Sermon: When God Says No

A parent prays for their sick child to be healed. The sick child dies.

A man tormented by Satan prays over and over for the torment to be taken away. It remains with him.

A church desperately prays for something they want. They do not get it.

A churchgoer prays for wisdom from God. They remain foolish.

A son prays for his mother to be saved. She dies an unbeliever.

Maybe you have read passages like Matthew 7:7-8 "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened." Or Matthew 21:22, "If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer." Or John 14:13-14, "And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 14 You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it." And so then asked yourself, "Why didn't God give me what I asked for?”

Of course not all prayer is about asking for things, but asking is a part of prayer, it's something that God encourages us to do, and that's what I'm going to be focusing on this morning. The Bible shows us that there are three basic answers we get when we pray to God for something. The first answer is Yes - he gives us what we asked for. This is obviously the answer we want when we pray. You don't ask for something you don't want. When we think of God answering prayer, this is the answer we most commonly think of. Even in the Bible they use the term "God answered my prayer" to mean "God answered Yes to my prayer - he gave me what I asked for". I hope you have all had this happen at some time in your prayer life: you pray for a job and you get one; you pray for a spouse and you find one; you pray for healing and a person is healed, you pray for someone's salvation and they are saved. Every time we receive a Yes answer to prayer, we are beneficiaries of God's incredible grace, his undeserved favour: we see God glorified, our faith is strengthened a little bit, we see good things happening in the world and receive good things. All that is grace, because we don't deserve to have our prayers answered. It's not like God owes any of us a debt. We're the ones eternally in debt to God, and yet, like a loving father, he provides for us as his children, gives us things, answers our prayers. It's incredible.

The second answer we can receive from God is Wait - so we pray, but nothing happens immediately. Perhaps something has to change first, or God gives us what we ask for but it takes time.  We can pray for something for a long time - for years even - before we finally see the result that we were seeking. Sometimes that's normal - when your child starts university, you pray that they might pass all their subjects, but you don't expect to wake up the next morning and find that God has answered your prayers immediately and they've already got their degree! Sometimes we pray for something that could happen immediately but doesn't - like the prayer for healing that God could do miraculously in a moment, but instead happens through years of medical treatment. Sometimes, God will only answer our prayers in eternity. If you've ever prayed for world peace, or for God's kingdom to come or for Jesus to return, or if you've prayed that there won't be any more pain or hunger or suffering in the world, or for justice against wrongdoers... God does say Yes to those prayers, but only in the new heaven and the new earth. We have to wait. Eternity will be fantastic, and sometimes we yearn for it, and so we ask God to usher in that perfect existence, and God says "It's coming, it's coming. Just wait, it's coming." We should acknowledge that God is still wonderful when he answers Wait - even if we have to wait years, or into eternity, for the thing that we've asked, the fact that God will make all things new and that our eternal lives with him will be perfect... that is boss. We might sometimes get impatient, but the fact that God takes his time does not reduce his awesomeness.

The final answer we can get when we pray to God is No - God does not give us what we ask. Sometimes he does nothing, or he even does the opposite of what we ask. A No from God is not simply a Wait – a No is when a door gets closed, when something irrevocable happens that means this will never be. Give up hope on this, it says. And that's the answer we will be looking at today: when God says No. It can be hard for us when God says no to our prayers. Which of the answers to prayer do you think is most likely to shake someone's faith in God, to make them seriously wonder how they can keep on believing in him? "Yes" is usually a boost to our faith; "Wait" can hurt, it can make us question, but it still leaves space for hope; but "No" can feel like God doesn't care, and especially when we are praying about things we really care about, that can cause people to question their faith - if God says no to my prayers, can he even hear my prayers? Is he really able to do what I asked? Does he love me?

Well, the Bible actually has some things to say about why God says no, because it is something that happens in the life of every single believer. I think it's worth us looking into it, because if we don't have the right understanding and the right attitude about it, it can shake our faith. But also, I think that having a good understanding about when God says no to our prayers actually teaches us more about God and our relationship with him, it can help us in our prayer lives to pray better prayers, and it will strengthen our faith by helping us understand why God might say no.

I think that even as Christians, we can sometimes get into this way of thinking about God where we think that because God loves us and wants what's best for us, if we pray and we don't get what we want, then he isn't listening or hasn't heard us: prayer has somehow become broken. My friends, let me tell you that whenever there is a problem with anything, the problem is not on God's end. God is perfect. He doesn't make mistakes. God is everywhere, his ears hear everything, even the thoughts in our heads and the feelings in our hearts. Romans 8:26-27 tells us that God's Spirit lives in us, and translates our rubbish prayers into sweet poetry that is a delight to God in a way that our words could never express. The Holy Spirit is like a prayer auto-correct, but one that actually works. Prayer is in fact the only perfect form of communication in the universe: the network is never down, the lines are always crystal clear, there is no language barrier, and best of all God never misunderstands what we're trying to say. If you ever feel like no-one understands you, then pray. God knows exactly what you mean.

As the perfect means of communication, prayer is obviously amazing. But as simple, finite, not-perfect humans, we have a problem - we can get confused, we can be led astray, we can make mistakes, and we can even deceive ourselves. So the first thing the Bible has to say about our prayers is that when we pray for something, we should examine ourselves and ask the question, "Why am I actually praying this prayer? What is my reason behind asking for this?" Because the Bible tells us that our attitude, the reason behind why we are asking for something, is important to God, and it can be a reason why God answers No to our prayers.

So I've come up with three questions that should help us examine ourselves when we pray, or that we can even ask when we receive the answer No from God to our prayers, to see if the problem might lie with us. And the first one might shock you a little, because the first question I think we should ask ourselves when we pray and receive the answer NO from God is: Do I really believe in God at all?

Wow, Ben, maybe you're going just a little far. I mean, okay, maybe my prayer life is a bit hit and miss, but you're questioning my faith now? Well, it's not me, it's Jesus. What did he say in Matthew 21:22? "If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer." The question is, do we really trust God to provide for us when we ask things of him? Here's how James puts it in his letter, James 1:5: "5 If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. 6 But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. 7 That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord."

Now it's important for us to pause a moment here and realise that this verse is not talking about what we might call a faithful doubt. Remember the guy who brings his little boy to Jesus and the disciples, and the disciples couldn't heal him? The man says to Jesus, "If you can do anything, take pity on us and help us." Jesus replies, "If you can? Everything is possible for one who believes.” And immediately the boy’s father exclaimed, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” And what does Jesus do? He heals that boy.

This is not the kind of doubt that James is talking about. No, James has his eyes set on a different kind of person, the kind of person he calls "double-minded and unstable in all they do". It's the kind of person who asks God for wisdom, but really already knows what they're going to do anyway, because they don't honestly believe that God has anything to offer them. They're going to do the worldly thing, the thing that looks smart on earth. The thing that provides worldly success, worldly fame, worldly riches. After all, if it produces such good results, it must be the "wise" thing to do, right? But that is not God's wisdom! How dare you come to God asking for his heavenly wisdom, while you are looking over your shoulder at your back pocket to see what impact it will have on your wallet? That is double-minded! Don't bother asking God if you don't trust that the things he will give you will be good things!

Of course, trusting God means trusting God knows best, even when he says No to your prayers.  If you do trust God, and yet he still says no, then you're in good company. Paul prayed to God asking for God to remove a thorn in his flesh, what he described as a messenger of Satan tormenting him. He prayed for that three times. What was God's answer? It was No. In 2 Corinthians 12:9, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." And Paul's response to that No answer was to accept it, in verse 10: "Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me." Would God have been glorified if Paul’s prayer had been answered with a Yes, and the torment was taken away? Absolutely. But God’s No answer to Paul’s prayer is even better than what he asked: it allows him to glorify God all the more, because God’s power is made perfect in his weakness.

So you didn’t get what you asked from God? Maybe it’s just that he knows better than you what is good for you. Will you accept that? So that's the first question we should ask ourselves: do we really trust God? Because if we do, then we trust that his No is better for us than a Yes could ever be.

Here's the second question we should ask ourselves when we pray: Am I asking for the wrong thing? Am I asking for something not in line with God's will? Am I asking for the right thing but for the wrong reasons? You might think that true Christians don't pray for anything not in line with God's will. But we are still sinful people, and it may be that we ask for sinful things. When a Christian alcoholic pleads to God, "Please, God, just give me one more drink," they are not asking for something in line with God's will for them. When we are greedy, and pray for stuff because we want more stuff, and better stuff, and more better stuff, we are not praying in line with God's will. Is there something wrong with stuff? No. But there's a difference between asking God for your daily bread and asking him for your daily caviar.

Shall we ask James what he has to say about asking God for things for the wrong reasons? When you want a straight-talking answer to questions about the Christian life, you can't go past James. He's a hammer, and he nails us for who we really are. In chapter 4 verse 1 he says this: "1 What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? 2 You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. 3 When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures."

James doesn't mince words. And don't you dare even think for a moment that, "Oh, James is talking about non-Christians, all those terrible people out there who fight and kill and covet. Of course God won't give them what they want." But James was not writing to non-Christians; his letter is written to Christians! Christians whose desires battle within them! Christians whose desires lead them to kill! Christians whose coveting causes them to fight and quarrel! Christians whose prayers are answered "No" by God because they are greedy and selfish.

Now again, we can't read this message prescriptively - I mean we can't say it's always true all the time. James cannot be saying that God never answers Yes to the prayers of sinful people. If that were the case, we would never see Yes answers to prayer, because we all fall short. That's not the point of this passage.

In fact, if you say, “Well, I am sinful, so I guess I shouldn’t pray” then you are missing the other side of what James has just said: “You do not have because you do not ask God”! The point is that God is generous, but God also cares about how we live, he cares about our motives, and he wants our motives to align with his motives, in our prayers and the rest of our lives.

But where can we find out what God’s will and God’s motives are? He reveals them to us in the Bible! How do we know that quarrelling and fighting are against God’s will? We find it in the Bible! How do we know that killing and coveting are not godly motives? We find it in the Bible! How can we be sure that when we are praying, we are praying with the right motives, and not for our own selfish pleasures? We reflect on our motives, and then we compare them to what God tells us in the Bible! We must not, we cannot, take up God’s way of us perfectly communicating with him in prayer, while ignoring his method of perfectly communicating with us through his Word.

And sometimes our motives are not wicked, but God’s plan is still different to what we ask. Jesus himself prayed to God in Mark 14:36, "Abba, Father,” he said, “everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me.” Jesus didn't want to be crucified! Is it wrong to not want to be crucified? Of course not! But Jesus knew God's will - he knew that God's answer was no, that God's plan was salvation for all who believe - and so Christ accepted it, and he prayed, "Yet not what I will, but what you will." And aren't we glad that God said no to Jesus that night? Our eternal futures relied on it. So like Christ, we must accept that sometimes when we pray it's not what we will, but what God wills that must be done.

The first question we should ask ourselves is do we really believe in God? The second question is are we asking for the right thing? Now here's the last question: Are we asking to escape the consequences of sin? Now I believe that there is one prayer that God always answers Yes to: "Lord, save me." God will never say "No" if you pray that prayer for yourself. But just because as Christians we are saved from the eternal punishment, that doesn't mean that the consequences of sin in this world will pass us by. Sometimes they might! But sometimes they will not.

The tragic example in scripture is David's prayer for his sick son, born of his adulterous liaison with Bathsheba, in 2 Samuel 12. God tells David through the prophet Nathan, "Because by doing this you have shown utter contempt for the Lord, the son born to you will die." And David tries everything: he pleads with God, he weeps, he fasts, he wears sackcloth, he prostrates himself on the ground. But God says No: on the seventh day, David's little boy dies. He doesn't even make it to circumcision - he dies without the symbol of God's covenant with his people.

I've never lost a child. I have no idea how painful that must have been for David, or for Bathsheba. It must have hurt David all the more to know that his child died because of his sin against God. But I would give anything to have David's response to God's No: he gets up, cleans himself off, goes into the house of God and he worships. He says, "While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept. I thought, ‘Who knows? The Lord may be gracious to me and let the child live.’ 23 But now that he is dead, why should I go on fasting? Can I bring him back again? I will go to him, but he will not return to me." That is faith. For as long as there was a hope, David was prepared to do everything he could to pursue it, because David knew that God is gracious. But when God's answer was a clear no, he accepted it. He had to live with it.

Now for most of us, we don't get a prophet of the Lord coming and telling us that a certain terrible thing is the consequence for our sin. David was the king of God's people, and he had done something terrible, so God made it clear what the situation was. Sometimes it will be clear to us too. Do some prison ministry, and you will meet plenty of Christians in prison who know that God has paid the price for their sins, and who wish they had never committed the crimes they are now locked up for. But they can't go back and undo what they did. Even though they are saved, that will haunt them forever. Of course there is nothing wrong with praying for God to graciously save us from a consequence of our own sins. As David said, "Maybe God will be gracious." But if his answer is No, we must accept it, because sin has consequences.

And this brings us to what is perhaps the most difficult prayer there is to receive a NO to: when we pray for our loved ones to be saved, and they die seeming to reject God and Jesus. I don’t think there is a prayer that can shake our faith more when it is answered No, because we know that it is God's will that all people be saved. We know that our motives are good. We know that we trust God for salvation, because how else can people be saved? And we are praying for people we love dearly - parents, children, siblings, best friends - and when they die denying God, turning their back on Christ, God that hurts. Of all the prayers we could ever pray, why would God answer No to this one?

I have prayed this prayer, for people to be saved, and I have seen people saved. But I also prayed for my mother for years. She was not a believer. She blamed God her whole life for the bad things that happened to her - and those things were pretty bad. She could not accept that God would forgive the people who hurt her. She said that if God could forgive them, she could not forgive God. My mother didn’t die straight away. Like her mother, she suffered from dementia, and so her life, her consciousness, her decision-making slipped away from her slowly over about 12 years. She died on 4 October 2016, while Penny and I were in our missionary training to come to Namibia.

Now there are some people who will say that you can never really know what decision someone makes in the last moments before their death; you can't know how they conclude their life's business with God. And I do believe in deathbed confessions of faith - the workers who come only in the last hour, and yet get paid the full amount. But I also know that "wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it." (Matthew 7:13-14.) I don't believe my mother changed her mind. She made her choice, and she stuck to it.

I won't pretend to be happy about the fact that my mother is most likely not going to be with us in the new heaven and the new earth. I don't think God wants me to be happy about it, because I don't think he is happy about it either. If it breaks my heart that my mother was not a Christian when she died, how much does it break God's heart, who sent his son to die for her, only for her to reject him? I can't be angry at a God who I know knew my mother perfectly, and gave her every chance she would ever need to freely choose him, and who mourns her loss more than I ever will.

Because, you see, God made sure that I was praying for her the whole time. You might remember what Paul Gunning said a few weeks ago, about when Hannah prayed to God for a child – God had set up her entire situation to make sure that she prayed for what God wanted to give as part of his plan. There is a very real sense that when we pray, we are involved in perfect communication from God to God; God does not simply hear our voice, but he hears his own voice through the Holy Spirit working in us. Which means that when God answers, he is not really answering us, but he is in fact answering himself. And so, just like God the Son praying in the garden of Gethsemane to God the Father, praying for that cup to be taken from him, and the Father having to answer that prayer with No, sometimes even when we pray the prayer most in line with God’s own will, the prayer that is on God’s very own lips – that those around us might be saved – God may have to turn back to himself and answer his own prayer with a no. And we are left with no other answer to give than that of Christ: “Your will be done.”

I haven’t quoted CS Lewis yet, but since that is a tradition here at New Song, let me finish with a poem he wrote that is simply called “Prayer”. I think he sums up this idea beautifully.

“Master, they say that when I seem

    To be in speech with you,

Since you make no replies, it’s all a dream

  – One talker aping two.

They are half right, but not as they

   Imagine; rather, I

Seek in myself the things I meant to say,

   And lo! the wells are dry.

Then, seeing me empty, you forsake

   The Listener’s role, and through

My dead lips breathe and into utterance wake

   The thoughts I never knew.

And thus you neither need reply

   Nor can; thus, while we seem

Two talking, thou art One forever, and I

   No dreamer, but thy dream.”