Unanswered Prayers

Jon Ludovina, the author of this post, serves as one of our pastors and oversees all of our teaching and preaching. For more information on our church's leadership, visit our

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The Crushing Weight of Religious Prayer

“How could God possibly love me? My whole life has been pain. He doesn’t hear my prayers. He hasn’t for years. Why won’t He answer me?”

She sobbed through the painful tears of religious frustration. Decades of praying with all her might, as skillfully as she could–even praying for good things–things she just knew God wanted her to pray for–countless prayers lobbed up at a God who now seemed distant and hard of hearing.

God Always Answers

Technically, there is no such thing as unheard or unanswered prayers when it comes to God. He knows all things. He hears all things. In Psalm 139, David writes, “Even before a word is on my tongue,behold, O Lord, you know it altogether.” So technically, the issue is not whether or not He hears because He always does. The issue is whether or not He listens and whether He answers yes or no.

But technicalities don’t comfort a heart that is racked with pain.

Straight to the Gospel

So instead of correcting the inaccuracy, we talked about the gospel. We talked about the good news of Jesus’ sacrifice for our sake. We talked about the cross where Jesus died in our place for our sin. We talked about how Jesus’ prayer for God to let the cup of His wrath pass was answered with a no. And as the truth of God’s love and grace washed over her, you could visibly see her soul stop trembling with fear.

My favorite truth that Kent talked about on Sunday in his sermon, Landlord or Father, is that our understanding of God’s love is not based on his answers to our prayers. Our understanding of God’s love is based on the cross.

• We don’t judge God’s love based on the circumstances of our lives, no matter how painful or wonderful they might be.
• We believe His love based on the painfulness of Jesus’ suffering in our place.
• We don’t judge God’s love based on getting or receiving the things we ask.
• We believe His love based on Jesus giving up His life so we could receive more free love than we ever dreamed.

Since God loved us while we were His enemies – while we had done nothing to deserve His love whatsoever – He owes us nothing. He is not indebted to say yes to any of our prayers.

And yet…He says yes to many!

We don’t deserve a yes to all–nevermind any–of our prayers. And honestly, if we knew what God knows we wouldn’t want Him to say yes to all of the things we ask. But God frequently lets us be in on His will and His mission for our lives and for planet earth. In His sheer grace He often says yes to our prayers.

Not because we deserve it, but because He is good.

The gospel of Jesus is hope and freedom to pray for anything knowing that God is good no matter how He answers. The cross of Jesus beckons, “Come and abide in life-giving relationship with the God who suffered for you. Come and pray to God who’s love for you is unshakable.”

Come. Pray. And abide.

“…That my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” (John 15:11)

Four Weeks of Abiding Through Prayer

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This Sunday in our Abide series, we discussed prayer as a means of abiding in and enjoying God as our Father. Prayer often seems like an easy thing to neglect. Because it takes a bit of concentration and effort, we tend to slack in it when we feel like we're failing to do it well. And since prayer is something most everyone struggles to thrive in, we wanted to provide an on-ramp to help.

The Challenge

For the next 28 days, beginning yesterday and ending on Father's Day, we're going to spend five minutes a day in prayer as a church family. All of us can spare five minutes. And if not, surely we all do five minutes worth of something that could be skipped and have no significant impact on us or our families.

You might be thinking I spend way more time than that in prayer every day already! And our response would be to keep it up! But others of us may need a jumpstart.

So we're encouraging each person in our family to spend five minutes in prayer–for anything. And our hope is that God will use these five minutes to grow us in our love for Him and each other.

Most of us have tons we could think of to pray for in five minutes, but just in case you need some help:

• You. Your love for Jesus, your spiritual health, your physical health.
• Your family. Their love for Jesus, their salvation, their anxieties, their struggles.
• Your LifeGroup. Their love for Jesus, people you're building relationships with, people joining you for your rhythms.
• Our church family as a whole. That we'd be an accurate representation of Jesus in our city and in our world. For strength and courage, hope in the midst of suffering, our relationships with others and with Jesus.
• Our city. That people in Columbia would place their hope in Jesus.
• Our world. That we would be a part of seeing God's kingdom come in power all over the planet.

Pray With Us for The Good Life

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We are very excited about looking at some of the major themes that Solomon touches on throughout The Good Life. Ecclesiastes, when understood properly, contains an ocean’s worth of wisdom to protect us like a moat from the siren calls of materialism, secularism, individualism, idealism, and performancism. These perspectives are the air we breathe in our culture. We are praying that Jesus will use this study to grow our family in loving Him, living in light of eternity with Him and learning to help our neighbors, friends and family see the vanity of living life without Jesus in view.

Please join us in praying for our church family throughout this study:

• Pray that Jesus will give us deep, honest insight into the underlying emptiness of many of the things we are chasing after to give us the good life.
• Pray that Jesus will give us more of His perspective from beyond the sun.
• Pray that we will grow as missionaries who can help discern and help to explain the deep down broken emptiness of life that many of our neighbors and friends are experiencing.
• Pray that Jesus will help our city see our need for Him in order to live the good life.
• Pray that Jesus will rescue us from the trap of individualism and help us live heavily intertwined, mutually encouraging lives as a church family.
• Pray that Jesus will protect us from the temptation of materialism and performancism and help us find our identity is perfectly given to us as a gift in Him.
• Pray that we will grow in contentment, enjoyment, and experiencing of the good life that is found in Jesus.