Why Doesn’t God Answer Prayers

Like many rebellious evangelicals, there was a time in my youth when I went through a bit of a ‘Pentecostal phase.’ I fell into the “name-it-and-claim-it” crowd who believed that whatever they asked for — in Jesus’ name — they would receive.

These particular Christians were especially fond of praying for the sick to be healed because, hey… if God was gonna do a miracle, they wanted to be in on the action. Besides this, they genuinely, fervently believed that a miracle was the most likely outcome pretty much every time they prayed.

I remember being part of their prayer circles where we would place an innocent victim… err, I mean willing participant, with some kind of physical ailment in the center, lay hands on them, and then unleash prayers on them in such a way that, well… there was no way the God didn’t hear us. We yelled and pleaded and implored God to do his best work!

But, let me tell you something: There is nothing more awkward than when a circle of well-meaning, zealous Christians gather around a sick or injured person and offer up impassioned prayers for that person’s healing, only to have God not come through with the goods.

But that’s exactly what happened.

And it happened a lot.

Sometimes God doesn’t answer prayers.

And yet we pray

Yet, unanswered prayer doesn’t seem to stop us. According to Pew Research, over 50% of Americans pray at least once per day, with a further 16% at least once per week.

But, what’s more astounding is that most Americans who pray — 83% in fact — believe that at least some of their prayers are answered. That includes one in four (25%) who say all their prayers are answered, one in five (21%) who say most of their prayers are answered, and more than one in three (37%) who say some of their prayers are answered. That’s according to research by Lifeway.

Go figure.

I wish I were with the 25% who say that all their prayers are answered, but — I won’t lie — I am probably with the crowd that could only agree that God seems to come through some of the time.

Like many people of faith, my reality is that often God doesn’t answer our prayers, at least in a way that we can perceive and understand. How are we to explain it?

Well, there are a number of occasions in the Bible where God actually tells people, straight up, “I am going to ignore your prayers.” In fact, I have found that the Bible describes 13 different circumstances where — no matter how hard you pray — God will give you nothing. Here are those Biblical explanations for God’s divine silence:

1. God doesn’t hear those who ignore the poor

If you find your prayers aren’t penetrating the ceiling, have you considered that it might be because you’re a stingy bastard who neglects the poor and needy? In Proverbs 21:13, God says:

If you stop your ears to the cries of the poor,
your cries will go unheard, unanswered.

That makes sense, right? Why should God help you if you don’t lift a finger to help others, especially those doing it the toughest?

Photo by Steve Knutson on Unsplash

2. God doesn’t hear those who are self-righteous

In Luke 18:11-14, Jesus tells a story about two men going to the temple to offer prayers to God. One is a Pharisee — a highly dignified religious leader — and the other is a lowly and despised tax collector. Jesus explains how they prayed:

The Pharisee posed and prayed like this: ‘Oh, God, I thank you that I am not like other people — robbers, crooks, adulterers, or, heaven forbid, like this tax man. I fast twice a week and tithe on all my income.’

Meanwhile the tax man, slumped in the shadows, his face in his hands, not daring to look up, said, ‘God, give mercy. Forgive me, a sinner.

After telling the story, Jesus affirmed that it was the tax collector’s prayer that was heard by God, not the Pharisee’s prayer. The truth behind the story is this: The prayer of the humble will be accepted, but the prayer of the self-righteous will be rejected.

3. God doesn’t hear those who use prayer as a way to bribe him

In the Book of Isaiah, the nation of Israel has turned its back on God, which ultimately leads to its ruin. Rather than turn back to God, the people simply try to appease God with lots of religious activity — including prayer.

Their prayers were merely an attempt to curry favor with God through their words without changing their actions. Of course, God sees straight through the facade and finds the whole charade a little bit sickening. Here is what God says to the people in Isaiah 1:15

I’m sick of your religion, religion, religion,
while you go right on sinning.
When you put on your next prayer performance,
I’ll be looking the other way.
No matter how long or loud or often you pray,
I’ll not be listening.
And do you know why? Because you’ve been tearing
people to pieces, and your hands are bloody.

In fact, God doesn’t rate any kind of religious activity done for the sake of being religious. God is after one kind of worship, one kind of prayer, and one kind of service — only that which is done out of a sincere heart.

4. God doesn’t hear those who seek to harm his people

Psalm 18 is a song written by the Biblical hero, David, who is being relentlessly pursued by an evil King Saul — a man who is desperate to protect his throne from the up-an-coming leader he sees in young David. David pens these words after he is rescued from his enemies in Psalm 18:40-41:

You made my enemies turn and run away.
I destroyed those who hated me.
They cried out for help,
but there was no one to save them.
They cried out to the Lord,
but he did not answer them.

It seems that those who seek to harm others can’t expect God to answer their prayers.

5. God doesn’t hear those who don’t really want to know him

Do you have a friend who never calls you, except when they are in trouble, need your help, or want something from you? Yeah… we’ve all got them. If you’re like me, you might roll your eyes when they call because you know what’s coming. After the obligatory salutation, you know they are just going to ask you for something. They aren’t interested in really knowing you or being known, for that matter.

In a similar way, I suppose it makes sense that people who show no interest in knowing God most of the time ought not to think it unfair that God might not hear them when they suddenly turn to him for help? Job 27:8-9 says:

What hope do people without God?
Do you think God will listen to their cry for help
when disaster hits?
What interest have they ever shown in the Almighty?
Have they ever been known to pray before?

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6. God doesn’t answer people who don’t believe that he is capable of answering

Well, it turns out that those crazy Pentecostals might have been onto something with their over-the-top level of confidence in God’s ability to answer prayers. At a Biblical level, there is some truth to the fact. James 1:6-7 says:

If you don’t know what you’re doing, pray to the Father. He loves to help. You’ll get his help, and won’t be condescended to when you ask for it. Ask boldly, believingly, without a second thought. People who “worry their prayers” are like wind-whipped waves. Don’t think you’re going to get anything from the Master that way, adrift at sea, keeping all your options open.

The invitation is clear. If you pray, you ought to believe that what you are asking for is really possible. Otherwise, you’ll likely get exactly what you expect from your prayers — Nothing.

7. God doesn’t answer people who ask for the wrong reasons

Ever prayed to win the lottery? I have. I even promised to give God a decent cut if he came through for me on that (like God is short of cash!). Of course, the reason that we ask for something is, perhaps, more important to God than the thing that we ask. And God — being God — sees straight through to our very motives. James 4:3 says,

When you ask, you don’t receive anything, because the reason you ask is wrong. You only want to use it for your own pleasure.

Sometimes we can ask for very good things, for very bad reasons. I trust God to know my true motives more than I trust myself.

8. God doesn’t answer people who knowingly commit wrong

There are really two kinds of sin. There’s the “Whoops-I-slipped-up-there” kind of sin — a slip of the tongue, a thoughtless deed, an accidental oversight. And then there is the deliberate, intentional, knowing-what-we-are-doing-is-wrong-but-still-doing-it-anyway, kind of sin. The second is the one that God really calls us to account for. In John 9:31, Jesus says:

It’s well known that God isn’t at the beck and call of sinners, but listens carefully to anyone who lives in reverence and does his will.

It makes sense — doesn’t it — that we ought not to expect God to hear us when we are purposely continuing to do something that is not what God would want us to do.

Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash

9. God doesn’t answer people who sin in secret

The close cousin of the previous point: How can we sin in private — understanding that God sees all — and then expect God to answer our prayers? Psalm 66:17-18 says:

I cried out to him for help,
and I praised him.
If I had been hiding sin in my heart,
the Lord would not have listened to me.

One of the best definitions of “integrity” that I have ever heard is: Being the same person whether others are watching you or not. God invites us to have an integrity of heart before him in our prayers.

10. God doesn’t answer people who do reject his guidance

Have you ever tried to give advice to someone who just wouldn’t listen to you? No matter how many times you said it, they just kept doing the same old, stupid thing. At some point, you probably threw your hands up into the air and gave up trying to help, choosing instead to watch on in silent exasperation. God seems to operate in the same way. In Proverbs 1:24-28, God says:

I tried to help, but you refused to listen. I offered my hand, but you turned away from me. You ignored my advice and refused to be corrected. Fools will call for me, but I will not answer. They will look for me, but they will not find me.

There is a point where you do give up trying to tell someone something, right?

11. God doesn’t answer people who are full of pride

The type of pride we are talking about here is not the pride you feel when your kid scores the winning goal in your little league game. Biblical pride is an excessive preoccupation with oneself and one’s own importance, achievements, status, or possessions. Job 35:12-13 says:

If evil people ask God for help, he will not answer them,
because they are too proud.

In reality, the person who is full of pride probably only prays for what is in their own interests. They are kind of like that friend who only ever talks about themselves.

12. God doesn’t answer people who won’t listen to him

There is a conversational aspect to prayer that people often overlook. Prayer is supposed to be a two-way interaction where both parties take turns speaking and listening. And, if I were you, I would spend a lot more time listening than speaking because God probably knows a fair bit more than you.

Regardless, unless you are a mad introvert, you probably find conversations where one person does all the talking quite exhausting. If you don’t, it’s probably because you’re the person who is doing all the talking and the other person finds you exhausting!

But prayer is listening — not just talking. In Zechariah 7:11–13, God says:

So this is what God-of-the-Angel-Armies said: if they won’t listen to me, I won’t listen to them.

Fair enough, right?

13. God doesn’t answer people when what they are asking for is not what they need

In the book of 2 Corinthians, the Apostle Paul makes an interesting admission about something that he calls “A thorn in the flesh” — some kind of ailment or hindrance that was bothersome to him, but that he can’t seem to get rid of. There has been much speculation about what Paul’s thorn might have been. In fact, I have written a whole article about it.

Paul does what you or I might do: He prays and asks God to take away this thorn. We read Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 12:8–9:

I begged the Lord three times to take this problem away from me. But the Lord said, “My grace is all you need. Only when you are weak can everything be done completely by my power.”

So we see that even the great Apostle Paul was denied an answer to his prayers. So you are in good company. God said no to Paul’s request because I think Paul was asking for what he wanted, not what he needed. In his wisdom, Paul goes on to recognize that this thorn — troublesome though it was — was, in a strange way, a gift that allowed God to do in him what God desired to do.

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Summing it all up

Of course, the skeptic comes to this article and says the reason that God doesn’t answer your prayers is that he doesn’t exist. Every time I write about religious matters, I always get these kinds of comments, and I’m sure this one will be no exception.

The reality is that prayer, like belief in God, is a matter of faith — which is belief in that which you cannot see, but hope is true nonetheless. But it isn’t completely blind. No sir! When you talk to people of faith, you will find that most of them will have personal stories of answered prayer. As for me, despite the radical faith deconstruction journey that I am on, even I have those stories. It’s hard to deny their power.

At the same time, I have many stories of unanswered prayers. And I wonder why. When I turn to the Bible, I find some reasonable explanations for why my prayers sometimes don’t seem to penetrate the ceiling.

Overall, the Bible teaches us that when we pray, we ought to do it with sincerity, not out of religious duty. When we pray, we ought to examine our own hearts before Him. When we pray, we ought not to ask God to give, if we ourselves are not giving. When we pray, we ought to do it from a posture of humility, recognizing that God is God and we are not. When we pray, we ought to pray with the expectation that God is going to answer us. And when he doesn’t, we ought to pray that God gives us the grace to accept it. And that is a prayer he may just answer.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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