The Persistent Problem of Unanswered Prayer Matthew 15.21-28 May 18, 2014 Introduction: On September 27, 1991, as was his custom, Gerald Sittser, a professor of religion and philosophy at Whitworth College, prayed, asking God to protect and bless his family. Then something went terribly wrong. Later that afternoon, returning from a family outing, a drunk driver lost control of his car and smashed into the Sittsers minivan. His wife, his daughter, and his mother, who was visiting for the weekend, were all killed in the collision. Sittser wrote about it years later in an article from Discipleship Journal, saying, To this day I have been unable to understand what made that day different. What prevented my prayers from getting through to God? Did I commit some unpardonable sin? Did I fail to say the right words? Did God suddenly turn against me? Why, I have asked myself a thousand times, did my prayer go unanswered? 1 I doubt whether there s a person in this room who hasn t asked himself those questions. You prayed that God would heal the cancer but it only grew worse. You begged God to restore your marriage and yet your spouse served you with divorce papers. You asked God to provide for your family and then one day your boss tells you that the company is downsizing and you re losing your job. You pray in the morning for the strength to resist that particular temptation yet by the evening find you have succumbed to it once again. Different story, same questions. When faced with unanswered prayer, we question God, ourselves, and whether we should even bother with prayer at all since too often it seems God is silent, deaf, or unwilling to answer our requests. This morning I want to go where fools dare to tread and address the topic of answered prayer. I believe our passage has something to teach us about this, as a woman with a desperate need comes to Jesus with her request and finds that the answer she seeks is not immediately forthcoming. How this plays out I believe gives us some insight into the nature of unanswered prayer, helping us to gain the proper perspective we need as we wrestle with the persistent problem of unanswered prayer in our own lives. So to that end, please join me in opening your Bibles to Matthew 15. If you do not have your own Bible with you, I d invite you to grab one of the Bibles in the pew in front of you and open it to pg. 821. We ll be studying just a short section this morning,v. 21-28 of Matthew 15, which I ll be reading from the ESV. And Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon. And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon. But he did not answer her a word. And his disciples came and begged him, saying, Send her away, for she is crying out after us. He answered, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. But she came and knelt before him, saying, Lord, help me. And he answered, It is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs. She said, Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table. Then Jesus 1
answered her, O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire. And her daughter was healed instantly. Obviously this passage isn t addressing prayer directly, but what this woman is doing in asking Jesus to help her is the same thing we do in prayer, the only difference is she had Jesus present before her physically while we have access to him through the Spirit. Her request is no less a prayer than our requests are, only she could see Jesus and we can t. So then, let s break this challenging passage down and consider what it has to say about God and unanswered prayer. The first area I want us to consider is 1. When God is silent Our passage begins with Matthew reporting that Jesus left the region he was in and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon. For those of you who were here for the message last week, you might remember that Jesus had a bit of a run-in with the Pharisees and challenged them on their misunderstanding of what made a person unclean. Since the Pharisees didn t look very kindly on being publicly corrected, Jesus decided to avoid the inevitable coming conflict with them by getting out of Dodge and traveling north into Gentile territory. This would give Jesus a chance to recharge the batteries by avoiding the Pharisees and hopefully have a little downtime for him and the disciples. Of course, this doesn t often work out for Jesus as his reputation precedes him. Even though he s now outside of the normal sphere of where he has been ministering, the people up north have heard the news about Jesus and so one woman in particular gets wind that Jesus is in her neck of the woods and comes out to see him. She cries out to him, Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon. You can t fault her for this request. I love my three daughters and if they were being severely oppressed by a demon or gravely ill or dealing with a significant hardship, you better believe I m coming to Jesus on their behalf. This woman does what any parent would do for their suffering child. She comes to Jesus and begs for his help. And if you look at what she says, this is a pretty solid request. First, she refers to Jesus as Lord, a title of respect and honor that s due him. Second, she doesn t come demanding or claiming Jesus owes her anything: she simply asks for mercy. And finally, her request is right up Jesus alley: she s heard that Jesus can drive out demons and believes that if he answers her request, her daughter will be liberated. That s a great prayer: come to Jesus humbly, believing he can do something that you know he has the power to do, and requesting him to do it. If you want a model prayer, here s a perfect one to follow. So of course Jesus is going to answer this request straightaway, right? She checked all the right boxes on the How to Pray Properly checklist. She is as good as golden. But what does it say at the beginning of v. 23? But he did not answer her a word. Silence. Nothing. The Word made flesh had not a word to say. Her desperate pleas on behalf of her daughter were met with the deafening silence of Jesus. 2
My friends, though this text is leading us into uncomfortable territory, it is not unfamiliar territory, is it? You pray and you pray. Your pillow is damp with your tears. You ve asked every friend you know to pray for this request, this burden of your heart. You ve fasted and made bargains with God. And yet the heavens are silent. Not a word. Not an answer. The days turn into weeks and the weeks turn into months and still nothing has changed. No voice from heaven, no dew on the fleece, no miraculous cure. And the silence of God is only disturbed by the sobbing of your voice. So what do we make of the silence of God? I will not give you glib answers but I think I can point to at least one answer that this passage suggests and that is God s silence has a purpose. Jesus doesn t respond to this woman s request; at first, he gives her no answer either way. But this silence leads eventually to Jesus addressing her, to her great faith being praised by Jesus, and ultimately to her daughter being healed. The silence was a means, not the end. It was a necessary step in the outworking God s plan to lead this woman towards greater faith. It was not a silence that pushed her away but rather one that drew her in and resulted in her expressing deeper faith than was first evidenced in her initial cry for help. It may be when our prayers are met with silence, God is at work more in us than in those we re praying for. This woman was concerned for her daughter, but I think in his silence Jesus was more concerned for her soul. Because he didn t answer, she went deeper. Her faith grew stronger, more tenacious. Perhaps thenthat s part of God s purpose for us as well. The silence of God is his way of drawing us in, to help us plumb deeper the depths of faith he would have his people discover. It is given to aid us in experiencing the strength of faith that still believes even when we do not see and do not hear. God is at work for our good in all things, even in the silence. This then brings us to the second aspect of unanswered prayer that this passage highlights for us, and this concerns 2. When God has other plans Look back in your Bibles and follow along starting at the middle of v. 23. And his disciples came and begged him, saying, Send her away, for she is crying out after us. He answered, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. This woman wasn t letting up. The fact that Jesus hadn t responded to her was no deterrent. You can imagine her running along on the side of the road, calling out to Jesus and pestering the disciples to get Jesus attention for her. But this insistent woman quickly gets on the disciple s nerves. It s like when your kids ask you over and over and over for the same thing and eventually in exasperation you say, Enough already! Fine, you can have it provided you ll stop badgering me about it. That s the point where the disciples are at. They come to Jesus and say, Please just give this psycho woman what she wants so we can have some peace and quiet. But the disciples don t get what they ask for either. Jesus simply replies, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. In other words, as a Gentile, she s not part of the plan right now. Jesus had been given a mission to go and minister to 3
the people of Israel. In God s plan of redemptive history, he went to the Jews first. Jesus was to be a savior for all mankind, but before the good news of the kingdom of God went to the Gentiles, it was to come to the Jews. The historical reality is that Jesus didn t come to everyone. He didn t show up in Rome and preach to the Roman Senate. He didn t travel to China and heal people there. He didn t become flesh and dwell among the Indians of North and South America. Jesus ministered in a very small region in a backwater portion of the Roman Empire almost exclusively with one people group for less time than you spent in high school. Jesus had been sent by God to preach to the Jews and that s what Jesus did. The Gentiles would have to wait. What this means for us is that sometimes God doesn t answer prayer because it s not in accordance with his sovereign plan. When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, one of the first things they re told to ask for is, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. To pray the way Jesus taught is to set God s will first and our will second. It s to realize that I don t see all ends; God has a good and perfect plan I need to trust, even when the working out of that plan doesn t seem to be all that good and perfect to me. It s hard to be humble to admit our perspective is limited, to say the least. When we can t understand why God doesn t answer a prayer for healing, or for a marriage to be restored, or for you to get that job that seems perfect to you, it can be beyond difficult to say, Thy will be done. After all, doesn t God want his people to be healthy, to have strong marriages, to work productively to provide for their families? But lest we forget, even Jesus dealt with unanswered prayer. He pleaded with his Father in the Garden of Gethsemane to let this cup pass from him. There was suffering and death on the immediate horizon for Jesus and he asked with such impassioned earnestness that he sweated drops of blood, yet his request was not granted. But what else did Jesus pray that night? Not as I will, but as you will. God s will comes first and I have to trust in it, even when I don t receive what I ve asked for. There s much more I could say here, but we need to move on. We ve consider first those situations of unanswered prayer when God is silent and second when God doesn t answer our prayer because he has other plans. Now we come to an aspect of unanswered prayer that may be the hardest one of all, and that is 3. When God puts you in your place In spite of what Jesus just said, this woman wasn t going to give up. She had finally gotten some kind of response out of him, and so now she goes for broke. Look back in your Bibles as v. 25. But she came and knelt before him, saying, Lord, help me. And he answered, It is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs. She kneels before Jesus and begs him once again to help her, but even now, she meets with another obstacle. This time Jesus seems to dash her hopes completely by saying something that is arguably one of the harshest sounding statements Jesus 4
has ever made. He responds with a little proverbial saying, It is not right to take the children s bread and throw it to the dogs. This of course isn t too hard to understand: your children are far more valuable than dogs, and so you wouldn t take food away from your child and give it to your pets to eat so that animals would be full and your children go hungry. So the surface meaning is easy enough; it s the way it is being applied here that s difficult. The application Jesus is making is the Jews are the children and so he must go to them first; the Gentiles on the other hand are the dogs who will need to wait. So what Jesus did here is essentially call this woman a dog and told her that as a Gentile she wasn t a priority. Now that s harsh, no doubt about it. This passage will really mess up your Hallmark card version of Jesus who s all sugar and spice and everything nice. But there s a couple of things worth saying to help us in this. First, we don t know how this was said. Perhaps there was a twinkle in Jesus eye, said in such a way as to indicate that he didn t really think of her in that way but was only using this to draw her out, to test her, to if I might dare apply the phrase to Jesus to play devil s advocate for a moment. Certainly it is a possibility: after all, it seems out of character for Jesus to be so harsh with someone who was seeking him out. But even if not, and Jesus really was intending to be rather pointed in his comment, he wouldn t be out of line in reminding her of her place in the scheme of things. After all, Matthew tells us she was a Canaanite woman, a member of a people God had judged through the conquest of the land by Joshua. God didn t owe them anything. The people of Tyre and Sidon, the region where she lived, were known for their wickedness. They were pagans, enemies of Israel, worshippers of false gods. She had no dibs on Jesus, no rights to ask of him anything, no real reason to expect him to do anything for her. If Jesus had done anything other than denounce her for her sin, she would be getting more than she deserved. We need to remember we re all sinners and have no right to expect mercy or grace or any kind of answer to prayer. We aren t good people who deserve blessings; we re sinful people who deserve death and judgment. Our sinfulness is a factor in how God responds to our prayers. So, for example, sometimes God doesn t answer our prayers because our motivations are sinful. In James 4:3 it says, You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. God s not a genie in the sky who grants us our every wish. He ll refuse to give us what our sinful desires want. Now that s not the case with every prayer request we make, but if we re honest, it s true of some of them. We re sometimes motivated more by our own desire for comfort and material blessings than for God s kingdom to come and his will to be done. Other times, God doesn t answer our prayer because our attitudes are sinful. Think of Job. He wanted an answer as to why he was suffering. If he was indeed righteous and his friends were right that God punishes the wicked and rewards the righteous, then Job felt God owed him an explanation. Job got arrogant enough that he thought he had a right to place God in the dock and demand he explain himself. Instead, God shows up and rebukes Job for his audacity to question him and lays out chapter upon 5
chapter of pointed questions driving the point home that Job is in no position to question or demand anything of God. Job doesn t ever get the explanation he wants because he grew too big for his britches and so God had to cut him down to size. We need to be faced with the humbling prospect that God will at times put us in our place by refusing to give us what we ask. The need for divine discipline, for people and situations to remain in our lives that humble us and bring us low, for illnesses that remind us of our weakness and our need to rely on God rather than our own strength, are part of God s arsenal to humble us and conform us into the image of Christ. At this point you might think this woman would have thrown in the towel and gone home. It didn t much look like Jesus was going to grant her request. Yet she has one more thing to say, and that brings us to our fourth and final point, and that concerns 4. When God answers Jesus replied to her pleading by telling her it wasn t right to throw the children s bread to the dogs, and yet look at how she responds in v. 27. She said, Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table. Then Jesus answered her, O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire. And her daughter was healed instantly. Her reply was the capstone on what can only be called an amazingly persistent and tenacious faith. She didn t give up. She refused to be discouraged. She was willing to be humble about her place in the scheme of things. And so in spite of all that went before this, Jesus praises her for her faith and grants her request. What does this mean for us? Let me make a few points. First, it should encourage us to see that unanswered prayer may become answered prayer. The silence of God is not a permanent silence. The no we receive today may turn into a yes tomorrow. God may have his purposes for a time not to grant what is asked. But although the answer may not be immediately forthcoming, sometimes what we perceive from our limited perspective as a no may from God s perspective actually be a wait. Second, when it comes to prayer, faith matters. While it is wrong to say, as some do, that God didn t answer your prayer because you didn t have enough faith, since then we would have to say Jesus lacked faith because God didn t grant him his request for the cup of suffering to pass from him, it s right to say any answer to prayer won t come apart from faith. It s the greatness of her faith that leads Jesus to grant this woman s request. Jesus is amazed at the centurion s faith in Matthew 8 and heals his son. In Hebrews 11:6 it says, Without faith it is impossible to please God, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. In the book of James we re told, Let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord (1:6-7). In prayer, faith matters. It doesn t guarantee God will answer every prayer, but any answer to prayer won t come apart from it. 6
Third, we ought to be persistent in prayer. This woman didn t give up. She kept pressing her case, even to the point of annoying the disciples. In Luke 18 Jesus told a parable about a persistent widow, the purpose of which was to teach his disciples that they ought always to pray and not lose heart (18:1). Living in an age of instant gratification, we re prone to abandon things when we don t get immediate results. But Jesus tells us we shouldn t give up so quickly. God doesn t operate on our timetables. It may that be is using unanswered prayer to help us draw closer and depend more keenly upon him. Fourth, it s okay to argue with God. This Canaanite woman had the audacity to debate with Jesus. Well, she s in good company. Abraham bartered with God to spare the city of Sodom if he could find an ever-decreasing number of righteous people. Moses argued with God to spare the Israelites when God threatened to destroy them after they created the golden calf. God can handle an honest prayer that happens to strongly disagree with his decisions. I had one of those kinds of prayer during the process of applying here. I had gone through the interview by the Search committee and had to have a phone interview with the elder board before they would invite me to come out to formally candidate. The interview went okay, except for a minor point of doctrine I wasn t as firmly convicted about as they were, which seemed to be a pretty big issue to them. So after I got off the phone, I was livid. I told Karen it was obvious that I wasn t going to get the job, all because of some insignificant doctrinal issue. I had been doing the job search for well over a year at that point and was frustrated and extremely mad at God. So Karen and I prayed, and I let loose a pretty pointed prayer, angry at God for yet another closed door. If God had shown up in a whirlwind by the end of that prayer and gave me the Job treatment by telling me to gird up my loins and answer his questions, it would have been well deserved. Instead, right after we finished prayer I got a phone call from Ted Boger inviting me to come out to candidate here. Needless to say, I was totally shocked. I had angrily argued with God and yet he was gracious to me and answered my prayer. Fifth and finally, don t think any of the previous four things I mentioned guarantee your prayer will be answered. Sometimes unanswered prayer will remain unanswered. No matter how much faith you may have, no matter how persistent you are, no amount of debating and arguing is going to change God s plan. God is not a pagan deity we can manipulate through our actions nor a cosmic gumball machine that automatically spits out blessings whenever we put the right coin of belief or behavior in the slot. God is a Person who relates to us and has plans for us that sometimes we can t understand. This woman received healing for her daughter in the end. I got offered the job here. But other times the ending doesn t read, and they all lived happily ever after. The prayer to heal the cancer isn t answered and the loved one dies. Your spouse leaves you anyhow. The job is offered to someone else. And like the evangelism video we saw earlier, in spite of years of praying and witnessing, God still hasn t given your unbelieving friend eyes to see and ear to hear. This is not a sermon about how to pray in such a way that you turn unanswered prayers into answered prayers. There is no formula to make that happen and if someone claims there is then they re trying to 7
sell you something. This sermon is to help you pray so that you don t feel hopeless when God doesn t answer your prayer, to recognize that sometimes what we perceive as a no may be a wait, and when a no is indeed a no to assure you that you can still trust in the sovereign goodness of God in the midst of it. Conclusion Let me close by returning to Gerald Sittser, the gentleman I mentioned at the beginning of the sermon, who in spite of his prayers for safety for his family, lost his mother, wife, and daughter in a tragic automobile accident. He had questions that he couldn t answer. He didn t know why God hadn t answer his prayer that day, much like you and I have at times struggled to come to terms with the urgent and fervent prayers we prayed that were nevertheless left unanswered. He still cannot explain it, but he concluded the Discipleship Journal article on unanswered prayer with these words: Jesus charges us to view life from a redemptive perspective. There s more to life than meets the eye when God gets involved. He works things out for good. We view unanswered prayer from the perspective of our immediate experience and our limited vision. But God is doing something so great that only faith can grasp it, wait for it, and pray for it. 2 May we at Grace Fellowship trust in the sovereign goodness of God, even in the mystery of unanswered prayer, believing that even though we do not understand why God doesn t always grant our requests, nevertheless God is at work to accomplish his will for our good and for his glory. Please pray with me. Endnotes 1. Gerald L. Sittser. Discipleship Journal. Jan/Feb 2001, p. 26 2. Ibed. This sermon was addressed originally to the people at Grace Fellowship of Waterloo, IA by Pastor Rob Borkowitz. Copyright 2014. 8