Why Doesn’t God Answer Some Prayers? — Edwards on the Affections
⏱ 11 min read
You did not arrive at this question lightly. The phrase why doesn’t God answer my prayers is not the search of the curious. It is the search of a woman who has been keeping a list — silent or written — of the asks she has brought faithfully, over months, sometimes years, that have come back to her as a closed door, or a wall, or worse, a long unbroken silence. You have prayed the prayer. You have prayed it well. You have prayed it in the right posture, with the right scripture underneath, in the way the books taught you. And the answer has not come.
This is a slow read, not an answer-key. The work you are inside of is older than the modern devotional shelf, and the saints who walked it before you left their notes. Jonathan Edwards in particular — a man who watched a generation of New England seekers misread the silence of God in the 1740s — wrote one of the more honest pieces of pastoral theology the church has on what the unanswered prayer is actually doing. The slow practice you are about to walk has its 140-day form in the Prayer Journal for Women, which is the daily home for the kind of asking this essay describes; the essay itself will only walk three of Edwards’s passages, slowly, and let them say what they came to say.
If you have been searching for how to start a prayer journal because the prayers you are bringing have started to feel unmoored, you are in the right place. The mooring Edwards offers is not faster prayer. It is a slower reading of what prayer is for in the first place.
The first thing Edwards will not let you assume
Edwards begins his pastoral work — Religious Affections and the sermons of the same period — from a position most modern devotionals will not begin from. He assumes, before he addresses the unanswered prayer at all, that the human heart is a deeply confused organ about what it actually wants. The woman who is asking why doesn’t God answer my prayers is, in Edwards’s reading, asking a question with a hidden premise inside it — the premise that she knows exactly what she has been asking for, and that the asking is clean, and that the only variable in the equation is God’s response.
Edwards will not let you keep that premise. He starts further back. Listen to him from the Select Sermons:
“This your practice shows, that you place not your happiness in God, in nearness to him, and communion with him.”
— Jonathan Edwards, Select Sermons
Read the sentence twice. It is short. It is doing more than it looks like it is doing.
Edwards is naming, in one line, the diagnostic question that sits underneath the unanswered-prayer question. He is not saying the unanswered prayer means you are bad at praying. He is saying the unanswered prayer is, sometimes, the kindest way God has of asking you what you are actually praying for. Because the asks themselves — the healing, the job, the husband, the child, the diagnosis reversed, the door opened — are not, in themselves, your happiness. Your happiness is nearness to Him. The asks are the surface. The nearness is the soil underneath. And the woman who has been bringing the asks faithfully for years has, sometimes without knowing it, been asking for the surface and assuming the soil would tend itself.
This is not a rebuke. Edwards is not the pastor who gets angry at the praying woman. He is the pastor who has noticed that the unanswered prayer, in the lives of the women he most respects, is often a long quiet way of God redirecting the asking down — from the surface gift to the deeper communion the surface gift was, all along, supposed to be the door into.
Sit with that for a moment. The question you came to this page with — why doesn’t God answer some prayers — is, in Edwards’s frame, possibly already being answered. Not in the way you wanted. In a slower way that is, when it is eventually visible, the more loving way.
A small thing for the body, before the next passage
Notice the shoulders. They have probably been carrying the weight of the unanswered prayer for longer than you noticed. The chest is tight. The jaw is set. You have been holding the waiting the way a person holds a breath they did not know they were holding.
Let them drop by an inch. Not to perform peace — the dryness is real and the prayers are still unanswered — but to give the body one minute of not being the carrier of the wait by itself. Press both feet flat to the floor. Let one slow inhale come in, and one slow exhale go out. The next passage is here when you are ready.
The second thing Edwards names — the ingratitude underneath
This one is harder. Edwards, in the same body of sermons, walks the reader to a sentence most of us would prefer not to be walked to:
“God, notwithstanding this ingratitude, has still continued his mercy; but his kindness has never won your heart, or brought you to a more grateful behaviour towards him.”
— Jonathan Edwards, Select Sermons
You will want to set this one down quickly. Do not. Edwards is not accusing you of being ungrateful in the surface sense. He is naming a deeper pattern, which the unanswered-prayer season tends to reveal — that the prayers we bring are often built on a quiet contract we have not noticed we made. The contract reads: if You answer this, I will be more grateful, more present, more devoted. The contract assumes the answer is the precondition for the gratitude. Edwards is saying — gently, in pastoral tone — that the contract has the order backwards.
The unanswered prayer, in his frame, is sometimes God refusing to sign the contract. Not because He does not love you. Because the contract would teach you the wrong thing. The contract would teach you that God’s love is the response to the ask, instead of the posture underneath the ask. The contract would let you finish the prayer, get the answer, and walk away — slightly more devoted than before but still ultimately the woman who comes to God for the gifts and leaves when the gifts are delivered.
Edwards does not want that woman. More importantly, the woman herself, if she sat with it honestly, does not want that woman either. She wants the kind of nearness in which the gift is incidental and the Giver is the centre. The unanswered prayer is sometimes the slow apprenticeship into that wanting.
This is the viral line of Edwards on this question, if there is one — the unanswered prayer is sometimes the answered one, because the answer was never the gift; the answer was the deeper desire for God that the unanswered season is quietly carving in you. The answer is happening. It is just not the answer the surface ask was looking for.
The slow home for this kind of asking
If you are the woman who has been bringing the same ask for two years, and you are now sitting with the possibility that Edwards is describing your prayer life with uncomfortable accuracy — there is a practical home for what to do next. The Prayer Journal for Women is built, day by day, for this slower kind of asking — a place for the surface ask to be honestly named, and a place underneath it for the deeper communion to be slowly cultivated, so the two are no longer competing for the same minute.
It is not a journal that promises answered prayer. It is a journal that walks a woman gently from the contract-prayer Edwards describes into the nearness-prayer Edwards is pointing her toward — over a hundred and forty days of small, scripture-anchored returns. The format is what this essay is, made daily. (If the surface asks have piled up to a point that they no longer feel safe to write — the embarrassing ones, the ones you have not even told a friend — a daily prayer journal that holds the asks you’re embarrassed to pray is the companion essay for the prayers that have grown small from being whispered too long.)
The third passage — the rational knowledge that is not the answer either
There is one more passage from Edwards worth slowing for. The woman whose prayers seem unanswered will, at some point in the dry stretch, attempt to reason her way to peace. She will read more theology. She will study more scripture. She will read the saints. She will accumulate, over months, what Edwards calls a rational knowledge of divine things. And the rational knowledge will be real — it will give her better categories, better language, better arguments against her own doubt. But it will not, by itself, hand her the nearness she came for. Edwards saw this happen often enough to write about it directly:
“The more you have of a rational knowledge of divine things, the more opportunity will there be, when the Spirit shall be breathed into your heart, to see the excellency of these things, and to taste the sweetness of them.”
— Jonathan Edwards, Select Sermons
Read this one slowly. Edwards is not dismissing the rational knowledge. He is naming what it is for. The rational knowledge is not the answer. It is the opportunity for the answer. It is the prepared ground that the Spirit, when He moves, has more to work with. The woman who has spent two years studying her unanswered prayer has not wasted those two years — she has been building the field the eventual nearness will plant itself in.
This reframes the whole season. The dry stretch in which the prayers are not being answered is, in Edwards’s reading, also the stretch in which the soil is being deepened. The studying you have done. The reading you have done. The small daily presence with scripture you have kept up even on the days you did not feel like it. None of that is wasted. None of it is irrelevant. It is the opportunity — the prepared ground that, when the Spirit moves, has more depth for the moving to happen in.
This does not mean the answer is coming next Tuesday. It means the wait is not nothing. The wait is doing real work. The woman who emerges from this stretch — and you will, eventually, emerge from this stretch — will not be the same woman who entered it. She will be a woman with a slower, deeper, more durable nearness, because the wait did the deepening the answered prayers would not have done.
(If the wait has worn you to the point that you cannot feel the standard devotionals any longer — they have stopped landing, the pages feel thin — a daily devotional for today (when the standard one has stopped landing) is the companion read for the woman whose usual reading has gone quiet, the same way her prayers have. And if the unanswered prayer has any active spiritual warfare around it — patterns, repeated obstacles, the sense that something is contending — the war room prayer strategy, the slow, personal version walks the slow form of that practice without the Hollywood urgency.)
What Edwards is not saying
Before this essay closes, it is worth naming what Edwards is not saying — because his theology gets misread on this point regularly.
He is not saying every unanswered prayer is a sign of misordered desire. Some prayers go unanswered for reasons we will not see this side of the grave, and Edwards would be the first to admit that. He is not saying the ask itself was wrong — the healing you have been praying for, the relationship you have been praying for, the child you have been praying for, is not, in his frame, a bad ask. He is naming a pattern, not a rule. The pattern is that the unanswered season tends, over time, to deepen the woman who walks it faithfully — and that the deepening is itself, sometimes, the answer the surface ask was a doorway into.
He is also not saying you should stop asking. The Psalmist did not stop asking. Jesus in Gethsemane did not stop asking. The asking is part of the relationship. What Edwards is asking you to do is let the asking change shape. Let the ask become smaller and the wanting-of-God become larger. Let the contract become a posture. Let the surface gift, if it comes, be received with surprise and joy — and if it does not come, let the nearness that was being built underneath be received as the real answer.
The sentence to keep near the page
If you take one line from Edwards into the rest of this week, take this one — the unanswered prayer is sometimes the answered one. Not as a slogan. As a slow companion. Write it on the small piece of paper you keep by the kettle. Read it on the morning the same ask comes up again. Let it sit underneath the prayer you are about to pray.
The asking will go on. The wait may continue. But the wait will not be empty. The wait is the slow opportunity Edwards described — the prepared ground for the Spirit, when He moves, to do the deeper thing the surface ask was the early door into.
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A companion for the asking that is being slowly reshaped
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women. A page each day — a place for the surface ask, a place for the deeper wanting underneath, a verse pre-printed, and the small structure that Edwards’s pastoral counsel asks of a woman in this stretch. Built for the woman whose prayers have not been answered the way she expected, and who is ready to let the asking be slowly deepened into the nearness it was always the early door into.
(If the cluster of saints on this question is part of what you are walking with right now, the companion essays are what to pray when you don’t know what to pray — Spurgeon’s counsel and how to pray when God feels far — Augustine’s Confessions pattern. Edwards is one voice in the long conversation; Spurgeon and Augustine are the other two this cluster walks slowly through.)
