Looking to Jesus When Your Prayer Goes Unanswered

This episode contains portions from the following programs:

"Five Women in the Bible Whose Prayers Weren't Answered."

"Handling Unanswered Prayer."

"Does Jesus Still Take Your Breath Away?"

_________________

Dannah Gresh: If you’re carrying an unanswered prayer like a heavy weight in your chest, you are not alone.

I have one. It’s so complex I’m not sure I can share it. But it breaks down to this: six years ago I felt God leading me to pursue a truly God-sized task. When I told my husband, Bob, he sensed it was from the Lord. We pursued it together . . . and fell flat on our faces. But we still feel the calling. How can that be? I have asked the Lord to either remove the desire or open the doors. It seems I’m still in a holding cell. 

Have you ever spent time there?

Not only have I been there, but so has Dr. Katie McCoy. Katie holds a PhD in Systematic Theology from Southwestern Seminary where she served on the faculty for five years. She loves the Scripture, and she’s a frequent speaker and writer on women’s and gender issues. She’s written a book called, To Be a Woman. 

Not too long ago, I got to sit down with her and soak up her wisdom (she’s got a lot of it!). She was super vulnerable about some unanswered prayer in her life on the Revive Our Hearts daily podcast. We’ll link to that episode in today’s transcript because it is so relatable and encouraging. She’s also deeply studied the women of Scripture—immersing herself in their stories, and she’s found that so many of them were sitting with unanswered prayer as well. I’d love to share part of that conversation with you. Let’s listen. 

Dr. Katie McCoy: There are five women in the Bible that come to mind when I think of unanswered prayer. They may not necessarily be lessons that we think where we would go to in Scripture about unanswered prayer, but what they do is, I think, they counter some of the lies that we believe or even fears that we have that are very common to all of us, and very normal to experience.

So, you want to just dive into the first one?

Dannah: Let’s dive in! You have me. I want to know what lies I might be believing.

Katie: Okay.

Hagar is the first one. Hagar counters or disproves that fear that we may have in our hearts that says, “God doesn’t really see me.”

Dannah: Oh. Do tell.

Katie: You remember the story of Hagar. She’s running away from Sarah, and at that time, she’s Sarai. I can’t remember exactly in Genesis where it occurs, but the Lord has given that promise to Abraham that the son of the promise would come through Sarah, and, of course, Sarah tries to help God and she gives Abraham her servant Hagar to have a baby through Hagar (see Genesis 16 & 21).

One of the things that’s really easy to forget is how culturally common that was. But Hagar was a woman who was caught in the middle. She didn’t really have a choice.

Dannah: It was still very, very dysfunctional.

Katie: Completely.

Dannah: Culturally common things are often still very contrary to God’s plan.

Katie: Oh, exactly. Whether it’s that or polygamy . . . It never ends well. Right?

Dannah: Right.

Katie: So Hagar was caught in the middle of all of this. She was trying to take back some control of her life. 

Dannah: Yes.

Katie: She was in this place that felt absolutely desperate, and she’s running away with nowhere to go in the desert, in this arid climate in the Middle East. She gets to this place of desperation, and the Lord meets her there. She calls God “The God who sees me.”

Now, what’s so spectacular about that is that Hagar was not the wife of promise. She was not the wife through whom the son of promise would come. But, the social status of Hagar was not the predictor of the care of the Lord. So no matter where she was, out in the middle of the desert, a slave woman that had run away . . . The Lord tells her to go back. You can imagine the fear of that, too. What would she be in for in terms of punishment and the faith that that would have taken as well.

So Hagar reminds us that when we feel like “God doesn’t really see me,” He is the God who sees us. 

He sees our pain. 

He sees what got us to where we are. 

He sees where we are. 

Then He sees what we need to do next. He tells us where to go. He tells us the next step. 

And that’s a great comfort for us when we’re wrestling with unanswered prayer.

Dannah: It really is.

Just as you were saying that, I got chills as I was listening to you, interceding for the woman who’s running from God, for the woman who’s running away, to know: God sees you, and He has a plan.

Katie: Yes. He will meet you in that faraway place you ran to and guide you back.

Dannah: Beautiful.

Okay, next woman, next lie.

Katie: A favorite of ours—Hannah.

Dannah: Oh, yes. Absolutely.

Katie: She’s a rock star.

Dannah: She is.

Katie: Hannah reminds us that it is not true that God doesn’t really care because Hannah, oh what a story she was. She teaches us how to pray with tears in our eyes. When I’m afraid that God doesn’t really care about this, I have to think of Hannah.

The reason Hannah’s story is so powerful to us is Hannah was not in a place of desperation. She actually had everything she needed. In fact, when you see the setup of the story, her husband loved her. Her husband still gave her a double portion even though she did not have the children. That was the statement of honor.

So, the fact that she was infertile did not have any bearing on how much her husband gave her affection and attention. In fact, her husband says what probably many a woman has felt rather an insensitive comment. Her husband says, “Aren’t I as good to you as ten sons?” Like, “Why are you crying? Do you lack something that I haven’t given you?”

What I love about that is it’s okay that even Hannah’s husband did not understand her pain. She still went to God with it anyway. Hannah was still wrestling with the desire. It wasn’t a need. She had all the food, shelter, and clothing she needed. But there was this deep desire.

What we also see is that God was preparing Hannah for a Samuel and that Samuel had a major role to play in the entire nation. Hannah’s prayer ends with not only her saying, “Okay, I’m going to get up and wash my face and not be sad,” after Eli the priest sort of blesses her and affirms her. But hidden in that prayer and tucked away is her heart posture that says, “Lord, if You give me a son, I will give him right back to your service.”

I have a hunch that Hannah did not start off praying like that.

Dannah: Bingo.

Katie: I think she got to that place in her pain. This wasn’t like a bargaining thing, like a negotiation, like, “Lord, if You’ll give me this, I will give you that.” No. It was surrender.

Dannah: Yes.

Katie: It wasn’t negotiation. It was total surrender. And with that surrender, it was almost like she had resigned herself to the loss of her son anyway.

She had lived with the pain of the loss of not having a child, and now she was willing to lose him again for the Lord. And so, Hannah got her request. The Lord granted her request.

Now, we can read that and go, “Okay. If I just find the right words, maybe God will grant my request.” That would miss the point of the story.

The whole point of the story is Hannah got to this place where she was at peace with the answer before she even got the answer. That’s what surrender is.

 

Dannah: What meaningful advice from Dr. Katie McCoy—to pray with God’s big-picture Kingdom plan in mind. The more we fix our eyes on Jesus, the more we’ll do this. We’ll think, Okay, I really, really desire this seemingly good gift right now, but what if God wants to do something even more glorious with me? What if He intends to glorify Christ through me? What if He’s gonna display the gospel through my life in a way I can’t see or imagine right now?” Isn’t this such a redemptive, hope-filled way to pray?! I hope we’ll learn to do this more and more.

Now, I know you just listened to that little portion of my conversation with Katie and probably thought, Don’t stop there! I’ve gotta know what other women you talked about! Fret not, my friend. We will link to the full conversation in today’s transcript. Head on over to ReviveOurHearts.com to find that.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth also has encouragement for you as you navigate unanswered prayer. She shared this message in her series on Habakkuk, which was all about moving from fear to faith. Let’s listen.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: I had a conversation not too long ago with a couple who had been in pastoral ministry. He had been a pastor for many years, and then he had heart surgery, had a near heart attack and had to have heart surgery.

As a result, he had to leave the ministry; he just physically could not get back into a place where he could handle the pressures and the strains of ministry. But they were a younger couple, and they found out he couldn’t get a job. She couldn’t get a job.

They were telling me this story together, sitting around the dinner table one night, tears welling up in her eyes as they described the depression that he had fallen into, after years of serving the Lord.

I remember hearing her say, “We felt so abandoned by God. We prayed; we cried out; we looked around; we couldn’t find answers. We felt abandoned by God.”

And isn’t that the way it is sometimes? We cry out. There’s no apparent answer, so we assume God hasn’t heard or He isn’t saving, and then we can end up disappointed with God.

We feel He’s let us down, and then sometimes, unfortunately, the next step is we start to accuse God. We put our fist in His face; we remonstrate with God; we accuse Him falsely.

And here’s where we come into the danger of falsely accusing God, the danger of accusing God, charging God with wrong doing, just because He has not met our expectations and our demands.

“God, You will not hear,” Habakkuk says. “You will not save. You idly look at wrong.”

It reminds me of the story in John chapter 11, when Mary and Martha have sent for Jesus because their brother Lazarus was sick. They knew Jesus could heal him, could do something about it, but Jesus, for unfathomable reasons, decided to stay where He was for an extra four days. By the time He arrived in Bethany, their brother had died.

First, Martha, and then Mary, say to Jesus, “Lord, if You had been here, this wouldn’t have happened. Our brother would still be alive.” The implication is, “Why? Why didn’t You do something? Why didn’t You care?”

There’s this sense of perhaps accusing God with wrong doing. By contrast, I think of Job chapter 1. Remember when Job faced crisis after crisis after crisis in his life, one on top of the other?

The Scripture says "in all this, Job did not sin or charge God with wrong" (v. 22). Now, that changed later on in the book of Job, but initially, early on, Job never charged God with wrong doing. He assumed there were things God knew that he didn’t know.

But so often, we don’t have that picture. We just have our perspective on it. We say, “Lord, don’t You care? If You’d have been here . . . why didn’t You do something?”

So we have that challenge of long-term, ongoing, unrelenting pain and problems.

Listen. Anyone can trust God with one bad day or short-term situations. But when you have long-haul suffering, it gets tough.

When you have that elderly parent who’s hanging on by a thread to life, but is in such pain. The parent is dying from cancer, who’s weak and feeble, and you say, “Lord, why don’t You take her? Why do You let her suffer on like this?

It’s the long-haul. It’s the ongoing. It’s that son or daughter who’s been away from God for years and years and has created such havoc and pain in your family. And you cry out, “How long, Lord? I keep crying out to you, Lord, but still, You don’t do anything.” It’s that “How long?” question.

“You will not hear.” Habakkuk accuses God of not listening to him. Ultimately, as we go through this book, we’ll see that Habakkuk comes to realize that he has not been listening to God.

God has been listening to him, but Habakkuk needs to learn to listen to God, and that’s what prayer really is. It’s learning to listen to God. Yes, giving Him our honest questions and then listening to what God has to say, listening to God give us His perspective.

And so, Habakkuk cries out persistently, he cries out long-term. There’s no apparent answer. Ultimately, God’s going to answer, but God says, “I’m not necessarily going to answer immediately, and I’m not going to necessarily answer in the way that you would choose.”

As we read through the book of Habakkuk, you’ll see that God never answers all of Habakkuk’s questions.

It’s not that God doesn’t know the answers, but God never gives Habakkuk all the answers, and the answers God does give raise even more questions, as we’ll see as we get into chapter 1.

I want to tell you that God is not going to answer all of your questions. If you knew all the answers, you would be God, and you wouldn’t need God. God’s not going to answer all your questions, but I’ll tell you what He will do.

As you ask honest questions and then as you listen to God, He will reveal Himself to you. God gives Habakkuk a broader, eternal perspective that makes him willing to go on, able to go on, without knowing all the answers.

God wants to give you a perspective that will enable you to face your situation, to face your circumstances without knowing all the whys. Habakkuk ultimately comes to a point of being able to worship without understanding everything that is going on.

That takes faith, and the kind of faith that can worship when we don’t know the answers is what pleases God. 

That’s really what it comes down to, isn’t it? It’s this question: Is God worthy of my trust? Can God be trusted? I want to tell you that the answer is a resounding YES!

He can be trusted. He is worthy of your trust. And as you ask your honest questions—not accusing God, but putting yourself in a position where God can reveal Himself to you and can give you His perspective on circumstances—you will find that God really can be trusted. And then your worrying will turn to worship. No longer “Why?” but, “God, I worship You.”

Dannah: Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth on handling unanswered prayer in a way that glorifies God, and that leads from worry to worship. This is what we want! But we won’t experience this kind of unshakable rest amid unfulfilled desires if we don’t fix our eyes on Jesus.

That’s what my friend, Judy Dunagan, is going to remind us as we close. Judy is a speaker and Bible teacher and serves on the Board of Deeper Walk International. For several years, she was an acquisitions editor for Moody Publishers. She and her husband Rick live in Colorado.

Here she is to share a piece of her own story—and how looking to Jesus transformed it.

Judy Dunagan: My mom was a pastor’s wife and saw that as her calling. She just served alongside my father. She was a mentor and a godly woman. She wasn’t perfect, but she was a precious gift to me.

When she was only seventy, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. It’s a horrific disease. She languished with that for fifteen years. My father was able to care for her in their home in Phoenix for fourteen of those years—just the last year we had to move her. My husband and I both work out of our home, so we could often go to Phoenix and help.

Well, we got the call one day that things were progressing pretty quickly—this was about four years before she passed away. We didn’t know if she was going to make it even through the week. My sister and I got on the plane with my husband, and we were there. It was the first time she didn’t know me, didn’t know my name, didn’t remember who I was. We had to bring a hospital bed into their home.

My sister and I were just cleaning up some of the clutter in the home, and there was a pile of newspapers in my parents’ room. And only by God did I notice this. There was a yellow sticky note on this pile of newspapers, and I picked it up.

I’m kind of stunned because it was in my mother’s beautiful handwriting (which had been stolen by Alzheimer’s about two or three years before). 

It said, “I’m fading away, but Jesus is keeping me every day.” And under that she wrote, “Hebrews 12:1–2”—just a reference.

Well, after she passed in 2013, I asked Daddy if I could have her Bible—it’s the one that had been in her assisted living. It’s one he gave her as she was dealing with Alzheimer’s. She had many Bibles with beautiful notes—she loved to take notes. But this one was almost child-like. Her name had been written at the beginning of the Bible. She had whited it out. I don’t know if she spelled Anita wrong and had re-wrote it.

And then I looked through it. Philippians 4 was a favorite of hers. She had written, “Praise the Lord,” and didn’t spell praise or Lord correctly. And she’ll write, “Amen.” I have this as a treasured gift.

Well, in the front of that Bible, she just wrote Hebrews 12:1–2 again. So I decided I needed to pay attention to these verses. (I call it my “sticky note legacy,” which is a pretty sweet legacy to have because of Alzheimer’s in my mother’s life.)

I just want to quote these verses over you. They’re from Hebrews 12:1–2.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders, and the sin that so easily entangles. Let us run with perseverance the race that is marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

How about those verses for life verses? We’re told to “throw off everything that hinders,” and women, let’s just do that. Let’s commit to do that together.

“Throw off the sin that so easily entangles,” which includes that sin sometimes of being too busy serving Him and not being with Him.

“Let us run with perseverance [together] the race marked out for us.” Now, that doesn’t mean being busy. I’ve learned that sometimes that running with perseverance means pausing and slowing down, getting some breath, spending time with Him.

And then, finally, “let us fix our eyes on Jesus.” I love this version because He’s the author and perfecter of the faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”

Now, my heart for sharing today is not to put any guilt on any of you. This is not about, “Oh, I should have longer quiet times,” or “I should get up at 5 a.m. before my kids are up so I have time alone with Him.”

Ask Him how you can run to Him, how to find margin. That’s what I love about CARA time. My mentor said she was going to hold me accountable so I’d have a CARA day—“Come Away and Rest A while” day. I would tell her the date, and she’d pray for me. And what that day may look like, I know for some of you it’s harder with little ones, but just put it on your calendar—CARA.

And what I did (and I live in the mountains, which makes this easier for me) is I took my Bible, journal, worship music, and car and got into the mountains. And during that time when I was so burned out in ministry, the Lord just met me there in such a beautiful way through worship music and His Word, and reconfirming my calling.

So I encourage you to try that—maybe with friends or loved ones or spouse. Say, “Hey, I need a CARA day, and will you pray for me? I’ll be praying for you as well.”

Let’s pray together.

Father God, I just thank You for Your lavish love for us. Make us women desperate for You, women who run to You, who sit at Your feet and listen to Your teaching through Your Word, who fall at Your feet in sorrow and lamenting, and who worship You in a lavish way.

We worship You now, and we love You. In Your holy, magnificent, and very personal name I pray, amen.

Dannah: We’ve been listening to Judy Dunagan share a very personal, very beautiful story about looking to Jesus. I mean, I’m just thinking about her precious momma fixing her eyes on Him even as Alzheimer’s settled in. What a testimony.

Looking to Christ in the midst of suffering isn’t a natural impulse; it’s one we’re called to cultivate. Nancy’s Advent devotional for this coming Christmas season is designed to help you do that. She’s titled it Consider Jesus, because at the end of a busy year, in the chaos of Christmastime, isn’t that what we need to do most? She’ll help us examine who he is and what he’s done for undeserving sinners. We’d love to get this resource in your hands. When you make a donation of any amount to support the ministry this month, we’ll send you a copy as our thanks! To give and request yours, visit ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1-800-569-5959. 

And before you go, I want to remind you that next Saturday—October 31—is the LAST day to enjoy our super early pricing for True Woman '27, so don’t wait to sign up—and don’t come alone! Tell your friends. Tell your church. Tell your neighbor next door. We want all of you to join us in Indianapolis next fall! For more information, check out TrueWoman27.com. 

Next weekend, we get to celebrate a special day. Hint: it’s the day a man nailed a piece of paper with a LOT of words on it to a door in Wittenberg, Germany. Ha ha, that man was Martin Luther, and the day in question is Reformation Day! We’ll talk about the beautiful theology that compelled Martin Luther to do something so unusual when we’re back together.

Thanks for listening today. I’m Dannah Gresh. We’ll see you next time for Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

*Offers available only during the broadcast of the podcast season.