Did You Stop Praying Because He Didn't Answer?

Have you ever applied for a job that you really, really wanted? You spent hours on it. You tailored your resume, you wrote, and maybe you rewrote your cover letter or the email, you hit submit, and then you waited. A day, a week, two weeks, nothing. And the worst part wasn't getting a no, because at least the no is an answer. You can you can do something with the no. You can get mad, you can get sad, move on, start over. The worst part was the silence because you didn't even know if they received and read your resume. You didn't know if they even saw your name or if they lost it, if it got lost in someone's inbox, maybe they took a look at it and decided that you were the wrong candidate. It wasn't even worth a response. A lot of us have been praying that same way. And honestly, that's where I want to go in today's episode, because last week we kicked off this new series, and this week we're gonna start getting specific about why the prayers we stopped praying got quiet in the first place. Hey everyone, I'm Melissa, and this is my question for you. So if you missed last week, we kicked off a new six-part series that I'm calling the prayers I stopped praying. And the first question we sat with was just this. When did you stop praying for that? Just noticing it, just letting the prayer surface and not trying to fix anything just yet. But this week, I want to go a little deeper, a layer deeper, because if you did notice something last week when we brought up this question, if a prayer actually came to mind for you, then by now you might be starting to ask this next question. Why did I stop? And here's what I think for a lot of us, the honest answer is this. You didn't lose your faith. You just got tired of the silence. So here's my question for you today. Did you stop praying because God didn't answer? Okay, so let me name something I think a lot of us have lived through, but never said out loud. Here's what unanswered prayer actually feels like. It's not dramatic. There's no big moment where God shows up and says no, that would almost be easier. At least then you'd know the answer, right? What actually happens is this you bring a prayer to God. Maybe it's about a person, maybe it's about a situation, about your own heart, and you pray it honestly, and you mean it. And then you wait, but nothing seems to happen. So you pray it again and again and again. And every time you pray it, you're a little less sure he's hearing you. Not because you've stopped believing in God, but because the silence is starting to feel like its own answer. And here's the part nobody really talks about. The reason most of us stop praying about something isn't that we decided God said no. It's that we couldn't tell if he was saying anything at all. A no you can grieve, a no you can sit with, you can bring it back to God and ask him to help you accept it. But silence, silence is harder because silence makes you wonder if the message even got through. And after a while, you stop sending the message because sending it into what feels like nothing started to hurt more than not sending it at all. That's where a lot of stop prayers come from, not from anger or from doubt about God's existence, just from the slow, quiet exhaustion of asking and never being sure if anyone is listening. So I want to take you to a story in Scripture today. It's a story most of us know. But I want us to read it a little differently this time. I want us to read it through the eyes of two women who, by any honest measure, had their prayer ignored. Okay, so let's jump in. There's a story in John chapter 11 that I think every person who's ever felt unheard by God needs to sit with. It's the story of Lazarus. Lazarus is sick. His sisters, Mary and Martha, are the ones who are watching him get worse. And Lazarus isn't just anyone, he's one of Jesus' closest friends. But scripture goes out of its way to say it. The one you love is sick. So the sisters send word to Jesus. They send a message, essentially saying, Please come. He needs you. We need you. And here's the part I want you to really feel. They knew the message reached Jesus. They sent it directly. They weren't praying into the void, wondering if God could hear them. They had a personal relationship with Jesus. He had been in their home, he had eaten at their table. They knew he cared about their brother. And so they sent the message and they waited. And he didn't come. Scripture tells us, and this is the part that's so wild, that when Jesus heard the news, he stayed where he was for two more days. He didn't rush. He didn't drop everything. He stayed. And by the time he finally got there, Lazarus had been dead for four days. Now, here's what I want you to notice. The first thing Martha says when she sees Jesus is not a polite greeting. It's not, thank you for coming. It's not even, I knew you would show up. The first words out of her mouth are this Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. That is an accusation. That's a woman who is grieving, who feels like the person she loved and trusted didn't show up when she needed him most. And she says it to his face. And a little later, when Mary finally comes out to see him, she falls at his feet and says the exact same thing. She says, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. These two women who love Jesus, who knew him personally, who had sent him a direct message, are telling him out loud that they feel like he didn't answer. And listen to what Jesus does. He doesn't correct them. He doesn't tell them they should have more faith. He doesn't lecture them about his timing. The Bible says Jesus wept the shortest verse in the Bible. Jesus wept. He stood with them in their grief over what they thought was an unanswered prayer, even though he knew what he was about to do next. Now stay with me, because this next part is the whole reason I wanted to tell you this story. Here's the thing about Mary and Martha that I can't stop thinking about. From their perspective, the prayer didn't get answered. They asked Jesus to come heal their brother, and he didn't. And Lazarus died by every measure that mattered to them in the moment. The prayer they prayed was not the prayer that got answered. But something else was happening that they couldn't see. Jesus wasn't ignoring them. He wasn't absent, and he wasn't even delayed by accident. He was intentionally waiting because the answer he was preparing was bigger than the one they had asked for. They prayed for healing. He was preparing resurrection. And here's the part that breaks me a little, because from where Mary and Martha were standing, those two things looked exactly the same. Both of them looked like unanswered prayer. They didn't know that the silence was doing something, and they didn't know that what felt like absence was actually preparation. They didn't know that Jesus had been working on something the whole time, even when it looked like he hadn't received the message at all. And I want to say something really carefully here because I know how this can land wrong. I am not telling you that every unanswered prayer is going to turn out like Lazarus. Okay? I'm not saying that if you just wait long enough, you'll see the dead thing in your life come back to life on this side of heaven. Some of you are praying about things that may not get a yes. And I want to honor that. That pain is real, that grief is real. But here's what the Lazarus story tells us all unanswered prayers are really about, even the ones that don't end in resurrection. The silence is not the same as absence. He heard the message. He was present in the grief. And he was doing something, even when it looked like he wasn't. But I want to give you one more story because I know not all of us are sitting in the Lazarus part of the story. Some of us are sitting in something a little bit harder, a prayer that's been answered, but the answer was no. And the place that I want to take you for that one might be the last place that you'd expect. Let's go back to the night before Jesus was crucified. He went into a garden called Gethsemane to pray. You probably know this story. Jesus is hours away from the cross. He knows what's about to happen, and he knows the pain of it. He knows the weight of it. And he prays. And in Matthew 26, Scripture tells us what he said. He said, My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me. I want you to just sit with that for a second. That's Jesus, the Son of God, in a garden on his knees, asking his father if there's any way around what's coming. Asking if maybe, just maybe, there's a different path, a different way out of it. And he doesn't just ask once. Scripture says he prayed it three times, the same prayer. Let this cup pass from me. Take this from me. And the answer was no. There was no other way. The cup wasn't passed. The cross was still coming. Now this is where I want to be really careful because this is a heavy thing to sit with. But I think we need to. If Jesus, Jesus, prayed something honestly and the answer was no, then your no doesn't mean God isn't listening. Doesn't mean he doesn't love you or that your prayer didn't matter. But sometimes the answer is no because something bigger is happening than what we can see from where we're praying. But there's another point of this story that I really don't want to miss. Luke's version of this same scene tells us that while Jesus was praying, in the middle of the hardest prayer he had ever prayed, the one that wasn't going to get the answer he asked for, an angel appeared and strengthened him. The Father didn't grant the request, but he did not leave the room. He sent presence right into the middle of the prayer that was being answered with a no. That's the thing that I want you to hold on to. The silence on the specific thing you are asking for is not the same as God being absent from the asking. Sometimes the answer to an unanswered prayer is not the thing you asked for. It's God being with you in the asking. The same God who didn't give Jesus a different path is the same God who sent an angel to strengthen him for the path that was coming. Both things at once the know and the presence, the unanswered request and the deeply answered prayer underneath it. Okay, so let me bring these two stories together because I think they're saying the same thing, but from two very different directions. Mary and Martha prayed for Jesus to come heal Lazarus. He didn't come, and Lazarus died. But that wasn't the end of the story. The silence between their prayer and his arrival was not God being absent. It was God preparing something they couldn't have asked for because they didn't even know to ask for it. Then there's Jesus in the garden. He prayed three times for a different way, and there wasn't one. The answer was no. But that no wasn't God being absent either. The Father sent an angel right into the middle of the prayer. The cup didn't pass, but Jesus didn't pray it alone. In both stories, in both of them, the people praying could have looked at what was happening and concluded that God wasn't listening. In one case, the silence stretched four days while a man they loved was dying, and in the other, the answer was a clear no to the most honest prayer ever prayed. And in both stories, the silence and the no were not the absence of God. They were the place where God was working in a way nobody could see yet. The prayer that didn't get answered the way they asked was not the prayer that didn't get heard. And I think that's the thing some of us need to sit with this week. The prayer you stopped praying because the answer didn't come, maybe the answer was coming, but just not the answer you were looking for. Maybe the silence was doing something you couldn't see from where you were standing. Maybe you weren't ignored. Maybe you were heard. And those aren't the same thing. And that brings me back to the question that I want you to actually carry with you this week. Because what we're really asking underneath all of this is something deeper than did he answer? The surface question we started with was this Did you stop praying because he didn't answer? But the question behind that question, the one I think God is gently asking us is this. Have I confused God's silence with his absence? Because those two things are so very different. His silence might mean he's preparing something. It might mean he's saying something different than what we asked, that he's working on a longer timeline than we can see right now. But his silence has never, not once in the history of Scripture, not once in the history of his people meant that he was absence. He has never stopped being present, he's never stopped hearing, and he has never stopped caring about us. The God who wept at Lazarus' tomb is the same God who's hearing your prayer right now. And that's something that's so powerful to think about and remember. It's the same God, and he works in the same way. So before we close this out, I want to give you something to do with it. It's what we always do. And I'm gonna tell you up front, I'm not asking you to start praying again. We've been saying that. That's not what this series is about. I know some of you are not ready for that. So this is something a little gentler. Just something to wake us up and help us notice and get us to the point where we feel like we are ready to start praying again. So this week, I just want you to remember. Find the prayer that you stopped praying because the answer didn't come, the one you got tired of asking about, and the one that hurt too much to keep bringing it up. And I just want you to remember it. Remember why it mattered to you when you first started praying it. Remember who was on your heart, what you were reaching toward, and what you were hoping for. You don't have to pray it just yet. You don't have to be ready to bring it back to God. I just want you to blow the dust off it and remember that it was there. At one point it mattered, because the prayer you stopped praying was real, and the silence around it wasn't the end of the story. It was just the part of the story that you can't see yet. And here's why I think this really matters. Some of you stopped praying about something years ago, and the prayer is still sitting there, covered in dust in a corner of your heart that you haven't visited in a very long time. And every time you walk past it, something in you remembers. But maybe it just hurts too much to pick it up again. So I'm not asking you to pick it up today, but I am asking you to walk into the room, to look at it again, and let yourself remember why it was so important enough to pray it in the first place. Okay, before I let you go, I want to just leave you with the line that's been sitting with me all week. You weren't ignored. You were heard. And those aren't the same thing. The God who heard Mary and Martha, the God who stayed with Jesus in the garden, even when the answer was no, the God who wept before you raised the dead. That same God heard your prayer. He heard it the first time you prayed it. He heard it the hundredth time you prayed it. He heard it the last time you prayed it. And he hears you now, even in the silence between then and the version of you sitting with this episode today. So this week, just go find the prayer. Remember it. Let it back into the room. Bring it back to life. Next week, we'll talk about something maybe a little bit harder. The prayers were a little afraid to pray again. Because the last time we prayed something like it, God did answer. And the answer was hard. So until then, I want you to always keep asking, keep listening, and remember, he may not have changed your circumstances, but he has never once left the room. Before you go, if today's question stayed with you, I'd love to keep the conversation going. Each week, I send a short email called This Week's Question, a Quiet Invitation, and it's a simple reflection to help you stay grounded, to pay attention, to dive deeper into God's Word, and to walk with God throughout your week. You can sign up at myquestion for you dot com, bringing you encouragement for your spirit and wisdom for your walk.