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As a church in 2010, we are focusing on Scripture memory the last Sunday of every month. I will be preaching on the memory verse for the month, and there will be an opportunity for testimony later. This month’s focus has been on prayer, which has always been a difficult subject for me to preach on, because there is such mystery. We are talking to someone we can’t see, of course, and we are asking for things that we sometimes receive and sometimes do not. The Bible passages on prayer don’t necessarily help clear up the mystery either. Case in point, take our memory verse for the month, which is John 15:7 – “If you remain in me, and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be given you.” Taken at face value, most of us hear a promise that if we can just find the right relationship with God, the vaults of heaven will open to us and we will receive whatever we ask for in prayer. And there are others like it:

Matthew 7:7-8 "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. ⁸ For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.

Matthew 21:22 If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer."

Obviously Jesus wants us to ask boldly, to believe in faith that God wants to give us what we ask for. The challenge is that many of us have done that, prayed fervently and in faith for things that were really important to us, only to see our prayers go unanswered. There are few things more heartbreaking and challenging to our faith than unanswered prayer. To pour yourself out in prayer for a sick child, only to watch him die. To plead with God for a friend or loved one to find God, only to watch that prayer go unanswered. Maybe intellectually we know that it’s not that simple. Sure – we all know that if everyone who prayed to win the lottery won it, the payout would be like 25 cents each. And we know that everyone eventually dies, so our prayers for healing can’t all come true. But each of us have some prayers that really matter, that don’t feel selfish, that seem to be according to His will. How do you explain John 15:7, in the light of the reality we experience?

And so this subject is hard to preach on. On the one hand, I want to exhort you to pray audacious prayers, to be bold and full of faith. And I know that some of you have experienced incredible answers to prayer, unexplainable apart from the hand of God. And on the other hand, I know that I am speaking to people who have experience the heartbreak of unanswered prayer and the questions about the goodness of God that arise as a result.