Watch at: https://www.christianworldmedia.com/watch?v=2aJfs45h41-R (sermon starts at 22:07)
Read below:
This is week seven of a series on prayer, and I beg your indulgence to remind you of some of the things we have already seen. You can think of this as the “Previously on…” scenes at the beginning of your favorite TV show.
We have seen that the kind of life you live will determine the kinds of answers to prayer you receive (and, frankly, the kinds of prayers you offer). The proud who look down on others will not receive many answers; the humble will.
We saw that God wants to answer our prayers but frequently these prayers need to evolve and be shaped to his will. So, the first time we pray, our pray may be in the general direction of God’s answer and yet require significant course modification. I once read that the Apollo missions’ spacecraft were off-course over 90 percent of the time. They only reached their destination by repeatedly altering their direction as they received guidance from mission control. So, with our prayers. They will not be aimed right unless we let God guide our praying. We learned we must pray with the help of the Holy Spirit.
We also learned that the condition of our heart – the central part of us, the control center of the human being – will impact the effectiveness of our prayers. If “our hearts know something against us,” (this was 1 John 3:19-21) it will be hard for us to pray in faith and receive answers. But if “our hearts do not know something against us,” we will see many and sometimes remarkable answers to prayer.
Once, several years ago, after I preached on that 1 John 3 passage, I received an email from a friend. He said that my sermon led him to question his own heart, for God had not answered his most urgent request. After church, he and his teenage son were talking about the sermon, and his son asked if their request – that his mother would be healed of cancer – was rejected because they had done something wrong.
I was stung by the question. My sermon aroused terrible doubts in these friends who had just lost wife and mother. Perhaps it produced false guilt in others. I don’t want that to happen to any of us. What I shared about the condition of the heart and its impact on answered prayer is profoundly important. I believe that all of us sometimes, and some of us at all times, fail to see prayers answered because our hearts know something against us. But that is not the whole story. Not by a long shot.
Our failures, sin, and corruption may be the reason for unanswered prayers, but there is more to it than that. Unanswered prayers may stem from our wrongness, but they also may stem from God’s rightness. Even the greatest saints (as we will see) have their requests turned down. Unanswered requests and requests that receive a no answer are not always – and may not even usually – be the consequence of our sin.
Dave Roever was a gunner on a river patrol boat in Vietnam in 1969 when a phosphorous grenade exploded. He was literally on fire when he jumped into the river, but phosphorous burns in water. When medics found him, they thought he was dead and put him in a body bag. When, at the MASH unit, the body bag was unzipped and they found him alive, they rushed him to surgery. But every time the surgeon’s incision exposed embedded phosphorous to the air, it would ignite, and Roever would catch on fire all over again.
Despite his suffering and disfigurement (even after more than 50 reconstructive surgeries), Dave became a spokesman for Jesus. His story has helped thousands of people. Yet once, when he got up to speak at a prosperity gospel church, a group of congregants rose simultaneously and marched out. Their spokesmen went last, and when he reached the door, he turned and said to Roever in a loud voice: “When you get the sin out of your life, God will heal you.”
Had Dave’s disfigured body gone unhealed because his heart knew something against him? I don’t think so. There are other reasons that God does not answer our prayers. That was true even in St. Paul’s life. He, the author of more than a quarter of our New Testament, the Apostle to the Gentiles, hero of the faith, and martyr for Jesus, also had his request denied. Let’s read what he wrote about that in 2 Corinthians 12:6-10.
Look again at verses 7 and 8. “…a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me … Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me.” This is Paul the Apostle, the Ambassador for Christ, the writer of Holy Scripture. He had been a Jesus-follower for many years. But he suffered greatly from a chronic problem, which he calls a thorn in the flesh, Satan’s messenger (or angel).
No one knows what this “thorn in the flesh” was, but that has not stopped Bible readers from speculating about it. Many older scholars believed it was a physical disability. Taking their cue from one line in Galatians, some thought Paul suffered from an eye disease that caused him pain or vision loss. Others believed he had some chronic illness like migraine headaches, or epilepsy, or malaria. Many contemporary scholars argue that Paul’s thorn in the flesh was a metaphor for difficult people, because the Old Testament uses the idiom in a similar way. They think Paul’s thorn in the flesh was not a physical illness but a person or group of people who continually nettled him – and Paul certainly had such people!
We cannot be sure about the nature of Paul’s thorn, and we don’t need to be. That is not the important thing. The important thing is that Paul ached to be rid of it. It harassed him or, as the Greek has it, “it battered me.”)
You and I know the feeling. “I can’t take it anymore. I just want it to be over.” Enough is enough.
That is how Paul felt, and he did just what you and I do when we feel that way: he prayed. Surely God would not say no to his loyal apostle. He would not say no to a man who was full of faith and cleansed of sin.
Paul says, “Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me.” He pleaded … but God refused his request.
It’s one thing when God denies my request, but to deny the great Apostle Paul’s was another. We want to say, “God, it doesn’t make sense. What possible reason could you have for saying no?”
Let me ask you a question and let me preface it this way. Think of the thing in your life for which you have prayed most earnestly but have not received the answer you wanted. Imagine that God spoke to you in a vision and said to you, “I want you to know why I denied your request. I did it because I was looking out for you and for many other people. I have something better in mind.” Would that satisfy you? Would you feel better after the vision?
If you did, it would mean that your heart and God’s heart were aligned; it was your mind that was agitated because of a lack of knowledge – and we humans always lack knowledge. But if, after the vision, you continued to be upset or bitter, it would be a sign that your heart was and remains out of alignment with God’s heart. The mind can never be at rest when the heart, which it serves, is in upheaval.
Here is the thesis of this message: When God says no, he does so because of love. When he says no, it is because saying yes would be unhelpful in the long run to you and to others. When he says no, it is to preclude some evil that would happen or to promote some good that would not happen were he to say yes.
The evil that must be precluded and the good that must be promoted may not be apparent to you now. They may not even be apparent in your lifetime. That good or evil might be four generations away, or fourteen. We cannot see it, think it, or even imagine it – our minds are too limited; we are still babes in the infancy of humanity. There is so much we don’t know.
But God knows. He stands outside of time is already present with those great, great grandchildren, four generations removed from us. He exists in their time as truly as in ours. He is as concerned with their needs and prayers as he is with ours. He doesn’t guess; he knows. He knows – he sees – the consequences of some action it never entered our minds to consider.
Paul’s situation helps us get a grasp on this. Let me give you some background. In a rhetorical flourish, Paul lets the proverbial cat out of the bag and informs the Corinthians that he has had visions, remarkable revelations from God. He has been – whether in body or not he could not tell – in the third heaven, the very throne room of God.
Paul doesn’t speak of a revelation, but of revelations; he uses the plural. This is not something that happened once. It has happened repeatedly.
Along with the rapture of these revelations came the misery of what Paul calls “a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan.” Whether it was a physical disability or an unrelenting adversary, it was painful and perpetual, and Paul wanted relief. He could see how much better things would be if the thorn was pulled. So, he prayed for that and, as we’ve already seen, God said no.
But notice the reason God said no, which Paul seems to have gathered in hindsight (verse 8): “So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited.”
The etymology of the word translated “conceited” is “to lift or raise above.” Paul, the great apostle, theologian, and martyr was in danger of getting above himself. He was in danger of looking down on others. Or, as the ESV put it, of “becoming conceited.” Let that sink in for a minute.
Do you know how ruinous for the Church of Jesus and for the world a conceited Apostle Paul would have been? It would have been disastrous! Christianity would be unrecognizable. Our Bible would be entirely different. A conceited Paul would have posed far greater danger to the church than an unconverted, rampaging Paul.
Had you asked Paul if he thought he was in such danger, I don’t know that he would have said yes. He probably did not see the danger or its consequences, but God did. We can be thankful that God didn’t spare Paul the terrible thorn. If he had, who knows if we would even be Christians? And the danger to Paul himself, the personal loss and the spiritual devastation caused by pride, would have been a heavier burden by far than the thorn he carried.
Before my 14-year-old brother died of cancer, lots of people were praying for his healing. My parents would have given their lives for it, and they certainly gave their prayers. But God did not heal my brother. Perhaps he saw some consequence, invisible to our eyes, that would have brought evil into the world – maybe not then, fifty years ago, but a hundred years from now and for a thousand years to come! All we could see was our own pain and loss; it is a rare human being who sees beyond that. But God does.
God addresses this directly in Isaiah 57:1. Speaking of the deaths – seemingly tragic and premature – of good people, God says: “The righteous perish, and no one ponders it in his heart; devout men are taken away, and no one understands that the righteous are taken away to be spared from evil.”
Sometimes, when God does not answer our prayer the way we want, it is to spare us and the world from evil. By not taking Paul’s thorn away, God prevented an evil – a conceited apostle – that would have been ruinous for him and a plague on God’s church. If God says no, it may be to preclude or prevent some evil that would have happened had he said yes.
But there’s more to it than that. His answers not only preclude evil; they also promote good. This was certainly the case in Paul’s life. Look at verse 9: “But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.”
Paul’s thorn in the flesh, whatever it was, became the means through which he experienced God’s grace as power in his life. I believe if you had asked him, “Paul, if you could change the past so that you never experienced that thorn, would you?” he would say, “No. I experienced the riches of God’s grace in my life because of that thorn. I have been strengthened with power because of that thorn. I hated that thorn, but it has bloomed into a rose.”
My older brother, my hero, my closest friend, died, despite our prayers. I will never say his death was a good thing; it was not. But his cancer was instrumental in bringing me to faith in Jesus Christ. It was not a good thing, but the good God made good come out of it. Had God said yes to our prayers, I do not know what would have happened. I do know what did happen – or a little of what happened – because he said no.
So even St. Paul had requests turned down. But go further. Even Jesus, the perfect son of God, never once out of alignment with God’s will, who “offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to him who was able to save him from death” (Hebrews 5:7), received a no answer.
Think of that. There was never a more just and reasonable request, nor a person so deserving. What was about to happen to him was unjust, heinous, and evil. Yet, had God said yes to his request, we would know nothing of the cross, of the sacrifice, of the atonement Christ made for us. Had I been God, I would have said yes … to the detriment of the world. But I am not God. I don’t know what he knows.
It has been estimated that all the knowledge (and nonsense) on the internet adds up to just over 1 million exabytes (a billion billion bytes) of data. If all of that – the vastness of human knowledge – was downloaded onto two terabyte hard drives, they could be stored in a space the size of our local Walmart. Human knowledge, impressive as it is, is limited. What we don’t know far exceeds what we do.
We cannot understand God and his works, but we can trust him. Yet how can we trust him when the things we desperately pray won’t happen do happen – people we love leave, or they die? How can we trust him when the things we desperately pray will happen – it seems like all our happiness depends on it – don’t happen? How can we trust him?
We can trust him not because we understand him – never that – but because Christ died for our sins. Everything in the Christian life depends on this. “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Our challenge as we stumble along with our unanswered prayers and troubling questions is to trust him.
That trust is a choice, and I am asking you to make it. But there is more to it than that. That trust grows when we start praying within the story God is telling. Then our prayers actually become the pens that God will use to write his story. More about that when we come back to our prayer series in two weeks.
The Way Home 