Prayer: Not Always What You Expect (Transcript)

Bob Barney discusses prayer today on The Plain Truth’s 7:11 broadcast. If you believe in God and you believe in prayer, have you ever had it where your prayers were not answered, and you don’t know why?

Click here to listen to Bob’s Broadcast on Prayer

If you believe in God and you believe in prayer have you ever had it where your prayers were not answered and you don’t know why?

Hi, this is Bob Barney and this is another broadcast from The Plain Truth dot com. You can listen every morning at 7:11 AM, you can listen to driving into work if you have a phone that plugs into your car or on your drive home or you can listen any time during the day all the way to 7:11 the next day when the new show appears. All these old shows stay on our site and you can go to the podcast portion of our site and listen to them at will. Good morning.

There was a joke one time about a man who just did not understand why God could not answer his prayers. He didn’t have a job and he was out of money, he prayed to God so he could get a job and make his wife happy and keep her from divorcing him. A week or two went by and he didn’t have a job, his wife spoke about divorce. He pleaded to God, help me help me, if I could only win the lottery then my wife won’t leave me, he prayed. Low and behold the next day after the lottery, he did not win and within a week or two she filed for divorce. He begged God, please let me win this next lottery or she will leave me and I owe mortgage on the house and if I cannot come up with the money they are going to take our house! Next evening the lottery happened and he did not win. The next day he said to God, I am losing my house, my wife, please help me win the lottery tonight! The lottery went off at 11 at night and the morning comes and no lottery winner for him and his wife leaves him. HE is at the end of his rope, he said to God, I am going to kill myself because you udont care about me. He hears a voice from Heaven that says “Hey down there, help me out! Buy a lottery ticket!”. 

This might sound a little bit amusing but there is some truth to this. We think and we have been led to believe that God answers all prayers.  Well maybe that is not exactly the way it works. Possibly God answers prayers when people do something. Unfortunately the ministers today and the TELevangelists make it sound like it is very easy to  get whatever you want in prayer, especially if you send them money, on your TV or even in your local church, they pass around the cup to collect…every sunday, which the Sabbath really is Saturday which you should be honoring. You don’t have to do anything to be saved or have your prayers answered, you just have to believe. Just believe in God, that is all you have to do. 

Well, in the book of James, please check it out yourselves, you will find a small paragraph where James is talking about expecting from God without works. He has a statement in there that says faith without works is dead.  This idea that if you just believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and in His name, you are saved and you don’t have to do anything but just believe, is a false notion. It is part of the antichrist, the devils’ message to you. So that you will have prayers unanswered like the guy in the joke, so you won’t have a relationshipw ith God…because you are not following God plainly as it says in the Bible. And I say this phrase over and over again, for which there is a reason for which is why I do that, “those that seek me diligently will find me”. Notice you have to seek Him diligently. You don’t just look for Him and He shows up, you don’t just have faith in Him and zap whammy, He is right there. No, you have to search for Him diligently and have to work at it. If you don’t work at it, He won’t work on you. A lot of times our prayers are not answered because of the fact that we are just not trying hard enough to help God answer our prayers by showing our faith by our works.

Now, what does that really mean? For this man in the joke, it was about winning the lottery. God says to Him, “help me out here, get a ticket”. You cannot win the lottery without having a ticket. You can pray all day long…and I am not saying anybody thinks they are going to win the lottery by praying although it is possible. But even to win the lottery ticket, you have to do something and buy a ticket. This idea that you have to do nothing for God to save you or justify you or answer your prayers is simply not The Plain Truth

You have to do something, show God your love for HIm, or Them, because God is really Jesus Christ and the Father and they are made up of the Holy Spirit.

You have to show Them, through obedience to their Laws. God has ten major Laws that were written on stone and in the prophets we are told that these Laws are going to be written in our hearts and minds within our bodies. This is after Christ returns, not now although I do believe it could be now for those with the Holy Spirit and who are Christians today  because they really do understand the Law of God and obey….as much as they ncan. Everyone sins, the Apostle John says that in 1JOhn and anyone that claims he has no sin is a liar. We all sin. There are ten major Laws that GOd has given to us to worship Him in obedience. Those Laws we simply call today, The Ten Commandments. Then you ask yourself, “What Ten Commandments?” I am not sure if you realize this but the Catholics have a different set of ten compared to the protestants or the Jews. THe Jews and the PRotestants agree on the order of the Ten Commandments, the Catholics do not; they leave out a very inconvenient commandment for themselves because they dont want to obey it, so they just abandon one whole commandment and turn one into two commandments. That is funny in a way but that is the truth. How I discovered this fact and I didn’t really understand it…I like to collect different memorabilia and I saw a nice series of plates made by Franklin Mint that had the Ten Commandments on them. We have a hutch that displays biblical plates and other items, I thought I would really like to get these. I looked on EBAy, there were ten plates for 30 bucks each. I was getting ready to order them and I noticed that the Third Commandment said, “Observe the Sabbath day and keep it Holy”. Well, I know my Ten COmmandments. The third commandment is not that, it is the Fourth Commandment that is the Sabbath Commandment. Doing some research, the third commandment says that there should be no idols, well, the Catholics have a lot of idols as they worship statues…in ROme I believe there is a statue of Mary with her hand worn off from people kissing it. The Catholics believe in idols, a perfect example. They have pendants around their necks with crosses and St Christopher battles, etc. IT was inconvenient, they took the 9th commandment and made it the 9th and 10th. Two commandments on coveting is what they created. 

Again, you have to even ask yourself which commandments are you supposed to follow?

My idea is very simple. You follow all of them as written in Exodus. In Exodus you will not find the Ten Commandments as 10. The Jews call them the ten sayings. They are quite in depth, look them up for yourselves to see what I am talking about. Even if you don’t have them in the order of the Ten Commandments, it is important to study the order, don’t get me wrong, but even if you dont know the order, you know what they are. You know love the Lord with all of your might and love your neighbor as yourself, Jesus said that sums up the Ten Commandments. But you know you believe in God and do not use His name in vain, you do not have idols, you observe the Sabbath Day which is the problem one which is why churches do not want to honor the 4th commandment. To honor your father and your mother, that is the only commandment with a blessing. If you honor your father and your mother you will have a long life. No other commandment offers you a long life but obedience to your parents. God understood that the cornerstone of civilization is the family unit and not just a micro family or the nuclear family as we have today, but the extended family is what God envisioned. He envisioned a family unit that would consist of maybe grandparents and great grandparents, the parents and their children. That is what GOd had envisioned as a family. Where you had most likely 3 or 4 generations living together, not necessarily in the same house but in the same neighborhood. 

I was quite lucky growing up in my neighborhood. I had my grandparents, both grandmas and one grandpa as one had died before I was born, and they were less than a quarter mile from my house. My fathers mother actually lived in a trailer on our property and my grandparents on my mothers side, lived not even a mile up the road. My uncle lived right next to us in a house not even 300 feet from our back porch to their back porch. I grew up in a family unit that I think is very critical in raising a child in a family that they can go from house to house to different family members; great grandparents, grandparents, uncles and aunts…experiencing love for everyone. If their parents are mad at a child then they have the love very close to comfort and understanding. So this is the honor of your father and your mother…there are others about adultery and murder and coveting which are basic principles of God’s LAWS.  IF you do not obey the Sabbath day which is Saturday, then you know, life would be a lot better for people if they would just follow them. But back to the idea of why when you pray to God does GOd not answer the prayer…many times He isn’t because you aren’t doing anything or following His commandments, you are not following His ways, and you expect that if you just believe in Him you can ask for something.

There are cases and I witness these cases from people and including myself, were in desperation that God is answering your prayer when you don’t even deserve to have it answered. YOu are maybe so far down spiritually and morally that you think God has abandoned you and you pray to God and you are in desperation and suddenly, miraculously, your prayer is answered almost immediately.  That really is amazing and an amazing feeling when it happens to you. It has happened to me and I am sure there are plenty of people out there who were in dire straits  maybe someone was dying and they were in a car crash and they were praying, and by the will of God and the grace of God the prayer was answered and the people were saved, didn’t die, etc. There are prayers answered all the time which is one of the proofs by the way that God exists. 

Those that know me know that my greatest answered prayer other than my salvation and my belief in the real God, is my wife, and we are going on 43 years this year.  I had known my wife Tammy since she was 16 years old and had a crush on her…I was 7 years older than her so I guess I was one of these child molester as they would say today but I never did anything like that, but I did care for her, she was a very pretty girl and I prayed when I first started believing in God in 1978, in December, I rejected God for many years after listening to Garner Ted Armstrong and people and other ministers and reading the Bible for myself, trying to disprove what was in the Bible, trying to make sure that God really did not exist. I realized quite early on in life in my studies in around 1974 that you had to follow God’s way in order for God to accept you. I knew from the beginning that faith alone wasn’t the answer, and I did not want to live a life of being different from everyone around me, especially by following God’s commandments, especially the Sabbath Day. 

So I thought about believing in God for about four years.  My first real prayer of consequence was at a very low time in my life when I prayed that one day God would give me Tammy and that we could be married. I think today we have a very beautiful love story to tell because it was three years almost to the day, but to the same month, it was three years before Tammy told me that she loved me. I didn’t think anyone loved me, I was down and out and miserable. Low and behold the girl that was the girl of my dreams married me December 17 1981 in Florida. My greatest prayer was answered. Over the years  I have had prayers not answered and other prayers not answered. It seemed like when I was the lowest and the weakest in my journey with God, my prayers get answered pretty quickly. When I was stronger in my belief in Him and feeling as I was pleasing God, it seemed like myprayers were unanswered. That was always confusing. 

One thing that is very critical is that when you pray that it is in accordance with His will. People dont know this but the night of Jesus’ arrest after the Passover meal that He and His disciples had, he went out and prayed three times to be delivered from death to the Father God. Believe it or not, and I think many people listening may be surprised to hear this but Jesus three times prayed that if it was possible for God the Father because Jesus Knew what  His father was, that he was going to suffer the most horrible death that anyone has ever died, for his sins, a painful horrible death, he prayed three times that “Father if it is possible, lift this cup from Me, but not my will, YOUR will be done’. Jesus showed up sthat in our prayer, they have to be in accordance with God’s will. Think of this, JEsus who was the God of the Old Testament, His most desperate prayer was not answered by God or it was in a way answered and it was no, that He had to go through His death, He had to go through that suffering. That he had to die to save the world from the sin of mankind and the devil. Christ created all things including the angles. The father God did not create them, Christ did and you can read that in the first chapter of John. Plain and simple “through Christ all things were created and without HIm nothing that was created, was created”. Jesus is the Lord of the Old Testament who created everything. HE is the one who tried to get out of the crucifiction three times in a prayer to God The Father and was denied His prayer. In other places in the Bible we read where Jesus and the same prayer that night that he prayed to get out of His crucifixion also mentioned a verse that many people dont read or dont understand, that the people behold His glory like He shared with the Father before the world began. 

Jesus Christ and God, the Father were equal God’s before the world began. Before there was a universe which could have been five billion years ago, I am not one of these creationists that everything was created four thousand or so years ago. I believe the earth could be billions or a trillion years old. God is eternal. I am sure that there were things in existence that God created in the beginning. We don’t know when the beginning, but God was even prior to the beginning! It is not even comprehendible to our minds, this idea of eternity both ways. 

We can possibly think about eternity going forward but the idea that there was never a beginning to God but a beginning to the universe is mind blowing. I cannot understand it and if anyone can  tell me a better way to think about it, i just dont think the human mind can comprehend the power and the eternity of the Godhead which included Jesu Christ who at one time was equal to the Father and stepped down from that position to be the Son of God when he became a man.  He never again regained the position of being God’s equal.  He put Himself in a subservient role to this day to God the Father to allow us now in order to just pray to HIm as the ancients did, but now to pray to the other God as well, taught Him in order for us to understand the true destiny of mankind. This is to become God’s children in spirit. We are going to be born again at our resurrection as Gods. We are going to be literally spiritually above the angels. God did not create the angels after his own kind. He only created man after His own kind or after their own kind, after their own likeness. As you can read, “Let US make man in our image,” God says to each other. So, Jesus did it but He had total agreement when He created the universe and man, and that is the importance of Jesus. Too many times today it bothers me that people use Jesus’ as a stepping stone to the Father God. They dontunderstand Jesus’ character in the beginning before he became a man. 

You hear these prayers Father this Father that, Father  Father Father, by Jesus Christ AMEN. Like it is some kind of a formula of prayer as if they repeat the word father and father over again and dont even include GO idn the prayer until the end as if He makes it all happen, people believe that is how you get answered prayer. It won’t get you anywhere to try such an approach. Jesus is a part of that prayer. You are praying to God, you are really paying to both of them. WHen you pray to the Lord God you are really praying to Jesus.

Let me tell you what I do in the morning, I pray to both Gods. Sometimes when I am desperate I just pray to God in general and I know  that means, praying to both of them, but the idea that Jesus’ greatest prayer was not answered because it was not in the will of God should teach of something. That not all of your prayers are going to be granted to you if it is not in His will. But if it is and it is in accordance with His will and you obey God and you believe in God and you obey His laws and His commandments, God will most likely answer your prayers. IF you pray for a million dollars well, maybe he isn’t going to answer your  prayer because maybe He doesn’t see that a million dollars are going to be good for you and chances are for most middle class people, if they suddenly woke up and won the lottery and are a 100 million dollar winner, their whole life changes, and not for the better. A lot of people find themselves in total misery. 

I remember a story, a true story when I lived in Stuart Florida many years ago, that a man’s power wires fell on his trailer. His wife was electrocuted and he was hurt badly. He sued the power company and won like 20 million dollars. He was a greedy man and he decided because they really weren’t legally married if I remember right, but for some reason he won a huge settlement but he never even bothered to pay the hospital bill that tried to save his wife’s life. That shows you what kind of character the man had, Within three years he also was a drug addict and a drunk, living back on the streets worse off than he was before winning the lawsuit from Fla power and light. That is the problem, sometimes when we pray for something that God doesn’t think is in our best inverters. The most serious prayers that God doesn’t answer that would bother us the most, and it bothers me because I have had many go unanswered…that doesn’t make God unreal, just because he doesn’t answer them does not make Him unreal. It just makes the position clear that he doesn’t want to answer it for some reason…either for His good and purposes or for yours. NOt all things that are going to happen are for your own good but can be for God’s good. If you are a christian and you are a soldier for Christ you may be expected to die for Christ and be a martyr for Christ. He predicted that. YOu cannot get out of your death as a martyr as He couldn’t get out of His death…because He was meant to be a martyr for us and be the forgiveness of our sins through His blood.

NEver forget this, that Christs greatest, most sincere prayer as a man was not answered and yours may not be asl well even though you are a true believer and obey His laws and follow His sabbaths…your prayer just may not be in the Will of what God’s plan is for YOU and for others. 

Noone is a Christian today for their own cause. He does not make you a Christian for your benefit. You become a Christian for the benefit of others not for yourself. Never forget this point, you are a Christian because God has a plan for you and for other people’s salvation, you are to be a lightning rod, a shining light on a hill, for other people looking to see the way, looking at you and how you live your life and how you obey God and are an example. That is what God wants from Christians today. It is not for your personal salvation. Sometimes your biggest prayers are not going to be answered but you will also find what keeps you involved with God and believing in HIM AT TIMES, when you most desperately need God and cry out to Him, he is there for you. He has done it for me, and he has done it for many in this audience.

That is the end of the show for today, Tuesday, this is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth Today .com saying goodbye and thank you for listening.