Why Doesn’t God Answer my Prayers?

We have pages of them.

The stack becomes thicker and thicker with time until we eventually give up on it completely.

Unanswered prayers can be the doom of most Christians.

“I used to pray”, I hear people say, “until I noticed that God never answers any of my prayer requests”. “What’s the point?” others say. “If God really cared about my needs, why hasn’t he stepped up to the plate?”

While statements like these seem extreme in nature, they threaten to erode the base of our belief to the point of extinction.

Why doesn’t God always answer our prayer requests?

It’s a question worth asking and a question with Biblical answers. I’d like to share 5 reasons why God doesn’t seem to answer your prayer requests.

1. Your prayers remain unspoken. Many of us talk big but don’t deliver. Oh, we’re good at talking about prayer. We’re good at complaining when God doesn’t answer. We’re good at analyzing and theorizing and intellectualizing our faith, but the last thing we actually do is get on our knees and pray. We know we should. We spend enough time thinking about it. But until you actually start to pray, you will not begin to see God at work in your life in a personal way.

2. You are praying for the wrong things. I work in an ER. I get kids with cuts that need stitches. If I were to listen to most kids, I’d give them the band aid and skip the shots and the stitches. Their wounds would remain largely unhealed and prone to infection. I don’t give them what they want. I give them what they need. It’s the same way with prayers. We can ask all we want, but we are blessed to have a God who gives us what we need. In James 4:3 it says “you ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” Those are true words in my life.

3. You are praying the wrong way. Wait…there’s a wrong way to pray? Am I supposed to stand up? Kneel down? Lie down? What magic words should I use? No! I’m not talking about superficial methods and how to’s. I’m talking about praying in the way Jesus did. Here are some keys to praying God’s way: pray to your Father, pray according to God’s will, and pray in Jesus name, and pray as you obey (Matthew 6:9-13, I John 3:22, I John 5:14).

4. You stopped praying too soon. That’s probably the biggest one of all. We pray. We pray often. We pray desperately. But we give up too soon. Job spent 42 chapters “praying” his problems to God. Abraham prayed almost 100 years before he saw a son. Are you on the verge of giving up? Don’t! God delays only to increase His glory when the answer does come. So pray on, Christian.

5. You are praying without faith. God has made believing a condition of receiving. I’ve read this recently: “prayer without faith quickly degenerates into an aimless routine or heartless hypocrisy.” I find that to be so true. I often say the words but my heart is not in it. How can you tell if you’re praying with faith? Philippians 4:7 gives us the answer: the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will keep your heart and mind. If you’re still anxious and worried, if you’re still plotting and planning, if you’re still complaining and pacing, the odds are you’ve not prayed in faith.

Life is hard. But we’ve been given a weapon to live our life powerfully for God. Use it!

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