1. Whether prayer is answered or not is always a matter decided in the last and most important case by the person who prays. In the secret of our own heart is to be found the reason why prayer does or does not receive the response of God. “A man’s soul is wont to give him tidings, more than seven watchmen that sit on high on a watch-tower.” It is necessary that the verdict be given, not only upon the use of the opportunity of prayer, but upon a right use. Since prayer is a means of the essential discipline of life, the correction and direction of our desires thereby must qualify our expectations. That this or the other impulse of our own will cannot overrule the events of life is a necessary postulate of a Divinely ordered world. Prayer must count for something, but it cannot count for everything. Prayer cannot spell anarchy; yet it may so permeate and colour our life that we may “pray without ceasing, and in everything give thanks”.
I remember, as a child, putting God to the test. I placed a bright farthing in a drawer, and then knelt down and prayed God to transmute it into a half-sovereign. With trembling eagerness I opened the drawer, and found that the copper was copper still. That was my dawn of scepticism in prayer. Some people seem to remain in that childish attitude all their lives, and the dawn of scepticism waxes to the perfect day. [Note: R. F. Horton, The Prayer-House of God, 25.]
2. Though we are often unable to give a reason why our prayers are not answered, that is not always so. If we consider the matter carefully we may find that the denial is due to one or other of the following reasons.
(1) Petitions are sometimes denied because if granted they would bring us positive injury. True wisdom, if we had it, would never allow us to be at cross-purposes with God.
So weak is man,
So ignorant and blind, that did not God
Sometimes withhold in mercy what we ask,
We should be ruined at our own request.
And possibly if we would all think back a little through our own history we could recall some earnest prayer of the heart, some cry of the soul, which later events proved to be against our own best welfare.
There are people who say, “What is the limitation of the promise? If it means anything, it means everything—‘Ask, and ye shall receive; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’ ” Would you grant your boy’s request if he asked for something which you knew to be bad for him? Would a woman give her child a red-hot poker if the little child asked for it? Of course it means that, if it is good for us, and if it is best for us, it will be given, but otherwise it will not be given. [Note: A. F. Winnington Ingram, The Call of the Father, 74.]
(2) Our prayer is sometimes denied in order that a higher and better blessing may come to us. Earnestly and repeatedly did Paul pray that a certain thorn in his flesh might be taken away; but God let him know it was a thing in which he would some day glory, and when Paul looked back upon it from the close of his life he would tell those gathered about him of the special nearness of God and the presence of Jesus which had been a millionfold sweeter to him than any fleshly ease the removal of that ugly annoying thorn might have brought him.
Sometimes when we have really prayed, for temporal blessings especially, we have been like those who have asked for a penny with just one definite bronze penny in view. We may or may not have received our penny, but if our prayers were from good and sincere hearts, hearts obedient to the supreme will, we have received pounds instead of our penny; and by praying more and more in accord with the Divine will, we may gain by our prayers thousands and millions of pounds, in the long run, for God and humanity. [Note: W. Arthur Cornaby, In Touch with Reality, 243]
(3) And still another reason for unanswered prayer is to be found in the inconsistency between our prayers and God’s better purposes of wisdom towards others. The unanswered prayer of Moses will illustrate this. It was a bitter blow which kept Moses from entering with Israel into the Land of Promise. So bravely he had defended them, so patiently he had toiled for them, so earnestly he had prayed and interceded for them, surely he might well expect to enter in. But that little sin excludes him. He prays—he who had obtained in his intercession the turning away of God’s wrath from Israel, he who had stood before them in the gap,—he prays now for himself that he may go across and see the glorious land. “But the Lord would not hear me,” he says; and why? Not altogether as a punishment for that little sin, but because the granting of that prayer would have been inconsistent with the great system of moral teaching by which God was educating Israel. This inconsistency between the prayer and the Diviner purposes of God’s wisdom to Israel he speaks of as the reason for its denial: “The Lord was angry with me for your sakes. The Lord would not hear me.”
The good of those who pray could not be accomplished at the expense of those who do not pray,—God could not be God and act thus—but the accomplishment of God’s unvarying favour toward all is contingent upon human faith; and when its accomplishment depends, as it does depend in all social things, upon the increase of faith in whole classes of men, it is Divine prescience alone that can foresee the time that will be required. Resignation as to the time of fulfilment is required in the hearts of those who pray for such needful things as depend upon the action of society, but not because God withholds the boon. [Note: Christus Futurus, 63. troppuSelbiB]
3. The perplexity of unanswered prayer is felt most keenly when the prayer is intercessory. How often does it happen that, instead of the heart being cheered, and our confidence strengthened, by the blessed result of intercessory prayer, on the contrary, the very earnestness and faith of our prayer offers an occasion for a particularly severe temptation. A broken-hearted wife, for instance, whose dissolute husband has wrecked the happiness of the home and blighted her whole life, seems to receive absolutely no answer to her agonized entreaty. With strong cries and tears she has pleaded for his salvation, and yet he remains as he was, a curse to his family and his home. What wonder if the enemy takes advantage of her distress to shake her confidence, either in her relations with God, if she is of a timid and despondent temperament, or in God Himself, if she is given to forming hasty conclusions, and is not altogether indisposed to yield to sceptical misgivings?
The answer to these perplexities is to be found in the recognition of the fact that intercessory prayer is a part of Christian work and shares in the limitations that belong to all service on behalf of others. All that the most skilful and gifted worker for God can do is to liberate the Divine power by complying with Divinely appointed conditions of effort. It goes without saying that no man can of himself impart spiritual life, and yet it is the promise of Christ to the true believer that forth from his body shall flow rivers of living water. We do not say that it is of no use to work for souls, because we know that no effort of ours can produce those spiritual results that we long to see, unless not only God shall work through us but man, for whom we work, shall yield to the influence thus brought to bear upon him. We know that it is God’s will thus to use our efforts, and that it is our duty to expect, with heartfelt faith, to be used of Him. But when we have done all that love can do, we may fail, even as our Master failed, to carry the day with wilful wayward men, who do always resist alike the Spirit of God and the kindly offices of their fellow-men. Our Lord Himself tells us that He had failed to gather those whom He sought to gather, and yet there was no fault or defect in His service; and if He failed, surely it is not surprising that our poor, imperfect efforts should fail from the same cause, even where the failure is not due to our lack of skill or of earnestness.
If this be so with our spiritually philanthropic efforts, is it a thing to be surprised at that our intercessory prayers should have a like issue? Our efforts are not thrown away because they do not seem to be crowned with the success that we desired. Our Divine Master did not really fail, although He did not accomplish what He had longed to accomplish among His contemporaries. Even so, we may feel assured that no earnest effort for God and good that is wrought in the power of the Holy Ghost will in the end be found to have been destitute of all beneficial consequence. It will, at least, have benefited him who wrought it, if it has benefited no one else. And, analogously, no earnest, believing intercessory prayer will be altogether lost; it must at least contribute to the spiritual development of him who has offered it, and perhaps as a contribution to the sum total of intercession the wide world over, may have other and far-reaching consequences, of which at present we can scarcely form an idea.
Some months ago an intelligent and devout woman whose daughter had died after a painful illness said to me: “I fear that I have lost my faith in prayer. Once my faith was strong. I used to pray with confidence for anything I needed, believing that if I asked in Jesus’s name, and had strong faith, God would give me what I asked for. I had been taught so to pray and believe. When my child was sick I besought God with an agony of desire for her recovery. I asked in Jesus’s name. I believed that God would grant my prayer. When the doctor said she could not live I refused to believe him, declaring that God, who had promised to hear my prayer, would surely heal her. I fully believed that in some way God would do what the physicians thought impossible. When she died I was stunned, not merely because of my grief, but because it seemed to me that God had failed me. The faith in which I had been reared, and which, up to that moment, had been for me absolute truth, crumbled into dust. At first I was embittered and hostile. Then I passed into indifference. It was a long time before I could pray at all. Then I gradually resumed the habit of prayer, but never with the old confidence; I pray now because I think it is right to pray, but my unquestioning faith in prayer is gone.” This incident, which I believe to be typical, caused me to restudy the question of prayer, for it seemed to me that this woman was a victim of wrong teaching. She had, in a word, been led to substitute faith in prayer for faith in God. [Note: C. W. McCormick, The Heart of Prayer, 5.]
When Captain Hedley Vicars was in the Crimean War, Miss Marshall, the lady to whom he was engaged, and her aunt, Miss Marsh, prayed continually that his life might be spared. He was, as we know, shot; but the ladies came in time to see that after all their prayers were not unanswered, and confessed as much in these words, “We asked life of thee, and thou gayest him long life, even for ever and ever”. [Note: E. J. Hardy, Doubt and Faith, 151.]
