Does God Always Answer Prayers?

Kent opened by asking the church to think back to when they first became a Christian.

Back then, did you have any idea how long the road would be? How many twists and turns, how many potholes and sinkholes, how often it would run through dark and shadowy places, how many times you would trip and fall and skin your knees and your hands and your face, and break a few things along the way?

He admitted he had no idea. Most of us didn't.

When we first come to Christ we sign up for the forgiveness, the grace, the mercy, the love, the joy, heaven when we die. All of it true, praise God. And then the hard times come and we think: wait a minute, I signed up for the good version of this. Nobody mentioned taking up a cross daily.

Well — maybe that part got left out when you came. But it is as much a part of following Christ as all the good news.

And right here, on that long road, Jesus says: ask. Seek. Knock. He does not hand you a map. He hands you access.

Kent prayed something over the congregation that is worth keeping.

Some of us, he said, are doing great — growing like weeds, and that is wonderful. And some of us barely made it here today. Some are watching online because they could not face the idea of coming and worshiping alongside other believers.

And then he reached for Isaiah: a bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench.

Many of us are wounded. Many of us are barely glowing this morning.

Hold on to what that verse does not say. It does not say God waits until the reed straightens out. It does not say he relights the wick before he values it. He simply refuses to finish off what is already nearly finished.

If you are the bruised reed this week — cracked, bent, not much use to anyone — you are not on the edge of being discarded. You are in the hands of the one person in the universe guaranteed not to snap you.

Kent gave the church three words for this passage: God guides, he provides, he abides.

Start with the first. God guides — if we ask him.

That conditional is doing real work. The promise in verse 8 is sweeping: everyone who asks receives, the one who seeks finds, to the one who knocks it will be opened. No qualifiers about worthiness. No spiritual résumé required. Everyone.

But it is still asking, seeking, knocking. Three active verbs. God is not in the business of forcing direction on people who have not requested it.

And Kent tied it to the whole Sermon on the Mount: this is Jesus' call to anyone who will answer to a higher authority, to operate on a different frequency, with a different motivation than everybody else. If your goal in life is simply to fit in, he said, forget about following Jesus. You can do one or the other. You cannot do both.

Guidance is for people who actually want to be led somewhere different.

He provides. That is the second word.

And Jesus proves it with the most ordinary illustration available: a kid asks his father for bread. Does the father hand him a rock? A kid asks for a fish. Does he get a snake?

Of course not. The question is almost absurd, and that is the point — Jesus wants you to feel how ridiculous the alternative is.

Because many of us pray as though we half expect the stone. We ask, and then we brace. Somewhere underneath we suspect that God is reluctant, or stingy, or that he answers other people's prayers more readily than ours.

Jesus is dismantling that. Not by promising you will get exactly what you name — a good father sometimes gives something other than what was asked — but by ruling out the one thing we secretly fear. He does not deal in stones and serpents. Whatever he puts in your hand, it will not be cruel.

You may not always recognize the bread. But it will be bread.

Here is the sentence the whole passage has been building toward, and it contains a small insult aimed at you and me.

"If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children..."

Jesus does not soften it. You are evil, he says, and you still manage to feed your kids. You are selfish and impatient and inconsistent, and even so, when your child asks for something reasonable, you generally come through.

Then: how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him.

That is the argument. Not from your goodness up to God's — from your very limited goodness up to his unlimited goodness. If flawed people manage to be generous with their children, what do you imagine a perfect Father is like?

And he abides. That was Kent's third word. The road stays long and the potholes stay real, but the one you are asking is not a distant benefactor. He is a Father who stays.

So ask. He is better than you think, and he is not going anywhere.