The Blessing Of An Unanswered Prayer

Let me start by saying this is my first real attempt at writing a Blog for myself. But as a starting point, I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself and this website to my readers. My name is Dave, I work fulltime as an IT Program Manager and I have an even fuller time loving Jesus. I have been married for about 3 years now and my wife, Larisa is also going to author a few blog posts on this website - hopefully. She is a counselling psychologist by profession. We started slowly transitioning to content creation and ended up posting more on instagram on our thoughts, our revelations, our understanding etc. and we felt that somethings were not meant to post on Social Media. Also, we wanted to explore our ability to write what God has put on our hearts and this website is meant to help out with this primarily. We also have a podcast called Another Day in His Steps by the blessing of our Spiritual Father Apostle Priji Varghese. We have a few teachings on social media and youtube which we have linked to the website. Additionally, we also believe in both counselling therapy as well as inner healing and deliverance by the ultimate counsellor - The Holy Spirit. We also believe in mentorship and conversations that instigate Godly thoughts and so if you are interested to spend some time with me and Larisa for any of these things, we would love for you to reach out and connect.

With all this being said, let me get into the actual topic that I wanted to talk about. Lately Larisa and I have had a lot of prayers being answered and it got us thinking and evaluating our own prayer lives. And I believe that this happens in every believer's life eventually or at some point. We start praying and believing and contending for something specific like a breakthrough or a healing or maybe even a door we want to see opened and we alert the intercession team, we pull out every prayer in the book, we fast, we sow and then God answers that prayer.

But somewhere in the celebration, in the announcement of our testimonies, something so subtle that we need a level of intentionality to notice happens. We stop praying the way we used to. Before the prayer was answered, there was a level of urgency that pulled us into His presence each day. There was an ache that used to send us looking for Him, and once that petition has been satisfied, our appetites tend to stop searching. It makes me wonder, is it possible that our appetites were for the wrong thing?

I know it sounds wrong to say, and I know many people have spoken about God being silent about the things we pray for but I believe that one of the biggest detriments to a believer's prayer life can be an answered prayer.

I say this again - it sounds almost wrong to say out loud. Because I used to think that every answered prayer had no downside anywhere in it because the blessing of the Lord makes us rich and adds no sorrow to it. (Proverbs 10:22). And while this is true, I've watched this decline in prayer show up in my own life and in the lives of people around me too many times. The seasons where my prayer life felt most on fire was almost always in the seasons of waiting, in the seasons where the answer did not come.

The lack of an answer itself kept me coming back every day. It kept me low before Him. It kept the conversation alive and kept me running after Him. But as soon as the answer came, as soon as the breakthrough was delivered - I lost the hunger that used to push me into His presence.

I have begun to realize that sometimes God preserves our prayer life by not answering our prayers.

I understand how that might come off. It might sound like God is withholding good things from us to check on our loyalty, but the longer I sit with it, the more it feels like that is God protecting us from what we are contending for. God sees something ahead of us that we can't see yet, the exact effect an early answer would have on a heart that hasn't finished learning to want Him for His own sake. What if the answered prayer becomes an idol? What if the desire for an answer to that prayer becomes an idol?

Our prayer life isn't meant to produce an answered prayer. It is meant to produce an understanding of an answering God.

I think about the people in the Bible who prayed the hardest prayers of their lives and watched the answer stay out of reach far longer than they hoped. I wonder how Paul must have felt when he asked three times for his thorn to be removed and was told Grace would carry him instead. (2 Corinthians 12:8-9) or what might have Hannah gone through when her prayer seemed unanswered for years before Samuel was born. (1 Samuel 1). Or what about David who spent seasons in caves praying for deliverance that came slowly, on a timeline he didn't choose.(Psalm 57, Psalm 142).

What if God was building something within all three of them during that stretch, a closeness, a nearness to God that the deliverance, the child, the rescue itself could never have produced.

Very often, this prayer-answering God keeps our prayers unanswered because being connected to Him is worth more than being blessed by Him. Our nearness to Him carries more weight than our comfort does. He seems more committed to who we're becoming in our asking than to rushing us to promised land.

And this is why it is so important to be reminded time and again that the end goal of my prayer is the proximity of Jesus. It is His nearness. Prayer is not about letting God know what we need because He already knows. (Mathew 6:8). Prayer is the language of lovers. It is the conversation between the lovers of God and God Himself.

Today, we live in a world, and sometimes even inside the church, where faith is measured entirely by outcomes. We mistake outcome to be fruit of our prayer. But what If the healing does not happen? Was it that our faith wasn’t enough? When the breakthrough does in fact happen, we testify of the outcome, but when it doesn't, we question our faith and sometimes even question God.

But if His nearness has been the goal all along, then I cannot write off a season of unanswered prayer as failure. Because the answer itself might have only been God reshaping my prayer life. And if this is the case, the biggest breakthrough is in me showing up at His feet day after day, because speaking to my creator is better than anything else that this life has to offer.

So every time I start to measure my prayer time as good based on whether or not something shifted, whether or not I walked away with a breakthrough, an outcome - I have to remind myself of this truth.

My prayer may or may not end in breakthrough. But my prayer must never end because of a breakthrough. The moment my breakthrough becomes my reason for showing up, I am at a risk of allowing my prayer life to become transactional and my relationship with God to become superficial. I come to the danger of having my conversations with God become a means toward achieving something rather than the actual point of it all.

As I write this, I have also been coming to the realization that a good prayer to pray for myself, my family and for all my readers, and maybe the most honest one available to any of us, is a prayer over our prayer life itself - that it might survive the answered prayer.

The greatest answer I could ever receive isn't the blessing that I've been contending for. It is a prayer life that is not motivated by a blessing, an emotion, a circumstance, or even an attack from the enemy but is motivated by the desire to hear the heartbeat of the lover of my soul, Jesus Christ.

Surely this type of prayer life will survive the waiting and the answer. It will hold together through the delays and will not be derailed by the blessing, because it was built on Christ alone from the start, and so we lose nothing, but gain everything.

As you read this, if your prayer life has experienced a decline since your last testimony, that's worth treating as an emergency right away. The simplest solution I know of is to return back to His presence itself, and allowing Him to deal with our hearts until His presence is our one desire once again.