Letter from the Pastor

When God Says ‘No’’

If you have been praying for very long, you have no doubt experienced times when you did not
get the thing for which you prayed. It may have left you disappointed, discouraged or even
frustrated with God. There may have even been some well-intended spiritual siblings who
pointed out that the likely reason for your ‘failed’ prayer is a lack of faith. “After all,” they might
argue, “”if your faith was strong enough, you would have gotten what you asked for.” To make
their argument sound more legit, they might even have yanked some Scriptures out of context
for you.

To be clear, is faith important when we pray? Is it vital to answered prayer? Absolutely! But is a
lack of faith the only reason we fail to get what we want? Not a chance.

Consider Jesus in Gethsemane. “Father, if it is possible, may this Cup be taken from Me. Yet
not as I will but as You will.” (Matt. 26:39) According to the Scriptures, He made the very same
plea in verses 42 and 44. Three times praying that the Cup of suffering would be removed. We
know how that turned out, though, don’t we? As we recently were reminded in a worship song
we are learning, “The Cup was not removed; He drank it all.” Some would have us believe that
our ‘unanswered’ prayers are the result of a lack of faith. Must Jesus’ faith have failed here, that
He didn’t get the Cup removed? Absurd. Of course His faith did not fail. The key, if you will, is
the second half of His prayer. “Yet not as I will, but as You will.” His trip to the Cross was the will
of the Father, as we are reminded in Isaiah 53. “It was the Lord’s will to crush Him and cause
Him to suffer...”

So, let’s look again at our own ‘unanswered’ prayers. I would argue that they aren’t unanswered
at all, but that they are instead times when God said either ‘no’ or ‘not yet.’ When we pray as
Jesus taught us in ‘the Lord’s Prayer’ and then modeled for us in the Garden of Gethsemane,
we too will pray for HIS kingdom to come, for HIS will to be done. If that is indeed our prayer,
then as we grow in our relationship with Him we will learn that He truly has our best interests at
heart and we will trust Him in every ‘No’ or ‘Not yet.’

Are we growing in our faith to the point of not whining and complaining when He says ‘no’? Are
we content to trust that what we were asking for must not have been His will? Are we praising
Him for NOT giving us what we asked for, truly living out the second half of the prayer that His
will was even more precious to us than the thing for which we prayed?

I’m not suggesting that a ‘no’ won’t leave us disappointed; I know I have been disappointed,
especially when I had my heart set on something. I AM suggesting, though, that when my heart
is set on His will and His kingdom, a ‘no’ or a ‘not yet’ will not lead to discouragement and cause
me to lose heart. Why not? Because I was pleading for His will to be accomplished, and now I
can assume it was done. And in that my soul can rest.

”Be at rest. Be at rest once more, O my soul, for the Lord has been good...”