Sunday Service 28th September

alvaparishchurch
6 days ago
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Updated: 5 days ago

Unanswered Prayers/Harvest

28/9/25

Call to worship

Hymn 174: God of great and God of small

Time for all

Hymn 493: It’s me; it’s me, O Lord

Reading: 2 Samuel 12: 15b-23

Prayer

Hymn 63: All people that on earth do dwell

Sermon

Prayer

Presentation of Long Service Certificates

Hymn 473: Thy Kingdom come

Benediction

Welcome to our meditation for 28^th of September.

This is our last reflection on prayer.

We have looked at prayers of complaint, prayers the others and prayers of thanksgiving.

We conclude today with the hardest of topics, unanswered prayer, or prayers that we feel are unanswered.

And the reading we use is an example of unanswered prayer.

Opening prayer

God of truth,

you know the cries we speak aloud and the ones we carry silently. More than that, you are a God who cares enough to listen.

Today, we bring before you the needs of the world and the needs of our own hearts.

We especially pray for those whose prayers feel unanswered:

for the sick waiting for healing,

for the lonely longing for connection,

for the grieving aching for what once was.

Be near to them, O God.

Let your presence be their shelter when answers do not come.

We pray for those living through war and displacement,

whose cries for peace and safety rise day after day.

We do not understand why suffering endures, but we ask you to move through those

who work for justice, who care for the wounded, who do not give up on peace.

Let your Spirit be present in every act of mercy.

We lift up those who carry burdens no one else sees;

mental illness, hidden grief, silent fear, persistent doubt.

We pray for this community and for ourselves:

for the questions we carry,

for the wounds we are still tending,

for the prayers we have stopped praying because hope felt too heavy.

Remind us that you are not a God who waits for perfect faith, but one who meets us in our humanity.

Teach us how to hold space for one another, without fixing, without rushing, without judgment.

Help us become people who can stay even in hard times, and who trust in unending love.

Soften our hearts, stretch our compassion, and keep us grounded in your mystery and your mercy.

Our Father,

Which art in heaven,

Hallowed be thy Name.

Thy kingdom come,

Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread,

And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil;

For thine is the Kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever.

Amen.

Sermon

I am going to start with a huge generalization; there are two types of unanswered prayers; the one we care about, and the ones we are not bothered about.

There are the ones we don’t care about,

the ones where we pray to God that the weather be nice the next day because we are having a barbeque,

and as it turns out the rains pour out the skies,

but also, as it turns out, no one bothers because the barbeque was just an excuse to get together and they still get together in the house and bond over moaning about the bad weather.

No one remembers those unanswered prayers.

And then there are the unanswered prayers that we care about, the ones about things that really matter to us.

The child that goes missing and we pray that they are found safe.

The war in Gaza or Ukraine or Sudan and the prayers that there may be peace.

Our marriage that is struggling and we pray that it might find healing and reconciliation.

This is a serious problem.

Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative Party, said that she lost her faith in God after reading about the abuse caused by Josef Fritzl, a father who imprisoned and raped his daughter Elisabeth for 24 years.

Kemi Badenoch said, “She prayed every day to be rescued, and I thought, ‘I was praying for all sorts of stupid things . . . why were those prayers answered, and not this woman’s prayers?’”.

Unanswered prayers are something we have to face.

And the temptation, the temptation is for preachers like me to have some kind of trite answer to justify God, defend God.

And then I can go home feeling that I have defended God, and you can go home believing that your faith is safe...until you have to face your own unanswered prayer or the unanswered prayer of someone you care about.

The thing is, there is no ‘answer’ to unanswered prayer.

It’s like scientists in the 60s and 70s telling us that they will find a cure for cancer.

Now a days we would say, ‘which cancer, and which variant of which cancer’.

There is no single cure for cancer, there are a multitude of treatments, which becomes more complicated when we have to take into consideration that some treatments that work well on one human being, may not work at all on another.

Let’s take our passage today.

It acknowledges that part of the problem is that we live in a very messy and complicated world.

We have the King David, who has an affair with Bathsheba who is married to one of the kings soldiers Uriah.

Bathsheba discovers she is pregnant and David tried initially to cover it and make it look as if it is Uriah’s child.

When that doesn’t work it threatens to create a scandal where David looks bad,

so David arranges for Uriah to be killed in battle and then he marries Bathsheba to legitimize the child.

Then that child becomes ill after it is born.

David prays for the child but it dies.

Everything about this is messy.

So why did God not answer that prayer?

The theologian’s that wrote the book of 2^nd Samuel would be very sure about the answer.

You mess with God’s laws and there are consequences.

God is a God of justice and purity who rightly punishes those who go against his just laws.

Just before this passage David has been confronted by Nathan the prophet who has told him that what David had done to Uriah was evil, and although God was willing to forgive David because he admitted his guilt, the child that was the result of that sin would die.

In the book of Job, which looks at a man called Job that has terrible things happen to him, and God seems very quiet through it all,

well Job has four friends come round and basically argue that every bad thing that has happened to Job is deserved, it is some wrong that he has done.

The reason bad things happen to us, the reason God doesn’t not save us, is that actions have consequences and if we do wrong, then bad things happen because of that.

And there is a truth there.

But it is not the whole truth, and it is not everyone’s truth.

If I did something horrible to Roseanna, if I had an affair for years and years, and kept it from her;

she thought I was always busy because I was doing God’s work and the reality was I had sacrificed our relationship, sacrificed her love, for an affair.

God might forgive me,

Roseanna in her graciousness, might even forgive me.

But that might not save the marriage, and that would be the prayer I was asking for.

It might not save my relationships with my children or grandchildren.

Sometimes the things we do, or the things other people do, have consequences we don’t like. Maybe sometimes there is a punishment that God gives us...or a consequence to an action that we have committed.

Others might find that a bit hard.

They might answer that sometimes God doesn’t answer in the way we want because there is a lesson to be learnt.

That in this case David had an opportunity to grow. The pain of the suffering was needed for David to face what he did and change his character. There is no doubt that before Nathan the prophet confronted David that David thought that he had got away with it and everything was fine.

And if everything carried on then David would keep on acting the way he was, in fact he might even get worse, he was going down a slippery slope that was getting steeper and steeper where he treated all people as his possessions to do with what he wanted and have no accountability.

Instead good came from those unanswered prayers.

And there is a truth there.

But it is not the whole truth, and it is not everyone’s truth.

There was a family in Kings Park, they weren’t evil or anything, but they were indifferent to the plight of others, they had a comfortable life and spent most of their life trying to maintain that comfort.

Until their son was in a terrible accident and ended up in a coma.

At that point there was no head injury unit in Scotland and by the time they got him an appointment in England the damage was permanent.

They then worked tirelessly for a head injury unit in Scotland.

So much good came from their struggles.

Maybe sometimes God can use suffering for good.

Others might struggle to see that.

They might argue that God has answered the prayers, with a direct, ‘NO’,

and we just don’t, want to see it.

We are like children who want sweets now, and God is a parent that realises that isn’t good for us, that we need a balanced diet so that we grow up to be healthy adults.

We just don’t see that as children, but later we will understand and be thankful.

And there is a truth there.

But it is not the whole truth, and it is not everyone’s truth.

When I was trying to become a minister I was unemployed for a year; I couldn’t get a full time charge anywhere.

And I was praying for a charge, my parents were praying for me to get a charge, good friends were praying for me to find a charge.

But I was stuck unemployed for a year.

Two things...I quickly realised that that year gave me another years experience as a preacher that I desperately needed.

I ended up a year later going to Castlemilk, where I met Roseanna, and that would never have happened if my prayers had been answered when I wanted them to.

Which brings us on to the last truth, the one that really does matter.

Because all these academic reasons for unanswered prayers,

and other academic reasons that are out there;

are all very good when we are sitting in the safety of church on a Sunday morning.

But when we are facing those unanswered prayers, when we are struggling, it really does us no good trying to rationalise what is going on.

They might help years later when we are reflecting on what has happened and see a bigger picture, but when we are in the midst of our troubles, or our family or friends are in the midst of their troubles, academic theories don’t help.

There is one truth that hopefully does help.

And that is the one thing that David gets right in our passage.

As many of you will know...I am not a great fan of David, I don’t think he is a good human being at all.

The way he treated his wives, his children, his friends...he would sacrifice them all for ambition.

What was worse he felt God condoned his actions because he had been chosen by God to be king, and he rarely questioned what type of king God wanted him to be.

But in this moment David got it right.

In this moment David believed that no matter what he was going through, God hadn’t deserted him.

God still cared for him,

as God still cared for the child that had died,

as God still cared for Bathsheba,

as God still cared for Uriah.

This is a truth, and it is a whole truth, everyone’s truth.

The one truth that we all need to cling onto.

No matter what we do, no matter what our motives,

no matter what happens to us that is unexpected or undeserved,

no matter how confusing or terrifying our future looks,

God still cares for us, and we need to remember that,