In the thirty-plus years I have served as a pastor, I have heard many, many believers express doubt over God’s real love or concern for them and sometimes their anger at God when they believed he had let them down. Most of that doubt came from feelings of abandonment over prayers they perceived as unanswered and, perhaps, unheard. Maybe it was the divorce of parents when he or she was a child or the death of a loved one after praying for healing. Perhaps, it was the unfulfilled dream of a marriage and children that an individual had prayed for but which had not materialized. For others it was a tragedy that, in their mind, God should have prevented but didn’t. In each case, a prayer or a season of prayer went unanswered in regard to something that they assumed God controlled or which they assumed was the single key in life to their happiness.

There is no doubt that at some point we will all have to wrestle with the experience of a significant prayer that has seemingly gone unanswered. How we respond to that moment is significant and often sets a course for our spiritual life. It is our fallen nature or our un-renewed mind that assumes God does not truly care about us when a dream of ours does not come to pass in the time frame or in the form we have set in our own hearts.

The first sin was predicated on the suggestion that God did not fully care for Adam and Eve and that he was selfishly withholding the best from them. Satan’s opening gambit with Eve was a suggestion that God was not really as generous as he pretended to be. Remember the question? “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’” (Gen.3:1).   Satan said that with a tone suggesting that he knew God and it would not surprise him to find God keeping the best things from others. Notice that the question implies that God was stingy by nature and unwilling for Adam and Eve to have many good things in the Garden that would contribute to their well-being and happiness. Eve correctly replied that they could eat of any tree except one – the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil – but if they ate of that one tree, they would die.

Satan then called God a liar when he declared that Adam and Eve would not actually die if they ate of that tree but would become as wise as God. He suggested that the greatest blessing in the Garden was in that tree and the blessing was shrouded by God’s lies. The implication was that God’s denial of the tree to them was costing them the one thing that would make life everything it should be. Satan planted the belief in Eve’s heart that God did not care for her nearly as much as he claimed and was quite willing to withhold “true happiness” from her and her husband. Eve, then, went her own way, ate from the tree, and brought disaster on us all.

The challenge is that our fallen nature or the natural man seems to always gravitate toward that view…even when the Spirit of God lives within us. There is a maxim in the counseling world that says we become angry whenever a person or a circumstance seems to block our goal. When God doesn’t always act as we have suggested through our prayers, our response is often anger at him which results in us carrying an offense toward God – sometimes for years.

It’s not that we end our relationship with God. We just don’t trust him anymore like a spouse who stays married, but simply doesn’t trust the other spouse to act in his or her best interest. When you carry that offense, it is hard to have joy, pray for anything with faith, or risk anything because you are not sure how much God really cares. When prayers go unanswered we can quickly default to the “God doesn’t really love me” mode and distance ourselves from him. Nearly all of us run the risk of falling into that mindset and, I believe that the only safeguard is to spend a considerable amount of time mediating on who God is apart from an experience of disappointment with God.

We’ve all heard the expression. “God is good – all the time.” We may be quick to say amen to that in a conversation but in our hearts we often doubt the truth of that. The key is found in knowing the heart of God and using that knowledge as a lens through which we can view his actions or inactions. We often look at God’s actions or inaction through a different lens – our desires, rather than through a conviction about the heart of God. Let’s face it, even as adults, we can be like children whose perception of whether a parent loves them or not is based simply on whether or not those parents always give them what they want. Any good parent has withheld some request from a child because in the parent’s wisdom they knew that what that child wanted more than anything was not in his or her best interest – although the child could not and would not see it that way.

If children truly believed that their parents loved them with all their hearts and always acted in their best interest (which is the definition of agape love), then they might be disappointed or not understand but would not distance themselves from the parent or begin to distrust them for a lifetime.

In our Bible reading we often look at the broad actions of God and interpret God’s heart through those actions rather than understanding his actions through the lens of his heart. I often find a clue to God’s heart in a verse or two imbedded in a big story and can miss the clues altogether if not careful. For instance, in the Book of Judges there is story after story of Israel turning her back on God and pursuing idols and massive, national immorality. After years of persistent rebellion God would allow another nation to oppress them as discipline in order to draw them back to himself. One verse opens the window on God’s heart in Judges 10:16 where the text says, “Then they got rid of the foreign gods among them and served the Lord. And he could bear Israel’s misery no longer.”

Even though Israel had rebelled again and again and shown disdain for the God who had brought them out of Egypt, the verse reveals that God’s heart hurt with them in the midst of their suffering – even though they had brought in on themselves. God is not distant and uncaring. He loves his children and, more than anything, wants to bless them. When their own actions create misery or demand discipline, he suffers with them just as a parent suffers when they see the awful state of their drug addicted son or daughter.

In 1 Chronicles 15, David had sinned and as the King of Israel had brought judgment on the nation. The Bible says, “And God sent an angel to destroy Jerusalem. But as the angel was doing so, the Lord saw it and was grieved because of the calamity and said to the angel who was destroying the people, “Enough! Withdraw your hand.” Again, even when the actions of his people demanded judgment, the heart of God was moved by their suffering. His heart breaks with every death, every lash of a slave whip, and every beating at the hands of the enemy. In a chapter on judgment to come, the Lord says, “For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign Lord. Repent and live!” (Ezek.18:32).

In the Old Testament we tend to view God as harsh and merciless because entire tribes were wiped out at his command and disasters were released by his word. But what we miss is the love of God protecting the bloodline of Christ from Israel’s enemies so that the entire world might be saved and the accumulated years of God calling nations to repentance through his prophets so that his judgments might be averted. When you read the fine print, you discover that God always went to extraordinary lengths to avoid judging nations and never took pleasure in the death of even the wicked – because he loves even the wicked.

In the New Testament the cross is the ultimate window into God’s heart. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us and Jesus himself said that whoever sees him sees the Father. We always see Jesus as kind and loving. He says that God the Father is exactly the same. God is good and loves each of us all the time. We can pray with hope and confidence because he loves us. Because he loves us he hears us and we can also pray with confidence that God will bring good things to us in time or will say no to the things that would endanger our faith and souls as any good father would. It is through that lens that we must view God’s activity or inactivity in our lives. We may not understand but we can still trust. You must know that before you pray or a loving “No” or delay may give offense when thanksgiving was the appropriate response.

When John the Baptist found himself in prison, he sent men to ask Jesus if he were really the Messiah. He asked because Jesus wasn’t bringing salvation to the world in ways that made sense to John. Jesus replied, “Blessed in he who takes no offense in me.” When God doesn’t act in response to our prayers as we expected, we must not take offense in him either. Being certain about the heart of the Father allows us to rest in his goodness, even when nothing around us make sense.