The End of Asking

Embraced by God's Loving No

"God’s refusals are His mercies." — C.S. Lewis

No.

Sometimes, this is God’s response to our prayers.

For a number of years now I have been investigating my “unanswered prayers”. I put these types of prayers, the unanswered ones, in quotes because there really is no such thing.

God always answers our prayers.

I have been both devastated and delighted to realize that what I thought were unanswered prayers were actually answered definitively by God: He said, “No.”

I realize what a sinking feeling this might produce in you dear soul, but if you will stick with me, and more importantly if you will stick with the Lord for the duration of your life, you will discover that one of the sweetest and most powerful answers God has given to your prayers is “no.”

It goes without saying, there are innumerable and undiscoverable reasons why God says “no” to our prayers. This post is not intended to address issues of sin, demonic resistance, asking for right things for the wrong reasons, or things of that nature. I highly recommend picking up Pete Greig’s God On Mute for a thorough exploration of such things.

It is also important to note from the outset that some of God’s “no’s” are tragic. Prayers for restoration, for healing, for deliverance are denied. It is not helpful to diminish the severity of pain and confusion these denials create with flimsy responses such as, “Well, God has a plan.”

That being said, He does have a plan.

If He has said no to you in a tragic way and there is no comfort in His plan right now, then tell Him as honestly as you can what you think about that. Pray your pain. Answers may or may not come but His denials are never the end of prayer, they are only the end of this particular asking.

As best you can, remember, that even the most tragic and confusing no’s are subject to God’s cosmic wisdom, and there in is a mystery of goodness that may be incomprehensible in this life, but will give way to glory and praise and honor in the next.

This post is not attempting to delve into theodicy or the complex factors for negative responses to our prayers. Rather, this is merely a simple meditation on the goodness and embrace of the love of God in His “no’s”.

“Most of the bitterness of unanswered prayer comes from the assumption that God will juggle his universe to give us what we plead for if we plead long enough.”—Georgia Harkness

I am officially at a stage of life where I can look back on prayers that I prayed in my twenties and thirties and say without equivocation God said “no.”

For the sake of illustration, I have a specific journal entry from my mid thirties that I am embarrassed to share but it is so concrete I will sacrifice my ego. I wrote on a retreat right around age 35, “Father, if our church has not grown past 500 adults by the time I am 45, I quit.”

I know, petty and shallow. Despite the temper tantrum tone of the prayer it was time stamped, had specific numbers, and clearly observable yes or no metrics. That journal entry is an echo of literally hundreds of prayers I’ve prayed through the decades; the “do this by this time or I’ll do this” type.

I’m 48. I’ve never led a church of more than 300. I have not quit.

45 ambushed me like a jaguar taking an antelope. It snuck up on me silently and unawares, massacred my demand of God, and left my request mangled and dead.

My 45th birthday was an official end of my asking. God may have pulled the shadow back on the stairs for Hezekiah (Is 20:1-11), but I am certain He will not time warp me back to age 35 to answer this specific prayer.

This end of asking was not disheartening though. It was the opposite of devastating. As I noted above, of course there are devastating “no’s” to our requests. There are life changing, tragic “no’s” none of us ever want to face—but even these ends of asking bring about incredible reorientation and transformation in the scheme of eternity.

Ironically, some of the most trusting and joyful people I know on this planet have endured (and embraced) God’s no in the most horrible of situations.

To press the metaphor of jaguars and antelopes to its absolute limit—something has to die for another thing to live.

“Prayer does not change God, but it changes the one who offers it.”—Søren Kierkegaard

I have come to many ends of asking.

Time stamped demands have come and gone and the Creator has not budged. Days, months, and years of pleading haven’t changed His mind one bit on certain requests. Anger, rage, and threats to just abandon this whole enterprise called prayer and faith seem to go unnoticed.

God never flinches in a game of chicken with His children. He runs right over, through, and past our limited perspective and disordered desire, not to crush us, but to put us on a path of submission instead of demand.

One of my all time favorite prayers is found in Every Moment Holy Vol. I by Douglas McKelvey. In his Liturgies of Sorrow and Lament, McKelvey has a prayer entitled, For Those Who Have Not Done Great Things For God.

It is gorgeous.

Each line is a paraphrase of my prayer journals through my twenties, thirties and early forties. Ubiquitous cries of, “You said you would, but you haven’t…” and “I thought You wanted to do this, but you didn’t…” are echoed in the words of this masterful liturgist, offering assurance that I am not alone.

Every human who makes requests of Mystery will find themselves dumbfounded and disoriented by “no.”

In one section of raw self-awareness Mckelvey prays, “…if the root of [this] prayer is some desire for heightened prominence or a sense of accomplishment and worth—either in my own eyes or in the eyes of others—than it would be better not to pray such prayers at all.”

It is an end of asking. A moment where one’s desire has been discerned and found lacking in holy motivation and alignment. The end of the asking is the beginning of new desire.

"God does not always give us what we want, that He may teach us to desire what is better."— Augustine

Reordering of Disordered Desire

This is ultimate transformation: when one comes to grips with our smallness, our myopic vision, our disordered desire for right (and wrong) things for the wrong reasons, and so our asking simply ends.

A holy quiet comes upon the soul.

A sincere request is fed by the death of insincerity, “What do you want me to ask for?”

A good Father denies His children the things that deform or damage them. A good Father says no to that which endangers His beloved. The hardest part of embracing the Father’s no is truly believing that it is an act of eternal love and goodness.

“For the Lord God is a sun and shield; the Lord bestows favor and honor; no good thing does he withhold from those whose walk is blameless.” (Psalm 84:11, NIV)

If He has withheld some perceived good it might be to reveal where we are blameworthy, not blameless. If he has withheld some perceived good, we must surrender to the truth that in the eternal mysteries of God’s wisdom, our request was not good.

Desire is reordered through its death because of God’s denial.

When that desire has definitively been denied, and it dies, we are freed from a hyper fixation on a future we were trying to secure by piling up endless prayers for the same thing over and over. When He has said “no” with unalterable finality, the horizon of a new future, with new pursuits, new motivations, and new desires opens wide and clear.

“What do you want me to ask for, oh Lover and Maker of my soul? This is my deepest and truest desire in response to your no. Thank you.”

The end of asking births a depth of new asking, with new vision and right order, that we could have never imagined had we received a “yes” to our original requests.

The Tightrope of Surrender vs Resignation

I am not talking about resignation. There is a very fine line between holy surrender and fleshy resignation.

Resignation resists God’s love. The demand is still there, burning like a smoldering fire underneath the ground cover, waiting to explode into a conflagration of anger and frustration at any moment.

Surrender rests in God’s love. The demand is still there, burning but in a different way. The fires are fueled by obedience from the heart. Desire has been reordered in accord with the will of God.

This takes a lifetime of endings of asking.

And, just to assure and comfort you dear reader, I have found more often than not, that resignation eventually leads to surrender. I have been at this long enough to have resigned myself to God’s no’s in rage only to experience my soul softening and becoming more malleable to His will over time and through continued denial.

Resignation tries to deny the desire itself, which is a total impossibility. I have asked God, in frustrated resignation, “Please just take these desires away!” I have tried to suppress the desires, act like they are not there, ignore them, and not pray them as an act of defiance against God’s will.

Guess what—The desires do not go away.

All desire is designed by God to keep us in constant, passionate, honest conversation and communion with Him. He is at work reordering and contouring every desire we have according to His will. This is not our work, it is His, and totally of the Spirit. All we can do is ceaselessly pray our desires as we currently understand them, over and over and over, until there is nothing left but surrender.

When To Stop Asking

Here is what I have found helpful in avoiding resignation and growing in surrender to God’s no’s. There is no “three easy steps to surrender.” The civil war of disordered and ordered desire is a messy, confusing process. I wish I could tell you, “choose to surrender” and suddenly all would be well. That is not how this works. You must war, and plead, and pray until the war ends.

First, As long as the desire is not explicitly sinful then pray and pray and pray it until God has clearly said no. Until the day I turned 45 I prayed “grow our church through 500”. To have ceased praying such a thing, before I had turned 45 would have been to take God’s will into my own hands. His denials forced me to discern the motives of my heart. My desperation kept me close.

The day after I turned 45 though, the opportunity for the prayer’s fulfillment ceased to exist. Holy surrender to his clear and final no was my only option.

After God’s denial of David’s fasting and praying to spare the life of His son David moved forward in surrender. He had no other option.

“His attendants asked him, “Why are you acting this way? While the child was alive, you fasted and wept, but now that the child is dead, you get up and eat!” He answered, “While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept. I thought, ‘Who knows? The Lord may be gracious to me and let the child live.’ But now that he is dead, why should I go on fasting? Can I bring him back again? I will go to him, but he will not return to me.”” (2 Samuel 12:21–23, NIV)

Fast, pray, and plead until death has taken your desire completely, then get up in surrender and go to where God is now guiding—there is still a future full of God’s will that must be lived into.

There are prayers I’m praying, and won’t stop praying, because they are time stamped by my literal death. There are other prayers that eventually will be buried and moved on from because time and circumstance will make clear that their possibility has passed forever.

No matter what, I will pray them until the “no” is final.

As I pray, the death may not be what I expect. The desire may love it life force and fiery passion and be transformed into something categorically different. Death will give birth to new life.

Pray the desire until it is transformed.

This has been a new phenomena for me. There are certain prayers that I have caught glimpses of God starting to answer, and it has terrified me. My desire has diminished a bit, it has died over these many years of pleading, and what has risen from the grave is a transformed different desire I couldn’t have ever expected.

Let me explain. There are certain responsibilities and hidden troubles and pains that come with some of my prayers being answered in the affirmative. In a broken world this is just the way it is. Never forget that a Father’s no is always protective.

A clear example of this are my hundreds of prayers over the years for a large church. Again, I confess the shallowness of this and ask mercy as I share. Besides, I’m pretty certain we’ve all got some pretty shallow prayers we’re pleading for! Sometimes it is helpful to not sanitize how silly some of our requests are, especially if they are just for vain glory and worldly success with Jesus’ name tagged on to the end.

I digress…

This specific desire has slowly been transformed in me over these many years of denial. Not entirely of course, I am still smitten with stages and lights and platform, but I have seen the underbelly of the beast, and it is terrifying. I have grown to love knowing the names of the faces of the people I teach. I love knowing the stories and being involved. I love the dynamics of intimacy and closeness within this community that a huge crowd simply cannot replicate. I treasure the simplicity of a smaller setting, a smaller budget, a smaller, more tight knit staff.

As our church (still very small) grows, I see the looming responsibilities and pitfalls, and notice that unbeknownst to me, my original desire for a huge church has been subtly transformed into desire for what I have right now!

Instead of, “Lord, grow us through this number…” I find myself praying more earnestly than ever, “Lord, grow us in character and love for one another. Provide the means and wisdom to accomplish your will within this specific network of relationships.”

Pray your desire until it is clearly denied.

Pray your desire until it transforms into something you could have never imagined wanting.

"The whole business of God is to perfect the soul. If He denies you what you ask, it is to teach you what to ask instead."—St. John of the Cross

The Son Was Told No

Lest we forget, the most loving “no” the Father ever gave was to His very Son in the pursuit of our salvation. Jesus embraced the Father’s no, trusting that apparent tragedy, loss, and death would result in ultimate deliverance, transformation, and life.

Growing up, as Jesus prayed the lament Psalms his heart was oriented towards the “no” of God as an act of love. As a young man, praying through painful passages like Psalm 13, Psalm 22, and Psalm 88 Jesus’ mind and heart would have been conditioned to perceive God’s “no’s” as necessary for life and the Father’s ultimate giving of greater goods.

Jesus learned to be loved in the “no” praying those psalms. He learned that the Father would say “no” to His requests. When the time came, rather than suppressing the desire to avoid the cross, he prayed that desire as earnestly and honestly as he could. Rather than raging against the Father in resignation, Jesus surrendered in trust and faith, embracing God’s “no” as an act of love.

“Abba, Father,” he said, “everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.”” (Mark 14:36, NIV)

The Father’s “no” saved the world.

This is the ultimate reason God denies our prayers. His “no” is always working salvation in greater measure for us and this world.

When He says “no” to us, He intends for us to trust like Jesus, to surrender like Jesus. The Father’s “no” is an opportunity to live in relationship with Him just like the Son did. In fact, because the Father said no to the Son, the Son now lives within us by the Spirit, and so the Father’s “no’s” are opportunities to live by the Spirit within us who surrenders and trusts crying “Abba” with groans and utterances we cannot comprehend.

In Jesus’ moment of denial we have a blue print for embracing God’s “no’s” as pure love.

“Abba, Father…”

We acknowledge that this denial is from our Father, our Abba, not an angry judge or cruel puppet master.

“….everything is possible for you.”

We acknowledge our Father’s providence. He could say yes and do whatever he wants. There is nothing He cannot do. If He says yes, we rejoice! If He says no, we rest in the truth that He is good, and in His goodness has seen fit to deny our prayer for the betterment of our soul and the world.

“Take this cup from me.”

Make the request. Make the request over and over until you no longer can or it transforms. Do not stop or suppress or hide from the desire. Pray openly and honestly to your providential Father for whom all things are possible.

“Yet not what I will, but what you will.”

There is final surrender when the prayer has obviously been answered and then there is moment by moment surrender until an answer comes.

This is where the Spirit intercedes on our behalf. This is where the act of Christian faith is solidified. The future is uncertain, the desire is unmet, yet, not what I will but you what you will. This is the prayer of every minute and moment of our days until our days end in death itself, not to be swallowed up by denial, but to be resurrected into an eternal “yes.”

His No Saved You and I and the World

Because the Father told Jesus no, you and I are saved. His no was the means of saving the world. The end of Jesus’ asking was the crucifixion. A holy quiet silenced His voice as He surrendered to the ultimate denial of His request, for your sake and mine.

Whatever the Father has denied you is for the sake of saving your soul and the world’s. There are no purposeless “no’s” in the economy of God. Every denial is as paramount to the fulfillment of His cosmic salvation project as is every yes.

Be embraced by His “no”.

Embrace His “no.”

Surrender and see your soul, and this cosmos saved, as you come to the ends of your asking.