House of Prayer - Unanswered Prayer (Adam Heather)

God is not unmoved by the pain and brokenness of the world, a world in which we will have trouble in a world of the now and the not yet. He is a god who has walked through it, who has experienced it all himself, who knows the intense pain, and he weeps with us. The Bible is clear that God only collects two things. Do you know what they are? Number one, your tears, and number two, your prayers. The only things that we ever hear that God collects from this world. Number one, every single tear that you have cried, God has kept. Number two, every prayer that you have prayed, God has kept. [00:39:00] (49 seconds)  #TearsAndPrayersKept

But Pete goes through a framework, which I think is really helpful, where he says that there's three reasons that your prayers go unanswered. God's world, god's will, and god's war. God's world, god's will, and god's war. And so let us journey through those today. Number one, and these get increasingly more complicated. So starting from the easiest, God's world. [00:11:09] (29 seconds)  #GodsWorldWillAndWar

If you feel like you have prayed and you have prayed and you have prayed and you've got to the end of your faith, remember, God talks about persistent prayer. Just keep going. So if you find that you've got to the point where you're like, I don't have any words left, find someone else in this room who can pray for you and can pray with you. Don't ever become so comfortable with unanswered prayer that you stop praying. Remember, right at the beginning of this series, what Ian says, you just keep knocking. That's what Jesus if he was here, I believe that's what he'd say. Keep knocking. Just keep knocking. [00:40:33] (40 seconds)  #KeepKnocking

He is a person that we get to have a relationship with, and his invitation to us is a peace that surpasses understanding. It's not a peace that we get because we understand everything. It's a peace that we get when we move beyond and we give up our right to understand everything and to say, God, give me the peace. That means I still have questions. I still do not understand, and yet I understand enough to trust you wholeheartedly. [00:34:06] (40 seconds)  #PeaceBeyondUnderstanding

But for those three weeks, he's praying and something is happening in an unseen realm that is being blocked. But, eventually, he keeps praying, and the breakthrough comes. So what does that tell me? Well, it tells me that there is a cosmic battle, which means that God doesn't always get his will. Or to quote Pete Greg, instead, we believe something so surprising that it will be almost impossible to accept if it wasn't so blatantly true. [00:23:25] (37 seconds)  #BreakthroughInTheBattle

From the moment you decided to humble yourself to receive understanding, your prayer was heard, and I set out to come to you. But I was waylaid by the angel prince of the Kingdom Of Persia and was delayed for a good three weeks. But then Michael, one of the chief angel princes, intervened to help me. I left him there with the prince of the Kingdom Of Persia, and now I'm here to help you understand what will eventually happen to your people. The vision has to do with what's ahead. [00:22:17] (34 seconds)  #HeavenlyDelayAndIntervention

So what's going on here? I don't know exactly, but what I do know is that God heard and the prayers started making a difference as soon as Daniel started praying. But there was another agency at work that blocked the prayers that were going up, that there was an evil agency opposing the will of God and the prayers of Daniel. And Daniel couldn't see all of this until three weeks later. [00:22:51] (35 seconds)  #UnseenSpiritualOpposition

And so this morning, we are going to wrestle. I'm not gonna try and answer all of your questions because I don't know if there are answers to all of your questions, but I do want to try and invite you into the conversation. And you might not agree with what I say about this, and that's okay too. Part of maturing in the faith is coming before God and wrestling through these things in your own head and your own heart, but we wanna create a church that isn't scared of the hard questions. [00:09:01] (35 seconds)  #ChurchNotAfraidToAsk