God always answers our prayers

Kevin Shin, one of the shepherds at Heartbeat Sydney, preached this Sunday on a single line: God always answers our prayers. Easy enough to say. Much harder to actually believe, especially if you've prayed for something important and heard nothing back for months. The text was Matthew 7:7-11, and the question underneath it was the one we've all sat with at some point. If God always answers, why does it so often feel like he hasn't?

The promise is real

Jesus does not say if you do it, I might answer. He says ask, and it will be given. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened. That is a promise, not a maybe. And the word he uses is everyone. Not the holy ones. Not the people with the right family or the right bank balance or a property in Sydney. Everyone.

The problem has never been whether God answers. The problem is that we read "it will be given to you" and assume the answer must arrive in the exact shape we pictured.

I really don't like this when someone says, oh, I just trust God. Oh, everything happens for a reason. So what's the reason?

The pat answer dodges the actual question. 1 John 5 puts the confidence somewhere different. The confidence isn't that we always get what we asked for. The confidence is that he hears us, and that his answer is shaped by his will rather than ours.

What we usually do instead

Most of us know the move. We pray for financial help and immediately pull out the banking app, hoping a number we don't recognise has dropped into the account. We pray for a job and start refreshing email. We pray for a sick family member and watch their face for the first sign of healing. When the script doesn't match the timeline in our head, we start running diagnostics on ourselves.

I pray for financial support and security and I just pulled out my phone and just looked at my bank account. Just hoping that miraculously there will be like a million dollars in there that I don't have to return to anyone.

The diagnostics are always the same. Maybe I didn't pray hard enough. Maybe I'm not holy enough. Maybe other people's prayers work because they're better at this than I am. None of which is what Matthew 7 says.

A Father who holds nothing back

If verse 7 is the promise, verses 9-11 are the reason the promise is trustworthy. Which of you, if your child asked for bread, would hand them a stone? Which of you, if they asked for a fish, would hand them a snake? Jesus is arguing from the lesser to the greater. If we, broken as we are, know how to give good gifts, how much more does the Father in heaven.

Paul puts the same logic into one sentence in Romans 8:32. He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? The cross is the receipt. It is the proof in writing that the Father holds nothing back.

But a Father who loves his children doesn't hand them whatever they cry for. Hebrews 12:10-11 says discipline is painful in the moment but yields a peaceful fruit of righteousness later. Francis Chan puts the same point a different way:

We're not in a relationship with a genie. The lamp doesn't just give us three wishes. We're in a relationship with a Father, and a good father doesn't give his child everything they cry for. God is a Father that gives you what you need.

God's three answers

If God always answers, what does the answer sound like? There are three shapes it can take.

Yes. The easy one. When the answer is yes, it isn't because we earned it. It's because what we asked for happened to line up with what the Father already wanted to give. The right response is the obvious one: thank you.

No. The one that pushes people away from God entirely. We asked for healing and healing didn't come. We asked for the relationship to be restored and it stayed broken. We prayed for the carpark and someone else swooped in. Paul knew this answer too. He begged three times for the thorn in his flesh to be removed, and the answer was a flat no, with a strange addition: my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in your weakness. C.S. Lewis names what's actually happening when God says no:

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

When God says no, he isn't turning away. He may be talking louder than he ever has.

Wait. The hardest answer. Waiting feels like silence, and silence is where our sinful mind speaks loudest. God isn't talking to me. God doesn't like me. Maybe God hates me. The internal voice keeps cranking up the volume to fill the gap. But the line worth taking home is this:

Waiting is not an absence of an answer, but it is the answer itself.

Psalm 130 gives the image. The watchman waits for the morning. He doesn't panic that the sun hasn't yet risen, because he knows it will. Active, anchored trust held in the dark, knowing morning is coming even when you can't see it yet.

Ten years of "wait"

To make the point land, Kevin told his own story. He has been praying one prayer, on and off, since 2016. God, what am I meant to do with my life?

In high school he wanted to be a basketball player. Trained early, played at recess and lunch and in his sleep. The door closed. His family couldn't fund the next step and that million dollars never appeared in the bank account.

He went on mission the year after and God gave him a clear heart for working with children. The answer was so clear he denied it. Enrolled in secondary education at uni instead of primary because primary "seemed really painful, if I'm honest." Then uni kept making admin mistakes. Wrong placement. Wrong units. Two or three years gone.

He pivoted to film. Turned out he was good at it. Got selected as one of twelve people from around the world for a film program. Two real doors opened in front of him: USC (the best film school on the planet) or a job at one of the fastest growing media companies in LA. He prayed about which to take. Both doors closed. USC was over $100,000 AUD a year. The LA job evaporated when COVID hit in 2020.

He came home, mid-twenties, watching every one of his friends graduate and find their pathway. And he resented God for it.

I resented him because he didn't answer my prayers the way I wanted them to be answered. It wasn't a yes. It wasn't a yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. But God said, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

What slowly came clear was that his job had never been to find the best use of his own talent. His job was to seek the kingdom first. Not his kingdom. God's. He's in his final year of his teaching degree now. He thinks. Possibly finishing as a primary teacher next year. Possibly starting something else. He still doesn't have the clean answer he was asking for at twenty. What he has instead is full confidence that God has been answering the whole time.

Trusting a Father we can't see

What do you do when the answer doesn't look like the prayer? When heaven feels silent and you just have to sit there? You trust the Father that God is. Not blindly, not without feeling the pain of it. Because of who he is.

And when you genuinely don't know what to pray, Romans 8 has a word for that too. The Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. The gap between what we can articulate and what we actually need is filled by God himself. And all things, not some things, not only the pleasant ones, all things, are being worked together for good for those who love him.

The challenge

If you're sitting on a prayer right now, one you've been carrying for weeks or months or years, here's what to hear. God heard it. He is answering it. The answer might be yes. It might be no. It might be wait. But it is not silence, and it is not nothing, and it is not because he loves you any less than the Father who would not spare his own Son to get to you.

Morning is coming. Even if the night feels long.