He Prayed for One Person and Got Nothing Back

He is not somebody who asks for things. That is the part that has to be understood or none of it makes sense.

He has never asked for a job. He has never asked about money. He would find both of those slightly embarrassing and he could not tell you exactly why.

There was one thing. One, in his whole adult life, and he asked for it properly, for about five months, in a way he had never done anything else.

It did not happen.

And what has settled since is not that he has stopped believing God is there. He does believe that, and would say so, and is not being polite about it. What has settled is a quiet conclusion that whatever the arrangement is, it does not include asking, and that he tried the one door and found out.

John puts the love and the delay in one sentence

There is a chapter in John where somebody sends for Jesus about a dying friend, and what happens next is written in a very deliberate order.

Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus. When he had heard therefore that he was sick, he abode two days still in the same place where he was. (John 11:5-6, King James Version)

Read the joint in the middle of that. When he had heard therefore.

Therefore is a word that connects a cause to an effect. John puts the loving first, then therefore, then the two days of not coming.

He could have written it any other way. He could have said, although He loved them, He stayed. That would have been the natural sentence and it is not the one he wrote.

You are not looking at absence dressed up as a reason. John 11 joins the love and the delay with a causal word on purpose, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a piece of sentence construction do something to five months of asking.

Both of them said the same thing to His face

When He arrives it is too late by every measure anybody had, and the two sisters, separately, say the same sentence.

Then said Martha unto Jesus, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died. (John 11:21)

If thou hadst been here.

Mary says it too, four verses later, almost word for word, and John records both.

That is an accusation, said to His face, twice, by two people who loved Him.

And He does not correct either of them. There is no rebuke in that chapter, and there is no explanation about the two days offered to anybody in it.

You are permitted to say the sentence they both said. John 11 records the accusation twice and no correction anywhere, and it is His Spirit who makes an unrebuked sentence feel like permission.

And then there are two words

The most surprising thing in the chapter is not the raising.

Jesus wept. (John 11:35)

Two words. The shortest verse in the collection.

He knows what He is about to do. He is minutes from it, and He is not weeping out of uncertainty, because that is not available as an explanation given what happens next.

He weeps standing next to people whose one ask did not come back in time.

Whatever the two days were, they were not indifference, and the tears are the evidence rather than an explanation.

You are stood next to by somebody who wept before He acted. John 11 puts the tears in a scene where they were not required, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes two words carry what a paragraph could not.

Paul asked three times and did not get it

There is a case where the ask was clear, repeated, and refused.

For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. (2 Corinthians 12:8-9)

Three times. And the answer is no.

That is a man with more access than most people in the collection, asking properly about a real thing, and being told no.

And the answer he gets is not an explanation. It is a sentence about where strength comes from, and he writes it down and carries it for the rest of his life.

You are not outside the arrangement because one thing was refused. 2 Corinthians 12 records the asking and the refusal without treating either as a failure, and it is His Spirit who makes an unanswered request stop reading as a ruling.

And the psalm keeps the unanswered part in

There is a line in Psalm 22 that describes exactly this and got kept.

O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent. (Psalm 22:2)

But thou hearest not.

That is in the songbook. Somebody wrote it, somebody kept it, somebody set it to music, and people sang it in a public gathering.

And the first line of that same psalm is the one Jesus says out loud from the cross, which means the words of a man whose asking got nothing were in His mouth at the end.

You are holding words that ended up in His own mouth. Psalm 22 keeps the unanswered crying in the collection and Jesus quotes its opening line, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that connection land on a man who asked once.