Scripture: 2 Samuel 12:13-23
As you may have heard, I have a vision for this church in 2024. It can be summarized in two words… “But God… [dot, dot, dot].” This means the following: I want us to be a people who continually looking to God for all the power, all the strength, all the courage, all the grace, all the love we need to live victoriously… in our lives, in our families, in our careers, and of course in our church. And since today’s sermon is about the power of prayer, it is especially fitting to emphasize this vision, “But God…”
And in today’s sermon on prayer, I want to talk about three different outcomes of prayer—and what they mean for us: Point Number One: when God says “yes.” Point Number Two: When God says “wait”—which sounds a lot like “no,” but we keep praying anyway. And Point Number Three: When God says “no”… But as I’ll show, even when God says “no,” that doesn’t mean prayer doesn’t work!
I want to begin by talking about Esther and Mordecai. Their story is found in the Book of Esther. If you have your Bibles—and you should—I invite you to turn to Esther chapter 4.Esther, you may recall, is a beautiful young Jewish girl living in exile alongside other Jews in Persia. Esther is an orphan. Her older cousin Mordecai takes her in as his adoptive daughter. Through a providential turn of events, Esther is selected by the Persian king, Xerxes, to be his wife. He doesn’t know she’s Jewish; she keeps her ethnic identity a secret.
The problem is, the king has signed a decree to destroy the Jewish people throughout his empire.
When Esther’s cousin, Mordecai, finds out about this evil plan, he sends a messenger to beg Esther to go to the king, to plead with the king to put a stop to this plan and save her people.
And Esther is terrified to do this. She explains to Mordecai that it’s against the law—even for the queen—to approach the king in his inner court without first being summoned. The king may have her executed just for attempting to talk to him in this way.
And Mordecai speaks these famous, fateful words to her, in Esther chapter 4, verses 13 and 14: “Don’t think for a moment that because you’re in the palace you will escape when all other Jews are killed. If you keep quiet at a time like this, deliverance and relief for the Jews will arise from some other place, but you and your relatives will die. Who knows if perhaps you were made queen for just such a time as this?” 1
In other words, Mordecai tells her, “God is going to save his people with you or without you; if it’s without you, you’ll probably die anyway. But it’s very possible,” he says, “that God has put you in this position, as queen, so that you would intervene and rescue your fellow Jews from destruction. Who knows?”
And what happens next?
Well… Esther summons her courage… “If I perish, I perish,” she says. She goes to the king’s throne room, she risks her life, and through her bold words and actions, she saves the day for herself and her fellow Jews.
At least that’s what we often remember. That’s what I oftenremember.
We tend to emphasize Esther’s bold actions and words… And we forget these two great words: “But God…”
By emphasizing Esther’s bold words and actions, we skip over three very important verses in between Mordecai’s words to Esther and Esther’s words to King Xerxes—which I want you to see in verses 15 through 17 of Esther chapter 4:
Then Esther sent this reply to Mordecai: “Go and gather together all the Jews of Susa and fast for me. Do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. My maids and I will do the same. And then, though it is against the law, I will go in to see the king. If I must die, I must die.” So Mordecai went away and did everything as Esther had ordered him.
So what did Esther do in between her conversation with Mordecai and her conversation with the king?
What she did was… only the most important thing of all…
She orders the entire Jewish population, through her cousin Mordecai, to do what? To pray. Yes, I know it says “fasting,” but in the Bible fasting always accompanies prayer. They always go hand-in-hand. When people in the Bible do their weightiest, most serious praying, we often see them accompany their prayers with fasting. Fasting has a way of sharpening our focus on God and sharpening our prayer life. When God’s people fast, they often find that their prayers become even more effective.
But my point today isn’t about fasting… I’m all for it, and I’m sure I’ll have an opportunity to talk more about fasting when we reach Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent… but my main point here is about prayer.
I am convicted by Mordecai’s words in verse 14: “If you keep silent at this time…” And of course, what he means is, “keeping silent” by Esther’s refusing to go to the king and plead the cause of her people.
But I don’t think most of us have Esther’s problem; we’re pretty good at talking… Words often come too easily to most of us… Our problem is not often a failure to be silent with our words… at least our words to one another. And we often hurt one another with words. See James’s warning about taming the tongue in James chapter 3…
Consider this: When we face a problem in life, what is the ratio of the words we direct to one another about the problem… versus the words we direct to God about the problem? If you know math, then you know that that number is probably very large. We want to reduce that ratio. Because unlike Esther, we use many more words directed at one another than at God in prayer!
No… I worry that God’s people today—including the people at Toccoa First Methodist, and including myself—I worry that we’re afflicted by a deeper kind of silence: the silence of too often refusing to speak to our one and only true King, our Father in heaven… the One who has all the power in the universe and beyond the universe to help us, to strengthen us, to give us patience, to give us courage, to give us deeper trust in him,to comfort us,to rescue us, to change our circumstances, to redeem unfavorable and harmful circumstances, to save us… Our Father has everything we need! Isaiah 59:1 says, “Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened that it cannot save, or his ear dull that it cannot hear.”
We need to be more like Esther… She first refuses to keep silent before God…
Before she summons the courage to go to Xerxes, the king of Persia, she summons the faith to go to God her King, the king of the universe, and tell him what she needs for him to do!
Let’s follow her example…
Her situation may have appeared bleak… and helpless… and hopeless…
But God…[dot, dot, dot].
At our Saturday planning session on January 6, I said that one of my goals for this year ahead is related to prayer. Before I got here, I heard that at one time there were prayer warriors that gathered in the chapel for prayer during our worship services—praying that God would do something powerful in the lives of people who had gathered for worship. Prayer warriors who worshiped at 8:30, for example, would agree to stay and pray during the 11:00 service and vice versa.
I don’t know when that stopped. Maybe before I got here… or maybe, like so many other things, Covid killed it off. I don’t know. But what I do know is that we are in no less need of prayer. I’m in no less need of prayer. Pastor April is in no less need of prayer. Ken, Kayla, Rich, and our youth and children’s interns are in no less need of prayer. Our congregation is in no less need of prayer. So this is an appeal to prayer warriors who want to take up the challenge. See me, or see Pastor April… Let’s talk about restarting that very important effort.
Speaking of the power of prayer, Christian writer and pastor Richard Foster has written some of the most convicting words I’ve read on the subject. In one of his books he tells the story of a young woman named Maria who was a student at the college where Foster was teaching. She fell out of the back of a pickup truck on campus and suffered severe head trauma. Foster, acting as her pastor, rode with her in the ambulance to the hospital, holding her hand and praying for her on the way, while the paramedics worked to save her life.
At the hospital, Foster gave a group of students who gathered there a crash course on intercessory prayer: “The brain is bleeding and swelling from the impact of the injury,” he said. “So our initial prayer efforts must focus on seeing the injured capillaries in the brain begin to heal and for the swelling of the brain to slow down.” 2 And that’s exactly what they prayed. And guess what? Maria got better! She was healed.
By contrast, Foster described an earlier prayer meeting for Maria with some of his fellow professors at the college. He said that they prayed things like, “It’s in your hands now, Lord; there’s nothing else we can do.” Or “Lord, help Maria to get well, if it be thy will.” Foster said that while he knew his colleagues meant well, their prayers betrayed the fact that they didn’t really believe that Maria would get better. 3
His point is, while it sounds pious to say “if it be thy will,” sometimes—not always, but sometimes—sometimes even these words may disguise the fact that we don’t really believe that God is going to do anything when we pray.
Even when these professors said, “Lord, it’s in your hands, there’s nothing else we can do”… they said it as if prayer wasn’t doing very much.
And all I can say to that is, the words of Jesus, along with the rest of scripture, disagree! Prayer isn’t the least we can do. Prayer is the most we can do… always… any time.
Those prayer warriors at our church who will gather to pray for us during our worship services are going to have to pray, first of all, believing that God is actually doing powerful things through their prayers, even when they see no visible signs that their prayers are working.
Because the Bible says that that will often be the case when God’s people pray… Do we give up, or do we keep praying?
And this brings us to Point Number Two… The Bible teaches us that it will often seem like God is saying “no” to our prayers, but we are supposed to keep praying anyway.
And this brings us finally to today’s scripture, and David, and his prayers and his fasting… If you’ve been following along in our “Journey Through the Bible” reading plan, when David confesses, in verse 13 of today’s scripture that he has sinned against the Lord, you might be forgiven for thinking that’s the understatement of a lifetime! Has he ever sinned!
In the previous chapter, during a time when David should have been fighting alongside his troops in a war with the Ammonites, he was instead lusting after the wife of one of his genuine friends… one of his most trusted allies… Uriah the Hittite. Uriah is identified elsewhere as one of David’s so-called “Thirty Mighty Men.” David’s actions are a terrible betrayal of trust on so many levels. He sleeps with Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba, and gets her pregnant. Now he has a problem: Uriah is off fighting a war. If Bathsheba turns up pregnant at this point Uriah will know that he’s not the father… and David’s sin will be exposed.
So David’s first plan is to call Uriah home from the front lines and try to get him to sleep with his wife—which Uriah refuses to do out of principle, while his fellow soldiers are off at war. David eventually arranges to put him in a hopeless situation on the front lines so that he will be killed. As the prophet Nathan reminds him earlier in Chapter 12, this is nothing less than cold-blooded murder.
David has sinned against God and many others—including his own infant son, who pays the ultimate price for his sin!
Here’s what ought to surprise us, however: The prophet Nathan tells David that his son will die—that God is taking his son’s life… as a consequence of David’s sin… And what does David do? He does the very same thing that Esther and Mordecai and her people do… He does the very same thing that Richard Foster and his college students do… Which is, instead of merely accepting his dire circumstances, instead of accepting what appears to be this worst case scenario, instead of acting as if there’s nothing he can do about it, David prays… and fasts—remember, those things often go together… And he does this for seven whole days… while the child remains alive.
You’ve probably heard it said that God always answers prayer. And that he either says, “Yes,” or “No,” or “Wait.”
While I agree that God always answers prayer, I don’t find this maxim very helpful… because how do you know when God says “wait” versus when God says “no”? It’s often difficult to distinguish one from the other.
In today’s scripture, we have a case in which David hears what seems to be a “no” directly from God. Because God speaks through the prophet Nathan—a man who has proven himself to David to be a genuine prophet who speaks for God… and Nathan says that God is going to take the life of David’s son… God seems to say “no” to David even before David starts praying… Yet David treats this “no” from God as a “wait.”
Isn’t that remarkable? David refuses to take God’s “no” for an answer. At least until that “no” becomes final on the seventh day, when his advisers reluctantly tell him that his child is dead!
People in scripture often refuse to take what appears to be God’s “no” and treat it like a “wait.”
And sometimes they’re justified in doing so!
If you don’t believe me, consider some of these examples: 1 Kings chapter 21… King Ahab… Remember, the wicked King Ahab and his equally wicked wife, Jezebel… They’re the ones who oppose the prophet Elijah. And God has finally had enough of Ahab. And God sends a message through Elijah to the king: “I will bring disaster on you and consume you. I will destroy every one of your male descendants, slave and free alike, anywhere in Israel!”4 It’s going to happen soon.
And Ahab, who the Bible identifies as the most wicked king of all, repents… at least a little bit, however imperfectly: 1 Kings 21:27: “But when Ahab heard this message, he tore his clothing, dressed in burlap, and fasted. He even slept in burlap and went about in deep mourning.” And then, in the very next verse, God gives Elijah another message: Verse 29: “Do you see how Ahab has humbled himself before me? Because he has done this, I will not do what I promised during his lifetime…”
This is an unbelievable statement of God’s grace: If God can show his grace and mercy to a sinner like Ahab when he repents, how much more will God show grace and mercy to his sons and daughters thorough faith in Christ—people like you and me?
But my main point is, even the prayers of wicked King Ahab changed what appeared to be God’s “no” into a “yes.”
Or how about later on, in 2 Kings 20… The prophet Isaiah sends a message from God to a relatively righteous king named Hezekiah: “This is what the Lord says: Set your affairs in order, for you are going to die. You will not recover from this illness.”
And Hezekiah prays… And God sends Isaiah to give him another message: Verse 5: “I have heard your prayer and seen your tears. I will heal you…”
Hezekiah’s prayers change what appears to be God’s “no” into a “yes.”
Or remember the prophet Jonah? He finally goes to the city of Nineveh and pronounces God’s judgment on the city: Jonah 3:4: “Forty days from now Nineveh will be destroyed.”5 There’s no ifs, ands, or buts… It’s going to happen, God says.
And the people repent and pray and fast—on an epic scale—and God relents from punishing them. And we learn in chapter 4 that the very reason that Jonah refuses to go to Nineveh in the first place is because he suspected God was going to turn around and show them mercy instead!
The point is, the people of Nineveh refuse to take what appears to be God’s “no” for an answer… And God changes what appears to be his “no” into a “yes.”
The lesson here is about persistence in prayer: even when we pray, and God isn’t giving us what we pray for, and we feel like giving up, and things look hopeless, we remember, “But God… [dot, dot, dot]. God may intend for us to keep on wrestling with him…
How quickly do we often give up in our prayers?
David, to his credit, is persistent… Maybe, just maybe, what seems like a “no” from God… will become a “yes.” As David himself tells his advisers, “I fasted and wept while the child was alive, for I said, ‘Perhaps the Lord will be gracious to me and let the child live.’”
But… In this case, unlike with Ahab, Hezekiah, and the people of Nineveh, God still told David “no.”
What are we supposed to learn about prayer when God says “no”?
This is Point Number Three…
Are we supposed to learn that when God says “no,” somehow our “prayers didn’t work”?
God forbid! Why? Because David’s prayers did work!
Why do I say that? Because we have the equivalent of a prayer journal that David wrote while he was on the ground praying and fasting for these seven days. And that journal is called Psalm 51. The preface to the psalm explains that David wrote it when “Nathan the prophet came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba.” And listen to some of its words:
Have mercy on me, O God,
because of your unfailing love.
Because of your great compassion,
blot out the stain of my sins.
Wash me clean from my guilt.
Purify me from my sin.
For I recognize my rebellion;
it haunts me day and night.
Against you, and you alone, have I sinned;
I have done what is evil in your sight.
You will be proved right in what you say,
and your judgment against me is just… 6
Create in me a clean heart, O God.
Renew a loyal spirit within me.
Do not banish me from your presence,
and don’t take your Holy Spirit from me.Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and make me willing to obey you… 7
You do not desire a sacrifice, or I would offer one.
You do not want a burnt offering.The sacrifice you desire is a broken spirit.
You will not reject a broken and repentant heart, O God. 8
How many of God’s people throughout the millennia have been helped by these profound words of confession, of repentance, of God’s grace, mercy, and steadfast love… which David simply was not in a position to write before he had this experience… and before he fell on his face in prayer for seven days?
David sinned in spectacular ways—to be sure—but Psalm 51 is tangible proof—it’s documentary evidence—of the fact that God has the power to take the very worst, most sinful things we do, and transform even them and use even them for our good… and for the good of others!
Which means—good news!—there’s hope for you and me… You’re not worse than David! I’m not worse than David!
So we shouldn’t read today’s scripture and feel disappointment that—unlike in the case of Esther and Mordecai and Ahab and Hezekiah and the people of Nineveh—unlike in their cases—prayer didn’t work for David!
On the contrary… David’s prayers worked… even if the work that God did was invisible to David’s advisers, and servants, and family, and subjects, and enemies…David was healed through his prayers. God healed David through his prayers. David prayed,and God gave David what he needed… It’s just that what he needed went far beyond anything that David asked for. The very fact that on the seventh day, when David learns that God has taken his infant son to heaven, David is able to get off the ground—to get dressed, to get cleaned up, to eat, and to resume his work of running his kingdom… these things are evidence that God gave David what he needed… God healed him… spiritually… And David will be better prepared, better equipped in the future to handle whatever trials and crises and challenges and problems come his way…
And it’s all because David prayed…
So that’s my encouragement to you…
It’s likely that some of you come here on Sunday, you look at your neighbor sitting near you and think, “I wish I could be like him or her! That person has got it together, unlike me. That person doesn’t have to struggle, unlike me.”
But you know that’s not true, right? Every single one of us needs continued spiritual healing. Every single one of us needs to trust in God more deeply. Every single one of us needs to treasure Christ more deeply.
How does this happen? What’s the solution to our problem?
Let’s take a cue from David and the other saints of the Bible…
And let’s pray.
And even when we pray our hearts out… and God still says “no”… We remember two important words: “But God…”
Even when God tells us “no,” he’s working in powerful ways. Amen.