Why does prayer not always work

Waiting can often produce some level of suffering and often we only know how to pray for suffering to be removed. We feel like we will know the prayer has been answered when the outcome we hope for is accomplished…otherwise we can often be left with disappointment.

But, what if God intends to answer our prayers in a different way for a different purpose? What if his answer and his purpose will put his glory on display? Teach us to live out genuine faith? Reveal hidden sin? Make us more spiritually mature? Or even…share in the suffering of Christ? What would it look like for us to change the way we pray by allowing scripture to shape the outcomes we pray for? You serve Him or you dont choose for yourself this day whom you will serve.

But dont say you love or serve God but dont keep His commandments. Wow, where is your love? Where is your grace? Frankly, the meaning of that two word phrase has to be contorted like some pretzel to make it conform to the reality of a God-man relationship. Jesus or God has never, not once, in all the years of my life befriended me in any way save through a storyline.

I know God through what I have been told about Him or read about Him. I am in awe over many things that I do not have a personal friendship with and for Christians to make that claim seems rather misleading and deceiving. Such proclamations only serve to make skeptics even more skeptical.

I can understand your point of view and frustration. I too am struggling with this same thing. I have been a Christian for decades now and have never seen, heard, or felt anything from God. All I know about God is from other people or the Bible. It appears that you need the same thing that I do. Direct interaction between you and God.

That would be glorious. Now, I will share what has kept me going for so long. I know that you are looking for a way to make that happen. Yes I will assume that you are Christian, or looking to be, as your are posting here in search of answers.

All I can do is have faith. Keep seeking and one day, hopefully in this life time, God might actually make contact. That is what I am trying to do. Keep up the fight. God bless you, in Jesus holy name, Amen. But I DO have a personal relationship with Him.

I know when to listen because His presence CAN be felt. Submission to the fact that He is in control and I am not usually straightens things out. Try asking Him to reveal Himself to you personally and He will. However, I noticed your posting after reading this article and felt touched by your statements. You cry out that Jesus not ever once befriended you in your life. Your relationship with him is like reading a story; you know the characters, the basic story line but once the book is closed your heart and life feel empty of his presence.

I have no way of knowing your story James. Your life, feelings and experiences so please bear with me during my response. A personal relationship with anyone is developed by spending time with them.

Talking with them, sharing yourself, your thoughts, getting to know them and who they are, what they think, feel, stand for and desire. A deep personal relationship with God is no different. We are told, if we draw near to Him, he will draw near to us. As a believer He is present with me everywhere I am, but if I never turn my face toward him, seek him and spend time with him then I walk without truly knowing him or having a relationship.

You say that Jesus is a story written by human hands. Have you every explored the true amazing wonder of the historical dating of the word of God we call the Bible. For example, the Dead Sea scrolls date to BC. Part of the Bible I read, hold in my hands can be found on a written document dated this long ago. This is just a small piece of the historical natural of the Bible I could point out. Yes, there are many splendors and wonders in life, and they within themselves they do not make a personal relationship.

If you do not devote a moment of your day, quietly spending it with him then I implore you to try. Start by praising Him. You may not feel like praising him for anything, so just find one thing you can thank him for on this day. Even if that one thing is the simple fact you are here, with breath in your lungs and the feel of the ground under your feet. Pray talk to him , tell Jesus you long to know him and anything else you long to say.

Read the Bible daily so you can start to know him; ponder what you read, ask questions, learn his character. The scriptures are spirit filled, start with John, then go from there. Seek him with all your heart. Same here!!!

What a great response to give, because the above poster Kristen, in my mind has also made some strong points she echoes my frustration. But of course there is always freedom of expression. Whether we agree with it or not. I just need to focus on my much needed spiritual growth cause the good Lord knows I need to. And YES, sometimes the answer is not always a yes or an immediate yes. Hi Linda! What a beautiful response you have given and wonderful instructions on how to have a nice relationship with God.

Oh, and yes, I feel like I have a personal relationship with God, because I do spend time with him every day, just talking to him. I so love to pray! I also love to read scripture and study. Thank you for your teaching and I will pass it on, with love, to people seeking a personal relationship with God. Peace, Gail Liberty. Very well said, Linda and true for me. The more I study and truly learn what the Bible is saying and the more time I spend thanking Him with sincere gratitude the more I know Him.

He already knows me fully and each of us because He created us and He really does see us. The relationship we build with Christ takes many years of learning of and from Him. Jesus died for me so that when I repented of my sin and turned from my sinful ways towards Him with a willingness to let him teach me I found I had a true friend in Him.

He does love us so much He suffered and died for us. If we reject Him that is our choice. This is true, it is hard to hear him with all the noise in the world and in our lives. We have to be still and listen. Turning everything off.

Stop listen to people. If you ask of him, you will receive. He never fails us, it is us that fails us. All these thoughtful people reaching out with respect and compassion to each other here over months of kind and generous sharing of thoughts.

Whether it was God or a ministering angel, I have felt comfort very strongly. I know the Holy Spirit is The comforter, and He comforts me. God, Jesus, Holy Spirt. Receiving Jesus, is not a feeling. It is accepting Him a Savior, and striving to follow His examples. My adult son recently died suddenly, and I felt and am still feeling their comfort. One problem with your thinking on that. I talk to him , and there are ways he lets me know he is with me, and has my very best in plan… I would hate to think i had to go thru life without a personal relationship with him.

What Kenneth Gray said was spot on. I would like to add that maybe you need to seek more using your mind. Our heart and mind need to be open to seeking God.

You may know in your heart God is with you but do you know intellectually? Christian Apologetics has really been a huge part in solidifying my trust in God and because of my trust, I have seen how he is working in my life. When you actively seek God and who and why and how he is the one, you thirst for knowledge for more knowledge and I believe the more you know about him, the more you can see him.

And always remember, God is God, yesterday, today, and forever. I am still waiting for God to answer my prayers. I can relate to the parent not giving bad things.

The parent does give the child some of what they asked for though. Why is God neglecting us? Not trying to discourage anyone or offend anyone, just looking for the reason why no one talks about the side where the parent does give the child something good.

To clarify, I am not including things that God gives to everyone, just personal requests from God. Thanks and may God bless you, in Jesus name, Amen.

I have been asking for answers to this question as well. And this is part of what I cry out to God. In order to have hope I need to hear something. Or if The parent always says no, then the child will eventually stop asking because they already know the answer is going to be no. I have prayed and really believed, because people kept saying believe that God can do the impossible, and years later prayer was never answered and I feel like I wasted my time crying and praying for something that God never intended to do.

So how are you supposed to know where to go from there? I read your comment and had to try to answer to give you maybe a different perspective. I read somewhere that more than asking God into our hearts, we are stepping into his life. Have you really done that? Stepping into his life to me is to allow Him to take me over. That I will transform to be more like Him.

That I will give comfort and hope to others that there is a God who loves them. Yes, sometimes I feel like I am praying to nothing, but that is when I read the Bible and let Him speak to me through His word. He will answer me there. With God I can do this. That is the big answer to prayer. I just follow and pray he opens doors for me to love others through Him.

That prayer is always answered. I copied and pasted this from one of my other responses but I feel you need to be notified of these truths. Think of Life as a flatland with a cliff on one side. The closer you get to the cliff the scarier it gets but once you hook onto the zip line you have to just push off no matter how scared you are. If you were to close your eyes out of fear, would you still be on the zip line?

Perhaps, it is that certain things are required of eac of us as human beings and God will not force us against our will, so that can look like a no answer to a prayer. I was born with a progressive crippling condition and I have asked God for healing and he has said no, not yet and I know that that is what he has told me after many years of Prayer.

Perhaps God is showing you that that person is fully rejecting Christ and you should get away from that person and let God be in control. Perhaps your child has rejected God and going off on their own and is living in sin and you want them to get saved. Well just persevere in prayer and let God do the work and do not harass your child let your child ask you questions if they want to an answer them with love.

God is not Santa Claus to give us all the good gifts that we want just because we ask him. Our illnesses and trials can be useful to show others how much we need God because without Him we make a mess of things. If everything was perfect and every person just came to Christ against their will, would we even need Him? Look how much we as a society have rejected Him in our selfish foolish ways but one day soon He is coming for the true faithful church, for those who have persevered and remained faithful to him and then we will have our new heavenly bodies and we will have full fellowship with Him and the other true Christians believers and Christ followers who have gone before us.

Persevere for this time is very short compared to eternity. Just hang in there and keep believing learn from him study his word be in conversation with him everyday. Maybe there is something better coming. Maybe he is teaching us patience. Maybe what we want to do is better done by someone else. Maybe it is just not His will to either not say yes now as he can see a far larger picture of things than we can. There can be so many reasons. How can you respond to that and it crushes people. No one knows the will of God so to even mention it is off point.

If you have faith in Jesus Christ if your eight-year-old child dies in an accident then you know that that child is with Jesus in Heaven and we will see them one day soon.

It is really all about how much we trust God or not. Jesus suffered pain and agony, death and Hell and He is grieving over our pain. Because we have hearts or minds full of sin God knew we would not trust Him like we should. This is the time we had better surrender our will to Him and trust for He is coming for the faithful very soon.

Those who continue to deny Christ will experience Hell, darkness and being alone through eternity. Today is the day to accept Jesus as Savior and make Him Lord. We brought the sin and illness into this world with our lack of faith and trust in God. From someone who has never had a prayer answered, you have my sympathy. I know what it is to be ignored by God.

Kenneth are you a born-again Christian? If you are how can you say that God has never answered your prayer? When we in sincerity ask Jesus to forgive our sin He does this and he never sees our sin again that is an answer to prayer. From that moment on we have eternal life and the promise of seeing God, walking with Him in the New Heavens and the new Earth.

I know when I was saved God created in me a new heart and gave me a new awareness, opened my eyes to new understanding and a thirst for knowledge. Yhis new ability to learn more and more of the world and of Him is miraculous and I have had to put that ability to work and I read and study.

This gives me a new outlook on life. My body is in terrible shape and I live with pain but my mind has been renewed and I now understand the Glory of God in my kimited capacity.

There is a book called Heaven by Randy Alcorn that you might want to read it is excellent and will give you much hope. You say that Jesus forgiving sins is an answer to prayer. I have never prayed for forgiveness of my sins. That comes automatically when you accept Jesus as Lord and Savior. Nothing but silence. Everyone says that God has three answers to prayer, yes, no, and wait. I have never heard any of the three, just silence.

I was trying to implore people to stop using this analogy. This was an attempt to show that looking at God through the eyes of a parent. There is more to parenting than not giving bad things. Parents also give good things to their kids. The person who God created for you will see something within you that you cannot see yourself. Ask God to bring your helper into your life. Never met, until recently when God told me it was time to travel to meet him.

God told me to prepare for marriage. Not the guy, God. And I did. And guess what? I came with everything I needed to get married. God speaks. God directs. We met online in November of that same year. You say nowhere in the bible does it say holy spirit is an emotion thats true.. But that does not mean that everybody who asks for a partner in life is going to get one.

Does that mean I asked God wrong? God bless you, in Jesus name, Amen. Asl God to remove all bitterness you have towards his silence. All traces of hurt and anger that you have. Bind it by the blood of Jesus and cast it out of you. Life and death is in the tongue. Bind what you hate and want to get rid of and loose what you love and want.

Matthew — Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Proverbs Good News Translation What you say can preserve life or destroy it; so you must accept the consequences of your words. Philippians ESV Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, being ready to punish every disobedience, when your obedience is complete. Look at what is before your eyes. Everything that you have mentioned that you are struggling with, find a corresponding verse to counteract satan with.

This is a fight against rulers of the dark world. What I have observed today in the things you have mentioned to me is darkness trying to steal your joy. This has nothing to do with God speaking to you or not. This is about first casting out all influence of evil in your life. And come to find out, he was being tormented my a demon. God revealed it to me. I had never seen evil looking back at me.

But gradually, I stopped being scared of evil and evil started fleeing from me. I prayed and fasted. It took a long time, but I never stopped praying for this friends deliverance, salvation and healing, and I can say that prayer works. Christ freed him from the grip of satan.

His no longer thinks negatively. He is no longer addicted to drugs, cigarettes, pornography, fornication, homosexuality. All chains of bondage have been broken. This person hated his life. He hated himself!

God told me to help him. Pray for a stranger who I met online. God showed me his true identity. He was demonized his entire life. Awful upbringing. But God brought me into his life to intercede for him. God me details about his life that no one else knew. He was shocked as to how I knew these things.

He admitted we were soul mates, but he still pushed me away. He thought I was too good for him. It was a demon. Tormented his whole life. Who the Son sets free is free indeed. We are getting married soon. God led me to him online and now God led me to him in real life. That hate he once had towards his life and bitterness is completely gone. He used to think he was ugly and undeserving of love, and he pushed me away.

Look now, we are so happy and so in love. I have prayed to God for help with all of this. So far no help from God. I have prayed for God to remove everything negative from me and this life. Genesis took two months. Whenever I pray things get more worse,relationships break,accidents happens…I feel like ending my life. Am total drained up in prayers because am working on a divorce, and every time these man likes to send money for his child on my account. But every time he send money,its either the child will fall and loose the teeth, or I will fall sick, or my parents will be involved in road accidents and ending up loosing double of what he send me.

Before he send the money, I will dream a man trying to assist me,then in the morning I will find money on my account. But before I realise something bad will happen to me,the child, or my family. Plz I need total deliverance. I tried a nother relationship,the man fall sick almost dying and that was the end of us. Plz I need prayers. God bless am siz. God did what you wanted him to do. So what do you say to the people who did not get what they wanted, to those who prayed and fasted and asked for God to move and do something in their relationship or in their lives and nothing worked out for them?

The above is a wonderful article on hope. It greatly encouraged me when I was discouraged as I have been praying for over 23 years for a wayward son. I have no guarantee that God will answer my prayers the way I want but I know that He is a good, faithful and caring Heavenly Father. God knows what we need. One of the first, is we feel our need of help from Him. One cannot pour water into a cup that is already full. If we have cherished sins in our lives, and refuse to give them up, or if we are doing things we should not be doing, and are disobeying Him, we cannot expect Him to answer our prayers.

He cannot answer our prayers if we have sins in our lives that are unconfessed or if we are hanging on to cherished sins. Also, if we refuse to forgive others who have wronged us, God cannot hear us. See Matthew and Ephesians One of the reasons we feel our prayers are not being answered, is because we stop praying. In reality, we should not be worried so much about if God hears our prayers — He does and He does care.

What we should be worried about is if because of temptations, hard times, and trials we get discouraged, and give up praying.

God is a God of love, and He is interested in every detail of our lives. He hears our prayers, and answers every sincere prayer if we meet His conditions. We must not expect that every answer will be "yes", since we are sinners and do not always ask what is best for us.

We must continue trusting Him, regardless of His answer at the moment. God's timetable is not the same as ours.

He knows better than we do when is the best time for our prayers to be answered. See Hebrews 6 A young widow who fled the Sack of Rome AD , Proba wrote to Augustine and asked how she should pray, her life spiraling into ever greater chaos. When we offer to God all of our desires for a happy life, Augustine explained, over time our offering is purified.

As we draw closer to God, and as our wills align to his, we wish more for what he wants to give us and less for what we want to give ourselves. Praying does not change God, therefore; it changes us—in our hearts and in our desires. In other words, we pray always and in every situation not to alert God of our needs, but so that we might grow in our desire for the good things that God wants to give us for a happy life, leading up to eternal life.

The mystery of Christian prayer as Augustine described it unfolds even in situations of great distress. In moments of trouble or trauma, we might not know how to pray as we ought, asking God simply to remove the cause of our trouble. Augustine granted that this prayer is natural and common. When troubled, we pray for the removal of our trouble, though acknowledging all the while that the trouble itself may provide a path to some greater good.

No prayer is useless, therefore. In either case, we pray confidently as creatures of a provident God, who wills that nothing of his ever be lost Jn