Unanswered Prayer

Jeremiah 33:3

Call unto me and I will answer you and show you great and mighty things which thou knowest not.

One of the things that seems to puzzle believers the most is prayers that go unanswered. Did you read the verse from Jeremiah? It doesn’t say that God might answer or will sometimes answer, it says the He WILL answer. So, for that reason, I submit the idea that there is no such thing as an unanswered prayer.

I can just hear the cry going out now from many who read this, they are saying that you just haven’t talked to me, I have had many prayers go unanswered. Well, either you are wrong or the Bible is not true. It plainly says here that God will answer. I think the problem lies in the defining of the term “answer”. It may just be that God has answered, but the answer is not what you wanted to hear, so you just say that He didn’t answer. There are any number of answers that one can get from a request, and NO is an answer. There are times God just simply says, “No” to our requests.In other instances, it seems that God doesn’t answer because He says for us to wait. Don’t you see that wait is an answer too?

It just may be that you haven’t gotten the answer yet. I know that many people pray once or twice and if they don’t get what they want in a day or so, they just quit and say that God didn’t answer their prayer.The Bible tells us that the children of Israel prayed and begged God for so long to give them a King, which was not His perfect will for them,that he finally gave them what they requested, but that it brought leanness to their souls. (Ps. 106:15) There is a saying that says,” You better watch out what you pray for, because you just might get it.”

I can remember a country song of a few years ago about a man and his wife going back to a hometown football game. While there, they ran into his old sweetheart. He tells how that he used to pray for God to give her to him for his wife, but now after seeing her again and seeing the wife he has, He thanks God for unanswered prayers. Have you learned to trust God enough to thank Him for "unanswered prayers?"