[This reflection by Martin Shorey was published in the weekly news bulletin of Horley Baptist Church, 23/Feb/2025]
Battleship Faith: Holding On When Prayers Go Unanswered
In the past week, the question of suffering and unanswered prayer has arisen a number of times. How do we feel and respond when God doesn’t seem to answer prayer? Why does the Bible encourage us to “present our requests to God”[1] only for us to sometimes feel as though our prayers are ignored or unanswered?
Pete Greig, in his book, ‘God on Mute’, highlights the problem of false faith that can emerge when we set high expectations on prayer—believing that if we pray hard enough, God will always provide exactly what we ask for: the perfect spouse, health, job, or life. Surely, the Christian journey should be one miracle after another, with God stepping in regularly to fix what is broken?
And yet, we all know this isn’t how life works. The miraculous remains stubbornly uncommon.
When we read through Acts, we see that the apostle Paul endured a great deal of suffering—much of it directly because he was pursuing God’s purposes. He knew what it was to live with unanswered prayer. And yet, he wrote: “I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death”.[2] For Paul, faith wasn’t a guarantee of an easy life but an invitation into a deeper relationship with Christ – one that would inevitably include suffering.
As I once heard it said: if we think the Christian life is like a cruise ship, we’ll be shocked when a hand grenade lands by our sun lounger. But if we understand it more as life aboard a battleship, we’ll be better prepared when hard times come.
Life will always include struggle. Often, suffering feels unfair, even cruel, leaving us wondering where God is and whether prayer makes any difference at all. But perhaps the purpose of prayer is not simply to get what we ask for, but to bring us closer to the One who walks with us through every trial.
I leave you with these words from Pete Greig:
I’m not suggesting that we should pray for hard times but rather that when such times come, we should feel a little less outrage and a lot more hope because Jesus, who went through similar struggles, predicted that we would have them and promised to be with us in the midst of them.
References:
[1] Philippians 4:6
[2] Philippians 3:10
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Last Sunday’s reflection: There’s Really Only One Kind of Love by Dennis Ginter
Contributed by Martin Shorey; © Martin Shorey