I’m sure we’ve all heard that old rhyme that says: “Patience is a virtue. Virtue is a grace, and Grace is a little girl who didn’t wash her face!” That one always infuriated me as a child when I felt it was being directed at me, but it makes me smile as an adult. It has a point. Patience isn’t always easy to come by, and of course, if you’re praying for patience, then you can be pretty sure God will allow situations that will test and stretch you, in the hope that with each event, you’ll get a little more of the thing you most desire.
One of the main ways our patience is often tested is when we have to wait for the answers to our prayers. I’m sure all of us have prayers we’ve been praying for many years to which we still haven’t received an answer, and sometimes we actually begin to listen to the discouraging voice of our enemy telling us that maybe God isn’t listening. However, as Christians, these are the times when we must stand upon our faith rather than being misled by our feelings.
The Bible makes it quite clear that God does hear and respond to the prayers of all his children. 1John chapter 5 verses 14 and 15 says: “And we are confident that he hears us whenever we ask for anything that pleases him. And since we know he hears us when we make our requests, we also know that he will give us what we ask for.” So why does it sometimes seem as though our prayers are hitting the ceiling and going no higher? WE understand from this scripture that we must be asking for things that please him, but surely requesting the salvation of a loved-one or the healing of a close friend would be pleasing to the Lord.
There was once a wonderful man of God called Daniel. I’m sure many of us have heard about him. Perhaps we remember the story of how he was thrown into a den of lions from our Sunday School days. Miraculously, the Lord shut the lions’ mouths, so they did not harm him. In my opinion, Daniel is one of the strongest men of faith and courage we meet in the old testament. He was also a prophet, meaning God gave him information about future events.
Once, Daniel was praying and pleading with God about the captivity of his people the Israelites. He knew 70 years of enslavement had been foretold by the prophet Jeremiah as a punishment for their disobedience, but as he understood it, the 70 years was almost up. Yet the answer to his prayers didn’t seem to come. Nothing was changing. Nothing was clear. We can read Daniel’s impassioned prayer in Daniel chapter 9 verses 1-20. Suddenly, in the middle of his prayer, the angel Gabriel showed up, probably causing Daniel to jump out of his skin! (Daniel 9: 21.)
Interestingly, the angel informed Daniel that he’d been dispatched as soon as Daniel started to pray. (Daniel 9: 23.)
Then later, in the following chapter, Daniel experiences an end-times vision of war and great hardship that is to come, but this only happens after 3 weeks of mourning and fasting from certain foods. A rather imposing angel appears before him and explains that he’d been dispatched on the first day Daniel began to pray for understanding, but he’d been caught up in a 21 day battle with a demonic enemy. Eventually, another angel had been sent to aid him, so he was released to complete his mission of getting to Daniel. (Daniel 10: 12-13.) The details are complicated, and lead to all sorts of questions about spiritual warfare. We know this exists, because in his letter to the Ephesians, Paul informs us that our battles are not against flesh and blood, but against the spiritual forces at work in this dark world. (Ephesians 6: 12.)
However, setting the subject of spiritual warfare aside for another week, the topic we’re considering today is delayed answers to prayer, which is something I imagine we’ve all experienced. These delays can happen for many reasons. We must always be aware of the fact that our lives and the lives of those we are praying for are all tangled up together in a sort of tapestry of coloured threads out of which God, the master weaver, is creating a design known only to himself. Anyone who has worked a tapestry will understand that sometimes, certain threads are left seemingly in the middle of no where while the weaver moves on with another colour. Then, at just the right time, the discarded threads are woven back in, and the picture begins to take shape. That is how I see our lives. From the back, the tapestry looks like a mess of knotted threads, but if you turn it around, the beautiful picture begins to emerge.
I have no doubt that God always hears and answers my prayers, but being God, he has the right to either say “Yes,” ‘No”, or sometimes even “Wait”, meaning the answer is not going to come right away, and I must exercise that wonderful gift of patience. I will not pretend that waiting is easy, particularly when our prayers concern loved-ones who are ill, or in need of the gift of salvation. I experienced the pain of this when my dad was ill in 2017. I had been praying for his salvation all my life, and now we added prayers for his healing. In the end, the Lord graciously did save him, but he healed him by taking him home to heaven. Obviously, a huge part of me wanted to see him healed here on earth, but I have to trust the Lord knew best. It was a very long waiting game – over 30 years of pleading with Dad to give his heart to Jesus, and I learned that in our waiting, we must not fall into the trap of thinking God hasn’t heard us. Remember that our enemy wants us to become downhearted, and he will do everything within his power to achieve that goal. Some days it was hard not to lose hope. Yet in the end, God’s timing was perfect.
So in the case of my dad, there was a “Yes”, but also a “No” because his healing didn’t come in the way we would have chosen. “No” is the answer we are least comfortable with. “What if God says “No?” is the title to a country gospel song I love, which states that if this happens, it doesn’t mean he loves us less. It is not a sign of lack of caring, but rather, it establishes that he knows better than we do what is best in any given situation. We flawed human beings might be convinced we know what the answer should be but remember the tapestry. We don’t see the full picture, just the section in which our thread of colour is involved. When God says “No”, it is never out of cruelty. He loves us more than we can ever begin to imagine or understand, so let’s rest in his love, and learn to trust him completely.
Prayer is a continuous process. I guess you could say it’s the work of a lifetime. We have to be prepared for the fact that we may not see all the answers this side of eternity, but one day, when we stand before Jesus, we will understand. We will see our prayers in the light of eternity, and appreciate why sometimes he says “Yes”, sometimes “No”, and at other times “Wait”. Here on earth, we just have to trust him and learn to be patient.