{{2009_08_18_t1.jpg}} {{2009_08_18_t2.jpg}} {{2009_08_18_t3.jpg}} [[http://www.jesusnetwork.eu/de/doku.php/jn_de_2009_08_18|Deutsche Version]] [[Start|| Wiki Start]] [[topics_collection_i|| Topics Collection i ]] ======Unanswered Prayer ...====== Tuesday, August 18, 2009. We talk about challenges of faith this week. We have already discussed the challenge of being among people who do not believe. But there are challenges which only believers can experience, for example the challenge of unanswered prayers. {{2009_08_18.jpg }} We have three children, and when they were babies one of the basic things we prayed for was to find sleep in the night. Assume you have a crying infant who does not find a way to sleep, it is approaching midnight and you need to get up around 6am to go into a long working day. What do you do as a Christian? You pray: God, please let him sleep. God, please help me. And what happens? The night is worse than the nights before. There are many experiences with prayer which resemble the one above. It can be jobs, relations, money, illnesses etc etc. You pray for some particular task and it does not improve at all, on the contrary it gets worse. That is challenging your faith. There are different reaction patterns which we can use when we are in the above situation. We can give up faith: God does not answer my prayer, God does not want me or God does not exist - I draw the conclusions and I quit. It is always a possibility to quit faith when we are challenged. You find further reaction patterns within Christian churches. Some people will say: you haven't prayed hard enough. You have hidden sin in your life. You need to carry out particular practices. You need to be filled with the spirit. Others tell you just to persevere and continue to pray and wait for the Lord. Good advice is rare. We need to realize that the topic of prayer is much broader than we could cover in some lines. But we can say some important things. If prayers are not answered in the sense that you get what you asked for, then this is not a catastrophy. Jesus had unanswered prayers of this type - he prayed that "the cup" of death at the cross would pass him, but he had to die a painful death. Also the apostle Paul talks about unanswered prayers. He had some illness which tortured him, but God did not take it away and even told him that he has greater things in mind with him than taking this away. I took a lesson from my difficult nights with the babies: it does not work like that. God is not a machine to fulfill our wishes. He is not there just to make our life as easy as possible. It is completely the wrong view of life, the wrong attitude and we miss the important things when we live like that. {{ 2009_08_18_2.jpg}} Unanswered prayers can be a great chance. We need to change our attitude towards God. We need to look to him, not to us. We need to search his will, not our will. We need to ask him for what he wants, not expect him to do what we want. We need to change and this change is a good one, since it brings us away from our own egoism into another life, into the realm of his Holy Spirit! God's "no" will be full of grace and mercy! [[http://www.jesusnetwork.eu/en/doku.php/topics_collection_i|... more texts]]