I find that for both myself and for many others I’ve talked to, our doubts about God often stem from the times that God seemingly DIDN’T work a miracle in a trying time or answer a prayer that was important to us.
However quickly some of us may, in our scientifically driven society, want to “prove God doesn’t exist” by methods like this, that would simply be doing what logicians and debaters call “defeating a straw man.” You’ve probably heard the term.
The thing we need to do when deciding if God has kept His promises to us or not is to look at exactly what those promises are. Does God promise to always answer every prayer that we pray right away and exactly in the way we were expecting? Quite simply, no. I encourage you to go find for yourself the actual promises that God makes to us by surveying the Bible for the pertinent information. There is no way better than to actually look yourself. Because I may miss a lot of it. But, if you want me to help a little bit, I can.
I’m just going to go off of the top of my head and work through what I can remember of the New Testament books. As just a starting point for any of us who hasn’t done a deeper dive than that. In Matthew, Jesus does make some promises like “ask and it will be given, seek and you will find.” But earlier He reminds us (and the devil) that “you shall not put the Lord your God to the test.” So if you are setting out to simply test God and prove Him wrong, He may not be so agreeable with you concerning this, and you are simply defeating a straw man. Jesus says “an evil adulterous generation seeks a sign.” And that the Queen of Sheba who searched out Solomon because of his famous knowledge about God could condemn those who rejected Him during His time on earth. A theme from Matthew: we need to seek and not test. Even if we aren’t speaking in spiritual terms, your attitude about something will of course determine how you see evidence for it (or against it). To seek God, to me, would be similar in attitude and effort as learning to seek out scientific evidence. Not that we would use the same methods. But what I mean is that science is a whole community that puts value in education/qualifications, repeated trials and large samples of data with proper controls, and peer review. To seek God, according to Jesus in the book of Matthew, is to “not just be hearers only but doers of My words.” It takes learning from Jesus and doing what He commands (including believing in Him to save you from your sins) to come to the kind of knowledge of God He promises. (This all needs to be done in community with other Christians as well, which is in Matthew, but much more obvious in John).
If we fast forward to Luke, we see a parable or two that concern Jesus encouraging us to have persistence in prayer. Luke also has Jesus painting this picture of us as children and God as Father and He always gives us good things. So we see that we are the children. Just as human parents know not to give their children everything they ever ask for but to sometimes overrule their children’s requests with the common sense of experienced adults, God will give us good things only and not simply what we ask for (in the cases that they are not good for us). In this illustration, Jesus tells us God will give us the Holy Spirit when we ask. When we pray, we are not so much receiving provisions and blessings so much as receiving a Person- God Himself. So just as you do not see your family as vendors of needs and gifts, we must see God as someone who we are in relationship with and prayer as communication, not simply an spiritual shop with free shipping.
John’s Gospel highlights something that pertains to what Jesus said in Matthew about being doers of His words (as I hinted before). Jesus, according to John’s Gospel, expects for His followers to “be one.” That means we can’t do all of this searching out for God alone. While we are individually responsible before God, and my father’s or brother’s faith can’t be directly applied on my behalf to save me, to follow Jesus means to join a community of others who are also seeking God. It is through others that we often get the provision/answer that God is providing. Because what He wants to do is bring many people together to be one as He is One.
Paul’s letters show a few guidelines for prayer- in addition to great encouragement for us to be in prayer, Paul gives an example of how He prayed for Jesus to remove a “thorn in his flesh” and Jesus told Paul that “His grace is sufficient.” Jesus flat out told Paul “no,” but not without giving Paul something else that he needed.
The letter to the Hebrews would teach us about Abraham, among others, who had to wait several years before God answered the promise of providing him with a son. We sometimes just need to wait for the answer.
James would teach us that, while the prayer of a righteous man is quite effective, to heal in some cases or to even stop/bring rain in other cases (like Elijah’s), that sometimes we don’t get what we ask for because we ask with poor motives. You don’t get the promises of chapter 5 without the caveats of chapter 4. And if we go back and look at the story of Elijah, not only did God tell Elijah what He wanted Elijah to pray for specifically and when He wanted it (for the rain to stop/start again), Elijah STILL had to be persistent and pray much for the rain to come back.
So, if you will let me take all of the New Testament into consideration, a lot is quite clear. Even if you only want me to look at each of these authors individually, every one would probably conclude the following about prayer:
1. It is done as a practice by people with faith in Christ (to save them from their sins)who are generally trying to do the other things Jesus commands, for the objectives Jesus has and not merely our own.
2. Following what Jesus commands must be done with others- letters are addressed to churches and the Jesus taught his disciples in a group setting almost always
3. God decides what the answer to a prayer will be, not us. He knows what is good for us
4. Things like patience and persistence are assumed if not explicitly commanded.
5. God does answer prayers and gives us very good blessings and provisions (and even Himself)!
All that said, I do think we can use the answered prayers God gives us to encourage us to continue in the faith (or if you are a seeker and want to know God, praying that you could know Him is a good first step). Here are 2 things we can do:
1. Reflect back on prayers of the past and how God has answered them. If you are like me, you will soon remember a good number of decent examples, and after perhaps a little labor in thought, maybe a handful of quite compelling examples. (If you don’t have these memories, maybe you can admit you haven’t tried praying very much and could start anew to pray more frequently or intentionally/specifically, which is step 2). Even if you are only a seeker and don’t have hardly any experience praying, maybe there are moments in your life that you can recall how something was provided to you and it seemed miraculous or just very providential. Reflect on occurrences like this.
2. Make it a point to try and notice and even begin to record how God answers prayers in the future. If you are a seeker and are just starting out, I think it is great to pray that God shows Himself to you. And then go seeking! Visit a church and even join some kind of class or group. Study the bible, take part in the kind of prayer happening around you. Consider if you feel convicted of sin and convinced in your need to be saved by Jesus. Ask questions and get to know some of the different people who believe in Jesus, from pastors to the pew dwellers to the ladies and gents in the kitchen (if there happen to be such folk at the church you visit). If you are a Christian, no need to really pray any different than before, although intentional and specific prayers are sometimes the model in Scripture so don’t be afraid to be intentional and specific sometimes if you aren’t already. But then just make it a point to try and remember (perhaps even record) what you have been asking for and reflecting on if God indeed has answered yet and how He has answered. And keep doing/restart doing what you know is good to do, beyond just prayer, that God asks of us.
If you don’t get the answer you expected right away, I’m not sure you are proving God a promise-breaker at all if you don’t also do your due diligence to obey what He asks us to do. Be patient. Be persistent. Have good motives. Look for ways He is answering that are actually better for you than if you just got exactly what you expected. As well as at least doing the minimum of joining/staying engaged with a community of Christians for a long enough of a season to know for sure that you know whatever it is that you find out through all of this. I am confident you will find out God is real and prayer works!
As for me, there are SO MANY times God has answered prayers. I am a skeptical guy and sometimes to me many seem like perhaps they are just coincidence. I pray to have a good day at work. And then I do! Is that God or just coincidence?
Well, to be honest, I have some examples that seem a lot less like coincidence. Here is a favorite of mine:
I was actually teaching a group of young christians about prayer at summer camp. Ok, “group” may be stretching it. There were 2 of them and me. It was a program at a camp for kids where teenagers would become counselors-in-training and help with the operation of the camp (aka dish duty and the like) while also diving quite a bit deeper into lessons about Christianity than what the kids learn. The sessions are 2 weeks long. It is actually a ton of fun! As most of these counselors-in-training, including all the them from this story, come back to do it again the next summer. But yeah, there were only 2 youth one particular session, Quinn and Michael. Which is quite a small crew to take care of all they were expected to. They did their best though and with my help and help from some other counselors we got through it all. For the first few days at least. Wednesday evening of the first week, I was teaching them about prayer and they were suggesting the workload was a lot for our small-ish sized crew and I made the bold claim that we could pray for help. We did. And, totally unknown to me, before the end of the week, another teen who was supposed to come the next session (in 2 weeks), switched plans and decided to come to the final week of the current session. So we got an extra hand for week 2 that we didn’t have week 1. To me, this is a clear answered prayer from God in a fairly rare way in that it is pretty much exactly what we asked for and exactly when we asked for it. I’m quite glad it came when I was teaching some youth about prayer. It was an encouragement to them and to me!
And this isn’t the only story of an answered prayer that certainly seemed like more than just coincidence. There are quite a few others. Here is one more that I like to tell. There was one time on campus when I felt that God wanted our efforts at evangelism to bring someone to confess faith in Jesus that same day, and so I told the group to pray that we see God bring someone to Himself that very day. It was the only time I can recall I’ve done that and certainly not a habit of mine. Well, as it would happen, my friend Nathan did share with a man who confessed his need for Jesus and his trust in Him just a few minutes after that prayer. And it was the only person we saw come to faith that particular semester from the efforts of our small group of about 6 putting in a couple hours of work a month.
And as I have struggled with doubts from time to time, I am glad I jotted down that these have happened. Not that I will likely forget it as there are things that happen to remind me of it from time to time. But jotting it down reminds me more frequently because reading through this and the other things God has done in my life as I do occasionally is another thing to remind me.
And there are a few more miracles to found in the other articles of this site as well as a list of ones I didn't fit into any other articles in the article titled “Index of Miracles and Some Extra Ones.”
As I correspond with my old friends and new and get more stories, then there should be even better accounts on this site in the “Guest Posts” section.
Thanks for reading!
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