Will God Answer Your Prayers?
one
Jesus’ promise and His example
Jesus repeatedly promised that those who prayed with faith would be granted the thing they prayed for. He says it clearly: “Ask, and it will be granted unto you.”
Then Jesus asks, here in this Garden, He asks His Father to “let the cup pass.” With the fullness of faith Jesus asked and it was not granted to Him. Like so many Christians down through the ages who would ask with faith for healing or strength or for the conversion of a loved one, Jesus asked and did not receive.
How can this be? How can it be that He who promised our prayers would be answered should Himself pray and not have His request granted?
two
God’s will as the Norm for Our Prayer
Jesus makes it clear that it is God’s will which must be the standard for our prayers. He ends His petition in the Garden, “Not my will, but Thine be done.”
The goal of the Christian life, including all prayers of petition, is not to conform God’s will to ours, but to conform our will to God’s.
Obviously, we should not expect God to grant us things which are contrary to His will for us. James tells the early Christians, “You ask and do not receive, because you ask badly, to satisfy your passions” (James 4:3).
Consequently, we can only be certain our prayers will be answered if we are certain about what God’s will is. We can ask for something and be certain about receiving it when we know it’s God’s will to give it to us.
By the same token, when we’re asking God to do what we know He wants to do, it means our wills are conformed to His. When our wills are conformed to His, He can do much more in us and through us
three
What we know God wants – our greater holiness
Jesus was always lamenting people’s lack of faith. In fact, we read once in the Gospel that He was unable to perform many miracles for a certain group of people, “because of their lack of faith” (Mark 6:5) They were unwilling to have confidence in God’s ability and desire to give them the things He wanted to give them.
When we ask for God’s help in growing in holiness, we can be absolutely confident that God can make us holy, and that He wants to make us holy and so God will be more able to make us holy!
So too with overcoming our vices. When Jesus spoke most dramatically about the power of faith, He was speaking about His miraculously causing the fig tree to wither, and about casting a mountain into the sea (Mark 11:20 ff).
In other words, the power of faith isn’t just constructive, it’s also destructive of our most intractable vices.
So we have to pray with relentless confidence that God will cause our vicious desires to dry up and will destroy the mountain of our vices. No matter how impossible it sounds, with God’s grace and our faithful petition, it will happen.
four
What we don’t know if God wants – worldly goods and the removal of trials
Jesus said that God is a good Father, who won’t give us a snake if we ask for a fish, or a stone if we ask for bread. The problem is sometimes, we ask Him for snakes and stones. We ask Him for things that won’t be good for us or that won’t make us happy.
Consequently, we are allowed to ask God for worldly goods and the removal of trials, but only as subordinated to our salvation. In other words, we ask for healing from an illness, safety on a journey, the success of a project, or even for the elimination of some interior struggle, only secondarily and conditionally. Only God knows whether the worldly good we’re praying for is really optimal for our ultimate happiness.
That’s why St. Paul prayed to be delivered from his “thorn in the flesh,” (II Cor 12:7ff) and God refused, because God’s power could be better manifested, and St. Paul’s mission could be better fulfilled, through Paul’s weakness.
It’s also why, every time we make a request for some worldly benefit, we have to at least assume the phrase “If it be your will” – the phrase Jesus used in the Garden, since, apart from some mystical revelation, we don’t know whether the thing we’re praying for corresponds to God’s will for our perfect happiness.
Again, the certainty of prayer is based on a certainty of God’s will and all we know for sure is that God wills what is best for us and those we love.
When we ask for a specific thing, that’s the confidence that should undergird our prayer, and the docile acceptance of whatever God’s will turns out to be.
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Salvation of sinners
Christ began His passion by asking whether God could spare Him; but He ended His passion by asking whether God could spare those who killed Him: “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.”
Jesus tells us explicitly to pray for sinners, especially those who sin against us: “Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you.”
He tells us to pray relentlessly, like the widow who petitioned the dishonest judge on behalf of her son, or the man who petitioned his neighbor for a loaf of bread on behalf of his unexpected guest.
But can we be certain that if we pray for sinners, they will convert? How many parents have prayed for their wayward children like St. Monica but their children have not come back to the faith? How many wives have prayed for their husbands? How many have prayed for the repentance of their friends, and their friends have continued unswervingly to ruin?
How do we make sense of this? Doesn’t God will the conversion of sinners? And doesn’t certainty in God’s will give us certainty that our prayers will be answered? Then why don’t sinners convert when we pray for it?
There are two points to make here. First of all, yes, God wills the conversion of sinners, but He wills that their conversion is conditional on their free choice. They must choose to repent, otherwise it wouldn’t be true repentance. Secondly, by praying for sinners, it increases our love for them, and makes us better able to help lead them to conversion. When we love someone, we are united to them, what happens to them and what happens to us becomes connected.
We’ve already said that when we conform our wills to God, He can do more for us than He otherwise could. Well, by being united to sinners through our love for them, our conformity to God’s will for them actually enables God to do more for them
This is the certainty we have when we pray for sinners. We know God loves them. We know we love them, and that our love for them and our prayers for them enable God to help them more. And we know that they are good. And these certainties should prompt us to pray with confidence and zeal, just as Our Lord did from the cross.