When God answers your prayers with no on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Heath Lambert and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors,

where we seek to provide biblical

solutions for the problems that people face.

The Christian life is the praying life, and as we think about the imperative that all Christians

have to pray, which is not just an imperative, but is a true need. As human beings, we are in need,

and God has set it up so that many of our needs are met in response to our prayers. This

truth is underlined in James 4, verse 2, where it says, you do not have because you do not ask.

And the statement is made very clearly there that there are some things you would have that you don't have because you don't ask.

And so this is a text that teaches us God's delight in meeting our needs when we ask for the things

that we need. But as soon as we talk about the fact that God loves to answer our prayers and

loves to give us things in response to prayer, we have to think about the problem of God answering our prayers

with no. That is to say, we ask and ask for something, and God says no to it. If we're going to

understand this text in James 4, verse 2 correctly, we need to be honest that the text is not a guarantee that God will give us

everything that we ask for. We do not have that promise in scripture that God will answer

our prayers with a yes regardless of what we're asking for. This text teaches, as I said a moment ago, that there are some things that

God would give us only in response to our request, but it doesn't promise that every request

gets a yes. And so what do we say when we ask and ask and ask God for something, but his response to that request is to not grant it.

Well, as we answer that question, I want to remind us of two accounts in Scripture that help us to

think through this matter. The first account that I would remind us of is Joshua's prayer in Joshua chapter 10.

There, Joshua has taken the Israelites and he is going to fight against the villages that have

declared war on the Ghibeonites. The Gibianites in Joshua made a treaty with the Israelites.

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