“And You’re Wondering Why God Has Not Answered Your Prayers!

By Lou Yeboah

(EMPIRE NEWS NETWORK—ENN)— Well, I tell you why? Sin! You going around doing everything from A-Z and you want to know why God hasn’t answered your prayers. Don’t you know unconfessed sin separates you from God causing God not to even hear your prayers! He says in [Ezekiel 14:3] “Should I let them inquire of me at all?”  It’s not that the Lord’s hand is shortened, that it cannot save; nor His ear heavy, that it cannot hear, but your iniquities have separated you from your God; and yours sins have hidden his face from you, so that He will not hear.” You see, “The eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and His ears are open to their prayers; but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.” [Psalm 34:15; 1 Peter 3:12]  Wondering why God has not answered your prayers! Ain’t No need of Wondering!

What makes it even worst, not only do you have sin in your life, “When you ask, you ask amiss?  “You ask wrongly… You adulterous people, says the Lord! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us?  Submit yourself therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” [James 4:3-10]. Wondering why God has not answered your prayers! Ain’t No need of Wondering!

And, most importantly, you must belong to God before you can communicate with Him. Jesus said, “He who belongs to the Father hear what God says [John 8:47]. The bottom line: As Christians, we need to put God first in our lives to have an effective prayer life. If you’re doing that, God does hear your prayers, and he answers them. You just have to trust God that He’s giving you the best answer for you- for your life- and for all eternity. As [Proverbs 3: 5-6] says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding and in all your ways acknowledge Him, and he will make your paths straight.

I want you to know that you are not the first person to have your prayers go unanswered. In fact, the Bible is filled with stories of men and women who prayed to God in the moment of crisis, and God for reasons sometimes explained and more often not explained – why He didn’t answer their prayers. Habakkuk struggled with the unanswered pray. He cried out, “O Lord, how long shall I cry and you will not hear?” Job struggled with unanswered pray. In Job 31:35 he says, “Oh, that I had one to hear me! Oh, that the Almighty would answer me!” King David struggled with unanswered pray. In Psalm 13, he said, “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me, forever? How long will you hide your face from me”? Habakkuk, Job, David, all echo the frustrations that many of us have had at one time or another when it seems as if God is not answering our prayers. “Three times God told Paul “No.”  Paul prayed for God to remove the thorn in his flesh” so that he could get on with his ministry. And each time God said No! Can you image that? The apostle Paul probably the greatest Christian who ever lived, prayed about this need in his life, found that God did not, would not, answer his prayers until he continued to persist, then God finally gave him an explanation. “… “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

Listen, though we may rebel against this idea, God doesn’t always work the way we want Him to. Just because we don’t see Him immediately answer our prayers in the way we expect, doesn’t mean He isn’t working in our lives. Often, we want things that will ultimately be bad for us. And we like to use God to get what we want, the way we want it, and when we want it. But time and time again in Scripture we see that God is not in a hurry. For 400 years, the Israelites prayed for the deliverance that God gave them through Moses. God is the master of time and therefore the master of timing. Even Jesus knew this.  Periodically, we’ll hear Jesus say, “His hour had not come,” and the Scriptures often mention events happening “in the fullness of time.” As the saying goes, “Anything worth having is worth waiting for.” So if God is silent, pray for His peace. Pray for His will to be done. And pray that He gives you the kind of faith that will wait.

As Job said, “I don’t understand this at all, but I’m hanging on to you, Lord, and I’m not going to let go.” [Job 13:15]. That’s the place to which God wants to bring us and sometimes unanswered prayer is the only way to get us there.

“For this reason we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding…. Strengthened with all might, according to His glorious power, for all patience and longsuffering with joy” [Colossians 1:9-11].

“Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.” [Ephesians 3:20-21].