What Do You Do When God Doesn’t Answer Your Prayers

When a prayer has gone unanswered for years, the hardest part is often the next prayer. Do you ask again? Do you soften the request so it hurts less? Do you quietly stop? This guide works through two passages that answer by example. In Psalm 13, David prays inside a silence he cannot explain. In Gethsemane, the Son of God asks for something and does not receive it. Neither passage tells you why your prayer is still open. Both show you how faithful people kept praying anyway.

You can use this guide alone over a week or with a group over one or two meetings. Read each passage before you read the comments on it. The observation prompts are there to slow you down. The practice and the discussion questions near the end are where the reading becomes prayer. Nothing here asks you to share more than you choose to.

Start with what makes the silence hard

In a Jude 3 Project conversation with author Jennifer Lucy Tyler, Lisa Fields named the particular ache of unanswered prayer: “the pain of just feeling like, God, you can do this.” The trouble is not that God seems weak. He seems able, and he still does not act. Tyler lived with that question through about ten years of what doctors called unexplained infertility. She lives with it now as she walks with her mother through metastatic breast cancer that returned in 2021.

Keep that sentence from Lisa Fields in front of you as you read. Both prayers in this guide come from people who believe God can do what they are asking. That belief is exactly what gives their prayers their shape.

Reading Psalm 13: the shape of an honest prayer

Read all six verses aloud before going further. Psalm 13 is poetry, written to be prayed as much as studied, and its heading in the KJV assigns it to David. Then look again with these prompts.

• Count how many times the words how long appear in verses 1-2. Who is each one addressed to?
• Find the point where the psalmist moves from complaint to request. What exactly does he ask for?
• Look at the verbs in verses 5-6. Do they point to the past, the present or the future?

The psalm opens: “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” (Psalm 13:1). Verse 2 adds two more, for four in two verses. Every one is spoken to God, using his covenant name. David does not complain about God to someone else. He complains to God. The Psalms treat that complaint as prayer, and Scripture kept it.

Verse 3 turns to request: “Consider and hear me, O LORD my God: lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death” (Psalm 13:3). The archaic phrase lighten mine eyes means something like give light to my eyes, restore my strength. The phrase sleep of death shows how much David feels is at stake. Notice also two small words in the middle of the verse: my God. The silence has not broken the relationship. He still prays as someone who belongs to the One he is protesting.

What happens between verse 4 and verse 5

Then comes the turn: “But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation” (Psalm 13:5). Readers have long asked what changed. Some interpreters suggest something happened that the psalm does not record, perhaps a word of assurance given in worship. Others read the turn as a decision of faith made while the circumstances stayed the same. The text itself reports no rescue. It never says the enemy fell or that God stopped hiding his face.

What the text does show is the direction of its verbs. I have trusted looks back. Verse 6 looks back too: “I will sing unto the LORD, because he hath dealt bountifully with me” (Psalm 13:6). The reason David gives for future song is what God has already done. His trust rests on remembered mercy rather than a present answer. And the psalm keeps verses 1-4 in place. The trust at the end does not erase the complaint at the beginning. Both remain in the prayer.

Reading Gethsemane: the same request, prayed again

Now read Mark 14:32-42. Mark’s account is the focus here, with Matthew 26:36-46 as a parallel worth comparing.

• What does Jesus say about the Father’s ability before he makes his request?
• How many times does Jesus go away to pray, and what does Mark say about the words of his second prayer?
• What does Jesus ask of Peter, James and John, and what do they do?
• How does the scene end?

Jesus enters the garden saying, “My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death” (Mark 14:34). The request that follows comes from anguish, not composure. Mark records it: “Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt” (Mark 14:36). Abba is the Aramaic word for father, which Mark preserves alongside its translation. The order matters. Jesus first affirms that the Father can do it. Then he asks plainly. Only then does he yield.

The next detail is easy to read past: “And again he went away, and prayed, and spake the same words” (Mark 14:39). Matthew records a third time (Matthew 26:44). Jesus did not search for better phrasing. He brought the same request back. Matthew also gives the wording of the second prayer: “O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done” (Matthew 26:42). Some readers see the prayer leaning further toward acceptance as the night goes on, without the request ever being withdrawn.

He asked his closest friends to watch with him, and three times he found them sleeping. The cup was not taken away. The scene ends with Jesus saying, “Rise up, let us go” (Mark 14:42). He leaves the place of prayer and walks toward the very thing he asked to be spared.

Where Gethsemane is a pattern and where it is not

Gethsemane is first about Jesus and the cup of his own suffering and death, which no one else drinks. Your unanswered prayer is not his cross, and reading it as though it were claims more than the text says. Two things do carry over by fair analogy. An ungranted request is not proof of weak faith or a broken relationship, since the Son prayed in perfect faith and was not spared. And the shape of his prayer is open to his followers, whom he taught to pray for the Father’s will to be done (Matthew 6:10).

What the conversation adds

Tyler came to faith in a word of faith, prosperity gospel setting. She says she “thoroughly believed that I could just speak what I desired long enough and it would have to obey me.” Under that belief, repetition is a technique for applying pressure until the outcome arrives. Gethsemane does not fit that picture. Jesus repeated the same words, and the cup remained. His repetition was what a son does when the request still stands, not a method for forcing a result.

Lisa Fields describes what prayer does instead: “It is a place where we don’t bend God’s will he bends ours.” She adds, “I may go into prayer with one agenda and then God like bends my will to his.” That is close to what Gethsemane shows. The request is honest, and the person praying is changed in the asking.

Tyler does not pretend this is comfortable. She says “we have to pray for his perfect will to be done in our lives,” and also that “sometimes we may not like what that perfect will looks like.” Her description of lament lines up with the turn in Psalm 13. She says David comes to the place of “God, this is what I’m struggling with, but you are good.” Psalm 13 makes that journey in six verses. A life may take far longer, and Tyler is candid about it: “that place of hope, we may not get to it overnight.”

She also names what can come in place of an answer: “instead of the answer, we may receive comfort.” In her mother’s illness, she says, “I’m learning to see him as comforter, the Holy Spirit.” That fits what both passages model. David and Jesus kept addressing God while the request stayed open. Neither stopped speaking to the One who was silent on the point they cared about most.

A test: is surrender just making peace with no?

A fair objection runs like this: praying for God’s will sounds like a polite way to give up. The texts answer it by their order. In Gethsemane, surrender comes after the request, never in place of it. Jesus did not skip take away this cup. Psalm 13 does not skip its four complaints to reach verse 5. Someone who rushes to surrender to avoid the pain of asking is not doing what either passage does. The reverse also holds. Asking without ever yielding is not what these passages show either. Both prayers hold the request and the trust in the same breath.

A practice for this week: pray the same words

This practice borrows Psalm 13’s structure and Gethsemane’s repetition. Give it seven days.

1. Write a three-part prayer. First, your own how long, addressed to God directly and specifically. Second, one concrete request, as plain as verse 3. Third, one sentence of remembered mercy in the past tense, as in verses 5-6. Tyler calls this kind of remembering building memorial stones, “memorializing moves of God in our lives, big and small that we can come back to.” Name one such moment, with the day or the person if you can. If you cannot honestly write the third part yet, leave it blank. Psalm 13 does not require you to arrive this week.
2. Pray it once a day, using the same words. Aloud if you can. Resist the urge to improve it. Mark 14:39 gives you permission to say the same thing again.
3. End with the Gethsemane line only if you can mean it. Say in your own words that you want the Father’s will. If you cannot say that honestly today, tell God that instead. That is also prayer.
4. Ask someone to keep watch with you. Tell one trusted person you are praying this way and ask them to check in. Jesus asked his friends for the same, and they fell asleep. Expect imperfect company, and ask anyway. This step is optional.
5. Read the prayer back at the end of the week. Notice whether any line changed in how you said it or how it felt, and whether the third part got easier or harder to write.

If the waiting has brought anxiety or low mood that is affecting your sleep, work or relationships, talk with a pastor and a counselor. Tyler speaks openly about needing God’s comfort “through my own anxieties and my own fears,” and seeking trained care alongside prayer is not a failure of faith.

Questions to discuss

1. In Psalm 13, every complaint is addressed to the LORD by name. What difference does it make to complain to God rather than about him?
2. Verse 5 begins with But, though the psalm reports no change in circumstances. Which reading of that turn seems most faithful to the text to you, and why?
3. Mark says Jesus “spake the same words” when he prayed again (Mark 14:39). Have you assumed that repeating a prayer shows either a lack of faith or an attempt to pressure God? What does this passage suggest instead?
4. Jesus begins with “all things are possible unto thee” (Mark 14:36). How does believing God can make an unanswered prayer harder? How might the same belief keep you praying?
5. Tyler describes receiving comfort instead of the answer. Would you welcome that, resist it, or both? Where would you look for evidence that God was present while the request stayed open?
6. Where does Jesus’ situation in Gethsemane differ from yours? What would go wrong if every hard request were treated as if it were his cup?

For those leading a group

Read both passages aloud and spend real time on the observation prompts before anyone applies them. The texts do much of the work if people actually look at them. Watch for one specific misuse: someone quoting verse 5 at a person who is still in verses 1-4. The psalm keeps both, and the group can too. If you do the first step of the practice together, give people quiet time to write, and invite volunteers only. No one needs to read their prayer aloud. If someone shares that the waiting has turned into depression or deep anxiety, stay with them, take it seriously, and help them connect with a pastor and a counselor rather than offering a verse to close the subject.

Psalm 13 ends before the rescue it hopes for. Gethsemane ends with Jesus walking toward the thing he asked to be spared. Neither prayer ends with an answer, and neither ends with the one praying falling silent. The question to carry this week is simple to ask and hard to live: what will your next prayer sound like?