God's Answers to Our Prayers

Yes it is true that God offers three answers to our prayers: Yes, No, and Wait. In my last posting I spent some time discussing the fact that God gets to choose which answer He gives to any particular prayer. This time, I want to look at these three answers. We’ll start with the one that may be the most difficult to accept, then move to the one that is most difficult to live with and finally with the one we all hope for when we pray.

If God is truly our heavenly Father and has our best interests at heart, He must, from time to time, tell us “No.” It is a poor father who never says no to the child he loves. No keeps the child from harm and from the wrong path. God’s no’s to us do the same. In addition, He knows the future and how we are designed to fit into it. Many times His no’s not only keep us from going the wrong way, but also keep us on the best way. For us, just like for a child, no is hard to accept. It goes against what we want now, and it may go against what we have carefully thought out. God’s no may go against our best judgment; in fact, we may not even be able to see how no can be the right answer. That is when we must bend our will to accept God’s wisdom.

The good thing about no is that it can be freeing. It can establish boundaries and help us focus on who God wants us to be and what He wants us to do. My wife was diagnosed with severe rheumatoid arthritis on her 18th birthday. The doctor told an athletic, beauty queen, pianist, valedictorian that she had a disease that would cripple her. It just didn’t seem right. In all her young life anything she tried, she had mastered. She thought, as did I when we met and married, that this disease would not stand. We were sure that God would give her a healing. We prayed for it. All our friends prayed for it. In addition, Tina tried all the drugs, vitamins, diets, and quackery she could find thinking that one of them might be the way God would use to remove the pain to heal her.

Instead, twelve years later she was confined to a wheel chair and dying from a side effect of the arthritis. The doctors were telling her that, at best, she would never walk again. The pain was so great that it would wake her up in the middle of the night. One night, as I sat up with her, she told me that she felt that the Lord had told her no concerning her healing. I argued with her that the answer was wait, but she said she was okay with no. She went on to explain that with wait, she had been putting a lot of things on hold “until I feel better”. Now that she had the assurance that her answer was no, she could begin living life and dealing with the abilities she had, rather than sitting and waiting until she felt like her old self. So, she started getting the most out of each day and did as much as her little body would let her. She learned new skills, found new interests, and discovered a new purpose for her life, and a different Tina.

Rheumatoid Arthritis changed her life. A “Yes” from God would have meant a healing that would have enabled her to continue with her old vision and purpose of her life. Accepting the no allowed her to find out what else God had for her to do. As a result, even though, R.A. changed her life, it didn’t ruin it. Her health is now better, but she still struggles every day with the disease. In the last 23 years she has had 43 surgeries. More important than that, she has learned to walk again, graduated from college, become a children’s pastor and ordained as minister. Tina began writing and by now has written children’s Sunday school curriculum for more than 20 years. She is the author of 6 children’s ministry books. She is now the editor of the children’s ministry magazine, “K!”, and writes an online children’s church curriculum, “Kitchen”, for Kidzmatter, and a sought-after children’s ministry workshop leader.

God sometimes answers no, but if He does, He has something else in mind for us. We may not see it right away. In fact, we may not see it until all things are clear to us in eternity. Obviously, no is not our first choice, but it is God who does the choosing. If He is truly our Lord and we are truly His followers, then let us put our trust in Him.