Here you can find the video script written for our fifth session as a reference.
Peace is priceless.
A while back I really felt God impress on me the importance of learning the art of contentment, even in the middle of what I would describe as a pretty horrific sleep disorder. That if I could learn to be at peace while life was difficult, then I would have something very precious and valuable, that would put me in good stead for the rest of my life.
There’s a verse in 1 Timothy that says “Godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it”. I’ve always loved that verse so, so much. I think it’s so under-rated. It’s like a shortcut to the place we’re all trying to get to. A place of internal completion, fullness and rest.
If you look at it, those two things in this verse — godliness and contentment — they seem to come as a pair. You could ask yourself: is it possible to be godly without being content? And is it possible to be content without being godly?
I don’t think so.
To me, it very much seems like those two things need to develop side by side as we walk with Jesus. In that sense, it might almost contain the trace of a warning… if you’re not godly, you’ll never be content. You’ll never be at peace. You’ll never have enough, and you’ll never be enough.
A few weeks back in one of our staff times, Oli shared a picture from a book (I forget which book) just describing desire like a fire: the more fuel you throw into it, the more intense that fire becomes, and the faster that fuel is burnt up.
No matter how much fuel we keep throwing on it — no matter how much we try and satisfy our desires — that fire only grows. And we’re forever in need of new pleasures, new leisures, new experiences. They’re great for a moment, but they all keep on running out, leaving us dry and empty.
Yet contentment draws water from another place. That what really satisfies us isn’t actually the thing we immediately crave.
Finite Difficulties, Infinite Joy
I’m sure there’s so many layers to contentment, and I think it’s worth its weight in gold. I think it can free up so much of your time and energy from pursuing all sorts of things in this world, releasing you to serve God and go after the things he’s put on your heart, that you can hear him calling you into.
But I also think it’s a key survival tool, that in hard times we’re all the more caught up in the goodness of God. We have our eyes lifted and can see his kingdom coming on the horizon.
We can see that all our difficulties and disappointments are finite, yet the joy coming is eternal. And in fact, the deeper our cup of suffering flows now, the more it will be filled with joy then.
But there’s something that I think stops this in its tracks, and can so easily derail us.
Unanswered Prayer
And that’s the notion of unanswered prayer. The felt experience or perception that your deepest prayers are being met with deafening silence — that God seems to be holding out on you for no good reason.
When you need God the most, he seems to go quiet. All your prayers for the one thing you really need him to act on seem to get lost into a void.
I don’t know if you can relate to that? Hard times, I think, can serve to reveal the very core of discontentment running in our hearts: the feeling that God isn’t really listening, and he’s holding back good things.
This kind of discontentment actually runs all the way back to Genesis 3, where Adam and Eve were duped into thinking that God was holding out on them — holding back something good, which they both desired and thought they deserved.
These next two points might feel trivial, and I’ve actually debated whether or not to include them because they might even seem a little bit quirky. But I can’t shake the fact that they’ve really helped me see some more of the dynamics around prayer that’s eased this angst and discontentment.
1. Conflicting Prayer
Have you ever considered the notion of conflicting prayers? Like you pray for one thing, and without realising it, maybe in the very next moment, you pray for the complete and total opposite.
So often we pray for all the good things: for a comfortable life, for a good level of provision and nice holidays. We want a nice garden, and a nice car, and some savings stashed away. We want good health and happy days; good friendships and families. On and on it goes, and in a sense, none of that is bad.
We pray these prayers, and they all have the same sort of focus, and they all go in one particular direction. They’re all centred on ourselves, the blessings we want, and things going well.
But then there’s moments when we forget all this, and have a total lapse of concentration. Perhaps we got frustrated with ourselves and prayed opposite prayers; that run in a completely different direction.
Things like: “Lord, I’m so sorry. I failed again. Please don’t leave me like this! Lord, help me change! Make me more like Jesus!”
And maybe we’ve prayed things like “Lord, I want to be used for your purposes! I want to be a more effective witness. I want you to use me to reach others. Please use me!”
And as much as God may not mind the prayers for an easy and comfortable life, I think he loves these other types of prayers, to be more like Jesus and to be used for his purposes.
And so, in his timing, he answers. Trials come in — perhaps that hedge of protection comes down a little. Our faith is tested, and strengthened in the process as we learn to rely on God and not ourselves; not in our own strength, or perhaps our bank balance, or all the other things we place our hope in. We’re slowly transformed.
As it says in 1 Peter, we are refined by fire. We’re softened to the point where we can be reshaped and remoulded. The fire also helps to burn away all the dross and imperfections, and purifies us, leaving us with a faith which is more precious than gold.
When the fire comes — whatever that trial might look like — we kind of realise how useless all those temporal things which claim our hearts really are. You might call them idols. We can even develop quite a disdain for them. “Look how useless you are! You promised me things, and now look!”. We realise how empty they are, and our hearts can even turn against them.
Yet it’s in the darkness that we so clearly see the light; where it comes from, and where it isn’t. And it’s in the context of your trials that others see your faith shine out. That’s when our witness to others can be very powerful as they see our faith in action — that it’s not just talk and nice ideas.
It just makes me think, when I’m struggling with what feels like the silence of unanswered prayer — when I’ve got all down and disheartened — maybe I should just pause and take a moment and consider which prayers my Father in heaven might be answering first.
He might well be answering some before he answers others.
And that’s switched the light on for me. It’s like “Sam, you really did pray for this. And God really did answer! He really is listening, and he really is answering!”
I know you might think this is a bit daft or a bit cute, but I genuinely think this is real, that there’s some substance to this. And it’s really helped me break out of this “God is ignoring me” mentality, or the idea that he doesn’t hear our prayers.
If you pay attention to the lyrics of some our worship songs, you’ll realise we don’t just say these types of things in prayer, but we all sing them together in worship!
If you’ve ever sung songs like The Potter’s Hand, or Refiner’s Fire, and go back and look at those lyrics, you’ll know the worship team have totally stitched you up! And as well they should, as they express the heart’s desire of every true Christian — to be purified, remoulded, and used for God’s purposes.
Which echoes 1 John 3 which says “All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure”. Sometimes God gives us a little hand in that.
When the Holy Spirit lives in you, he implants a deep desire to look more and more like Jesus. We just want to be better, to sin less and less, to walk in the light more and more. It’s a desire you end up finding at the core of your being.
While we use words when we pray, God’s really listening to our hearts, and knows exactly what we mean, even when we can’t find the right words or don’t manage to put it into words at all.
If you pray in tongues, it’s a huge blessing as it releases you from the language barrier, of thinking “how on earth do I put this into words?”. It’s like our Spirit gets unlocked and can flow freely. As 1 Corinthians 14 says, we utter mysteries to God in the Spirit. That’s a way of saying we’ve got no idea what’s coming out of our mouths, we don’t actually know what we’re praying. It’s from the depths of your spirit, guided by the Holy Spirit.
But is it possible, in all the mysteries that you utter, that at times you might pray deeply for your own sanctification, which the Holy Spirit has put on your heart, and for your faith to be an effective witness to others?
Are you paying attention to the deepest desires you have within you, which God can read, and may well be responding to?
2. The Little Things
Okay, a second little thought. This one’s much shorter. And it’s just that I for one have noticed that God’s answered so many of my little prayers — for moments of provision, for help and energy, for particular situations to work themselves out, for things like which school the kids get enrolled in. Even things which seem daft, like for car parking spaces, or to find a particular item at the shops. I’ve don’t know if you’ve noticed that? God seems to answer our little prayers, just as a way of saying “I’m still with you, I’m still here” but in the really big things we still have to trust him and wait.
It’s almost the opposite of what we expect. In my heart I’m thinking “I don’t care about the little prayers, give me the big one!” But his priorities are different to ours, and sometimes I think the way he works in the little things helps coach us.
3. The Greatest Treasure of Darkness
I actually have a third point, and this one’s massive. And spoiler alert: if you were planning on watching my video story at some point, this is the climax of that 24 minute story. Four years into wrestling with the silence of unanswered prayer and my sleep disorder, it slowly dawned on me that, while I was fixated on the one big solution that I wanted — healing, or a fix of some kind — I was actually feeling closer to God, and feeling his presence like I’ve never done before.
While I was praying for the thing that I wanted, God was answering with his presence.
He wasn’t ignoring my prayers. Instead he was responding in a way that I just didn’t expect, and wasn’t on my radar. God’s like that.
Hearing God speak and feeling his presence, you realise, is the real thing you need. Much more than the quick fix you’re after. It’s good to remember that everyone that Jesus healed died of something else. It wasn’t the ultimate answer. I mustn’t get so fixated on it that healing becomes like a god to me. Healings are a temporary blessing, yet God’s got his eyes on the eternal, and working out just what’s best for us, and others, in the long run.
Quite often it’s our need for God that holds us in his presence, listening to his voice. And God’s presence is quite possibly the greatest treasure of darkness we can ever experience.
The Battle of Prayer
Just a little aside, Romans 12:12 is a great verse that highlights the battle of prayer and troubles. It says “Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.”
It reminds us that while we constantly pray, we still need to be patient in all our troubles. They might go on for a while. They might go on for a long, long time, and it doesn’t mean we’re doing anything wrong, or God’s doing anything wrong.
We live in a very fallen broken world, with a lot of complexity. The answers aren’t always simple, but actively rejoicing in hope is what lifts us up.
Future Peace
I love Isaiah 60:22, especially the way the NLT phrases it. “When the time is right, I, the Lord, will make it happen”
In a way, that’s the answer to everything. To every prayer that’s left unanswered — assuming we’re praying good prayers and not for anything crazy or ungodly! When the time is right, he’ll do it — it will happen.
Isaiah 60 is looking forward to when heaven comes down to earth, and the two are unified. When everything bad is expelled from creation, including every form of suffering. All of your prayers are tied up here, and will be fulfilled here. It’s inevitable.
Why does God allow suffering? The ultimate answer is “he won’t”. Nothing can escape the date we’re counting down to. And all your prayers are stacked up here — piled high with a multitude of those from suffering saints through history, all awaiting fulfilment at this moment.
Take a Moment
Anyway, those are just a few thoughts on the nature of prayer, and why they seem to go unanswered at times. I hope it’s useful. It’s so important to reconcile this stuff and try and see something of the big picture. There is a very real mystery behind it all — the way God works, and when.
If we don’t quite see some of its scale, we can so easily get frustrated with God, or even feel condemned — that perhaps our level of faith isn’t enough, that we’re not enough, or that our Father in heaven is displeased with us in some way.
If you’re watching in a group, why not pause for a moment and consider the nature of prayer. Has anything from this section resonated? Has prayer been a source of pain, disappointment, or even despair for you? Is it fuelling discontentment, and a distrust of God within you?
Somehow we need to disconnect that line between our circumstances, and whether or not we think that God loves us, and is pleased with us. We need to rid ourselves of any sense of karma operating in our lives.
I’ve actually decided to split this video in two. It’s just ended up being longer than I hoped. Error! And I know it might seem usual to talk about unanswered prayer in a video about contentment, but I do think it can be such a huge blockage to finding our rest in God, and experiencing peace, that we just have to chat about it.
And in hard times, that’s when you need it most. That’s when you need to find your biggest rest in God.
I hope you’ll join us in the next video where we talk about two things I believe the Apostle Paul models for us, as he claims to have found the secret of contentment in every situtation.
See you then.
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