Why Didn’t God Grant My Prayer Request?

What have you prayed for recently? Healing for yourself or someone else? A job or a promotion? Money to pay bills?

If you did not receive what you asked for, you may be wondering why not. It could be any of several reasons. Consider these examples:

            1 – A child asks his mother for a cookie. Will the mother give him the cookie? Maybe, or maybe not. Giving him a cookie may not be in the child’s best interest, especially near dinner time, even though he probably won’t understand that or agree.  

            2 – A child asks her father to move to another city because she doesn’t like where they live. Will the father grant that request? Almost certainly not, because the father understands the full ramifications of such a request and the child does not.

            3 – A child asks his mother to do his homework for him. The mother should certainly say no, because she understands that it would not be in the child’s long-term best interest.

We are like one of those children asking their parents for a favor. Sometimes God says no—or not yet—because granting the prayer would be inconsistent with our best interests, or contrary to God’s plans, or for a variety of other reasons we might not understand or know about.

Are there examples of God refusing to grant prayers in the Bible? Indeed there are:

2 Samuel 12:15-18 and 21-23 – David’s child with Bathsheba that resulted from their adultery became very sick, and David pleaded with God to spare the child’s life. But the child died.

Matthew 20:20-23 – The sons of Zebedee asked to sit at Jesus’ right and left in his kingdom. Jesus declined to grant their request.

2 Corinthians 12:7-9 – The apostle Paul pleaded with the Lord three times to remove a “thorn in the flesh” that tormented him. God didn’t remove it.

Luke 22:39-42 – In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus asked God to spare him the suffering he was about to undergo. Obviously, God did not spare him.

If we truly love and trust God, then we must accept His will rather than our own, as Jesus and Paul did. James tells us this:

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.” Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.”[1]

We see this attitude throughout the New Testament. Here is but one example:

Now some have become arrogant, as though I were not coming to you. But I will come to you soon, if the Lord wills, and I shall find out, not the words of those who are arrogant but their power.[2]

So we should make our requests known to God, because he wants us to.[3] And we know that he has the power to grant our prayers.[4] But we should also remember that God is not a vending machine. He is in control, not us. We are his servants; he is not ours.

And one more thing—we shouldn’t expect Him to do everything for us. As Benjamin Franklin once said, “God helps those who help themselves.”

[1]. James 4:13-15

[2]. 1 Corinthians 4:18-19 (emphasis added)

[3]. Philippians 4:6

[4]. See, for example, Genesis 18:14, Jeremiah 32:17 and 32:27, Matthew 19:26