The Myth of Unanswered Prayer
1/26/14
Does God love you? (Not a rhetorical question!) Does God love you? Do you know God loves
you? Romans 5:8 tells us how God shows us his love for us: but God shows his love for us in
that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. That’s the primary way we can know that
God loves us, and that’s how we know how much God loves us.
But I wonder how many of us feel God’s love for us. Do you have moments where you’re not
sure if God loves you? As we’ve been reflecting on prayer over the past couple of weeks,
especially last week with our look at the Lord’s Prayer, we’ve highlighted the importance of
remembering that God is our Father and we are his children. As we’ve considered that reality, I
wonder if some of you might struggle with some aspects of that relationship. Maybe what you
know of “fathers” is not very flattering for God to take that role in your life. I didn’t meet my
biological father until I was 23 years old. The men who filled that role in my life growing up
were violent or absent, certainly not affectionate and concerned for my well-being. Maybe some
of you know what that’s like.
The Bible shows us what fathers should be like, and all human fathers fail, don’t they? But God
gets to define what he means in being our Father; he gets to show and tell us how he loves us,
how he cares for us, and how he “fathers” us.
If Christ’s suffering and death on our behalf is the primary ultimate way God shows his love for
us, we can also see numerous other ways that God loves us. The reality of prayer is one way that
God shows his love for us. He listens to us. He cares about what we say. He responds to us.
But, what about when God doesn’t seem to answer our prayers? What about when we pray and it
seems like nothing happens? What about the person who has prayed repeatedly, for years,
consistently, for decades, for the salvation of a family member, or for the healing of a loved one,
but nothing is different? In the book A Praying Life, Paul Miller refers several times to God not
answering particular prayers, and Chapter 21 deals specifically with that concept. But, if you
read him carefully, he vacillates on this point; sometimes he speaks of God not answering
prayer,1 but he suggests at the end of Chapter 21 that more is going on than meets the eye.
So, let’s explore this question: Does God always answer our prayers? I’ll go ahead and tell you
the answer I have come to from the Scriptures, and then I’ll try to show you. Does God always
respond to our prayers? Yes, absolutely always God responds to all of our prayers. Yes,
absolutely always God answers all of our prayers.
Let’s begin by returning to Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. Open your Bible to Matt. 7:7-11.
Matthew 7:7-11. Pastor Barry briefly commented on this passage and its parallel in Luke’s
Gospel a couple of weeks ago, but I think we need to start here today and take a closer look at
what Jesus says.
For example, he writes, “I often find that when God doesn’t answer a prayer, he wants to expose something in me.”
Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2009),
pg. 168.
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Jesus is moving toward the conclusion of his great sermon, in which, remember, earlier he had
taught the disciples a model for praying, which we looked at last week. So, after providing a
model to guide a disciple’s praying life, Jesus decides to come back to the topic of prayer before
he’s done preaching.2
Matthew 7:7-11: Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock and it will
be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the
one who knocks it will be opened. Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will
give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil,
know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in
heaven give good things to those who ask him!
By my count, this is one of about a dozen promises in the New Testament that God answers his
children’s prayers.3 So, about 12 times in the New Testament we have promises that when we
pray God will respond. Now, it’s true that all of the other passages besides this one in Matthew 7
and its parallel in Luke 11 have some kind of caveat, condition, or limitation, such as praying “in
faith” or “in Jesus’ name” or “according to God’s will.” Before we think about those and despair,
let’s take a close look at this unqualified promise from the teaching of Jesus, and I think we’ll
begin to see the generosity of God anew and we’ll see a little more clearly perhaps how much
our heavenly Father loves us.
Jesus commands his disciples to ask, seek, and knock. Remember that the Sermon on the Mount
is specifically addressed to Jesus’s disciples, even as a crowd was listening in. We ought to
marvel that Jesus commands this. It’s not simply a permission given, though that would be great
enough. It’s a command; we must ask, seek, and knock! And, as has been pointed out many
times, in Greek, these are present tense commands, which surely implies that Jesus’s disciples
are to keep on asking, keep on seeking, and keep on knocking. Repeated asking, seeking, and
knocking. Continual asking, seeking, and knocking. Habitual asking, seeking, and knocking.
Following each command is a promise. Ask, and it will be given to you. What is promised
here? “It will be given to you.” What is “it”? What will be given to the one who asks? Well, I
think we tend to assume that we will be given what we asked for, but the language is really
vague and non-specific here. Something will be given to the one who asks, but does our Father
always give us what we ask for?4 The illustrations Jesus offers in verses 9-10 keep the options
open. He refers to human sons asking their fathers to give them bread or fish, but he then raises
the question, “Would a human father then give his son a stone or a snake in response?” Of course
not! Then, the closing line and the main point of Jesus’s teaching here keeps the non-specific in
view: your heavenly Father will give “good things” to those who ask him. So, when we ask our
In fact, at least one commentator views this passage “as a sort of postscript to the model prayer of 6:9-13.” See
David L. Turner, “The Gospel of Matthew,” in Cornerstone Biblical Commentary, Vol. 11:Matthew and Mark
(Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2005), pg. 113.
3
Matt. 7:7; 18:19; 21:22; Mark 11:24; Luke 11:9; John 14:13-14; 15:7, 16; 16:23-24; Jas. 1:5-6; 1 John 3:22; 5:1415.
4
Cf. Craig L. Blomberg, Matthew (New American Commentary 22; Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1992), pg.
130, who writes, “‘It’ in v. 7 is somewhat misleading. The word does not refer to any particular thing requested but
forms part of a divine passive construction that means ask and God will give you [what he deems best].”
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Father for something, Jesus doesn’t necessarily promise here that we’ll get precisely what we
asked for, but he assures us that we will get something good.
The second command and promise is similar. Seek, and you will find. Again, notice the nonspecificity. We tend to assume that the promise is that we will find what we were seeking, but
perhaps Jesus simply means we will find something good. Seeking also seems to imply more
than just praying for something. He could be depicting prayer as a “strenuous quest,”5 or he
could be suggesting that sometimes, in the context of praying, we must also go on pursuit for
what we need, assured that our heavenly Father will lead us to what we need.
The third command and promise continues the series to a climax. Knock, and it will be opened
to you. Again, the question we would ask is “What will be opened?” Many translations supply
the word “door” which is surely the imagery Jesus is using. But, that doesn’t really help us. A
door, in this context, is a metaphor, so what does the door represent? Jesus could simply be
portraying prayer as approaching our Father who is waiting to welcome us into his home or his
throne room behind a great door, or he could be depicting a situation in which what we are
requesting lies hidden, concealed by some challenge or obstacle that must be overcome. Either
way, notice that this is in the passive voice: it will be opened by someone other than yourself. In
other words, God will open the door that stands between you and what you need. However,
again, we may be surprised by what’s behind the door! Once God opens the door in response to
our continued knocking, what we find waiting for us may be more wonderful than we ever could
have imagined.
In verse 8, Jesus reiterates the promises with a little different shape. Everyone usually mentions
how the commands in verse 7 are in the present tense, and that might imply that we might have
to pray repeatedly before we receive an answer or a response. But, no one ever seems to mention
that pretty much everything in verse 8 is in the present tense, which I think is far more important
to recognize. To bring this out, we could translate verse 8 like this: For everyone who is asking,
is receiving, and everyone who is seeking, is finding, and for everyone who is knocking, it
will be opened. I think this brings out the relational aspect of prayer that Jesus is working with.
When you ask your human father for something, he might put you off or ignore you. But, when
you ask your heavenly Father for something, he never puts you off. You are coming in the
position of needy asker, to the one who is the good Giver of all good things. You can be certain
that you are receiving from your Father; you can be certain that he is giving to you.
However, again, notice the non-specificity of Jesus. What does the asker receive? He doesn’t
say. He simply says that we are receiving. Now, we might assume that Jesus is implying that we
are receiving what we are asking for, but I don’t think that’s a necessary conclusion, and it
certainly doesn’t fit with our experience, either with our human fathers or with our heavenly
Father.
The one who is seeking, is finding. If you’re on the pursuit as one of God’s children, you can be
certain you are finding. Are you finding what you were seeking in the first place? Maybe. Maybe
not. But you can be certain that you are finding good things to which your heavenly Father is
5
So David L. Turner, Matthew (Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament; Grand Rapids, MI: Baker,
2008), pg. 210.
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leading you. Or, could it be that Jesus is referring specifically here to seeking the kingdom of
God, which he just mentioned a few verses earlier in Matt. 6:33? This would certainly connect
back to the model prayer asking for God’s kingdom to come (6:10).6
For everyone who is knocking, it will be opened. Now, the opening of the door is not in the
present tense, but it is still in the passive voice, which again reminds us that it is our Father who
will open the door in response to our persistent knocking.
We often talk about prayer as a “conversation” with God. But that’s not quite right. We could
say that prayer is our part in conversation with God. We address God in prayer; we talk to him.
His responses, whether verbal or otherwise, are not “prayer.”7 In fact, our praying is truly a
response to his address to us. As Ms. Earline Watson pointed out in her devotion during our
prayer week, God always initiates with us.
God has spoken to us finally in his Son, Jesus Christ, the Word in flesh. God has spoken to us
about his Son in this Word, the Bible. All of our praying and asking is part of our response to his
address to us. Just as we can say that we love God because he first loved us, so also we must say
that we speak to God because he has first spoken to us.
Well, Jesus illustrates the exceeding goodness of our heavenly Father by taking a look at the
disciples’ own experience of fatherhood. Some of the original disciples surely were fathers,
though none of their children are ever mentioned in Scripture. We know Peter was married, but
the text never tells of any children. Nevertheless, they all had fathers and their common
experience would have been that human fathers tend to provide the needs of their children.
Human fathers tend to grant the requests of their children for basic needs.
Jesus thus paints the almost inconceivable notion that a human father would, in response to a
child’s request, give something unhelpful (an inedible rock instead of bread) or something
harmful (a snake instead of a fish). However, it is actually conceivable that a human father would
do such a thing. Such is the utter sinfulness of humanity. I was in the home of a step-cousin
when I was 8 or 9 where my step-cousin, also 8 or 9 years old, asked his dad for a soda. They
didn’t have any soda in the fridge, so the dad said, “We’re out of soda. Here, try this on for size.”
And he handed him a beer from inside the fridge. My step-cousin took a drink, gagged, and
coughed it up, so that his dad laughed at him, took the beer away from him so he could finish it,
and then said something like, “Ah, you’ll grow into it.” Asked for a fish; his father gave him a
serpent.
Our heavenly Father is not like that at all. He’s not even capable of that kind of malice. Jesus
calls the disciples “evil,” but even in their sinfulness they “know how to give good gifts” to their
children. We all know how to give good gifts, and that too is evidence of God’s grace in our
6
So Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
2009), pg. 244.
7
Cf. Phillip D. Jensen and Tony Payne, Prayer and the Voice of God: Listening to God’s Living Word Will
Transform the Way You Pray (Kingsford, AUS: Matthias Media, 2006), pg. 73, who write, “Listening to God is the
basis of all that we do and think. It is essential. It’s just that ‘prayer’ is the wrong word to describe it. In the Bible,
prayer is not listening to God’s voice; it is responding to God’s voice by presenting our requests before him.”
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lives. We don’t always do so, however, and all fathers fail to reflect our heavenly Father’s
consistent goodness. Thus, beyond whatever goodness human fathers do express to their
children, our heavenly Father always and only gives good things to his children in response to
their asking.
He doesn’t here promise to give whatever we want, nor does he promise to give what we ask
for.8 The promise is two-fold and it’s beautiful. First, the promise is that our heavenly Father will
always respond to our requests. Always. Our requests are never ignored, never disregarded.
Never. Secondly, the promise is that our Father will always respond with good things. Again,
that doesn’t mean he always gives us what we ask for. “God always hears us but his answer is
not always ‘Yes.’”9
Now, starting here, with Jesus’s staggering promise that our heavenly Father will always respond
to our prayers, we need to proceed by examining our experience in the light of Scripture. But, in
order to do that well, we need to acknowledge that the Scriptures speak of God not answering
prayer sometimes. In fact, I count about 30 verses in the Bible that speak of God not hearing or
not answering prayer, or at least raise the question that one who prays might not be heard or
answered.10
For example, in Ezek. 8:18, Yahweh says, “Therefore I will act in wrath. My eye will not spare,
nor will I have pity. And though they cry in my ears with a loud voice, I will not hear them.”
There are several statements like that in the prophets. In fact, I think it’s significant that 27 out of
30 of these passages are in the Old Testament. And, almost all of these are in the context of
God’s wrathful judgment against rebellious Israel.
Without providing a full explanation, let me tell you the bottom line of why I think this is
important. The covenant relationship Israel had with God in the Old Testament had certain
implications with regard to prayer. Yahweh’s covenant with the nation of Israel included certain
stipulations about how the people could pray and what kinds of responses they could expect from
Yahweh. And, God’s refusal to hear or answer people’s prayers is an expression of his wrathful
judgment against their sin. But Jesus endured God’s wrathful judgment against our sin in our
place, so that God will never turn against us in wrathful judgment. Never.
Christian prayer is different than Israelite prayer. Said differently, prayer for a person who relates
to God on the basis of the Mosaic Covenant, the Old Covenant, “works” a certain way and has
certain limitations, while prayer for a person who relates to God on the basis of the New
Covenant, “works” differently. I believe Jesus is showing that in the Sermon on the Mount. He’s
telling his disciples who will be the initial beneficiaries of the New Covenant how prayer works,
8
Cf. Grant R. Osborne, Matthew (Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament; Grand Rapids, MI:
Zondervan, 2010), pg. 264.
9
Phillip D. Jensen and Tony Payne, Prayer and the Voice of God: Listening to God’s Living Word Will Transform
the Way You Pray (Kingsford, AUS: Matthias Media, 2006), pg. 139.
10
Deut. 1:45; 3:26; 23:5; Josh. 24:10; 1 Sam. 8:18; 14:37; 28:6, 15; 2 Sam. 22:42; Job 27:8-9; 30:20; 35:12-13; Ps.
18:41; 22:2; 66:18; Prov. 28:9; Isa. 1:15; 59:2; Jer. 7:16; 11:11, 14; 14:12; Ezek. 8:18; Mic. 3:4, 7; Hab. 1:2; Zech.
7:13; John 9:31; Jas. 1:6-7; 4:3. Some would count 1 Pet. 3:7, but I believe the reference to the “hindering” of
prayers refers to the hindering of our praying, not the hindering of God’s responding or hearing our prayers.
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and a major difference is that the threats that God will not listen or hear the prayers of his people
are gone.
But, what then of the three New Testament passages that seem to imply certain scenarios where
God might not hear or answer prayer?
The first is John 9:31, which we can dispatch with very quickly: We know that God does not
listen to sinners, but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does his will, God listens to him.
This statement is made by the man Jesus healed who had been born blind. He’s mocking the
Jewish leaders for their questioning of Jesus’s qualifications to heal. This man is a Jew and he’s
simply making a comment out of the framework of the Old Covenant. The statement is
essentially true, because one who worships God and obeys him is, in New Testament terms, one
of his children, and God does listen to him. But, coming from this man, he is commenting on the
exceptional ability of Jesus, seeing his healing miracle as evidence that he is a genuine worshiper
of God. If you know the rest of the story, Jesus confronts him after this conversation and
challenges him to know and believe in him. But, the fundamental glorious reality of the New
Testament is that God does listen to sinners, even as he forgives their sin because of what Jesus
has done.
The second and third statements come from the book of James. First, James 1:5-8 commands us
to pray “in faith, with no doubting.” He writes, If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God,
who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him. But let him ask in
faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and
tossed by the wind. For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the
Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways. James raises the possibility that
we might be missing something at times: wisdom. What do we do when we realize we’re
missing something? We might go scurrying about, looking high and low to find what we need.
Wisdom doesn’t work like that, however. It’s important to see why James suspects we might
“lack wisdom.” He opens this letter with the terrible command in verse 2: Count it all joy, my
brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds. I call it a “terrible command” because I’d
rather whine and moan about trials. I’d rather complain and question. His explanation doesn’t
really give me a lot of comfort; he commands me to rejoice because, verse 3, you know that the
testing of your faith produces steadfastness. Do I know that? Am I confident in that? Facing
the trials of life bears fruit? Really? Yes, James says, it does.
If I can’t see it, I must be lacking wisdom. I think that’s James’s logic here. If you’re struggling
to understand how the trial you’re facing can lead to this good benefit of steadfastness, you must
lack wisdom.11 Okay, so what must I do?
James says, let him ask God. Now, I must point out a Greek technicality here. The phrase “let
him ask God” reflects a third person imperative in Greek. An imperative is a command. Now,
this is one of those places where Greek and English don’t line up very well; English doesn’t have
such a thing as a third person imperative, or an indirect command. So, Bible translators
traditionally have used the phrase “let him” or “let them” or “let her” or “let it” do something.
11
Luke L. Cheung, The Genre, Composition and Hermeneutics of the Epistle of James (Milton Keynes: Paternoster,
2003), pg. 137.
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This is far too weak for what the Greek is after. The Greek is a command. The simplest way to
get this across in English so that it carries the weight of command is to translate “he must ask
God.”12 Almost all commentators will tell you this. The phrase “let him ask” could come across
as though James were saying “allow him to ask” or “he may ask if he wants to.” But, again, it’s a
command; James is telling us that this is what we must do when we recognize we lack wisdom.
We must ask God! It is necessary; it is commanded!
James stops here to describe the God we ask. James describes God as the one who gives
generously to all without reproach. The Greek, again, is more amazing, more incredible; James
describes God simply as “the Giver,” with a present tense participle, which we could expand as
“The One Who Continually Gives.”13 God is Giver, fundamentally, and James says that he is
giving to all people, which fits with what he says later in chapter 1, verse 17: Every good and
every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is
no variation or shadow due to change. Everything that is rightly called good in this world,
every good experience, every good feeling, every good thing, comes from God, is a gift given by
God. Whether you’re a Christian or not, if anything in your life is truly called good, it came from
God.14
How does he give? The ESV says “generously” which is fabulous enough, but the Greek word
more specifically means something like “single-mindedly” or “whole-heartedly”;15 he’s not halfhearted in his giving to us; he’s not hesitant, second-guessing his generosity because he knows
we’ll be ungrateful or we’ll misuse his gifts.
James further expands how God gives with the phrase “without reproach.” This phrase is
especially wondrous when we think of prayer, asking God for wisdom or anything else. How
does God respond to our asking? “Without reproach, avoiding a spirit of rapping them across the
knuckles for daring to ask...not stingy,” not berating, belittling, or debunking those who ask, as
12
Cf. most helpfully Dan G. McCartney, James (Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament; Grand
Rapids, MI: Baker, 2009), pg. 93, who writes, “The words ‘he must ask’ in the translation above represent a thirdperson singular imperative in Greek (αἰτείτω), traditionally rendered as ‘let him ask.’ The point is that James is
telling people to do something but is addressing them indirectly, using the third person. Modern English has no
exact equivalent for this. Older English stated third-person commands with ‘let,’ as in, for example, ‘Let her speak’
(= ‘She should/must speak’), which now, however, connotes something like ‘Allow her to speak’ (see Wallace
1996:485-86). However, ‘should’ or ‘must’ with a verb approximates the indirect third-person imperative, and so
usually in my translation of James I have rendered third-person imperative constructions with ‘he should’ or ‘he
must’ rather than ‘let him.’” See also Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: Exegetical Syntax of
the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1999), pg. 486, who writes, “One final note: the third person
imperative is normally translated Let him do, etc. This is easily confused in English with a permissive idea. Its force
is more akin to he must, however, or periphrastically, I command him to...Regardless of how it is translated, the
expositor is responsible to observe and explain the underlying Greek form.”
13
Cf. Craig L. Blomberg and Mariam J. Kamell, James (Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament;
Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2008), pg. 51.
14
Cf. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Letter of James (Anchor Yale Bible 37A; New York: Doubleday, 1995; repr.
London: Yale University Press, 2008), pg. 179.
15
Cf. Grant R. Osborne, “James,” in ESV Study Bible (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), pg. 2391. Also see A. K. M.
Adam, James: A Handbook on the Greek Text (Baylor Handbook on the Greek New Testament; Waco, TX: Baylor
University Press, 2013), pg. 7.
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though they were imposing on his goodness.16 God doesn’t “scold [us] for bothering him....He
does not bring up conscious or unconscious sins and failures..., or say that [we] are unworthy to
approach him.... He does not scold about [our] lack of wisdom....After giving a request, God
does not complain about giving it to us..., or remind us endlessly of the value of the gift.... God
doesn’t grant the request and then criticize us for asking....He doesn’t scold because we have
improperly used previous gifts or rebuke us for repeated lack of wisdom.”17
So, James commands us to ask God for the wisdom we lack, then he reminds us who this God is,
the Giver, and how this God gives to those who ask. Then, James promises that God will give
wisdom to the one who asks him for it. This echoes Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount in
Matt. 7:7: Ask, and it will be given to you.
But, verse 6 indicates that there is a kind of asking which receives and a kind of asking which
does not receive: But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a
wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. James repeats the command, the third
person imperative, “he must ask,” but he adds the descriptive qualifier “in faith.” What kind of
faith is James calling for here? What must we believe?
Before we can answer that question well, I think we need to understand the next phrase, the way
James says we must NOT ask. Almost all English Bible translations have something like “with
no doubting,” mostly because this word is set opposite to faith here and in other passages of the
New Testament. However, the Greek word itself does not mean “doubt,” if we mean “uncertain
about an outcome.” This verse can be very discouraging for people who, like me, find
themselves rarely sure of what God wants in a particular situation. I pray for things not knowing
if I’m praying according to God’s will (which is a topic we’ll look more closely at next week). Is
that kind of doubt, which I experience on a regular basis, what James is talking about?
Absolutely not.
The Greek word basically means “to be divided” or “to make distinctions” and is even translated
that way in James 2:4.18 Here, the term introduces the “double-minded man.” This image depicts
“spiritual instability,” divided loyalties. “[This word] does not mean uncertainty as to whether
God is going to grant the request....but rather a lack of focus and ‘faith’...in God.”19 At issue here
is not “uncertainty whether something is God’s will; rather, he is condemning a lack of
commitment, a divided loyalty..., or an indecision or hesitancy...that questions the integrity of
God.”20
Thus, James compares this person to ocean waves, which are completely “passive, susceptible to
change and manipulation, because [they] have no shape of [their] own. [They’re] always shifting,
16
James E. Rosscup, An Exposition on Prayer in the Bible: Igniting the Fuel to Flame Our Communication with
God (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2008), pg. 2551.
17
J. Harold Greenlee, An Exegetical Summary of James (2nd ed.; Dallas: SIL International, 2008), pg. 20.
18
For a full study of this term, see David DeGraaf, “Some Doubts About Doubt: The New Testament Use of
ΔΙΑΚΡΙΝΩ,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 48:4 (Dec. 2005): pgs. 733-755.
19
Grant R. Osborne, “Moving Forward on Our Knees: Corporate Prayer in the New Testament,” Journal of the
Evangelical Theological Society 53:2 (June 2010): pg. 261.
20
McCartney, James, pg. 91.
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never solid, never sure where or what it is, without foundation.”21 He goes on in verse 7 to insist
that “the one who doubts,” or, better, “the one who is divided,” must not suppose that he will
receive anything from the Lord. A person whose allegiance is divided, whose loyalty to God is
unclear, cannot presume that he is a child of the heavenly Father.22 This warning wouldn’t be
necessary if all James was referring to was a measure of uncertainty about whether he would
receive what he asked for. Rather, this kind of person is “a fence-sitter unwilling to commit
wholeheartedly to faith in Christ and the actions that flow from it....James may have in mind
people who were toying with acknowledging Jesus as the Messiah, or those who had done so but
were clinging to their non-Christian habits. They were attracted to Jesus the Christ but were
vacillating.”23 Perhaps we could say they were merely “fans” of Jesus.24
Well, if there was any “doubt” about who James is talking about, he goes on to call them
“double-minded,” or, more literally, “two-souled,” and “unstable in all his ways.” Being unstable
in all his ways reveals clearly that there is a fundamental inconsistency in this person’s life, a
“spiritual schizophrenia” some have called it, “a basic division in the soul that leads to thinking,
speaking, and acting that contradicts one’s claim to belong to God.”25 While this kind of person
professes to be a Christian, his outward lifestyle reflects the inner conflict of an unbeliever.26
The “two-souled” person actually seems to appear regularly throughout the letter of James. In
1:23, he is the one who “is a hearer of the word and not a doer”; in 1:26, he is the religious
person who does not bridle his tongue; in 2:1-4, he is the one who claims to “hold the faith in our
Lord Jesus Christ” while mistreating the poor and becoming “judges with evil thoughts”; in 2:14,
he is the person who claims to have faith but does not have works; in 2:19, the demons are
shown to be “two-souled,” as they “believe that God is one” while shuddering in terror and
disgust at the thought; in 3:13-16, he is the one who claims to be wise while harboring jealousy
and selfish ambition; in 5:1-3, he is the one rich with treasure but heading for condemnation on
judgment day. The “two-souled” person is also mentioned again in 4:8, where James calls them
to purify their hearts, parallel to his summons to “sinners” to cleanse their hands.
The “double-minded” or “two-souled” person appears to be a friend of God but is actually
disloyal and not committed to him;27 he doesn’t believe God is who he says he is; he
fundamentally mistrusts God, but connects himself with Christians, with the church, for some
ulterior motives, for some benefit he thinks he can get. He is “unwilling to let go of the world
and truly follow Christ, torn between sin and obedience, reluctant to let go of the pleasures of the
world for the sake of discipleship.”28 They may claim the title “Christian,” but they don’t have
21
Ibid., pg. 90.
Cf. Elsa Tamez, The Scandalous Message of James: Faith Without Works Is Dead (rev. ed.; New York:
Crossroad, 1990), pg. 57, who writes, “It is impossible for this person to pray with faith because we cannot approach
God with two hearts.”
23
Ibid., pg. 91.
24
Alluding to Kyle Idleman, Not a Fan: Becoming a Completely Committed Follower of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI:
Zondervan, 2011).
25
Douglas J. Moo, The Letter of James (The Pillar New Testament Commentary; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
2000), pg. 63.
26
John F. MacArthur, James (Chicago: Moody Press, 1998), pg. 38.
27
Cheung, Genre, pg. 197.
28
Blomberg and Kamell, James, pg. 54.
22
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any interest in God “interfering” with their daily lives. This word is the exact opposite of the
word translated “generously” in verse 5; thus, the “double-minded” person is opposite of God’s
“single-minded” generosity.29
Now I think we can see a little better what James has in mind when he commands us to pray “in
faith,” instead of praying with division in our hearts. In a sense, James is calling us to be singleminded like God;30 if God is singly committed to give, we ought to be singly committed in our
asking.31 With a wholehearted commitment to God, we can ask God for wisdom (and everything
else) trusting in his fundamental character as the giver of all good gifts.32 So, what does James
want us to believe as we ask God for wisdom? I think he wants us to believe what he says about
who God is in verse 5. That kind of faith is necessary, in part, because we may not receive from
God immediately; the commands “he must ask” are present tense, which suggests that James is
calling us to keep on asking, just like Jesus’s commands in Matt. 7.33
So, James insists at the beginning of his letter that God’s children must ask their heavenly Father
for wisdom and anything else they might request with faith, and that faith is not so much to
attempt to anticipate how God might respond to our prayers. Rather, we ask our Father trusting
that he is good and that he gives only good things to his children.34
The other passage we need to consider is James 4:1-3: What causes quarrels and what causes
fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and
do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do
not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to
spend it on your passions. James is aware of some serious conflict in the churches, and he
wants to get to the heart of the matter. Quarrelling, fighting, war, murdering, and coveting; those
are certainly not the kinds of words you hope characterize your church!
James points to “passions” as the root cause of these conflicts. This Greek word might better be
translated as “pleasures,” but it has the connotation here of “the desire for certain pleasures.”
Different folks with different ambitions, different desires, are vying for dominance over others in
the church. James paints a picture of “party spirit, contentiousness, and ambitious striving,” and
these “are not minor problems; they rank right up there with murder as a manifestation of evil.”35
Jesus had connected murder with anger, and here James is similarly connecting murder with
conflict rooted in unfulfilled desires, not getting what you want.36
29
Cf. Adam, James, pg. 10.
Cf. Tamez, Scandalous, pgs. 48-49.
31
Cf. Blomberg and Kamell, James, pg. 62, who write, “The simplicity or single-mindedness of God may be the
thread that ties together the three key themes of James; thus, believers must behave with unswerving loyalty to the
God who is wholeheartedly devoted to them.”
32
Cf. Cheung, Genre, pg. 137. Cf. also Blomberg and Kamell, James, pg. 52, who write, “Here ‘faith’ refers not to
initial belief, but to a continuing confidence in the identity and nature of our God.”
33
Cf. Blomberg and Kamell, James, pg. 62.
34
Cf. Timothy Chester, The Message of Prayer (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003), pg. 85.
35
McCartney, James, pg. 208.
36
Moo, James, pg. 184, thinks that James has not at all prepared his readers for a metaphorical reference to murder.
Rather, he suggests that James envisions murder as a hypothetical but literal concern as the eventual outcome of the
conflicts in the church.
30
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James’s bottom-line solution to these unfulfilled desires is to ask God; he says, You do not
have, because you do not ask. Now, we shouldn’t conclude that if they asked God to grant their
desires for certain pleasures, God would somehow be obligated to give them what they asked for.
Perhaps James recognizes that if they turned to God the Giver, they would find their desires
altered.37 Jesus taught that if you ask your heavenly Father for bread, he won’t give you a snake;
perhaps the true corollary is that if you ask your heavenly Father for a snake, the answer will be
“no.”38
But it seems that at least some of these folks James has in mind weren’t asking God at all, and
that might be an indication that these are the “two-souled” or “double-minded” folks from
earlier, stirring up strife and conflict in the Christian community. If they were genuine children
of God, living out of the wisdom that God gives, they would know God as the giver of all good
things and the satisfier of all their legitimate needs.39 They might not have been asking because
they were afraid that God would reproach them for asking; or, they might not have been asking
because they knew that their “pleasures” or “passions” were not good.
James recognizes that some of them might have actually been asking God. So, he turns to those
who have asked God, and he suggests that their motives are misguided. They “ask wrongly,” or,
more appropriately, they ask “evilly.” He’s not saying that they were asking with incorrect
forms; he’s not saying “they were doing it wrong.” Rather, James recognizes that they were
“approaching God with evil motives. Their prayer itself” had become an evil expression of that
“world of unrighteousness” James talked about in chapter 3, the tongue.40 They were asking for
the means to get their “pleasures” satisfied. They’re approaching the gift-giving God as though
he were a vending machine. Thus, as one writer says, “In this case, ‘prayer’ is a form of idolatry
and...expressive of ‘friendship with the world.’”41
In the next verse, James will call these folks “adulteresses” and begin to highlight their
friendship with the world and their hostility against God. Thus, these “non-receivers” who either
don’t ask God or ask God with evil motives are the “two-souled,” “double-minded” nonbelievers who don’t really believe God is the giver of all good things. But, we must admit, that
even as believers we sometimes ask God for things selfishly, or with poor motives. If we extend
the application of this verse to Christians who ask selfishly from time to time, we can truly
conclude that we may not receive what we asked for. But, that is not the same thing as saying
that God doesn’t hear our selfish prayers, or that God ignores our wrongheaded requests. For his
children, God “always hears; there is no such thing as unheard prayer or, for that matter,
unanswered prayer.”42 “No” and “wait” and “here’s something better instead” are still answers.
37
Osborne, ESV Study Bible, pg. 2396.
Ben Witherington, III, Letters and Homilies for Jewish Christians: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on Hebrews,
James and Jude (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2007), pg. 512.
39
Cf. Johnson, James, pg. 278, who writes, “One can ‘obtain,’ but only by recourse to God the giver of gifts. The
use of aitein (‘ask’) here deliberately echoes 1:5. If persons do not already live within the ‘wisdom from above,’
however, they are not likely to turn to God with their requests.”
40
Johnson, James, pg. 278.
41
Ibid.
42
J. Alec Motyer, The Message of James (The Bible Speaks Today; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1985), pg.
144.
38
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There is one other verse in the New Testament that is sometimes brought up to suggest that God
doesn’t always answer the prayers of his children. 1 Pet. 3:7 says, Likewise, husbands, live with
your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel,
since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.
Some see this as meaning that husbands’ harsh treatment of their wives will hinder their prayers
in the sense that God won’t hear their prayers because of their sin against their wives. This
understanding seems to me to fit the Old Testament perspective that God refuses to hear or
respond to his people’s prayers when they are sinning. Personally, I take Peter to mean that
husbands who are treating their wives poorly will experience the hindering of their prayers in the
sense that they won’t pray. Knowing that their heavenly Father sees their harsh treatment of their
wives hinders their desire to pray and short-circuits their own sense of neediness before God.
As Pastor Barry pointed out last week, sin reaches even into our prayer lives. Even as Christians,
sin continues to taint pretty much everything we do. So, if God doesn’t listen to sinners, or
refuses to answer us because our motives are sinful or mixed or confused, then none of us can
have any confidence that God will ever hear our prayers.
Fortunately, that’s not what the New Testament teaches. For the Christian, our heavenly Father
always responds to every prayer, to every request we make. He is eager to do good to us in every
circumstance of our lives. He cares very much about his needy children.
There’s one final reason the New Testament gives us that compels me to this conclusion that
God always hears, answers, and responds to all of our prayers as his children. Our heavenly
Father always hears, answers, and responds to Jesus’s prayers. This is stated explicitly twice in
John 11. Lazarus has died and Jesus has arrived in Bethany, and Martha approaches Jesus and
says in John 11:20-21, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But
even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you. Jesus confirms that her
perspective is correct, as he prays before he restores life to Lazarus in verses 41-42: Father, I
thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this on
account of the people standing around, that they may believe that you sent me.
Now, it may not be immediately intuitive as to why, if Jesus has confidence that God always
hears his prayers, then God must always hear our prayers as Christians. I think there are two
important angles to this reality. First, we need to remember that Jesus’s death covered all of our
sins. His self-sacrifice on the cross was accepted by God in our place to pay for all of our sins.
That includes our sinful praying and our sinful failures to pray. We pray for the wrong things; we
pray with mixed or wrong motives. Are those sins not covered by the blood of Jesus? Of course
they are. Why then should we expect God to ignore, rebuke, or dismiss our prayers? “In Christ
we cannot be condemned as inadequate or ‘failed’ pray-ers. I should not think, because I don’t
pray as I ought, that God is less inclined to listen to me than he is to listen to some great prayer
warrior.”43
Second, and equally importantly, we need to remember how it is that we are children of God.
Gal. 3:26 says it this way: for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. In Christ,
43
Graeme Goldsworthy, Prayer and the Knowledge of God: What the Whole Bible Teaches (Downers Grove, IL:
InterVarsity, 2003), pg. 50.
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through faith, we are adopted sons of God. Jesus is the true, faithful, and eternal Son of God; we
are adopted solely by grace to be sons. Paul goes on to connect our identity as sons to prayer in
Gal. 4:6-7: And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts,
crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir
through God. Part of Paul’s argument in chapters 3 and 4 of Galatians is that Christians have a
great inheritance from God. In Rom. 8:17, he specifically calls us “fellow heirs with Christ,”
suggesting that what Jesus as the true Son of God inherits, so we also as adopted sons inherit. I
think, among other fantastic things, I must agree with an Australian Christian named Graeme
Goldsworthy, who writes, “This means that our prayer, through Jesus, enjoys the same
acceptance as his prayer, because we are heirs with him....To pray ‘Abba, Father’ from the heart
is to stand consciously in our justification and to express with confidence our union with Christ
who motivates and patterns our prayer, and who justifies our inadequate prayer so that we can
say, as he did, ‘Father, I know that you always hear me.’”44
How shall we then pray? What do we do when it sure seems like God is silent? Are we supposed
to expect our prayers to change things? I think we’ll leave that particular question for next week,
but I would like to say a few words regarding our experience of not receiving what we ask for.
First, let me highlight something that Paul Miller highlights in A Praying Life, and we’ll discuss
this more over lunch. Miller encourages us to take a larger view of prayer and God’s answering
of prayer by recognizing that God is masterfully weaving a grand story, a story in which we get
to play a part, and our prayers get to play a part. He writes on page 201, “Sometimes when we
say ‘God is silent,’ what’s really going on is that he hasn’t told the story the way we wanted it
told. He will be silent when we want him to fill in the blanks of the story we are creating. But
with his own stories, the ones we live in, he is seldom silent.”45 I would suggest that God is
never, in fact, silent.
Chapter 21, where Miller writes about “unanswered prayer,” contains a powerful story, and he
illustrates how what we might initially interpret as “unanswered prayer” actually blossoms into
something quite different, and it’s only later on that we’re able to see how God was, in fact,
responding all along. He tells of how his wife repeatedly asked God to keep her baby from all
harm while she was pregnant. When Kim was born, everything went wrong; Kim seemed to be
“harmed” in every way imaginable. She was damaged and disabled.
Later in the chapter, Miller tells how Kim, through one of her disabilities, actually saved their
lives as a family. Years later, Miller had this thought: “We had thought the harm was a daughter
with disabilities, but this was nothing compared to the danger of two proud and willful parents.
Because Kim was mute, Jill and I learned to listen. Her helplessness taught us to become
helpless, too. Kim brought Jesus into our home. Jill and I could no longer do life on our own. We
needed Jesus to get from one end of the day to the other. We’d asked for a loaf of bread, and
instead of giving us a stone, our Father had spread a feast for us in the wilderness. Thank you,
Jesus, for Kim. When we don’t receive what we pray for or desire, it doesn’t mean that God isn’t
44
45
Ibid., pgs. 50-51.
Miller, Praying Life, pg. 201.
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acting on our behalf. Rather, he’s weaving his story.”46 Later, Miller writes, “Often when you
think everything has gone wrong, it’s just that you’re in the middle of a story.”47
My wife and I find ourselves in the middle of a story. In fact, all of us are in the middle of a great
story. God isn’t finished with any of us yet. He is our loving Father, who has adopted us as his
children; he is working in our lives every day, every moment of every day. He is not a hands-off
dad; he certainly isn’t an absent father.
Our Father absolutely always responds to all of our prayers. He doesn’t always give us what we
ask for in the form that we expect. One writer puts it like this, “[W]hen we pour out our anxieties
before the Father, we have no word or assurance from him that his solution to our anxiety will be
the same as our proposed solution. God will only ever do what is best for us, but in the midst of
the difficulties and problems of life, he is the one (not us) who will know what is best.
Sometimes our instinctive or heartfelt request will not be in our own interests and so God will, in
love, give us something different.”48
As we keep moving forward in the middle of the story God is writing of our lives, let’s keep the
long view in mind. Christians are called to be a people of hope, a people who look forward,
knowing, with utter certainty, that the best is yet to come. Let’s keep on asking, seeking, and
knocking, with full confidence that our Father is the Good Giver, wholeheartedly committed to
doing only good for his children. As Tamara and I keep walking through the story God is writing
in our lives, I ask him to heal her at least once every day. Many of you have been asking him to
do the same thing. She’s no better now than she was six months ago or even a year ago in some
respects. Does that mean God is ignoring us? By no means! Absolutely not! Does that mean he’s
telling us, “No”? I don’t know. But if he is, then “no” is a good answer. But, I don’t think “no” is
his final answer; “not today” perhaps, but not finally “no.” For we look forward to the certainty
of healing in a resurrected body. That is our destiny. That is what God has promised for his
children.
The Book of Revelation has an interesting image connected to prayer. The prayers of God’s
people are depicted as being collected in a bowl with incense in Rev. 5:8. In Rev. 8, that bowl is
dumped out on the earth. What if that is a picture of how God is storing up our prayers, preparing
to answer them with their most glorious answers all at the end of history? As he brings the world
to judgment, the New Creation to existence, and the resurrection of the dead as the culmination
of our Christian hope, perhaps, as Timothy Chester writes, “More of our prayers than we realize
will find their fulfillment in the consummation of history. Prayers we think of as directed to the
present are in fact being stored up to be answered on the final day. When we pray for those
suffering ill health we are expressing our longing for the day when there will be no more
sickness (Rev. 21:4).”49
46
Ibid., pg. 187.
Ibid., pg. 203.
48
Jensen and Payne, Prayer, pg. 137. Cf. also Blomberg, Matthew, pg. 130, who writes, “Often our prayers are not
answered as originally desired because we do not share God’s perspective in knowing what is ultimately a good gift
for us.”
49
Chester, Message of Prayer, pg. 243.
47
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