What Is God Up To?

Dannah Gresh: When you’re faced with, “Lord, when are You going to . . .?” Fill in the blank. How do you respond? Here’s Dr. Katie McCoy:

Katie McCoy: You have to not only come to that place of trust, but going, “Okay, will I still serve God with disappointment? Will I serve Him with a broken heart? Will I still pursue holiness, not for something I can get from Him, but because He’s God, and He’s the One I was made to know, reflect, love, serve, and enjoy?” And all of that comes to the surface in our unanswered prayer.

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Lies Women Believe and the Truth That Sets Them Free, for September 5, 2024. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Okay, Nancy, we’re tackling the subject of unanswered prayer today.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Yes, we are, Dannah. And that’s something every believer in Jesus has to wrestle with to some degree or another. I don’t know where you might feel it the most. 

Maybe it’s a son or daughter or a grandchild who’s not walking with the Lord, and you’ve been begging the Lord to turn their heart to bring them back to Himself, and you don’t see anything happening. You don’t see any evidence that God is hearing or answering your prayer.

Maybe you desperately need a job and nothing in sight. Or you’re battling a chronic illness, and it seems like your prayers don’t go any further than the ceiling.

Remember the story Jesus told in Luke 18 about the widow who kept bugging the wicked judge? Jesus’ point was that if a corrupt human being will give a nagging widow what she’s asking for, just so he won’t be bothered anymore, don’t you think our loving heavenly Father will give us what’s best for us? And that’s why Jesus said, “Persist. Keep praying. Don’t give up.”

The English preacher from the 1800s (I call him my friend), Charles Haddon Spurgeon, said this about persistence in prayer: He said, 

If the Lord has not answered you the first time, be very grateful that you have a good reason for praying again. If He does not grant your request the second time, believe that He loves you so much that He wants to hear your voice again. If He keeps you waiting until you have gone to Him seven times, say to yourself, “Now I know that I worship the God of Elijah for Elijah’s God let him go again seven times before the blessing was given.” The prayer that kills anxiety is prayer that perseveres.

I love that! But still, for you, it may not be seven times. It might be seventeen times or seventy times or more that you have cried out to the Lord and not heard or seen His answer. It can be so difficult to keep on praying when it seems like God isn’t listening.

Well, our guest today is here to help us think through the ins and outs, the ups and downs of unanswered prayer.

Katie McCoy holds a PhD in Systematic Theology from Southwestern Seminary where she served on the faculty for five years. She loves the Scripture, and she’s a frequent speaker and writer on women’s and gender issues. She’s written a book called, To Be a Woman: The Confusion over Female Identity and How Christians Can Respond. It’s an excellent book, and I want to encourage you to read it. You’ll find a link in the transcript of this program.

Besides all that, Katie loves to bake, or sometimes just make a mess in the kitchen, and she says, “The Container Store is her happy place.” We’ll let you find your own link to that.

Well, recently Katie sat down with Dannah to talk about the lessons we can learn from unanswered prayer. Let’s listen.

Dannah: Katie, everyone goes through seasons where our prayers, they just seem to be unanswered. We have to wait on God. Why is that, and how do we do that well?

Katie: Seasons of unanswered prayer, I think, are one of the most stretching things in our faith. We’ve all been in them, or we’re heading into them. I can tell you, in my life, that it’s the unanswered prayers in my life that keep me coming back to the Lord.

Oftentimes, wrestling with the things that it brings to the surface, usually those things are not very pretty. They typically have to do with beliefs that I have about God, who He is, His character, who I am, who I am to God, and then how my pain fits into God’s story.

And the truth is, we’re all wrestling with God in something. In part because we’re living in this post-Genesis 3 world. Unanswered prayer reminds us that we are not at the point where the Lord has made all things new. He is making all things new. Romans 8:28 is still true for our right now. He is causing it all to work together for our good. But that’s a painful process.

But, you know, Dannah, the thing that I find in unanswered prayer, when we’re wrestling with God in unanswered prayer, is that there are three things that oftentimes the Lord is doing, the Holy Spirit is working in our lives. And they’re three P’s:

• One is preparation. He’s preparing us.
• The other is protection. He is protecting us.
• And the other is purging. He’s purging us of something. Or we could say purifying.

So that first one—preparation—a lot of times there are blessings that God wants to give us, but He knows the weight of those blessings we are not yet ready to carry. It’s part of God’s goodness to us that He, as our master, teacher, our coach, our guide, He knows exactly the training that we need to get to a place where we are able to carry the weight, the responsibility of the blessing that He’s preparing us for.

Preparation, we could think of that as discipline. And when we think discipline, I think of Hebrews 12, and how no discipline is fun. Right? Nobody signs up, “Give me the discipline course. Sign me up!”

No! It’s painful. But what does the writer of Hebrews promise? “Afterwards it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness” (v. 11). There is something that God is doing in the inner work in our hearts of preparing us. He wouldn’t achieve that if He just gave us what we wanted when we asked for it. There’s a preparation process.

Dannah: Sometimes that’s deeply painful, but sometimes it’s just really practical. I remember for ten years before I was in full-time ministry, I was in marketing, and I was a marketing consultant. I enjoyed it to some degree, but it wasn’t the most fulfilling. I was itching to minister to women. I was itching. Like, I was praying, “God, let me minister. Put me out. Let me do it, Jesus. Let me out of the gate.” No. No. No. No. Ten years. Those were long years. 

Katie: I can imagine.

Dannah: But you know, Katie, how much I use what I learned during that time to market my books that I write or to even write a hook that makes somebody want to listen to the Revive Our Hearts podcast. It was all God preparing me.

Now, I was impatient during that time. But I can see now; I can look back. So it’s not always the hard things. Sometimes it’s just the mundane things that are preparation. Right?

Katie: Oh, it’s so true. That reminded me of one of my favorite 80s movies, The Karate Kid. (laughter)

Dannah: Oh, “Wax on. Wax off.”

Katie: That’s it! Here the character in Karate Kid, and he gets so angry at his teacher, Mr. Miyagi. He’s, like, “I’m wasting my time. I’m doing all of these dumb tasks. You’ve just got me cleaning. You’ve got me doing things. But I asked you to train me. I asked you to make me a fighter. And instead I’m painting your fence and waxing your cars and sanding your floor.”

And then there’s this lightbulb moment where he realizes, “That was all training. That was all preparation. It was all part of the process.”

It’s a very humbling thing, awe-inspiring thing when we really come to grips with, “If God is our Father, and He is perfectly sovereign, He knows how to prepare us.” But, oh, that takes faith to sit back and trust in that process.

Dannah: Yes, and patience.

So, preparation is one reason we sometimes aren’t having our prayers answered. What’s number two again?

Katie: Protection. Oh, my goodness. I cannot tell you . . . this would be a whole other podcast, Dannah. But the ways that God has protected me from what I thought I wanted through unanswered prayer, but things that I have wrestled with God, “And, Lord, would You give me this blessing?”

It may have been in the form of an opportunity. It may have been in the form of a particular relationship, and the Lord closed the door. And that did a couple of things: not only was He protecting me, but He also was allowing that to bring to the surface things that I had—beliefs about God, some expectations, the way I was relating to Him—that had to be cleaned out. (That’s that third one.)

But the protection one is often something that we don’t see until we’re way on the other side of it.

Dannah: Right.

Katie: And we realize, “Oh, had I gotten what I thought I wanted . . .” Perhaps what was good, but not at that time. I wasn’t ready. It would have been a disaster.

 

And, again, this all goes back to: do we believe God is good or not? I trip up over that all the time. I love that. I think it’s the first lie in Lies Women Believe that Nancy talks about.

Dannah: Yes.

Katie: It’s just, “I don’t really believe God’s good.” We don’t actually say that out loud. But when we have to wrestle with God in unanswered prayer and realizing He’s protecting us from ourselves, from things that we don’t even know we know about—a circumstance, about a person—it’s a real lightbulb moment when we look back and thank God for not giving us what we were asking for.

Dannah: Right. You just even think about the protection of Joseph and his whole entire family. How many prayers do you think Joseph prayed in that pit?

Katie: Oh, my goodness.

Dannah: How many prayers do you think he prayed in prison? How many prayers do you think he prayed when he was in Potiphar’s house? Maybe that he would be united with his family, that he would be set free, that he would be rescued by his father. Yet, none of those prayers were answered. At the very end of his life he says to his brothers, “God meant it for good.” It was all for the protection of, not just him, but his entire family.

Katie: Yes! And that brings up something else, too, Dannah. We are not just living for our story. God wants to take the things that we’re wrestling with Him in unanswered prayer, and He wants to bring it into His grand story, His big picture story. In fact, He wants to take the pain of unanswered prayer that He’s using in our lives for our preparation, protection and purification, and He wants to make that for something that is bigger than ourselves, something that will outlast ourselves.

Dannah: You know, that takes me back. You just quoted Romans 8 a moment ago, or you referenced it, I guess. It says that, “He works all things together for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.”

We make that verse about the here and now. “God wants me to have a full bank account,” or “God wants me to get this vacation.” That is completely taking it out of context.

What it’s really talking about is God is making this work together for good for the big picture of His big plan on the final day of redemption. Which means that the thing we’re praying for, we may not even get to see the good in our lifetime.

So this is a really big important thing to be surrendered to as we wrestle with this whole idea of unanswered prayer.

Katie: And believing that what God says about this life is true. It’s not that it’s meaningless. It’s all preparation. It’s all part of spending our lives in investment of who we are and what we do in this life forward. If this life is really a breath, then even the things that we’re praying for may be very good (in fact, most of them are), but they’re all temporary.

I can tell you, when I look at the things in my life that I’m asking God to do from eternity back, it takes on a different perspective. If I’m just looking at it from where I am forward, it feels huge. But when I look at it from eternity backwards, it’s not that it’s unimportant, but it is in the right proportion.

And then, you mentioned that Romans 8:28, the very next verse says what God’s goal for us is. It’s that His goal is to conform us to the character of Christ.

Dannah: Yes.

Katie: We go back to the purpose for letting us wrestle with unanswered prayer. It’s that there is something bigger. His lesson plan for us is even bigger than what we can see.

Dannah: Amen. I love that!

And what about the purging? I’m afraid to ask you about the purging. I don’t like that word.

Katie: I know. Purging or purification, it’s something that we can easily mistake to be punishment. You notice, punishment is not one of the P’s for our unanswered prayer because we live in the discipline of our Father who is conforming us to the character of Christ, but we don’t live in fear of punishment.

We do, however, have to be purified and purged of things. There could be, back to that preparation and protection, things that the Lord is waiting to give us. He’s got them stored up for us, but we might have a perspective that is self-centered. Or we might perhaps have selfish ambition.

We might have wrong motives. In fact, I think of that passage in James, “You have not because you ask not. Then when you do ask, you’re asking for the wrong reasons” (see James 4:2).

And so sometimes God’s protection for us is to first purge us of things that He knows are in our hearts that, if He were to just give us what we wanted when we wanted it, first of all, we’d probably be very spoiled daughters.

Dannah: Yes.

Katie: We would not be very useful in His kingdom. But He knows. He knows the things that need to be gotten rid of.

Here’s one of the best blessings of the Holy Spirit: the Holy Spirit knows what needs to happen in your heart and how to achieve that. It’s really okay if you can’t identify exactly what God is teaching you through the circumstances. He knows. He knows the lesson plan He’s got you on.

It’s similar to, again, that Mr. Miyagi in the Karate Kid analogy, or I think like a gymnastics coach, “I need you, I want you to submit to this type of training program.” You can’t see how it’s going to translate to your ability to do what you didn’t even know it was possible for you to do, but your coach does.

And so, the Holy Spirit is greater than a coach who just tells us what to do. He comes alongside us, is what Jesus said. He’s the one who laces up the shoes and runs it all with us, not just telling us what to do from a golf cart, driving alongside. He’s with us every step.

Dannah: Yes.

Katie: And so those three P’s, they’re all painful, let’s be honest. But they’re all for our ultimate good. They’re all for our eternal good, certainly, and they’re all for bringing us outside of our own perspectives so that the things that we’re praying for may be affecting us, but they’re not just about us. And that kind of impact is the whole point of us, to have a life that is beyond ourselves.

Dannah: Yes.

It makes me think about the fact that we gathered as a staff, the Revive Our Hearts’ family gathered as a staff, back in May to just seek the Lord’s face. He purged me of a false understanding of prayer in that prayer isn’t an end of itself. Like, the purpose of prayer is to talk with God. That’s it.

So many times I make it a laundry list. I wonder if sometimes the Lord isn’t just like, “I’m not going to answer that because, would you just chill out and sit with Me? And be with Me?”

Katie: That’s really good.

Dannah: That’s what the Lord is purging from me right now. Is He purging anything from you right now, Katie?

Katie: Yes. In fact, let me see if I can even put this into words. These kinds of three P’s, they kind of all work together. I didn’t plan on just opening up my heart and . . .

Dannah: That’s okay, I planned it for you.

Katie: Thank you. That is good.

So, I am nearly forty, and I thought I would be married by twenty-five, so so far I’m only fifteen years off. The Lord protected me from things that I had asked Him for. And I know that that is all for a preparation, and that preparation is for something that is greater than I am, greater than I can see.

But I even see how the discipline of that pain, not only dealing with that pain, but continuing to go to God with it, and looking back and saying, “Thank You, Lord, for protecting me from what I didn’t know, from what I thought was the right thing.”

And then, with that, all of that goes to a purging of, ultimately, that belief that “God doesn’t really care about me. He cares about making me holy, but He doesn’t care much about that, anything else, not like He cares about me, my happiness or anything like that.”

We kind of make God out to be a very stoic Father, as though living in holiness and happiness are on two opposite ends of the spectrum, as opposed to the ways of God are actually for our joy and our flourishing and us being everything He intended us to be.

And so it all kind of works together. I’m seeing the Lord do that in my life. But I will tell you, Dannah, it is, I would say kind of a daily thing. Because when you’re faced with that, “Lord, when are You going to ______?” and then fill in the blank. You have to not only come to that place of trust, but going, “Okay, will I still serve God with disappointment? Will I serve Him with a broken heart? Will I still pursue holiness, not for something I can get from Him, but because He’s God, and He’s the one I was made to know, reflect, love, serve, and enjoy?” And all of that comes to the surface in our unanswered prayer.

Dannah: Wow. You just allowed the Holy Spirit to take a holy scalpel to some hearts because I can think of women right now who love Revive Our Hearts who are single and waiting, or who are married and waiting for a baby, or who are married and know the Lord and they’re spiritually single because their husband doesn’t. 

They’ve been praying for years. They’re waiting on these unanswered prayers with that tension of trusting God but also having some tears and heartbreak as they surrender.

Katie: Yes.

Dannah: We’re not alone, though. I’m going to throw you a stumper. Jesus was God in the flesh.

Katie: Yes.

Dannah: Did He ever utter an unanswered prayer to God the Father?

Katie: In a way, we could say yes. We see the model for it in His prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. When the Lord Jesus says, “Father, if it’s possible, would You take this cup from Me?”

And that cup we understand it to mean the full suffering, not only of the physical torturing He would go through, but the weight of bearing sin and the separation from the Father that our minds can’t possibly fathom. We can’t understand that, much less put it into some type of logical system. But we don’t have to. The Lord Jesus has shown us. He told us what was happening. He did it for us.

And then the very next sentence, “Nevertheless, not My will, but Yours be done.” And what a picture of serving God in pain with a broken heart, submitting to the Father’s plan and doing His will. Hebrews tells us that He submitted to all of the pain of the cross, despising, setting aside the shame for the joy that was set before Him, and He recognized, “as horrific as this is, it’s still temporary. It’s not forever.”

 

Jesus didn’t stay on the cross forever. We’re not going to be left here. We’re not going to be left where we are. Our suffering is temporary. It’s still suffering, but it’s not without a purpose.

And our Lord who lived all of our sorrows and carried them for us, He knows the pain of doing the will of the Father at great cost to Himself.

Dannah: That’s so beautiful. He truly did know every pain, every temptation, every suffering that we have known.

Katie, I wonder, there is no doubt in my mind that someone is listening, and they’re saying, “Lord, can this cup pass from me?”

Katie: Yes.

Dannah: I wonder if you’d pray for them, lift them up to the Lord?

Katie: I would love to.

Father, You know the stories of the pain that every woman listening is carrying today. You know all of the circumstances that led to them even listening to this program. I pray that she would know that she’s not alone, not only that she has her Holy Spirit with her, walking with her, helping her, but she has sisters all over this world who are laboring, not only in prayer, but in the power of Christ to walk worthy in the middle of suffering.

Lord, we know that You do not promise a life without pain, without suffering, but You do promise to redeem it, to work it together for something that is not just good, but for our good. God, we confess that we can’t see that, but thank You that we don’t have to in order to believe it.

Lord, we place into Your hands the unanswered prayer, knowing that You do these things for our preparation, our protection, our purging and purification. Lord, also knowing that You would not have allowed it if You did not already have a plan for it. Knowing that You not only collect our prayers and even our tears in a bottle, but that the work You are doing underneath the surface is so very precious to You that You are intimately involved in the process.

And Lord, we trust the God who loves us so much that He gave Himself up for us with all of the process and all of our hearts. I pray that we would live in Your peace, knowing that while we may not be able to see the future, we may not know when this season will end, but we do know that the God who is the God of the process has purpose for all of our pain. And we ask this is Jesus’ name, amen.

Nancy: Amen. What an encouraging reminder from Dr. Katie McCoy.

Katie will be one of the speakers at True Woman 2025. Registration is now live for that event. You can go to ReviveOurHearts.com to learn more about it.

She’ll also be joining us in the upcoming online event called “Loving and Living God’s Word.” It’s part of our series this year on “Biblical Help for Real Life.” Katie will be there along with Kelly Needham, Erin Davis, and our friend Kay Arthur. That event will be taking place this coming Tuesday evening, September 10.

But even if you already have plans and you can’t watch it live, you can still register for the event, and you’ll have access to it for months to come. I’ll tell you how you can sign up in a moment.

But first, Dannah and Katie talked briefly about this event, and here’s what they said:

Dannah: Katie, I’m so fan-girling that you are one of our featured guests on the Loving and Living God’s Word: Biblical Help for Real Life online workshop that’s coming up. What are you excited about in terms of that workshop? What’s on your heart?

Katie: Okay, so this is not the most spiritual thing, but you’ll have to forgive me for that. I’m excited over the fact that Kay Arthur is going to be there.

Dannah: (Laughing) I do forgive you. I’m also fan-girling over that.

Katie: I remember the first time I got to hear her in person. It was a Revive Our Hearts’ event in Fort Worth, like over ten years ago.

And the other thing, and this is a little more spiritual, the preparation that I will have to do to be able to have something to give is something that I am very much looking forward to. Every time I get to share, it means that there’s first been something in my life that I have sat with. And every time that happens, it’s like the Lord does something in me first, and I get to be taught by Him before I get to have something to contribute to others.

So that’s going to be such a wonderful event. Anything with Revive Our Hearts is going to be just something that’s a highlight for me anyway. So it’s going to be wonderful this September.

Dannah: It’s our highlight to have you. That’s Tuesday, September 10, from 7–8:30 p.m., Loving and Living God’s Word, featuring Katie McCoy, Kay Arthur, and Kelly Needham will be teaching. Erin Davis will be hosting. We hope you can join us.

Nancy: So, to register, just head to ReviveOurHearts.com/Word. You can always call us at 1-800-569-5959.

And just a reminder that Revive Our Hearts is a listener-supported program. That means we rely on your prayers and your financial support to continue bringing you this program.

This month as a thank you for your donation of any amount, we’d love to send you a copy of my book, Adorned: Living Out the Beauty of the Gospel Together. It’s a resource intended to help older and younger women walk together in their spiritual growth and discipleship. I think it will be a blessing to you.

To make a donation and request the book, just go to ReviveOurHearts.com. 

Well, Katie will be back with us tomorrow, and she’s going to talk about five different women in the Bible who experienced seasons of unanswered prayer. Some of them for a very long time. Can you guess who they might be? We’ll find out tomorrow on Revive Our Hearts.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness and fruitfulness in Christ.

*Offers available only during the broadcast of the podcast season.