Faith Through the Journey

Unanswered prayer is one of life’s great mysteries, at least to our finite understanding. We wonder if God has heard, if He is listening, if there is something else we are supposed to be doing, what is wrong with us that our prayers don’t seem to be reaching heaven or being answered, so many agonizing questions that can plague us as we wait and wonder.

The short, simple answer is that we are not God. We do not understand the whole picture. In our society where everything is seemingly available almost instantaneously, anything that takes a length of time we deem unnecessarily long, we assume that something must be wrong. Surely something needs to be fixed in order to get the answer or solution we seek.

The answer that we find much more difficult to deal with is one that occurs many times in the Bible. God’s plan is SO much bigger than anything we can understand, and while we are each very important to Him, everything He does is connected to His bigger plan. The prayers were being answered; the work just wasn’t finished yet. God was STILL at work. It wasn’t time yet…

In Exodus, the people of Israel were crying out to God for deliverance from their oppression in Egypt. But, Moses was on the back side of the desert, hiding out and not nearly ready to take on the mission God had for him of leading Israel out of Egypt. God had not forgotten the promise He made to Abraham in Genesis 12, it just took several hundred years and lots of work on His part to work through all the people He would use to bring about this fulfillment. It took 6 whole books of the Old Testament from the place of the promise being made to the people of Israel possessing the land! The answer finally came, but NOBODY who prayed the original prayer saw the end! They looked forward in faith, they kept on, even when they didn’t see the end.

The book of Daniel also records a time that as Daniel prayed, an angel was dispatched with the answer. He had to fight with Satan in order to get through to Daniel. Daniel kept praying, not knowing about the heavenly war, but God was working on getting the answer to him.

The Old Testament ends with the book of Malachi, the last prophet that would speak to the people of Israel for 400 years before the birth of Christ. Up until that time, there had been prophets periodically given to give the people a message God wanted them to hear or be reminded of. But this was it: 400 years of silence, or so it seemed. But during that time, God was STILL working; He was preparing the world for the greatest event yet, the birth of His Only Son. The Roman Empire had systems of transportation and communication that were going to make it possible to travel throughout the known world; though it was far from a perfect world, there were things present that made it the exact right moment for Jesus to come from heaven. Even the prophesied crucifixion was a Roman punishment.

And there were still devout Jews looking forward to the coming Messiah; they never forgot to keep looking and keep praying! In Luke, when Mary and Joseph presented Jesus in the Temple, the devout Anna and Simeon had never stopped praying or believing that God would indeed send the promised Messiah. God rewarded their faithful devotion by allowing them to see Jesus!

As we pray, we come to understand the heart of our Heavenly Father. Prayer becomes less about us asking for stuff and wanting to know Him better. God’s Word tells us of His love and His desire to have fellowship with us, and our relationship with Him becomes more important than any other. Spending time in prayer changes us, as God goes for changes in us that make us more like Jesus and give us a much better life than our own human efforts will yield.

And in the end…in the fullness of time…God WILL answer our prayer as He knows best. He will give us an earthly answer, if He deems that best, or it will no longer matter when we get to heaven. Ultimately, the prayer we must ALWAYS conclude with is this: “Thy will be done”. He is ALWAYS on time: HIS time!