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The End of Prayer Unfiltered: When God Doesn't Answer the Way You Hoped · The Father's Business Podcast

0:00
SPEAKER_01: Eventually, we reach a place where the question is no longer how do I pray correctly?
0:05
SPEAKER_01: The question Elizabeth often becomes, how do I keep trusting God when I am grieving the story he allowed me to live or he is allowing me to live.
0:21
SPEAKER_00: Hey friends, I'm Kimberly.
0:23
SPEAKER_00: And I'm Elizabeth, and this is the Father's Business Podcast, born out of Sylvia Gunter's heart for people to know who God is and who they are in him.
0:32
SPEAKER_01: So wherever you're listening from today, we pray that you will sense his nearness and know that you are his beloved sons and daughters.
0:39
SPEAKER_01: We're really glad you're here with us today.
0:44
SPEAKER_01: Hey everyone, welcome back to the Father's Business Podcast.
0:47
SPEAKER_01: We're so glad that you're with us today.
0:49
SPEAKER_01: And today is a little bit of a bittersweet moment because this is our final episode in the series that we've been doing called Prayer Unfiltered.
0:57
SPEAKER_01: You know, we started this series because we kept hearing questions about prayer.
1:01
SPEAKER_01: Some were theological, some were practical, and some were deeply, deeply personal.
1:06
SPEAKER_01: We had questions such as, how do I know if God hears me?
1:09
SPEAKER_01: Am I praying wrong?
1:11
SPEAKER_01: Why pray if God is sovereign and can just handle it all?
1:14
SPEAKER_01: How do I hear his voice?
1:16
SPEAKER_01: Does it matter whether I pray silently or out loud?
1:19
SPEAKER_01: And what happens when I keep praying?
1:21
SPEAKER_01: And all the answers still don't come.
1:23
SPEAKER_01: And as the series went on, Elizabeth, the questions kept coming from people.
1:27
SPEAKER_01: And I'm so glad that people engaged us with their questions and sent us things because we realized people had a lot of good questions, some even really struggling with some things.
1:35
SPEAKER_01: Last week, I talked very personally about healing.
1:37
SPEAKER_01: The title of it was By His Stripes We Are Healed, and we talked about that verse in Isaiah.
1:41
SPEAKER_01: And I also talked about what happened in my own faith after my dad died.
1:45
SPEAKER_01: Today we want to pick back up where that conversation left off.
1:48
SPEAKER_01: And we have four questions today that we still want to answer briefly.
1:52
SPEAKER_01: And then Elizabeth and I want to take a step back and talk about what we think we have learned through this whole series.
1:57
SPEAKER_01: But there's one truth that we keep coming back to, and it's grief and trust are not opposites.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Carolyn, I think we need to hear that truth because underneath so many of the questions we've received, it's really the same struggle.
2:11
SPEAKER_00: I prayed, I didn't get the answer I wanted, so now what do I do?
2:16
SPEAKER_00: Why pray?
2:17
SPEAKER_00: Did something in me prevent God from answering?
2:19
SPEAKER_00: Is there some better way that I can pray so I can influence the outcome?
2:23
SPEAKER_00: And when you pull back all of those questions and many more questions that we receive, there is often another question hiding underneath it, and it's kind of a convicting one.
2:34
SPEAKER_00: What we're really saying is, what can I do to fix this?
2:37
SPEAKER_00: Because if I can just figure out what went wrong, if I prayed incorrectly, if I didn't have enough faith, if there was sin in my life, if I should have fasted, if I should have declared something differently, if I should have exercised more authority, then maybe I can keep this kind of disappointment from happening again.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: And I totally get it.
2:56
SPEAKER_00: I understand the impulse.
2:58
SPEAKER_00: We want our prayers to matter because what we're praying about matters.
3:03
SPEAKER_00: But somewhere along the way, we can begin to confuse prayers that matter with prayers that give us the outcome that we wanted.
3:11
SPEAKER_00: And that's not really the same thing.
3:13
SPEAKER_00: So before we look back over the whole series, we want to answer four more questions that have come in from people who have emailed us that really kind of bring us back to the center of that tension.
3:23
SPEAKER_00: And the first one of those questions is if the outcome might not change, why pray?
3:29
SPEAKER_00: And we received that question in several forms from different people telling us their stories.
3:33
SPEAKER_00: A lot of them were stories where they prayed along with other believers for God to heal a situation, change a situation, invite a prodigal child to come home, and the outcome was not what they wanted.
3:46
SPEAKER_00: So people kept saying, if it doesn't change the outcome, why bother praying?
3:50
SPEAKER_00: And Kimberly, you did such a good job talking about this last week.
3:54
SPEAKER_00: It was just beautiful to listen to you.
3:56
SPEAKER_00: And I don't want to repeat that entire conversation.
3:58
SPEAKER_00: I do want to encourage anyone, if you have not listened to the By His Stripes, We Are Healed podcast, really go back and listen to that because I thought it was one of the best ones we've had in the series.
4:08
SPEAKER_00: But if we had to answer that question in just a couple of minutes, what I would say is that prayer absolutely can change circumstances.
4:17
SPEAKER_00: Scripture gives us reasons to ask.
4:19
SPEAKER_00: We see that when his people call out to him, he does respond, he does heal, he does intervene.
4:24
SPEAKER_00: There are doors that are open and circumstances that change.
4:27
SPEAKER_00: So I don't think we want to become so afraid of disappointment that we stop asking.
4:33
SPEAKER_00: So if I have someone in my life that I love that's sick, I'm gonna pray for their healing.
4:37
SPEAKER_00: And if there's a seemingly impossible situation, I'm gonna ask God to intervene and have another thought or do something different because we're told throughout scripture and specifically by Jesus to ask.
4:49
SPEAKER_00: But the fact that God invites us to ask does not mean he gives us authorship over the ending.
4:55
SPEAKER_00: And that's where I struggle.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: And Kimberly, I think that's what you were sharing last week about how you struggle is prayer is where we have to choose to stay in relationship with him, where we choose to ask God for what we want, but we release the ability to dictate the circumstances.
5:13
SPEAKER_00: So prayer is where I remain in my relationship with God, whether or not the circumstances change.
5:19
SPEAKER_00: That's a hard one to live in.
5:20
SPEAKER_00: But so why do we pray?
5:22
SPEAKER_00: Because the Father invites us, because I love the people that I'm praying for, and because I cannot control what happens.
5:29
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes I don't get what I ask for, but I still need somewhere to bring my fear, my hope, my longing, and eventually sometimes my grief.
5:37
SPEAKER_00: So prayer is not only about how I ask God to change the story, but it's how I ask God to stay with me inside the story I already have.
5:48
SPEAKER_00: And there's a lot of you that have written us saying that so many horrible things have happened, you just don't know how to pray anymore.
5:54
SPEAKER_00: And that's okay.
5:55
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes prayer is just asking God to stay with you inside the disappointment, the grief, the pain, the fear, the doubt that you already have.
6:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
6:04
SPEAKER_01: And I would encourage you that if you are struggling with praying because of that disappointment or as a result of that disappointment, or even not sensing God's presence, hang on because we're gonna talk a little bit more about that at the end of this podcast.
6:17
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's that's a very, very real struggle.
6:20
SPEAKER_01: And like you said, Elizabeth, I talked some about that last week, but I think there's more to unpack there too.
6:24
SPEAKER_01: Another question that we want to briefly answer is does sin stop God from answering my prayer?
6:31
SPEAKER_01: I think that's a big one.
6:32
SPEAKER_01: I remember for a long time growing up, I was like, well, if I have sin in my life, is God gonna hear me?
6:37
SPEAKER_01: This question can become especially painful after unanswered prayer.
6:40
SPEAKER_01: Maybe it was me, maybe I didn't have enough faith, maybe I had unforgiveness in my heart, maybe I had some hidden sin that I wasn't willing to recognize or I didn't want to confess.
6:48
SPEAKER_01: Maybe God would have answered differently if I had gotten something right.
6:52
SPEAKER_01: And scripture does talk about sin affecting prayer, so we don't want to dismiss that.
6:57
SPEAKER_01: Scripture does take sin seriously.
6:59
SPEAKER_01: In fact, James tells us that we can ask with wrong motives.
7:02
SPEAKER_01: Scripture calls us to confession and repentance.
7:05
SPEAKER_01: And so if the Holy Spirit is convicting me or you about something, I want to listen, I need to listen, I need to pay attention.
7:10
SPEAKER_01: But there is an enormous difference between conviction and condemnation.
7:15
SPEAKER_01: There is biblical self-examination, and then there is desperately searching for the thing you supposedly did wrong that caused a tragedy.
7:22
SPEAKER_01: John 9 is important here.
7:24
SPEAKER_01: Jesus and his disciples encounter a man who had been blind from birth.
7:28
SPEAKER_01: And in John 9, verses 2 and 3, we read, His disciples asked him, Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?
7:36
SPEAKER_01: Jesus answered, Neither this man nor his parents sinned.
7:40
SPEAKER_01: The disciples wanted a simple equation to make sense.
7:43
SPEAKER_01: There is suffering and there's someone to blame.
7:45
SPEAKER_01: Jesus refuses that equation.
7:47
SPEAKER_01: He said, That is not how it works.
7:48
SPEAKER_01: So, yes, if the Holy Spirit puts his finger on something in my life or in your life, we need to repent.
7:54
SPEAKER_01: But if a prayer goes unanswered, we don't automatically need to conclude or assume that we failed a spiritual test.
8:01
SPEAKER_01: We should not turn our disappointment and an outcome into the scavenger hunt for hidden sin that will supposedly explain away our pain and our disappointment.
8:10
SPEAKER_01: Romans 8.1 says, Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
8:15
SPEAKER_01: Now conviction is specific and it's redemptive and it draws me to God.
8:19
SPEAKER_01: But that condemnation says, you're the problem.
8:22
SPEAKER_01: If you were a better Christian, maybe this would not have happened.
8:25
SPEAKER_01: Those are two different voices.
8:28
SPEAKER_01: So the more that we can understand and discern the difference in that conviction and that condemnation, the more we will learn to truly repent and deal with our sin versus trying to find what sin caused God not to answer.
8:41
SPEAKER_01: That's not the way that God operates.
8:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and again, that Kimberly, that's another one of those questions that we got that just kind of hurts my heart a bit that people are out there asking these questions thinking it's my fault.
8:53
SPEAKER_00: And that's not the heart of God.
8:54
SPEAKER_00: We've talked about that in so many of our podcasts.
8:56
SPEAKER_00: We're going to talk a little bit more about that as we kind of wrap this up at the end.
8:59
SPEAKER_00: But so many of the questions we're getting are, what did I do wrong so that God didn't answer me?
9:05
SPEAKER_00: And another one we got a lot was, can I be angry with God?
9:10
SPEAKER_00: It came in different forms.
9:11
SPEAKER_00: Kimberly and I are both like, yeah, you can.
9:13
SPEAKER_00: Like, yes, you can be angry with God.
9:16
SPEAKER_00: But for some people, that feels uncomfortable.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: Can I tell God I'm angry with him?
9:20
SPEAKER_00: Can I say, I trust you?
9:21
SPEAKER_00: I prayed.
9:22
SPEAKER_00: I asked you to do something different, and I'm disappointed and I'm hurt and I'm angry.
9:27
SPEAKER_00: And I think a lot of times we're not allowed to say that out loud amongst our religious friends because we somehow think that makes us less faithful.
9:36
SPEAKER_00: But I think scripture gives us enormous permission to be honest with God.
9:40
SPEAKER_00: You think of all the language in the Psalms, you know, how long, O Lord, will you forsake me forever?
9:45
SPEAKER_00: Why have you forgotten me?
9:46
SPEAKER_00: Why are you so far away?
9:47
SPEAKER_00: And then Job and all that he spoke so honestly with God about, and Jeremiah and Habakkuk, and even Jesus in the New Testament was lamenting when he was in the Garden of Gethsemane and he didn't want to do what he's being asked to do.
10:01
SPEAKER_00: And that's what I've noticed is that God doesn't require any of these people, including his own son, to clean up their emotions before they come into his presence.
10:10
SPEAKER_00: And there's a difference between bringing my anger to God and allowing my anger to harden my heart away from God.
10:18
SPEAKER_00: And I think that is the real risk we have if we believe we're not allowed to tell God we're angry.
10:25
SPEAKER_00: So we come to him with this unnatural religious language.
10:29
SPEAKER_00: And what it all does, if I'm not being honest with God and saying, God, I'm angry, help me through this anger.
10:36
SPEAKER_00: What it does is hardens my heart against him.
10:38
SPEAKER_00: And I just want to be away from his presence.
10:40
SPEAKER_00: And that's why I think I love the language of lament.
10:44
SPEAKER_00: Lament is pain that is still talking to God.
10:47
SPEAKER_00: That's the easiest definition I know for lament.
10:49
SPEAKER_00: It's when I bring my pain to God.
10:51
SPEAKER_00: So it is pain that's still talking to God.
10:53
SPEAKER_00: And it says, God, I trust you and I'm angry.
10:56
SPEAKER_00: I believe you're good, but this does not feel good.
10:59
SPEAKER_00: And there was a season in my life where I had to wake up every morning and say, God, I trust that you are good and kind, but what you're allowing is not good and kind.
11:07
SPEAKER_00: And I had to live in the tension of those two things.
11:09
SPEAKER_00: It's saying, I believe you're sovereign and I wish you had chosen differently here.
11:14
SPEAKER_00: Like, yes, you're the author of my story, but could you have not written this chapter differently than the way you did?
11:20
SPEAKER_00: And maybe it's as simple as, God, I love you and I am deeply disappointed.
11:24
SPEAKER_00: And those sentences aren't contradictions because trust is not the absence of disappointment.
11:31
SPEAKER_00: It's being able to be honest with your father.
11:35
SPEAKER_00: He knows what you're thinking, he knows the inner thoughts of our hearts.
11:38
SPEAKER_00: So why not be honest with him and say, God, all I feel right now is disappointment and sadness with you.
11:44
SPEAKER_00: You could have done it differently and you didn't.
11:47
SPEAKER_00: And I don't have anyone else to go to.
11:48
SPEAKER_00: I think of the disciples when they say to him, Where else do we have to go?
11:52
SPEAKER_00: Because you are the source of life.
11:54
SPEAKER_00: And a lot of times when we're angry, uh, Kimberly, you've shared in previous podcasts that right after your dad died and you're dealing with that, you weren't so sure you liked him very much and you invited him to sit in the backseat of your car.
12:06
SPEAKER_00: I love that analogy.
12:07
SPEAKER_00: And there's times where I've been like, okay, you can sit over there.
12:10
SPEAKER_00: So it's not denying his presence, but it's also saying, I don't know that I want to be near you right now because I'm hurt and I'm sad and I'm disappointed.
12:18
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
12:18
SPEAKER_01: It's being real and being authentic and knowing that God can handle that and dealing with that appropriately in the context of the relationship that we have with him.
12:25
SPEAKER_01: The fourth question that we've addressed, but still has lots of pieces to it, is how do I pray without trying to control the outcome?
12:34
SPEAKER_01: This one can apply to circumstances, but it also comes up when we pray for people we love.
12:38
SPEAKER_01: So we want to address that.
12:40
SPEAKER_01: It can be an adult child, a spouse, someone who's walked away from God or who is making choices that we're scared about their choices and what the outcomes may be.
12:48
SPEAKER_01: It can be someone whose life is not unfolding the way it we think it should.
12:51
SPEAKER_01: So how do we pray specifically without quietly trying to control another person or force an outcome through prayer?
12:58
SPEAKER_01: And I think first we want to say you're allowed to tell God exactly what you want.
13:04
SPEAKER_01: Honesty is not control.
13:05
SPEAKER_01: We've said this over and over again.
13:07
SPEAKER_01: Jesus himself prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, Father, if you're willing, take this cup from me, yet not my will, but yours be done.
13:15
SPEAKER_01: That's in Luke 22, 42.
13:16
SPEAKER_01: Jesus named his desired outcome in that prayer, but submitting to his father didn't require him to pretend that he didn't have a preference.
13:24
SPEAKER_01: He did have a preference.
13:25
SPEAKER_01: But the question is, what do we do with that?
13:28
SPEAKER_01: Do we bring God our request or do we hand him our script?
13:32
SPEAKER_01: And there's a difference between saying, Father, I believe this relationship is harmful.
13:36
SPEAKER_01: Please intervene.
13:37
SPEAKER_01: There's a difference in saying that versus, Father, make these exact five things happen by Friday so this person's life turns out the way that I think it should.
13:48
SPEAKER_01: We can pray boldly for someone.
13:50
SPEAKER_01: We can pray, Father, reveal the truth, protect them from deception, bring wise people around them, convict where conviction is needed, give them courage to respond to you, heal what is wounded.
14:00
SPEAKER_01: But one of the hardest prayers to pray is, Father, show me what belongs to me and what belongs to you.
14:05
SPEAKER_01: Because we can love someone deeply without becoming their Holy Spirit.
14:10
SPEAKER_01: And that's hard, especially when we care deeply for people.
14:13
SPEAKER_01: I can intercede for people without becoming responsible for their outcome.
14:17
SPEAKER_01: We are not responsible for the outcome.
14:19
SPEAKER_01: We're not responsible for them.
14:21
SPEAKER_01: Jesus is.
14:22
SPEAKER_01: He has them.
14:22
SPEAKER_01: If they're his children, he has them.
14:24
SPEAKER_01: And if they're not his children, we are his children.
14:27
SPEAKER_01: And we are begging him to work and intervene on their behalf, right?
14:29
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes, Elizabeth, I feel like people think that their desire for control may be selfish, like they recognize they're trying to get their own way here or looking for their own means.
14:38
SPEAKER_01: But what I really think is going on is that it's that desire for outcome is really out of fear.
14:43
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes we just don't want to be disappointed again because we have been disappointed.
14:47
SPEAKER_01: And sometimes we think if I can just find the right prayer, the right scripture, the right spiritual technique, maybe I can guarantee that this turns out okay.
14:56
SPEAKER_01: And so we come back to surrender.
14:57
SPEAKER_01: Surrender is not giving up on prayer.
15:00
SPEAKER_01: Surrender is giving up this illusion that prayer was meant to make me the sovereign one, to make me the one in control, to make me the one who manages and controls the outcome.
15:12
SPEAKER_01: And so again, we come back to Father, your will be done, just like Jesus prayed in the garden.
15:17
SPEAKER_01: And that is so hard to pray.
15:20
SPEAKER_01: And you know, Elizabeth, when we started the series, I don't think that either of us realized how often we were gonna come back to this idea of prayer is not about control.
15:30
SPEAKER_01: We really started with something basic of why pray?
15:32
SPEAKER_01: If God already knows, if he's sovereign, if he already knows what's going on, then why do we talk to them at all?
15:38
SPEAKER_01: But I think we have come back over and over again to this idea of prayer is not about control, it's about surrender and a lot of other ideas that are much bigger than simply why pray, although that's a really good question too.
15:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I think almost every episode since the beginning of this, which we really had no idea where this series was going to go because it was based on questions that people are gonna ask.
15:58
SPEAKER_00: But every one of them has been another angle on the same invitation, which is prayer is not a formula, prayer is not about controlling outcome, prayer is a relationship.
16:08
SPEAKER_00: And we talked about whether God hears our silent prayers, he does.
16:12
SPEAKER_00: We talked about whether praying out loud is more powerful, and we talked about it's not the volume that makes prayer more powerful.
16:19
SPEAKER_00: We talked about what happens when we don't have words and spend a lot of time in Romans 8 reminding ourselves that the Holy Spirit is not standing there waiting for us to produce a polished, perfect prayer.
16:30
SPEAKER_00: He comes to us in our weakness.
16:32
SPEAKER_00: And we talked about hearing God and discovered that, again, that listening prayer is not a technique for getting secret information from heaven.
16:39
SPEAKER_00: It's about our relationship with Him, it's about spending time in His presence, it's about growing our listening ears out of scripture and discernment and maturity and knowing who God is.
16:49
SPEAKER_00: And we talked about praying scripture, not because quoting Bible verses gives our prayers extra points or turbo prayer, because it shapes us when we pray scripture, not us shaping how God is going to respond.
17:03
SPEAKER_00: It reminds us of who God is when our emotions are loud, and it gives us language when I don't know what to pray.
17:09
SPEAKER_00: And we talked about, as you just talked about, Kimberly, praying and really letting go.
17:14
SPEAKER_00: And that one hits close to home because sometimes what we call an intercession is really anxiety with the Christian vocabulary, if we're honest.
17:22
SPEAKER_00: And then we talked about authority and declarations and speaking to mountains and binding and loosing and all of these different topics we kept talking about.
17:30
SPEAKER_00: They all came back to two pretty central themes for me.
17:33
SPEAKER_00: One is about submitted authority, believing that yes, we do have authority, but his authority is never independent of his lordship.
17:40
SPEAKER_00: And so we boldly declare what scripture says is true without pretending God has given us authority to decree every outcome.
17:48
SPEAKER_00: Again, going back to control.
17:49
SPEAKER_00: And also the the whole idea that at the core of all these questions is prayer is not a formula to get what you want out of God.
17:57
SPEAKER_00: It's a relationship.
17:58
SPEAKER_01: We also talked about fasting, and again, the question underneath that was does fasting make God more likely to answer my prayer?
18:05
SPEAKER_01: And we found that fasting is not leverage, it changes our posture, it focuses us for sure, it humbles us, it gives space for attentiveness and dependence upon God, but again, it does not give us control over God.
18:18
SPEAKER_01: We talked about praying in the spirit, we talked about speaking in tongues, we talked about what happens when different Christian traditions interpret those things differently, and we came back to dependence upon the Holy Spirit rather than upon spiritual performance.
18:29
SPEAKER_01: And we talked about what it really means to pray in Jesus' name.
18:33
SPEAKER_01: We don't attach the name of Jesus to the end of our agenda like a signature and make God obligated to perform it.
18:39
SPEAKER_01: We come to the Father because of Jesus, through Jesus, under his authority, trusting his character.
18:45
SPEAKER_01: And then there's healing, which a lot of people had questions about because we just get disappointed when it doesn't happen.
18:50
SPEAKER_01: And we talked about the scripture that says by his stripes we are healed.
18:54
SPEAKER_01: And why do we pray for healing?
18:56
SPEAKER_01: What happens when healing does not come on this side of eternity?
18:59
SPEAKER_01: I shared last week how my father's death eventually forced me to separate two things that I had kind of unconsciously joined together, God's goodness and the outcome that I wanted.
19:10
SPEAKER_01: And I think that brings us to where we need to finish.
19:13
SPEAKER_01: Because after all of the questions about how we pray, what we say, what we believe, what authority we have, how long we persist, whether we fast, whether we declare, whether we surrender, eventually we reach a place where the question is no longer, how do I pray correctly?
19:28
SPEAKER_01: The question, Elizabeth, often becomes, how do I keep trusting God when I am grieving the story he allowed me to live or he is allowing me to live?
19:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I think that's where it comes back to what we were saying towards the beginning of this podcast, that grief and trust are not opposites.
19:47
SPEAKER_00: And Kimberly, you and I both have lived enough life.
19:49
SPEAKER_00: We shared parts of our stories on this podcast.
19:52
SPEAKER_00: We both have more stories we could share, but who wants to do that much self-flagellation on a podcast?
19:57
SPEAKER_00: But there's been deep times of disappointment with God in both of our lives.
20:02
SPEAKER_00: And so we do not share what we're sharing as someone whose life has been perfect and great.
20:07
SPEAKER_00: And every time we've prayed, God has answered, and we haven't faced really hard times.
20:11
SPEAKER_00: And in some ways, right now, living in some questions that we both have for God that we don't really feel like He's answering a whole lot.
20:20
SPEAKER_00: So I think sometimes we expect trust to make us less affected by the outcome, as though stronger faith would mean we would not grieve quite so deeply, or we wouldn't be as disappointed, or we would recover more quickly from an unanswered prayer.
20:34
SPEAKER_00: And when disappointment comes, we try to correct it.
20:37
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I know I've done this myself, and I've also heard other people do it.
20:41
SPEAKER_00: They tell you something absolutely tragic that is happening in their life, and then they immediately go, but you know, God's good.
20:47
SPEAKER_00: Everything happens for a reason.
20:48
SPEAKER_00: I'm grateful.
20:49
SPEAKER_00: I know God has a plan.
20:51
SPEAKER_00: And those things contain truth, but sometimes I think we use true statements to avoid telling the truth about what really hurts.
21:00
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes, me, myself included, we we remind ourselves that God is good before we have admitted how much it hurts.
21:09
SPEAKER_00: And God's goodness does not require us to call every circumstance good.
21:14
SPEAKER_00: God's goodness does not require you to call cancer desirable, or betrayal, or infertility, or a marriage that's ending desirable or comfortable or good.
21:26
SPEAKER_00: Some of us are living in stories that we never wanted.
21:28
SPEAKER_00: And trusting his sovereignty does not require us to pretend that given the choice, we would have chosen the same story.
21:36
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you remember these, Kimberly, but I do from my childhood, where choose your own adventure, where you would read a couple of pages and then you get to the to the end is like, okay, do you want to go to the left or go to the right?
21:45
SPEAKER_00: And you would go to different parts of the book and choose your own story.
21:48
SPEAKER_00: Man, when I would read those, I would choose one way.
21:51
SPEAKER_00: And if I didn't like the way that was going, I'd go back and I would choose the other way.
21:54
SPEAKER_00: And how much better would life be sometimes if God gave us choose your own adventure?
21:59
SPEAKER_00: But what we can't Can say is God, I trust your sovereignty and I would not have chosen this.
22:04
SPEAKER_00: And that, Kimberly, is an honest prayer.
22:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and that does not mean that you have stopped trusting God.
22:11
SPEAKER_01: Grief and trust answer different questions.
22:14
SPEAKER_01: Grief says, this mattered to me and I have lost something.
22:18
SPEAKER_01: Trust says, I still believe I am held by God inside of that loss.
22:23
SPEAKER_01: And those truths can live in the same heart.
22:26
SPEAKER_01: I can trust God and I can still grieve my story.
22:29
SPEAKER_01: I can believe that he's good and I can still mourn what he allowed.
22:33
SPEAKER_01: I can believe he is sovereign and still be disappointed in the way he chose to act, or in the way he chose not to act.
22:40
SPEAKER_01: I can believe that God still loves me and I can still say, Father, this hurts more than I know how to carry.
22:47
SPEAKER_01: Because we believe that biblical faith makes room for both confession and lament.
22:52
SPEAKER_01: It's why we see it in scripture.
22:54
SPEAKER_01: And one reason we know that this is true is because not every psalm ends with the emotional resolution that we sometimes expect from that Christian testimony.
23:03
SPEAKER_01: A lot of psalms do make a turn.
23:05
SPEAKER_01: The psalmist cries out, complains, grieves, and then remembers the goodness of God.
23:09
SPEAKER_01: And those psalms are beautiful, but there are also prayers in Scripture that do not resolve with a pretty bow on the top of the package.
23:17
SPEAKER_01: Psalm 39 is one of them.
23:19
SPEAKER_01: David is wrestling with how fragile life is.
23:22
SPEAKER_01: He is also aware of suffering, mortality, and the brevity of his days.
23:27
SPEAKER_01: He asks God to help him understand how fleeting life really is.
23:31
SPEAKER_01: And by the end of the Psalm, he has not yet arrived at some triumphant emotional conclusion.
23:36
SPEAKER_01: Listen to how the Psalm closes.
23:38
SPEAKER_01: Psalm 39 verses 12 and 13.
23:41
SPEAKER_01: Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear to my cry.
23:44
SPEAKER_01: Hold not your peace at my tears, for I am a sojourner with you, a guest like all my fathers.
23:50
SPEAKER_01: Look away from me that I may smile again before I depart and am no more.
23:55
SPEAKER_01: That's in the Bible.
23:56
SPEAKER_01: That's the ESV version, actually.
23:58
SPEAKER_01: The other versions say, look away so I can enjoy my life again.
24:03
SPEAKER_01: David is essentially ending this psalm by saying, My life would be better off without you.
24:09
SPEAKER_01: Like there's no tidy pretty bow on that one.
24:12
SPEAKER_01: There's a sudden declaration that he now understands everything.
24:16
SPEAKER_01: And apparently God was willing to preserve that prayer as a scripture for us, which means also that God does not require every prayer to end with us feeling emotionally resolved because that's not real.
24:29
SPEAKER_00: Exactly, Kimberly.
24:30
SPEAKER_00: And I I think of one of the Psalms you were talking about, those that make the turn.
24:34
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 13 is one of my favorite.
24:36
SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly what it does.
24:37
SPEAKER_00: The first part is all about how long are you going to forget me and how long are you going to let my enemies triumph over me.
24:42
SPEAKER_00: But then at the end, he goes, But I'll trust in your unfailing love and I'll sing of your love forever.
24:47
SPEAKER_00: That's not what's going on in that psalm.
24:48
SPEAKER_00: And it's also not what's goes on in Psalm 88.
24:52
SPEAKER_00: And I think this may be the darkest psalm in the entire book.
24:56
SPEAKER_00: So the writer of this psalm is feeling abandoned.
24:59
SPEAKER_00: He feels overwhelmed by suffering.
25:00
SPEAKER_00: He feels cut off from people.
25:02
SPEAKER_00: He feels as though God has hidden his face.
25:04
SPEAKER_00: And most of the psalm, most of them eventually turn back to, I trust you.
25:10
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 88 does not.
25:12
SPEAKER_00: The final verse of that psalm says, You have removed my beloved and my friend.
25:17
SPEAKER_00: Darkness is my closest companion.
25:19
SPEAKER_00: That's it.
25:20
SPEAKER_00: The end.
25:21
SPEAKER_00: That's the end of the psalm.
25:22
SPEAKER_00: Darkness is the last phrase of that psalm.
25:25
SPEAKER_00: And it's almost shocking to think about God intentionally allowed that prayer to remain in his word.
25:32
SPEAKER_00: Because sometimes we think a faithful prayer needs to end on, but I know everything's going to be okay.
25:36
SPEAKER_00: Yes, darkness is my closest companion right now, but you're still good, you're still faithful, and it's going to be fine.
25:42
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes I think Christians feel pressure to add that sentence before their heart has actually arrived there.
25:48
SPEAKER_00: And I think we need to become the kind of friends to people that aren't the friends of Job, but are people that allow our friends and our family when they're in those dark places to sit in that before we feel like we have to protect God's reputation or we need to demonstrate stronger faith.
26:05
SPEAKER_00: So we try to hurry ourselves or people around us out of lament.
26:10
SPEAKER_00: Partially I say because we're concerned for them.
26:13
SPEAKER_00: I think also partially because we're uncomfortable with other people who are grieving.
26:18
SPEAKER_00: But Psalm 88 stays in the darkness.
26:21
SPEAKER_00: But here's why I think it's so important and why I think it is part of scripture is the psalm ends in darkness, but the relationship does not end.
26:30
SPEAKER_00: The entire psalm, even though it is dark, is talking to God.
26:35
SPEAKER_00: So the psalmist is talking to God from the darkness.
26:39
SPEAKER_00: He hadn't solved it, he hasn't explained it, he hasn't even emotionally moved beyond it, but he's still talking to the one person who is bigger than he is.
26:49
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes that's what trust looks like, Kimberly, is in the midst of our deepest, darkest place, is just saying to God, this is really dark, and I don't like it.
27:00
SPEAKER_00: And I think you could have done something different, because even that is an honest prayer because you're still talking to him.
27:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
27:07
SPEAKER_01: It changes the way that we use the word trust because trust does not mean that this will eventually work out the way I hoped.
27:13
SPEAKER_01: And honestly, that's what we want it to mean.
27:16
SPEAKER_01: We want trust to mean eventually God is going to make this thing work out.
27:20
SPEAKER_01: And sometimes he does.
27:21
SPEAKER_01: There are beautiful redemptions and restorations, there's miracles, there's reconciliations, there's answers that exceeded what we could have imagined.
27:29
SPEAKER_01: But trust, again, it cannot depend upon the assumption that eventually my preferred ending will happen.
27:36
SPEAKER_01: Because it doesn't.
27:38
SPEAKER_01: Our preferred ending doesn't often happen, unfortunately.
27:41
SPEAKER_01: So trust cannot always mean I know this will eventually work out the way I hoped.
27:46
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes trust sounds like I would not have chosen this, but God, I am bringing my disappointment to you.
27:53
SPEAKER_01: Father, I don't understand.
27:55
SPEAKER_01: I wish you had answered differently.
27:57
SPEAKER_01: I wish this had not been part of my story.
27:59
SPEAKER_01: I wish this had not been all of my story.
28:02
SPEAKER_01: I am grieving the life I thought I was gonna have, and I'm still here.
28:06
SPEAKER_01: And that last part matters.
28:07
SPEAKER_01: I'm still here.
28:08
SPEAKER_01: I'm still talking, I'm still bringing my heart to him.
28:12
SPEAKER_01: Not because I have made peace with every detail of the story, but because I still believe that nothing he has permitted can place me beyond his care.
28:22
SPEAKER_01: And Elizabeth, I think when we talk about this, we have to remember the bigger story of the Bible.
28:28
SPEAKER_01: We have to put ourselves in 2026 in the tiny place that we are in the bigger story of God's word.
28:36
SPEAKER_01: Because for centuries there has been a liturgy and a story and a place to lament and to grieve.
28:43
SPEAKER_01: And I just don't think our contemporary church leaves room for that.
28:47
SPEAKER_01: And I think it's because, like you said, we want to fix things.
28:51
SPEAKER_01: We want to control things.
28:52
SPEAKER_01: And we, especially as an American people, don't know how to not do that.
28:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
28:57
SPEAKER_00: And not only in the church, but in our culture, I think we do try to hurry up and fix people and hurry up and fix situations because we're uncomfortable with things that don't have answers, especially in our modern age where we can get an answer to anything on Google in just an instant.
29:13
SPEAKER_00: But also we're uncomfortable with someone else's pain.
29:17
SPEAKER_00: And I mean, that's compassion, right?
29:19
SPEAKER_00: We don't want to see people in pain.
29:21
SPEAKER_00: But I think God's care is not proven by our story always being comfortable.
29:27
SPEAKER_00: And that might be one of the hardest lessons in prayer, that God's care for us is not measured by how good our story becomes.
29:36
SPEAKER_00: Like you said last week, Kimberly, if comfort becomes the evidence that God is good, then every painful circumstance becomes evidence against him.
29:44
SPEAKER_00: And life will eventually give all of us circumstances we cannot reconcile that way.
29:49
SPEAKER_00: The Christian promise is not that belonging to God gives you immunity from grief.
29:54
SPEAKER_00: The promise is that nothing we encounter in grief can separate us from him.
29:58
SPEAKER_00: Famous verses in Roman 8, verses 38 and 39.
30:02
SPEAKER_00: For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
30:17
SPEAKER_00: And we love to hang on to the promise of that.
30:20
SPEAKER_00: But I think the bigger picture you're talking about, Kimberly, is notice that Paul does not say those things aren't going to happen.
30:26
SPEAKER_00: We're all going to experience death and hardship and loss.
30:31
SPEAKER_00: But the truth of it is, is that none of that can separate us from the love of God.
30:36
SPEAKER_00: Perhaps that is the true definition of trust.
30:39
SPEAKER_00: Not that I trust nothing painful will happen because my God is so big and He can do anything.
30:45
SPEAKER_00: But nothing that happens can carry me outside of the reach of the Father's love.
30:50
SPEAKER_01: What do we hope people take away from this series, Elizabeth?
30:52
SPEAKER_01: For me, I hope that you take away a sense of freedom.
30:56
SPEAKER_01: Freedom from believing that prayer has to sound a certain way.
31:00
SPEAKER_01: Freedom from believing that God is grading and wanting to perfect your words.
31:05
SPEAKER_01: Freedom from thinking if you just believe hard enough, you can guarantee the outcome.
31:10
SPEAKER_01: And freedom from all those things because I want you to have the freedom, and I want to have the freedom where we can bring God our true, real hearts.
31:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Kimberly, I would agree with that with freedom, but I also say it's relationship.
31:23
SPEAKER_00: That prayer is not a performance, it's not spiritual leverage, it's not a mechanism for controlling God.
31:29
SPEAKER_00: It's a relationship and it's a real relationship with a loving father that can hold all of our emotions honestly.
31:38
SPEAKER_00: It can hold the joy, it can hold the silence, the questions, the disappointment, the grief, the anger.
31:44
SPEAKER_00: God is big enough to handle it.
31:46
SPEAKER_00: And you can pray scripture beautifully one day, and then the next day barely be able to whisper help.
31:53
SPEAKER_00: And you can pray confidently for healing, and then you can weep when it doesn't happen.
31:58
SPEAKER_00: And you can fast and still not receive the answer that you wanted, and you can exercise authority in Christ and still encounter situations that are beyond your control.
32:07
SPEAKER_00: So we're not trying to focus on an outcome.
32:10
SPEAKER_00: We're trying to focus on a relationship.
32:12
SPEAKER_00: And maybe that's what we want to leave you with today, more than anything else, is that you don't have to choose between grieving your story and trusting God because you are in relationship with him and you're allowed to bring all of who you are to him and he can handle both.
32:26
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
32:27
SPEAKER_01: Some of you listening today have stories that you never would have chosen.
32:30
SPEAKER_01: Elizabeth and I have some stories that we would have never chosen.
32:34
SPEAKER_01: You prayed for something different, you expected something different, and maybe you're still waiting.
32:39
SPEAKER_01: Maybe there's a chance that your story will still change.
32:42
SPEAKER_01: Or maybe the thing you prayed for can no longer happen.
32:45
SPEAKER_01: Maybe the person died, the marriage ended, the opportunity passed, the life you imagined is gone.
32:50
SPEAKER_01: And maybe part of you thinks that trusting God means you should be less affected by that than you are.
32:56
SPEAKER_01: We want you to hear us.
32:58
SPEAKER_01: Your grief is not evidence that your faith has failed.
33:02
SPEAKER_01: Jesus wept and he knew the resurrection was coming.
33:05
SPEAKER_01: Grief is not unbelief.
33:07
SPEAKER_01: Disappointment is not necessarily distrust.
33:11
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes disappointment simply means something or someone mattered deeply to you.
33:18
SPEAKER_01: You can trust God and still grieve the prayer that remains unanswered.
33:22
SPEAKER_01: You can trust God and still grieve the life that looks nothing like the one you imagined.
33:27
SPEAKER_01: You can trust God and say, I wish you had done this differently, I still have questions, I am angry.
33:33
SPEAKER_01: You can trust God and say, I am tired, and you can trust God and say, I don't know how to make peace with this yet, and know that biblical faith, walking with Jesus, has room for all of that.
33:44
SPEAKER_01: Trust does not require you, friends, to call every circumstance comfortable or desirable.
33:50
SPEAKER_01: I'm never gonna call the cancer that my dad got comfortable or desirable.
33:54
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't.
33:55
SPEAKER_01: But I can still trust in God in the midst of that.
33:57
SPEAKER_01: Trusting God's sovereignty does not require you to pretend that you would have chosen the story he allowed you to live.
34:03
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes trust does not sound like I know this is all gonna work out one day exactly the way I hoped.
34:09
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes trust sounds like, father, I would not have chosen this.
34:13
SPEAKER_01: I am grieving what has happened, I am disappointed, I am mad, I am hurt, I am sad, I am angry, and I'm bringing all of it to you.
34:23
SPEAKER_01: All of it.
34:24
SPEAKER_01: Because like we said, grief and trust are not opposites.
34:28
SPEAKER_01: Grief names what you have lost, and trust names the one you are bringing that loss to.
34:35
SPEAKER_01: And maybe this is where this prayer unfiltered series should end.
34:39
SPEAKER_01: Not with every question answered, because we've admitted we don't have all the answers, not with every mystery solved, because scripture says we're not gonna solve them all, but still being in relationship with the Father, still talking with the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, still bringing our Father the truth of what's in our hearts, even from the darkness.
34:58
SPEAKER_01: So Elizabeth, would you mind closing this series for us?
35:01
SPEAKER_01: Sure, I'd love to.
35:02
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
35:04
SPEAKER_00: Father, after all the words we've spoken throughout this series, we end where prayer always begins, which is with you.
35:11
SPEAKER_00: You already know the hearts of everyone listening, you know the prayers that we're still praying, the answers that we've been able to celebrate, and the places where the answer was no.
35:21
SPEAKER_00: You know the places where there has been only silence, and you know every story that we would have written differently, and the chapters where we're still waiting to see what exactly happens at the end of this story.
35:32
SPEAKER_00: So, Father, would you teach us to trust you without asking ourselves to stop grieving?
35:38
SPEAKER_00: Would you give us permission to tell you the truth?
35:41
SPEAKER_00: Father, help us when we're disappointed to bring it to you, when we're angry to be honest with you about it, and when we don't understand, keep us from pretending that we do.
35:51
SPEAKER_00: And Father, I thank you that when we're afraid, you meet us in our fear.
35:55
SPEAKER_00: And Holy Spirit, thank you so much that when we can't find words, you're still there to help us in our weakness.
36:02
SPEAKER_00: And Father, I ask you to forgive us for the ways that we've sometimes tried to turn prayer with you into a formula for the ways we've tried to find the right words, the right amount of faith, kind of the right combinations of buttons to push in order to give us the answer that we so desperately want.
36:17
SPEAKER_00: Pray that you would teach us instead to live as sons and daughters who know that we are welcome by our loving Father.
36:24
SPEAKER_00: Jesus, thank you that you opened the way for us to the Father.
36:29
SPEAKER_00: And thank you that you're not unfamiliar with grief.
36:32
SPEAKER_00: You wept, you suffered, you prayed honestly, you cried out to your father and didn't get the answer that you wanted.
36:39
SPEAKER_00: So we entrust ourselves to you, Father, even when obedience leads us through suffering.
36:44
SPEAKER_00: And we ask you, Holy Spirit, to help us stay in relationship with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit when our story hurts, when all we can do is groan and you groan on our behalf.
36:54
SPEAKER_00: And Father, I pray specifically for those people living in Psalm 88 today where darkness seems to be the final word.
37:01
SPEAKER_00: I ask you to be so near to them and where they don't feel like you're present, would you give them something, even if it's just a whisper of your presence, so that they can hear you?
37:13
SPEAKER_00: I pray for those that are in Psalm 39, that are weary and aware of how fragile life is, who are crying out to you, and we ask you, Father, that you would hear their cries and that you would be with them in the darkest moments that they are walking through.
37:28
SPEAKER_00: And Father, for those who have received their miracle, we rejoice with them.
37:32
SPEAKER_00: And we thank you for being a God who sees, a God who cares, and a God who does give good gifts to his children.
37:39
SPEAKER_00: And for those that are waiting, I ask that you would give them strength just for today, that you would give them grace for just this moment, and for those that are grieving, an answer that will never come because they hoped in you in a way that caused them to have deep disappointment.
37:53
SPEAKER_00: I ask that you would hold them so tenderly, and that you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, would come and minister to them today.
38:01
SPEAKER_00: So, Father, we can confess that you are good and we can lament the things that hurt.
38:06
SPEAKER_00: We can confess that you are sovereign and we can grieve the stories that we would not have chosen, and we can confess that you love us and we can bring you the places where we have struggled to feel loved by you.
38:18
SPEAKER_00: So I pray that you would keep us from believing that our faith somehow has to be untouched by a loss.
38:24
SPEAKER_00: But instead, would you make us a people who brings every part of ourselves into your presence?
38:29
SPEAKER_00: And when we can't even say, God, I understand why you acted the way you did, would you give us grace to simply say, Father, I'm still here.
38:37
SPEAKER_00: And maybe for today that's enough.
38:39
SPEAKER_00: And God, we declare that we trust that nothing you have allowed, nothing that we have suffered, nothing that we have lost, and nothing we still do not understand can separate us from your love in Christ Jesus.
38:52
SPEAKER_00: I thank you that you are a father that listens.
38:54
SPEAKER_00: I thank you that you are a God who stays.
38:57
SPEAKER_00: And I thank you that you are a loving father, regardless of what our human experience has been like.
39:03
SPEAKER_00: So we bring our whole hearts to you and we say to you, we love you, we trust you even when it hurts.
39:11
SPEAKER_00: And we pray all this in the name of Jesus.
39:13
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
39:13
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
39:14
SPEAKER_01: And thank you to every one of you, our listeners, who have walked with us through this prayer unfiltered series.
39:21
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for trusting us with your questions, especially with the ones that were difficult to just say out loud.
39:29
SPEAKER_01: Because you were saying them out loud when you texted, emailed, however you got them to us.
39:34
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for doing that.
39:36
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for being bold enough and courageous enough to send them and just say them out loud.
39:40
SPEAKER_01: So we may be ending this series, but we hope that you will keep asking and keep seeking and keep listening.
39:46
SPEAKER_01: And most of all, we hope that you will keep talking to your father because he is still listening.
39:52
SPEAKER_01: Practically speaking, we're going to be taking the next few weeks off from releasing new podcasts, so don't be surprised or disappointed.
39:59
SPEAKER_01: We're going to be traveling and speaking for private events, so we appreciate your prayers for us as we lead a weekend retreat in a few weeks.
40:05
SPEAKER_01: But you can go to our website or you can go to your favorite podcast platform and you can listen to the over 300 episodes that we have.
40:11
SPEAKER_01: There are many out there that are video.
40:13
SPEAKER_01: There's also a lot more that are audio.
40:15
SPEAKER_01: Check them out.
40:16
SPEAKER_01: Listen, there's a lot of good content that we all need to be reminded of again.
40:19
SPEAKER_01: So we look forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks.
40:22
SPEAKER_01: Take care, everyone.
40:23
SPEAKER_00: This podcast is made possible through donations by people like you.
40:28
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40:32
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