Unanswered Prayer One

By: Martin Connolly | Date: 2026-01-06

Unanswered Prayer One

      Let us consider Jesus and His prayer in the Gethsemane. It has to be held in the understanding of Jesus who took on human form and was called by His Father to live out life with all the ways of being human, except He took them on and lived them, without any sin.  He was as Hebrews tells us,

 Hebrews 4:15 “For we have not a high priest who cannot be touched with the feeling of our weaknesses; but was in all points tempted like we are, yet without sin.”

        So as a human, think how it must feel to know what lies ahead. You are going to enter the darkest experience of your life. Absolute abandonment by your closest friends. Hatred and abuse poured upon you. Battered and beaten to within an inch of your life. Dragged in humiliation through the streets. Nailed in the greatest agony onto a cross. Hung out to experience further abuse, spitting and mocking and ridicule. But that is not all. You also know you are going to take upon yourself the entire history and future of all sin. You will enter into death itself. How are you feeling? 

Luke 22:42 “… Father, if you be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done. And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him. And being in agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”

            He makes His request to the Father. Does He know the Father’s plan? Of course He does. However, He also knows His Father will listen and as the all-powerful God, things can be changed by Him. There is no recorded answer to Jesus’ prayer. He has only the Holy Spirit within, that is His constant comfort.

             Move now to Golgotha. The dear Saviour has endured everything thrown at Him. The worst of humanity and the evil powers of Satan, has done its best to cause the Lord to abandon His mission. He had tried before, don’t forget. As the darkest gets to its climax, He calls out:

Matthew 27:46 “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why have you (or to what) have you abandoned me?””:         

         Note it is not Abba that He cries out to. It is Eli (Aramaic), the mighty God reflected in the Hebrew Elohim – the Judges. Jesus, the innocent Lamb of God, who knew no sin was judged and condemned to death, because of our sin. As it says in Scripture:

 2 Corinthians 5:21 “For he has made him, who knew no sin, to be sin for us; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.”

         You see the prayer of Jesus in the garden, encourages us to see the humanity of Jesus. He like us prayed to the Father, making His requests known to Him. The request for a different outcome was not met, directly. This shows us the three principles that govern prayer: 

The will of God – From Luke 2:42 above “..not my will, but yours, be done..”

 The timing of God – Romans 5: 6-8 “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. ⁷ Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. ⁸ But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

            The purposes of God – “Yet it pleased Yahweh [Life Giver/Father] to crush him. To make his life an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring [children/descendants], and shall prolong his days; through him the will of the Yahweh shall prosper.”

          The purpose of the Father was to save us and make us His children. It was His will, His timing and His purpose, that Jesus submitted Himself to. He brings us the reality of prayer. We need the Spirit’s discernment to know these three things, when we seek answers to our own prayers. Like Jesus, the Son of God, we too need to understand that an unanswered prayer, at a given time, has to be seen in the greater plans of God. Again, these plans shine out, in the burial of Jesus in a tomb, was for three days – that was God’s will. The three days were God’s timing to fulfil Scripture and its purpose was to demonstrate that in the power of the resurrection, we too will rise to glory!