The Problem of Unanswered Prayer

For decades Zacharias and Elisabeth prayed the same prayer: “Lord, give us a child.”  

Year after year the altar of incense rose with their cry, yet the womb stayed shut. They watched younger couples dedicate babies in the temple while their own arms remained empty. They were righteous. They were blameless. They walked in all the commandments of the Lord. Yet heaven was silent.

If you have ever prayed for revival and seen only apostasy,  

if you have begged God to save your children and watched them walk away,  

if you have pleaded for healing, for deliverance, for a move of God while the church grows colder,  

then you know the ache of Zacharias and Elisabeth.

We call it “the problem of unanswered prayer,” but the Bible never does. Scripture treats long silence not as a problem to explain away, but as a womb in which God is doing His deepest work.

Look at Luke 1 again.

1. God’s delays are not denials  

   The angel said, “Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard” (v. 13). Past tense. God heard the first time they asked—decades before the answer came. The silence was not rejection; it was preparation.

2. God waits until human hope is dead  

   “They both were now well stricken in years.” Only when nature said “impossible” did God say “now.” Dead wombs make the best testimonies. Dead churches do too. When every statistic says revival is finished, that is precisely when God loves to step in.

3. God’s silence is preparing a forerunner  

   The long wait was not ultimately about Zacharias and Elisabeth’s comfort; it was about raising up a John the Baptist who would shake a nation. Your unanswered prayer may be the wilderness schooling for the Elijah company God is raising in this dark hour.

4. God is looking for Nazirite-grade consecration  

   The angel did not say, “Because you prayed hard enough.” He said the child would be great because he would be separated—set apart from the wine of this world and filled with the Holy Ghost from the womb. Many of us want the miracle without the separation. God will not give John-the-Baptist answers to Laodicean prayers.

So if your prayers have gone unanswered for years, do not stagger at the promise through unbelief. Instead ask:

- Have I settled for a respectable Christian life when God is calling me to a Nazirite walk?  

- Am I willing to keep serving blamelessly even if the answer tarries another twenty years?  

- Is my barrenness meant to birth something greater than personal comfort—a voice that will turn many to the Lord?

The days of Herod are here again. Compromise fills the pulpits, perversion fills the streets, and most of the church is drunk on the world. But in hidden places, old saints are still praying. Wombs that the world counts dead are being prepared for a move of God.

Your unanswered prayer is not a closed door.  

It is a shut womb waiting for an angelic announcement.

Keep walking blamelessly.  

Keep crying out.  

The silence is about to break.

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