimes his answer is no or wait. Secondly, God desires for us to ask in prayer. He does not want to have an efficiency-based relationship with us.
So if you look at 1 John 5 again, if we go back to 1 John 5, it says, this is the confidence we have towards him, that if we ask anything— if we ask anything— asking involves relationship and humility. And this says ask anything. Don’t hide from God. But ask according to his will. So again, back to our previous episode where I talked about this, we’re simply remaining in step with the Spirit. We’re simply remaining in alignment with the voice of God, with the word of God. We’re not— I’m not encouraging you to, you know, take a fine-tooth comb over your prayers and make sure, oh, am I praying things that sound like they’re aligned with God’s will? No, it’s very broad. Is very broad.
God’s will is clear in Scripture. And as we pray faithfully aligned with that will, we actually become more and more aligned with His will. And the things we ask for reflect that more and more. Charles Spurgeon said this quote, it becomes safe for God to say to the sanctified soul, ‘Ask what thou wilt, and it shall be done unto thee.’ The heavenly instincts of that man lead him right. The grace that is within his soul thrusts down all covetous lustings and foul desires, and his will is the actual shadow of God’s will. The spiritual life is master in him, and so his aspirations are holy, heavenly, and godlike. Spurgeon is saying that as you continue to pray and as you become more and more like Christ, more sanctified, the things that you’re asking are a shadow of God’s heart. They’re a shadow of his will.
They are so aligned with him that you’re asking things that echo his, his own spirit. This does not mean that all your prayers are going to be super spiritual. This is where a lot of people’s heads go. They immediately go, well, God’s a spirit, so all God cares about is spiritual things. No, God made a physical world. He made us with physical bodies. He came in a human body. As a man, he has experienced everything we’ve experienced.
He created marriage, he created children, he created all the beautiful things in this world that we experience. God cares about the physical world. So in saying that we are drawn to pray what God cares about, to pray God’s will, does not mean that the more you grow in your faith, the more mature you grow, that the more heady and spiritual you get. No. Actually, I would say the more comfortable you get praying for physical things too, but you know what to pray for because you know his voice and you know the Spirit’s leading so well. You know when something compels you to pray for a specific issue or a specific person or for healing or for a baby or whatever the thing is that’s on your heart. God is moving you. Through alignment to his will to pray for it.
I remember a couple years ago, I, I had a friend I had not talked to since college. So 10 years, a decade, no conversation. Maybe we’re Facebook friends. But I all of a sudden, out of nowhere, had a dream about this friend. And in this dream, I don’t even remember the specifics, but in this dream, they were just grieving something very difficult. And throughout the next day, I thought, that’s weird, weird that I had a dream about this person. I haven’t talked to this person. I haven’t seen a picture of this person.
I wonder why they’re on my mind. I just kind of put it out of my mind, but then she kept coming up. Like, I just kept thinking about the dream. And then I thought, you know what, worst comes to worst, the best thing I could do right now is pray for this person. So I’ll just pray for them. Throughout the day, and then I’ll just message her and let her know that I’ve been praying. So I did that, and when I messaged my friend, I found out that their family was going through an intense period of grief. Everyone around them had lost someone or lost something significant.
It was just a very heavy, heavy time. And that is an example of as you build your prayer life, as you walk with the Lord, he may lay someone or something on your heart so that you can be a part of spiritually carrying the burden that is on their life. I had no idea, I’d had no reason to know what they were carrying as a family, but the Holy Spirit gives me a dream that makes me think of the person that then leads me to pray for that person which in the spiritual realm is carrying that burden for them. And this has been done for me. This has been done for me, again, using the example of Oliveira’s story, that was done for us in that season. But the reason that that happened is because the people who were walking closely with the Lord knew this is what’s being put on my heart to pray. I’m going to pray for this thing. So it can be a very physical thing.
It can be a spiritual thing. David Guzik notes something so important on this point. 2 Corinthians 6:1 says that we are workers together with God. And he points out that God is not interested in just accomplishing His will without us. He is bringing His will to fruition through our cooperation. We get to actually participate with God in the supernatural realm through prayer. Now, I’m not saying that we’re all-powerful, that we are, you know, executing some godlike power that exalts us above him or beside him in some way. No, I’m saying that God has designed the system that he wants us to pray.
He invites us to pray. He commands us to pray. Why does God care about that? Why would He care about me praying? He does— if He, if He’s sovereign, why does He want me praying? Because He wants your cooperation. He wants you to be a part of what He’s doing in the lives of other people. And for me, this is so impactful because it was the prayers of the church that carried us through the darkest season of our married life. And through the terror of losing another child, losing another baby, it was the prayers of the church who supernaturally carried us in that time. And I, I can’t even imagine what it would have been like to try to walk that path without them. God desires for us to ask in prayer.
He wants relationship. He wants to hear from us. He wants cooperation. My third point is this: faith is the basis of prayer. You must believe he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. That’s what Hebrews 11 tells us. Now, faith again is not a feeling. It is not an emotion that comes and goes, and it’s not just rationality.
It’s not just believing a fact. I love how Matthew Bates defines faith, that word, the Greek word pistis, the way it’s used in reference to— in the literature from the first century, the way that word is used is to describe allegiance, allegiance to a king, loyalty to a king. And see, this definition of faith is so important when we’re understanding prayer, because somebody who’s like, yeah, I sort of believe God exists, Jesus sort of exists. Isn’t going to have the same prayer life as someone who says, I believe Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior. He is the leader and King of my life. Those two prayer lives are going to look very different because the prayer life of the first person is going to come from a standpoint of testing and doubt, and the prayer life of the second person is going to come from the standpoint of trust and faith. In prayer, when we test God, we become blind to his answers. Testing God in prayer is not intimacy.
It’s not faithful prayer. So, God, if you do X, Y, and Z, I’ll believe you. Now, I think that God, in his grace, God sometimes answers prayers like these. I’ve heard these testimonies of people who were not walking with him and said, God, if you’ll only give me a sign, or if you’ll only, you know, grant me this thing, or, you know, Martin Luther is a great example. He said, God, if you preserve my life in this lightning storm, I will become a monk. I’ll follow you. And he preserved his life. He became a monk.
And we know the rest of the story. So God in his grace answers those prayers. But if the only way you ever pray is by testing God and constantly demanding that he answer in a certain way, or you won’t trust him, you won’t believe him, that is not a prayer of faith. That is a prayer of doubt. That’s a prayer of testing. One of the passages that are used to kind of defend this is the passage in the Old Testament about Gideon. And what many people don’t realize about the passage in Judges 6 regarding Gideon is that Gideon’s not a great example in that passage. He’s not being held up as an example of faith in that section, at least.
Later on, he changes his tune. Gideon was this humble man who had nothing. And God came to him and gave him a great commission. But in coming to Gideon and giving him the commission to deliver Israel and to judge, judge them and free them from their oppressors, God knew that he was dealing with someone who did not have a great faith. Gideon tested God. He said, if I put out this fleece and the fleece is dry, but the ground is wet, or if the fleece is wet but the ground is dry. If you do that for me, then I will trust you and do what you say. And God is gracious for that.
He met Gideon where he was and then empowered Gideon to be a great leader. Personally, when I read this story— this is just personal— I see a character trait in Gideon at the beginning that shows up again in the end. At the end of Gideon’s life, He returns to the pagan idols and multiplies marriages and has, I think, 60 or 70 sons. But his sons do not walk with the Lord. And at the end of his reign as judge, his house completely falls into ruin. His sons are killing each other and it’s just utter chaos. There is no good legacy. How does that happen? Gideon, the underdog, raised up by God to deliver Israel, you know, 300 against thousands.
And all of a sudden, at the end of his life, it ends worse than it began. I think the behaviors we saw in Gideon at the beginning showed up again at the end of his life. And those behaviors, the word I would use for that is faithlessness. He was faithless. He was not loyal to God. He was not faithful to God. He was willing to go with God as long as God gave him what he wanted, what he needed, gave him the privileges, the blessings. But when he had to do the day in and day out faithful walking with God that so many of us have to do, he did not continue on that path and he went to something more convenient and more efficient, which would have been an idol.
That’s just my personal perspective on Gideon. But I think if we are not careful to persevere in our faith, to persevere in our prayer life with the Lord, we can very, very easily be led astray by these efficient, attractive, helpful idols that the enemy will offer us, things that seem like they can answer our prayers better than God can. We need to remember that the basis of prayer is faith and faithfulness, being full of faith towards God. And if you feel like you don’t have that, you can ask God to give it to you. I love that passage in the Gospels where a man comes for healing to Jesus and he says, I believe, help my unbelief. You can ask God to help your unbelief. Remember, it’s not a feeling and it’s not just an intellectual thing. It’s a response to God’s grace, and you can ask him to increase that for you.
But another way for your faith to be increased, something that I teach my kids regularly, is to take God personally when it comes to God’s answers, looking everywhere for the visible ways he’s already answering you. These are the ways he cares for you before you even ask. When we were walking through this difficult season of secondary infertility and a lot of other losses and difficulties that were coming at us, one of the things that we talked about was taking God personally. Every sunset, every paycheck, every time there’s food on the table, every time I’m sitting at coffee with a friend, that is a picture, that is a blessing from God’s grace to me. That is him personally loving me, personally showing me his goodness. And you know, in scripture, when you read the Psalms, God is given credit for most of the things that we now give science credit for. We look at a sunset and we say, that’s just the way that the clouds came together, and that’s the sun going over the horizon. Well, yes, that’s true, but who put that in place and why? Why is it so beautiful? Why did he make it beautiful? It didn’t have to be.
He did it for you. He did it for me. When my daughter was about 3, We went out to the garden one day and we had planted a zucchini plant and we lifted up the leaf of the zucchini plant and there was a zucchini. And she raised her hands in the air and she said, God did this just for me. Now in my head as an adult, I’m like, no, the zucchini was planted, it was a seed, it grew, and then the zucchini grew on the zucchini plant. Rationally, yeah, that’s true. But who created the seed to bear fruit? Who designed it this way? Who envisioned this at the dawn of time? And who saw to it that this particular plant bore fruit for the delight of a 3-year-old? See, we can live in this place where our hearts are hardened to God and we believe he just isn’t answering ever. Anything, but the truth is he’s answering all the time and we just don’t give him credit for it.
We give God all the credit for the things that go wrong, the things that are hard and horrible, but we do not give God credit for the things that are good and beautiful and true. And it will change your life because when you go through suffering and it seems like there are prayers that aren’t being answered, or the answer is no. Seeing the way that God is still moving carries you through to when you get to the harvest season. I know that this episode isn’t going to completely solve some of your questions. At the end of the day, we don’t always know why God says no. We don’t always know why God says wait. But I want to end this episode with a quote from With Christ in the School of Prayer by Andrew Murray. This is a classic book on prayer.
If you’ve never read it, I highly recommend it. I’m going to read you where he talks about how to view our prayers and what happens with them in the heavenly places. I’m going to read you two different quotes from this section. This is in chapter 16. The power of believing prayer is simply irresistible. Real faith can never be disappointed. It knows how, just as water, to exercise the irresistible power it can have, must be gathered up and accumulated until the stream can come down in full force. There must often be a heaping up of prayer until God sees that the measure is full and the answer comes.
Man in his spiritual nature too is under the law of gradual growth. That reigns in all created life. It is only in the path of development that he can reach his divine destiny. And it is the Father, in whose hands are the times and seasons, who alone knows the moment when the soul or the church is ripened to that fullness of faith in which it can really take and keep the blessing. As a father who longs to have his only child home from school and yet waits patiently till the time of training is completed, so it is with God and his children. He is the long-suffering one and answers speedily. What’s in view here is a passage of scripture that Andrew Murray is referencing that says that God will answer speedily. And for many of us who are praying, it doesn’t feel like he’s answering speedily.
So Murray’s point here is, is like water when it’s coming together, it’s trickling down from the mountains into a river, and then the river and its streams are all coming together until it’s this wild, rushing, strong force of water. So our prayers, in a sense, over time, as we’re giving them to the Lord, they are, in his view, building up this force of spiritual power. So a lot of Christians view prayer as, I tossed up one or two requests, or even I’ve prayed over it for a year and I haven’t seen an answer, or the answer has been wait, or the answer has been no. And so we think, well, nothing’s happening, but we don’t understand it in the spiritual sense. We only understand it in the natural sense. And he’s pointing out that perseverant prayer is believing that the things that you are praying actually are making a difference, but they’re on God’s time. And the way that he understands answering speedily is different than how we understand answering speedily. He is outside of time.
And so there are things that we may not see answers to on our timeframe because of the free will of man, because of the working will of God, because of the circumstances of, of the world that we don’t understand, the things that God is doing over here that we can’t possibly comprehend. We only see what’s happening over here. I often think of this if you’re getting married in the summer and you just want to have a clear, summery, sunny day for your wedding, but the farmer who lives in the same city as you is begging God for rain. How does God answer those prayers? How does he, how does he look at the requests of these two people? How does he answer that? Right? We don’t fully understand. We don’t fully know. And I think that’s where the faith walk of being a Christian is so vital, so important, because without faith, it’s impossible to please God, right? That’s the basis of our prayer life with Him. If we come to our prayers thinking that God only exists to answer what we want on our timeframe, we are not serving a God out of faith. We are looking for a genie in a bottle who does what we want and serves our purposes.
That is not an all-powerful God. That is a God made in our own image. So if we are to have an all-powerful God, an all-wise God, an omniscient God, it can’t be a God that we can control. It must be a God that we trust in his goodness and that we will follow him even when the answer isn’t what we think is best. Or what we would hope would be the time frame. This picture of our prayers heaping up and coming together over time to align with the timing that God knows is best, him saying that God knows the moment when the soul or the church is ripened to the fullness of faith in which it can actually take and keep the blessing. Sometimes we ask for things, we pray for things, and we’re not ready to receive that thing. We’re not ready to not only receive the blessing, we couldn’t keep it if we had it.
We couldn’t steward it if we had it. And God knows that. And so he waits until the right time to answer. And other times we’re praying in the spirit and the Lord is working through his spirit on the life of someone else, but that person needs to surrender to him, and God’s not going to override their will. He’s going to call them, and he’s going to offer them all the opportunities to come to him, and our prayers are part of the Holy Spirit’s work in their lives. God has chosen to use our prayers to reach other people, and yet they still have to come to the point where they’re willing to follow him. And then I know multiple stories of people who were prayed for for 20-plus years before they came to know Christ. But when they came to know Christ, their influence for the kingdom was profound, and they actually ended up having more influence than the person who prayed for them.
So the faithful prayers over 20, 30 years that resulted in someone’s conversion to Christ. Has led to them being transformed. And that reminds me of Ananias in the book of Acts, who the Lord called to minister to the Apostle Paul. And Ananias was terrified, but he was a faithful man. He was a prophet. He’d been praying for the church, for the followers of Christ. God calls him to go and minister to Paul—at the time he was Saul—and heal him of his blindness. And through Ananias’ faithfulness, through his willingness to partner with God in what God wanted to do for Saul, he enabled Paul’s ministry to have the influence that it did throughout the ages.
So you don’t know what your prayers are accomplishing in the supernatural realm, but God does. And so our trust must be in God’s character and in what he is doing even when we cannot see the ending. Thank you for watching this episode or listening to this episode. Please stay tuned for the rest of this prayer series of Verity Podcast. As always, it’s helpful if you subscribe in iTunes, you subscribe on YouTube because it helps Verity Podcast to reach other people. And we can also check out our prayer resources in the Every Woman a Theologian shop at phyliciamasonheimer.com.