by Rose Murdock

We know that God is truth. We know that He’s just, and that He holds the answers to all of our questions. But if He did not communicate with us, then we would be in a most frustrating position wouldn’t we? Knowing that God holds our solutions but yet not being able to hear or understand those solutions would leave us feeling helpless and hopeless. But thank God He does communicate with us. He is not silent. He is not withholding answers or direction from us!

At times we feel like He’s not speaking to us. It may seem like God has forgotten about us. But God is not being silent. We just need to learn to understand the manner in which He communicates with us. God’s language is not the same as ours. He communicates with us through many different ways. He can use anything to speak to you. He’ll speak within your heart, but He will also speak to you through other people. Sometimes the ones you would least expect! He’ll speak to you through a variety of means, even through your circumstances. Yes, God will talk to you through your circumstances. There is a message there. Sometimes the answer is right in front of us but we don’t see it.

God tells us to pray, to ask, to seek and to knock. James tells us that the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much. We are to take the initiative to pray and ask and seek Him. But then we also need to get ourselves into a position where we can hear Him speak to us. I don’t just mean a physical position, but we need to prepare ourselves mentally, emotionally and of course spiritually to hear Him. The answer may come when we least expect it. We need to stay in tune to the Lord all the time.

The Bible tells us that the reason we don’t get answers to our prayers is because we are praying lustful prayers, (James 4:3). Sometimes the things we are praying for, we’re asking for because we have ungodly motives. We want something for the wrong reason. We might think we need God to supernaturally intervene to change things in our lives, (sometimes we do and sometimes He will), but what we really may need is wisdom and direction for the next step. We need guidance and God is not being silent in giving that guidance. He is speaking to us. But we may not like what He is saying so we don't hear Him. God may be telling you something that will correct the lustful motivation of your prayers and you need to be willing to hear that. He may be trying to tell you why your answer hasn’t come like you’ve wanted it to, but you need to be open to hear Him, the God of Truth, speaking. If we’ll open our hearts to receive the truth, whether we like it or not, we’ll hear Him.

We may be asking God to change our circumstances and He’s trying to tell us something that we need to do in order to change the circumstance. Too often we throw up our hands and say, "there’s nothing I can do, it’s all up to God." When in reality there’s nothing we want to do. There is a way, but often the way is not a path we want to take. So we just keep crying out to God, hoping for a miracle, when that may not be His best for us. God does do miracles and we thank Him for them. And God will do miracles to deliver us, even when it’s not His best for us, but then like Jesus said, "When the Son of man comes, will He find faith on the earth?" We want our faith to take us a certain way so we can avoid the uncomfortableness of the situation, when God’s plan may be for our faith to bring us through. Is our motive really to please Him in our faith, or to please ourselves by our faith?

It may seem that the things God is leading us to do have nothing to do with getting our prayers answered. We want to talk to God about this big problem and He’s talking to us about something else. We may think He’s ignoring our prayers, when in reality He is helping us by getting the lustful motivations out of our heart. He’s concerned about eternal things as they pertain to us, we have a tendency to get anxious and hung up on the temporal things. He knows better.

The next time you feel like God is not answering your prayers, ask yourselves if there is some solution that you are avoiding. Is there an answer there that you haven’t even considered because you just assumed that God would never ask you to do that? That just may be the answer He has for you. And when we follow the solution that He provides things will work out better than we could have ever imagined!