A father and his child walked together by the banks of the Yangtze River. They paused often to gaze at it in wonder. In the distance, they could hear the roar of a waterfall and they could see great clouds of mist rising far into the air. Soon they came to the edge of the chasm where the water plummets to a gorge far below. Approaching the bank of the river where the water is shallow and safe, they stopped and stooped so the father could dip a cup into the river. He held it toward his child and said, “Drink.” But just as the cup met the child’s thirsty lips, a voice boomed from the river and said, “Don’t drink! There’s not enough water for you. I am in danger of running dry.”

The missionaries had traveled far down the Amazon in a long, open river canoe. A local pilot guided the husband and wife safely through sections narrow and wide, deep and shallow. He led them safely to the point where they would disembark and begin their lives among a tribe that had never heard of Jesus and never had the opportunity to worship his name. When the boat finally nudged up against the bank of the river, they leaped ashore. Having unloaded their meager belongings, they watched the pilot turn and head back, their last link to the lives they had left behind. Taking a bucket, the wife dipped it and filled it and just as she began to pull it ashore, the river cried out, “You can take that, but no more. You can drink seldom, but not often. For my water is running out. This river is running dry.”
Stuff and nonsense, as they say. The world’s great rivers do not run dry. The world’s great rivers flow throughout the seasons. The world’s great rivers are never so low that they cannot sate the thirst of a parched traveler, never so dry that they cannot refresh the body of a weary wanderer. We can drink from them as often as we need to, refresh ourselves in their waters, irrigate our lands as much as necessary. They flow swiftly, they flow mightily, they flow endlessly. They flow like the grace of God. They flowed yesterday and they flow today and they will flow still tomorrow and through endless ages to come. They flow without end and always invite us to take and drink.
And so too the grace of God. We can always and forever approach God’s throne of grace and plead for mercy and grace to help in our time of need. We can plead for mercy that forgives when we have strayed and God will never turn us away, he will never fail to respond, he will never refuse to pardon us. We can plead for grace, grace to equip us to endure trials, to remain unbroken when tested, and to remain unsullied when tempted.
And that grace will never run out. We will never exhaust God with our coming to him, never tire God with our pleas for his help. We will never reach the end of his ability to assist or his capacity to intervene. We will never encounter an enemy that is beyond his power to defeat and never come into a situation that is beyond his power to overcome. He will never be bothered by our coming and he will never turn us away. If God utters any complaint at all, it is merely that we should have approached more often and more earnestly, that we should have drunk more freely of the waters and drunk more deeply.
“Drink!” say the great rivers of the world. “Drink until you are satisfied and then drink again. Drink without hesitation. Drink without concern. Drink without fear that you will exhaust these waters.” And “Approach!” says God. “Approach my throne and simply ask—ask for mercy, ask for grace, ask in your time of need, ask and ask again, and I will supply what you require. The Amazon will run dry long before you reach the end of my grace. The Yangtze will cry out for you to stop drinking of its waters before I will scold you for coming to me too frequently, too earnestly, too helplessly. So come and speak, come and plead, come and drink.”

Inspired by F.B. Meyer

There are times when it seems like God does not hear us. There are times when it seems like God has become deaf to our prayers and unresponsive to our cries. There are times when we seek but do not find, knock but do not find the door opened. Why is it that God sometimes does not answer our prayers?

There may be any number of reasons, but before we consider a few of them, we need to acknowledge that often God actually does answer our prayers, though either in a way we cannot yet see or in a way we do not accept. He sometimes answers invisibly or imperceptibly and he sometimes answers in a way we simply fail to see or, worse, fail to acknowledge. Then there are times when God gives us not exactly what we had pleaded for but what he, in his wisdom, has determined we need. Either way, we should always take great care before we conclude “God has not answered my prayer.”
Yet there actually are times when he does not answer. This should not surprise us if we have an appropriate assessment of our own finitude, our own selfishness, our own sinfulness, our own simplicity. We know that God has power that is vast, holiness that is perfect, wisdom that is complete, and plans and purposes that encompass all of time and space. Our lives and the world around would be in woeful condition if God was beholden to each and every one of our petitions.
Our confidence, then, is not in God answering every one of our prayers just as we have prayed them, but in God hearing those prayers and determining if, when, and how to best respond. If God is truly who he says he is, if he is truly our good Father and we the children he loves, we can be certain that if he does not answer, it is only because this is better for us. He is not cruel, nor arbitrary, nor apathetic. Hence his inaction must be for our good, not for our harm.
So what are some of the ways God expresses his love and his goodness through unanswered prayer?
God may not answer our prayers when to answer them would be to rob us of a blessing. This is especially true when we pray to be relieved of suffering or delivered from a burden. The Bible and our own experience makes it clear that God often works mightily through hardships, not apart from them. This being the case, to deliver us too quickly would actually be to rob us of a blessing. It would be to take away the very circumstance through which God is conforming us to his image. There are some flowers that can be plucked only in the depths of valleys and only on the peaks of mountains, and there are some blessings that can be gotten only in adversity. God will not rob us of experiencing blessings by lifting us past the means through which they can be ours.
Then, God may not answer our prayers when they are selfish. If we pray in such a way that we account only for ourselves and not for others, God may not grant our request. God’s mind is much greater than our own and his plan much more expansive. He always accounts for all of his children and will hardly do injury to one in order to bless another. Whether our prayers are knowingly selfish or ignorantly selfish, God may not answer them if giving a blessing to us would prove a sorrow to another.
Of course God may not answer our prayers when what they request is sinful or when we ourselves are living in unrepentance. God will not grant prayers that demand what he has forbidden or that reject what delights his heart. He will not grant prayers to those who are living in unrepentant sin and are rejecting the prompting and pleading of his Spirit. God may close his ears to our pleas as a means of fatherly chastisement that is meant to awaken us to our sinfulness, soften our hearts, and steer us back to him.
Then there are times when our prayers are unanswered only because they are delayed. The God who sees the end from the beginning is not refusing to answer, but is simply waiting until the time is right. We may not yet have character that is prepared or circumstances that are appropriate to receive what we have prayed for. Just as a child cannot take advanced mathematics before he has mastered the basics, we may need divine preparation to be able to receive and appreciate some of God’s blessings. Many who plead for success would be ruined if they received it, so God lovingly delays until their hearts and lives have been made ready.
Then, it could also be that the blessings we want have not yet been fully prepared. We may plant an apple tree and immediately pray for it to bear fruit, but it will take many seasons for it to grow and mature and only then will it satisfy our hunger. And this is true of many of the blessings we long for. There may be a long time of preparation in which we need to wait patiently as those blessings are readied by his hand. God’s silence does not flow from apathy or indifference, but love. He is not refusing to grant us the blessing, but simply preparing it, nurturing it from seed to sapling to fruitfulness.
Where we so often go wrong is in failing to believe that God truly means to bless us, failing to believe that his motives are only and always love, failing to wait for his timing to be right and his answer to be perfect. Our task is to trust him—to trust him in what he will give and what he will refuse, in what he will grant in a moment and what he will grant only in time. Our task is to pray and wait, pray and trust, pray and watch for him to do exceedingly and abundantly beyond all we can ask or even imagine.

Inspired by The Hidden Life by J.R. Miller

Good morning. May the Lord be with you and bless you today.
At Westminster Books this week you can get a discount on the Dream Keeper Saga by Kathryn Butler. You can also get up to 68% off some of their summer reading picks.
Today’s Kindle deals include Jonty Allcock’s Impossible Commands.

Most of us can be cowardly when it comes to evangelism. Mack Stiles has a good word for us.

“Churchgoing is good for the poor and vulnerable in a variety of ways: it gives people moral guidance on how to live their lives. It gives them opportunities to directly serve others as a community. It results in tithes that are then spent on a wide variety of charitable works. These things are not salvation, and it is certainly possible for someone to be warming a pew for 50 years without a saving relationship with Jesus Christ. But any person is far more likely to find Jesus while nodding off in a pew than watching Netflix in bed.”

Reuben Bredenhof writes about some of those experiences that will be near-universal to preachers.

This video from Gavin Ortlund is a long one but has some fascinating (and at times heartbreaking) things to say about the Israelite’s conquest of Canaan.

Anne Kennedy: “My question is, when will the rulers of the world finally be anxious enough about the collapse of their own societies to be curious enough about discovering for themselves what would make women want to have children? I feel like it’s not that complicated. But apparently, it is absolutely beyond the reach of modern societies.”

Rebekah Matt has three words for Christian parents. “The Bible has some other things to say about raising children, but in general, the overall message is to pass down your faith. As the years fly by and your children get older, your influence over them shrinks dramatically (this is by God’s design—it’s nothing personal), but laying the foundation of faith in Christ remains your primary purpose.”

Subjection describes actions taken by the one with authority where submission describes actions taken by the one under authority. When it comes to marriage, church, and our shared life with other believers, we are instructed to submit, not to subject.

How useless worrying is! It removes no trouble, lightens no burden, and softens no hardness in one’s lot. On the other hand, it only makes the trial greater and the heart in its feverishness, less strong for endurance.
—J.R. Miller