Five Women in the Bible Whose Prayers Weren't Answered

Dannah Gresh: When God says “no” to something you’ve asked for, it’s helpful to keep the larger perspective in mind. Here’s Dr. Katie McCoy.

Katie McCoy: There are things that God is doing in our lives to make our blessings bigger than ourselves because all of our lives are intended to be bigger than ourselves. So not only do we wrestle with the “what” of unanswered prayer, but the “why” as well.

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast for September 6, 2024. I’m Dannah Gresh. Our host is the author of Adorned, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: I want you to think about something you’ve been praying for that God hasn’t said “yes” to—at least so far. You’ve been pouring out your heart to Him, but sometimes it seems like He’s just not listening.

Well, here’s some timeless encouragement from a nineteenth-century pastor in England. He said, 

It’s true. Waiting times are often appointed to praying souls. It’s not, however, because the prayer is unheard, but the due time for the blessing has not yet arrived. The longer delay often the larger the gift.

He went on to quote another writer who said, 

Ships that make the longest voyages bring home the most valuable cargos. So prayers long unanswered come home bearing the richest treasures.¹

What a helpful way of thinking about it.

Well, our guest today is here to help us gain that sort of perspective. Here’s the cohost of Revive Our Hearts, Dannah Gresh, to introduce this conversation.

Dannah: I’m so delighted to have Katie McCoy again with us today on Revive Our Hearts. Yesterday, Katie got very vulnerable with us about some unanswered prayer in her life. It just skewered my heart. If you missed that episode, you need to go back and listen to it.

Katie, I also shared some areas where I’m learning from the Lord why I might be having some of my unanswered prayers. You and I can’t be the only women in history who’ve experienced unanswered prayers. (laughter)

Katie: Nope. In fact it’s a pretty human thing.

Dannah: Yes. So, let’s dive into the Bible. Let’s look at some of the women in the Bible who experienced the pain of unanswered prayers and see if maybe we can learn from their lives rather than on the hot pavement of life.

Katie: Oh, that’s so good. There are five women in the Bible that come to mind when I think of unanswered prayer. They may not necessarily be lessons that we think where we would go to in Scripture about unanswered prayer, but what they do is, I think, they counter some of the lies that we believe or even fears that we have that are very common to all of us, and very normal to experience.

So, you want to just dive into the first one?

Dannah: Let’s dive in! You have me. I want to know what lies I might be believing.

Katie: Okay.

Hagar is the first one. Hagar counters or disproves that fear that we may have in our hearts that says, “God doesn’t really see me.”

Dannah: Oh. Do tell.

Katie: You remember the story of Hagar. She’s running away from Sarah, and at that time, she’s Sarai. I can’t remember exactly in Genesis where it occurs, but the Lord has given that promise to Abraham that the son of the promise would come through Sarah, and, of course, Sarah tries to help God and she gives Abraham her servant Hagar to have a baby through Hagar. (see Genesis 16 & 21).

One of the things that’s really easy to forget is how culturally common that was. But Hagar was a woman who was caught in the middle. She didn’t really have a choice.

Dannah: It was still very, very dysfunctional.

Katie: Completely.

Dannah: Culturally common things are often still very contrary to God’s plan.

Katie: Oh, exactly. Whether it’s that or polygamy . . . It never ends well. Right?

Dannah: Right.

Katie: So Hagar was caught in the middle of all of this. She was trying to take back some control of her life. 

Dannah: Yes.

Katie: She was in this place that felt absolutely desperate, and she’s running away with nowhere to go in the desert, in this arid climate in the Middle East. She gets to this place of desperation, and the Lord meets her there. She calls God “The God who sees me.”

Now, what’s so spectacular about that is that Hagar was not the wife of promise. She was not the wife through whom the son of promise would come. But, the social status of Hagar was not the predictor of the care of the Lord. So no matter where she was, out in the middle of the desert, a slave woman that had run away . . . The Lord tells her to go back. You can imagine the fear of that, too. What would she be in for in terms of punishment and the faith that that would have taken as well.

So Hagar reminds us that when we feel like “God doesn’t really see me,” He is the God who sees us. 

• He sees our pain. 
• He sees what got us to where we are. 
• He sees where we are. 
• Then He sees what we need to do next. He tells us where to go. He tells us the next step. 

And that’s a great comfort for us when we’re wrestling with unanswered prayer.

Dannah: It really is.

Just as you were saying that, I got chills as I was listening to you, interceding for the woman who’s running from God, for the woman who’s running away, to know: God sees you, and He has a plan.

 

Katie: Yes. He will meet you in that faraway place you ran to and guide you back.

Dannah: Beautiful.

Okay, next woman, next lie.

Katie: A favorite of ours—Hannah.

Dannah: Oh, yes. Absolutely.

Katie: She’s a rock star.

Dannah: She is.

Katie: Hannah reminds us that it is not true that God doesn’t really care because Hannah, oh what a story she was. She teaches us how to pray with tears in our eyes. When I’m afraid that God doesn’t really care about this, I have to think of Hannah.

The reason Hannah’s story is so powerful to us is Hannah was not in a place of desperation. She actually had everything she needed. In fact, when you see the setup of the story, her husband loved her. Her husband still gave her a double portion even though she did not have the children. That was the statement of honor.

So, the fact that she was infertile did not have any bearing on how much her husband gave her affection and attention. In fact, her husband says what probably many a woman has felt rather an insensitive comment. Her husband says, “Aren’t I as good to you as ten sons?” Like, “Why are you crying? Do you lack something that I haven’t given you?”

What I love about that is it’s okay that even Hannah’s husband did not understand her pain. She still went to God with it anyway. Hannah was still wrestling with the desire. It wasn’t a need. She had all the food, shelter, and clothing she needed. But there was this deep desire.

What we also see is that God was preparing Hannah for a Samuel and that Samuel had a major role to play in the entire nation. Hannah’s prayer ends with not only her saying, “Okay, I’m going to get up and wash my face and not be sad,” after Eli the priest sort of blesses her and affirms her. But hidden in that prayer and tucked away is her heart posture that says, “Lord, if You give me a son, I will give him right back to your service.”

I have a hunch that Hannah did not start off praying like that.

Dannah: Bingo.

Katie: I think she got to that place in her pain. This wasn’t like a bargaining thing, like a negotiation, like, “Lord, if You’ll give me this, I will give you that.” No. It was surrender.

Dannah: Yes.

Katie: It wasn’t negotiation. It was total surrender. And with that surrender, it was almost like she had resigned herself to the loss of her son anyway.

She had lived with the pain of the loss of not having a child, and now she was willing to lose him again for the Lord. And so, Hannah got her request. The Lord granted her request.

Now, we can read that and go, “Okay. If I just find the right words, maybe God will grant my request.” That would miss the point of the story.

The whole point of the story is Hannah got to this place where she was at peace with the answer before she even got the answer. That’s what surrender is.

Dannah: Yes. I think it was Nancy, maybe, I may be attributing something to Nancy that isn’t, but probably half of my brain is attributed to Nancy, who said, “Hannah wanted a son. God wanted a prophet.” There had been hundreds of years (tens of years, if not hundreds of years) of a drought of God’s people hearing the voice of God.

In that process of her pleading with God and submitting her desires, she was able to birth the son that would then be given over to become trained as a prophet.

Katie: Yes.

Dannah: So many of the things that we pray for, God’s timing, when it seems slow, is (going back to what you said yesterday) both preparation for us to be able to do what He needs us to do. You also mentioned this yesterday (I hope you’ll go back and listen to yesterday’s program because it was so rich with good content), that our prayers need to be in the context of the big picture of God’s kingdom plan, not necessarily just our here and now.

And that’s what happened as Hannah waited.

Katie: Yes, exactly.

Dannah: All right, Katie, this is such good conversation. Can we have coffee together every week?

Katie: I would love to. Let’s do it.

Dannah: Let’s talk about woman number three.

Katie: Oh, this is an amazing one—Naomi. We talk about Ruth. The book is named after Ruth, but bookending the story of Ruth is actually Naomi. Naomi’s life and her story counters that fear that we have often that says, “God doesn’t really have a plan here.”

It’s really easy to feel like we are knocking on the door of heaven saying, “Is there actually a plan here? Is God really doing anything? I mean, I hear this mantra that while you’re waiting, God is working. I really want to believe that, but does He actually have a plan?”

The amazing thing about Naomi is you could put Naomi’s name on one side of the column . . . Take a sheet of paper. Draw a line down the center. Put Naomi on the left and then put the name [on the right] that she comes back calling herself after she has just had her life turned upside down, and that is Mara, meaning bitter.

You’ve got Naomi on one side, Mara on the other. Here’s the amazing thing: all of the events played out exactly the same. But whether Naomi called herself Naomi or Mara depended on her perspective of what the Lord was doing.

God had a plan the whole time. He was working it all out—not only for Ruth but for Naomi—because at the end of the book, it actually says, “A son has been given to Naomi.” So she has been restored to this place of honor. The Lord was doing that the whole time, but the difference for Naomi was her perspective.

It’s so easy in the middle of our unanswered prayer to feel like, “God has just checked out. He does not have a plan here.” And Naomi tells us, “No, no, no. He actually does.”

Dannah: You know, I get chills when I think about the plan because . . . Okay, I’m going to ask you a question about her that I don’t know the answer to, but maybe you do.

Ruth, of course, becomes the great-great-great-great grandmother of Jesus [ten generations]. So His plan was not only big, it was epic big. It was as big as it gets in kingdom plan, right? Did you think Naomi ever knew how big the plan was that God had?

Katie: That’s a great question. We don’t know if she lived long enough because this book would have been written at, I believe, after David was anointed the king. Then they’re going through the history of the king of Israel that’s been anointed by the Lord. And looking back and seeing his lineage, and there’s a Moabite woman in his lineage.

This is such a lesson for us that sometimes the things that we go through won’t make sense until generations later.

And so, Naomi likely didn’t live long enough to realize that she had been grafted in, if you will, to the lineage of the king. So here she comes back to Bethlehem thinking that she is bereft. She is without social status or standing.

Dannah: She feels like an old, worn-out widow. Right?

Katie: Yes. And she has no hope.

In reality, the Lord was weaving together her story to make her name a part of the lineage of the greatest king of Israel, and then The King, capital “K,” of everything.

Dannah: Beautiful. It’s so good.

I was interviewing a friend for the program months and months ago. She said, “It’s interesting that in the Book of Ruth, Naomi calls herself bitter, Mara, but the writer of Ruth never does. He only quotes her as saying that about herself.”

Katie: Oh, that’s so good.

Dannah: The writer writes from heaven’s perspective.

Katie: Oh, that’s great.

Dannah: All right, woman number four?

Katie: Elizabeth.

Dannah: Oh, hmm.

Katie: Elizabeth tells us that we don’t need to be afraid, “that God’s plan is going to be worth it.” I will confess to you that in my low moments, I’ll say, “Okay Lord, maybe You’re going to answer this prayer, but, come on, is it going to be really that great? Is it really going to be worth the wait? Is it going to be something really good? Or is it kind of like, ‘I know it’s good because God said everything He does is good. So obviously, it’s good,’ but it doesn’t feel very good to me.”

 

And that really is a deception of the evil one to convince us that God is not really good and that waiting on His plan is not worth it.

Elizabeth tells us, “Oh, no, no, no, girl, God’s plan is worth it.”

So we see in Luke 1 that she is old. She is past childbearing age. And then, the good Dr. Luke says, “She was, along with her husband, blameless. She was a godly and upright woman” (see v. 6)

That tells me so much. That can tell so much about Elizabeth. She was still obeying the Lord long after she knew that, unless there’s some miracle, she’s not having a child.

She obeyed God because God was worthy of her worship, and God was worthy of her obedience. This was not a transactional obedience. It was simply because of who God is.

And similar to Hannah’s story, the Lord was preparing Elizabeth. She was asking for a son, and then the Lord gave her a son that would announce the arrival of His Son.

So, once again, the pain that this woman had to go through, it was all preparation. It was all getting her ready to be, not just having a son, not just to be a mother, but to have a significant place in God’s story of redemption.

Dannah: I think that the mother of John the Baptist probably needed some extra special preparation.

Katie: Oh, yes. Can you imagine raising John the Baptist? And then, think about this too. John the Baptist was a man that was known for being socially odd or an outcast. Don’t you think the wife of a priest who was barren understood what that felt like?

Dannah: Oh, wow.

Katie: Here’s another one: she also ministered to Mary. Mary went and saw her after she was told she would give birth to the Messiah.

So, here Mary is preparing to be a social outcast as part of God’s plan of redemption. Who but Elizabeth would have understood that? Who but Elizabeth also had a miraculous pregnancy?

Dannah: Yes.

Katie: And then one of my favorite things about her: when she has this meeting with Mary, her baby John leaps in her womb. She is affirming to Mary what the angel has revealed to her.

You don’t see any competition or comparison. You don’t see her going, “Really, Lord? Now, if You wanted to make a statement of the miraculous birth of the Messiah, why wouldn’t you have done it through the old woman?” 

No. You just saw her having this joy that she was part of the story. She had a part to play. She was part of God’s grand plan. And so, oh, she’s wonderful.

Dannah: She is wonderful. As you tell that story, one of my favorite verses in Scripture comes to mind. It’s from 2 Corinthians 1:3–4: 

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves received from God.

When you talk about her probably feeling like an outcast, knowing how to comfort her son, knowing how to comfort Mary, that verse just comes to life. Doesn’t it?

Katie: Yes. Because there is probably someone in all of our lives that we are her “Elizabeth.” She needs the lessons, the wisdom, everything that we have gleaned from the valley because she’s going through it too.

Dannah: Amen.

All right. We’re almost out of time. We have just minutes left, but we have to get to woman number five.

Katie: All right. Woman number five is Martha. You tend to think about Martha and associate her with unanswered prayer. But think about in John 11 when her brother is sick. These were Jesus’ close friends. They were all really tight.

Martha tells us that, “It’s never too late, and it’s not too broken.” Martha dealt with the pain of feeling like Jesus let her down. She dealt with the pain of feeling like, “I asked You to come through. I knew that You could do this. I looked to You, and it feels like You failed me.”

What a vulnerable thing because, when the Lord comes, she says, “Lord, if You had been here, if You had come . . .” And Jesus, the passage says, “was loving Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, and so He waited.”

He waited because He had a bigger plan in store. Again, not just for the healing of Lazarus, but the healing of Lazarus to raise him from the dead so that people would believe and have life in Jesus’ name. 

You see this conversation between Jesus and Martha is spectacular. He’s engaging her, actually, theologically. I think Martha was a pretty logical person. You kind of see that at the tomb when Jesus says, “Roll the stone away.” Martha’s the one going, “Umm, it’s going to smell really bad.” Like, you see her thinking very logistically.

It’s the same thing with, “Lord, I’m cleaning. Mary doesn’t care. Tell her to help me.” So Martha’s kind of a “get-it-done” girl.

And she has the faith, the gutsy kind of faith, to come to Jesus and say, “If You had been here . . . and yet, still I know that You will raise him. He will be raised at the resurrection.”

And then, to Martha, the Lord Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life” (v. 25). That is a statement of revealing His identity as the Messiah. He does it in this private conversation with His friend. That’s so spectacular. 

But, you know, Dannah, the thing that Martha’s story teaches us, not only is it never too broken, it’s never too late. But Lazarus eventually died again. And as we’re wrestling with what we’re asking God to do in unanswered prayer, that sounds kind of harsh, kind of morbid. But you think about it, Lazarus eventually died again.

All of these unanswered prayers, even after the Lord gave them, they were temporary.

Hannah’s baby grew up and left her at three and went and served the Lord. Elizabeth’s baby boy was beheaded. Naomi, as we said, maybe didn’t live long enough to see how it all fit. Hagar still had the pain of having to leave again, and she had to depend on God.

 

All of these things were temporary. It reminds us that everything we’re asking God to do for us, it doesn’t make it insignificant, but it does put it into proportion. We talked about that last time that there are things that God is doing in our lives to make our blessings bigger than ourselves because all of our lives are intended to be bigger than ourselves.

So not only do we wrestle with the “what” of unanswered prayer, but the “why” as well.

Dannah: Remind me once again, because sometimes my heart gets amnesia, Katie. What is always our “why”?

Katie: Our ultimate “why” is, and this is where keeping the perspective of eternity helps us see even the pain that we’re walking through through a different lens, that God is doing something so much bigger than our own lives.

And, you know, Dannah, there are probably women listening to this that you may be like Naomi, it may be your grandchildren’s generation before it makes any sense what you’re going through.

There’s one quote that I go back to again and again when it comes to unanswered prayer, and it comes from Tim Keller. He said, 

God will give you what you ask, or He will give you what you would have asked if you knew everything that He knows.

I have to go back to that quote in my life.

Dannah: It’s so good, yes.

Katie: Because it ultimately comes down to, I don’t know everything that God knows. I don’t understand everything that God understands. And so, I think of it from the angle that: God who loves me holds nothing back from my good.

The verse that says, “No good thing does He withhold from those who walk uprightly” (Psalm 84:11) Well, that means that if there’s something that God is withholding from me, it means that He knows it’s not good for me right now. It’s not for my good.

And ultimately this goes back to how the Lord uses unanswered prayer to mature us, to trusting the God who loves us, who made us, and who has a plan for the most painful things in our lives.

Nancy: What a comfort it is in the midst of unanswered prayer to remember that you’re not alone. I know I’ve been through those seasons myself, and other godly individuals have felt the same way. What a great reminder there from Katie McCoy and Dannah Gresh.

Katie is one of the guest speakers who will be featured this coming Tuesday during our online event, Loving and Living God’s Word. This is the second of four events in our series called, Biblical Help for Real Life.

Maybe you’re feeling like you’re in a slump in your devotional time. Maybe you’re not being consistent in your time with the Lord the way you’d like to, it’s been kind of haphazard recently. Or maybe you’ve lost the joy of reading and soaking in God’s Word.

Well, you’ll want to watch this event, Loving and Living God’s Word. Our much beloved friend Kay Arthur will encourage and challenge us, and Kelly Needham will teach us from the Scripture. And, of course, we’ll hear from Katie McCoy as well.

Now, if you’re thinking, “I’d love to watch that event, but I can’t do it on Tuesday.” Guess what? You can always watch it later. All the details for how to sign up for Loving and Living God’s Word are at this web address: ReviveOurHearts.com/Word. Or if you’d rather, you can call us at 1-800-569-5959.

Now, would you say that your life adorns the gospel? What do you think it means for us to live out the beauty of the gospel? Those are the kinds of questions we’ll be answering as we take a closer look at a passage of Scripture: Titus chapter 2, verses 1–5.

I would invite you to take some time and meditate on that passage sometime before Revive Our Hearts returns on Monday. Again, that’s Titus chapter 2, verses 1–5.

Well, I hope you’ll have a wonderful weekend. I trust you’ll spend time worshiping the Lord with your church family, and then be sure and be back for 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.

All Scripture is taken from the ESV unless otherwise noted.

¹George Everard, Counsels to Christians on the Details of Every-Day Life, 1866, https://www.gracegems.org/Everard/counsels_to_christians.htm

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