Does God answer prayer?

What the Bible says

The Bible begins with the claim that God listens. Jesus taught on the mountainside:

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.

Matt 7:7-8

He goes on to compare God to an earthly father who would never hand his son a stone for bread, and concludes: "how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask Him" (Matt 7:11). Prayer rests on a relationship, not a technique. Luke records the same saying with a telling difference: the Father gives "the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him" (Luke 11:13). The best answer God gives may be God himself.

None of this means that more words make prayer stronger. Jesus says, "Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him" (Matt 6:8), and then teaches a short prayer, the Lord's Prayer. Yet he also urges persistence. The parable of the widow and the unjust judge is told "about their need to pray at all times and not lose heart" (Luke 18:1). The point is not that God resembles the judge but that he is the opposite: if even that judge gave way, will God not hear his children who cry out day and night?

The promise of prayer has a direction.

And I will do whatever you ask in My name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.

John 14:13

Asking "in My name" is not a formula added at the end. It means asking in keeping with who Jesus is and what he wants. John explains: "If we ask anything according to His will, He hears us" (1 John 5:14). James names one reason some requests fail: "you ask with wrong motives, that you may squander it on your pleasures" (James 4:3). Prayer is not a tool for bending God's will to ours. It is a way of entering his.

What, then, when we do not receive what we asked? Scripture does not hide this. Paul asked the Lord three times to remove a thorn in his flesh. The answer was:

My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is perfected in weakness.

2 Cor 12:9

The thorn stayed, yet the prayer was answered, because Paul received something other than what he asked and something he needed more. The deepest example is Gethsemane. Facing the cross, Jesus prayed, "My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me. Yet not as I will, but as You will" (Matt 26:39). The cup did not pass. But the prayer was not discarded: the Son drank the cup in obedience, and through it the world was saved. And where we do not even know what to ask, "the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groans too deep for words" (Rom 8:26).

The church's witness

Commenting on the widow, Chrysostom says it is a blessed privilege to speak with God in prayer and to make all our wants known to him, and then adds: "He despises not petitions, He tires not but when you are silent" Chrysostom. In the same passage he says that God answers "though not in words, yet by His mercy" Chrysostom. An answer does not always arrive as a voice or an event.

Matthew Henry faces the problem of unanswered prayer directly in his note on Paul's thorn: "Though God accepts the prayer of faith, yet he does not always give what is asked for: as he sometimes grants in wrath, so he sometimes denies in love" Matthew Henry.

How prayer fits with God's rule over all things is a question on which Christians differ. The Reformed tradition teaches that God's eternal plan includes both our prayers and his answers, so that prayer is a real means by which he does what he has purposed, and in praying we are brought into line with it. Arminian and other traditions stress that God, knowing all things, has chosen to respond to his children's free requests, so that some things happen because we ask that would not happen otherwise. Both agree that God hears, that Christ commanded us to ask, and that the answer is not always what we requested.

In the original languages

The usual New Testament noun for prayer is proseuchē (προσευχή), which covers prayer in general; its prefix means "toward." To pray is to turn toward God. By contrast, the "ask" of Matthew 7:7 is aiteō (αἰτέω), a word for requesting something specific. Jesus teaches prayer as bringing our needs to the Father.

When Paul says he "pleaded" with the Lord about the thorn, the Greek is parakaleō (παρακαλέω). It means to plead, and also to comfort, as in 2 Corinthians 1:4. The double sense is only vocabulary, but it fits Paul's story: he pleaded, and he was comforted.

Common objections

"Prayer is only talking to yourself." This deserves respect. Prayer calms people, as meditation calms unbelievers. We remember the requests that came true and forget the rest, and controlled studies of prayer for the sick have generally found no clear effect. But the objection is really about God rather than prayer. If there is no God, prayer is a monologue; if there is, it is a conversation with a person, not a mechanism to be tested, and Jesus himself refused to put God to the test (Matt 4:7). Christians pray not only because it works but because they believe someone is listening. Notice, too, that self-talk usually tells us what we want to hear, while the prayers Scripture records often do not: the cup did not pass. This is a clue, not proof, to weigh alongside the question of whether God exists.

"I prayed desperately and nothing happened. The person I loved died." This is the hardest objection, and there is no easy reply. To say ‘God said no’ can wound more than it comforts. The Bible does not hide such silence. The psalmist cries, "My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? Why are You so far from saving me, so far from my words of groaning?" (Ps 22:1). Jesus took these words on his lips on the cross. Prayer includes lament and protest. What the church can say is not that God explains every unanswered prayer, but that the Son knows suffering from the inside. This theme continues in Does suffering have meaning?.

"If God already knows everything and does what is best, why pray?" Jesus answered this first. In the very place where he says the Father knows what we need, he teaches us to pray. Prayer is not a way of informing God; it is how a child talks with a father. Children tell parents things they already know, and in the telling come to know them better. How this fits with God's plan is, as noted above, debated. Either way, Scripture commands us to pray, and those who obey find themselves closer to God.

Going further

To those who pray, Paul writes: "Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God" (Phil 4:6). The promise that follows is not that we will receive whatever we ask, but that "the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus" (Phil 4:7). That is a reason to believe prayer is not wasted even on days when no answer is visible.

You might ask yourself: Do I think of God mainly as someone who grants requests, or do I call him Father? Is there something I have prayed about for a long time, and have I told him honestly how that feels? Have I ever received something different from what I asked, yet something I needed?

To read further, see Who is the Holy Spirit? and How does God speak?.