When Your Miracle Doesn’t Come – Part 1

David J. Mullins: Hey, podcast listeners. Thanks for streaming today's podcast from Pathway to Victory. Pathway to Victory is a nonprofit ministry featuring the Bible teaching of Dr. Robert Jeffress. Our mission is to pierce the darkness with the light of God's word through the most effective media available, like this podcast. To support Pathway to Victory, go to ptv.org/donate or follow the link in our show notes. Now, here's today's podcast from Pathway to Victory.
Dr. Robert Jeffress: Hi, this is Robert Jeffress, and I'm glad to study God's word with you every day on this Bible teaching program. On today's edition of Pathway to Victory.
Dr. Robert Jeffress: What do you do when your miracle doesn't come? Today, we're going to talk about five biblical principles for what to do when your miracle doesn't come. And the first principle, the foundational one is this. Rest in God's grace.
David J. Mullins: Welcome to Pathway to Victory with author and pastor Dr. Robert Jeffress. One of the most painful struggles a believer can face is when a prayer seems to go unanswered. But even in the silence, God has not abandoned you. Today on Pathway to Victory, Dr. Robert Jeffress shares five biblical principles to hold on to when the miracle you long for doesn't come. But first, let's take a moment to hear some important ministry updates.
Dr. Robert Jeffress: Thanks, David, and welcome again to Pathway to Victory. In a moment, I'm going to begin my final message in the series on Divine Invasions. But first, let me invite you to join me and Amy on a vacation of a lifetime coming up in May 2027. You know, there's something genuinely rare about spending 10 uninterrupted days with like-minded believers, people who share your love for the Bible and your curiosity about the places where it was written. That's the heartbeat of the Pathway to Victory Journeys of Paul Mediterranean Cruise. Together, we'll sail the ancient waters of the Mediterranean, wake up to breathtaking new destinations every morning, and explore the very lands where the foundations of our Christian faith were laid. Every meal prepared, every detail handled, and you can reserve the cabin of your choice today by going to ptv.org. Okay, here's a question that touches every one of us sooner or later. What do you do when your miracle doesn't come? When you've prayed and pleaded and believed and the answer is still no. That where we come today as we close this series, and I promise you God's word has real help for those tender moments. But before we begin, let me urge you to request my brand new book Divine Invasions. When you give a generous gift to support this ministry, I'll send you the book along with a collection of eight Divine Invasions Encouragement Cards. I'll say more later in today's program. But right now, let's consider what to do when your miracle doesn't come. About a year into her marriage to University of Oregon campus pastor Douglas Grutheis, Rebecca, his wife, was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a disorder that affects the way pain signals are processed in our nervous system. In what some people call a fibro fog, Rebecca began forgetting things like how to get back home for her appointment at the hair salon. Her husband Doug had to file a missing person's report with the police to find her. At one time, she forgot how to turn on the engine of her automobile or how to turn on the windshield wipers. Doctors offered no answer to her problem. Then in 2014, Doug rushed Rebecca to the hospital. She couldn't get out of bed. She couldn't talk, Doug told an interviewer. Emergency room doctors found nothing physically wrong, though she exhibited depression-like symptoms. So they called in a psychiatrist who eventually admitted her to a psychiatric hospital. They strapped her down and took her away on a stretcher. She looks so forlorn, her husband said. She was there for about 5 weeks and was diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia, a rare neurological disorder that attacks the portions of the brain that control our ability to speak and write. As Doug explained later in the interview, it begins in the frontal lobe of the brain and moves backward, which is the opposite of Alzheimer's. You lose your use of words and then your executive functions, the ability to analyze and perform tasks. The particular cruelty of this disease is that you slowly lose your mind and you're aware of your mind slipping away. Doug and Rebecca lived with the slow creeping diminishment of her cognitive abilities for 4 years. Through it all, they and others prayed for God to intervene, beseeching God for healing. The Lord said no. I didn't know a soul could endure so much emotional anguish, Paul later said. I'm becoming an expert on suffering. In 2017, a year before Rebecca's death, Doug wrote a book about the emotional and spiritual toll. Her illness took on both of them and how they wrestled with God's decision not to heal her. In his book Walking Through Twilight, Doug concluded love is as strong as death and stronger. We know this because of an innocent man nailed to a Roman spike of shame with a dying criminal on each side. That young man died and was buried. 3 days later, his tomb was emptied of death, and he was found more alive than any of us are right now. These matchless and unmatchable events are my only hope in life and death and Becky's life and in Becky's death. Jesus is Lord. We're in a series I've called Divine Invasions. It's about miracles. We've talked about the fact that miracles are real. They're not reserved for another time in history. They're not reserved for another place in the world, third world countries. Miracles are for now, for the here and now for us. We've talked about miracles that come from God. We've talked about miracles that actually can come from Satan. But today as we close this series, we're going to look at miracles that never come at all. What do you do when your miracle doesn't come? Probably the lack of miracles, the seeming refusal of God to answer our request, unanswered prayer poses the single greatest threat to our faith. Why doesn't God answer our prayers? Is it that he doesn't hear us? Is it that he doesn't care? Is it that he's unable to intervene in our situation? Or is it possibly he doesn't exist at all? We all have faced the difficulty of unanswered prayer. Even Jesus faced it. He struggled with it. Remember the night before he was crucified, he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, Father, do a miracle. If there is any way at all, remove this coming experience from me. He prayed that prayer. 12 hours later, he was hanging on a cross, and he cried out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Jesus struggled with unanswered prayer. Today, we're going to talk about five biblical principles for what to do when your miracle doesn't come. And the first principle, the foundational one is this. Rest in God's grace. Rest in God's grace. On your outline, we don't have time to go through it, but I've just listed seven reasons the Bible says God may not answer your prayer. First of all, not praying from a pure heart. Secondly, not praying in faith. Thirdly, not praying from an obedient life. Fourth, not praying to bring glory to God. Fifthly, not praying with a goal of sanctification. Sixth, not praying with an attitude of humility. Seventh, not praying in conjunction with the Holy Spirit. Those are all reasons, and you can look at the Bible verses later that go along with those reasons. But sometimes there are other reasons that God doesn't answer our prayer. Paul was not guilty of any of these things I mentioned, and yet on three separate occasions, he prayed for God for a miracle to relieve the physical suffering he was going through, the thorn in the flesh. He records that experience in 2 Corinthians 12 verses 7 through 10. He writes, because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, for this reason, to keep me from exalting myself, there was given me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me to keep me from exalting myself. Concerning this, I implored the Lord three times that it might leave me. And he said to me, my grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness. God said no to Paul, but he gave him a gift, grace to endure that unanswered prayer. What is grace? Some people say, well, that's easy, pastor. That means God saving us from our sin when we trust in Christ. Amazing grace. Well, that's true, but grace is bigger than that. Our salvation is one example of God's grace. But grace is more than that. The best way to understand grace is to contrast it with mercy. Mercy is not giving us what we do deserve, God's judgment. Grace is God giving us what we don't deserve. What is it that he gives us? That word grace, charis in Greek, comes from a root word char, c h a r, that means joy, and it's used as the basis for the word charismata, gift, enablement. Paul uses it in 1 Corinthians 12 talking about spiritual gifts. God's grace is a divine power, an enablement he gives you to meet the trials of life. And the thing about God's grace is he always gives it to us at just the right time. God never gives us this divine enablement before we need it, and he doesn't give it after the fact. Remember Corrie ten Boom, the great saint of God who endured the Nazi Holocaust, and she was talking one time about when she was a little girl and would get ready to go on a train trip by herself, her father never gave her the ticket early, like several days early because he knew she would lose it. Instead, he would always hand her the ticket just before she got on board. God does that. When we go through a journey of suffering in our life, he doesn't give us his grace before the fact. He gives it just when we need it. And by the way, he always gives it in the right amount too. He never gives us too much grace or too little grace. We need to be assured of God's grace and rest in the fact that when we're going through suffering, he will give us what we need. By the way, the way we do that, rest in God grace is by remembering God's promises. You know, in Acts 20:32, it calls God's word the word of his grace. The Bible is filled with promises of God's divine enablement when we need him. You know, Warren Wiersbe says it well when he said, we do not live on explanations. We live on promises. Our feelings change, but God's promises never change. Remember to rest in God's grace, saturate yourself in the promise of God's grace. Secondly, learn to wait for God's timing. Learn to wait for God s timing. You know, one of the things you find in scripture is many times God will answer a request, but he requires a waiting time before that request is answered. Why is that? Why does he make us wait? Sometimes that wait is for a test to see what is really in our heart. Now, God already knows what's in our heart, but we need to know what's in our heart. Are we really trusting God or not? You see a great illustration of that in Exodus 15. Remember when God delivered the Israelites out of Egypt and he set them on the path to the promised land, but one of their first stops was to get water. You need water in the wilderness, in the hot wilderness. So they stopped at Marah, which is a word that means bitterness. They stopped there, and the water at Marah was bitter. It was bitter water. And what did they do? They begin to grumble. They begin to complain to God and to Moses about their situation. God was testing them, and he gave them a giant F on that test. It didn't stand for faith either. They were lacking in faith. And many times, we have to go through a waiting time before God intervenes in our life so that God can test our faith or even expand our faith. We grow many times through times of waiting. God could have taken the Israelites straight to Elim where the 12 springs of fresh water were, but he had them go through that test of their faith. You know, you've heard the saying probably, when God closes a door, he opens a window. Have you ever heard that before? The idea is when God says no to one request, sometimes he opens the window to another miracle in our life we never thought of. And I would say that's true most of the time. I would add a word, when God closes a door, he opens a window eventually, not immediately, but eventually. But I had an insight this week after thinking that through that I think is biblical and it's certainly part of my experience. You know what makes closed doors especially difficult when God closes a door? The door is already open when he closed it. Do you realize you can't close a door that's already shut? Instead, you can only close a door that is partially open. Many times, we're praying for a God to open a door, and that door begins to open. We think a miracle is coming when he slams the door shut. And that's when we really begin to question God. Have you ever experienced that? A door that seems to be opening and then it shuts. I'll never forget my own experience with that many years ago. You know that my first church to pastor in 1985 was 100 miles west of here, and we went to that church and Amy and I were so excited, and we had seven great years at that church. But at our seventh anniversary at the church, they always had a yearly celebration, my anniversary, and would have it in the fellowship hall, and there was always a garbage can at the front of the fellowship hall for people to discard their plates and their knives and forks, and they would have us stand right next to the trash can so that the people could come up and say their words of appreciation. So there was a line coming through us in the trash can, and after the last person went through the line, Amy looked at me and she said, this was our last one, wasn't it? I said, yes, it is. Now, we didn't have any reason to think it was our last one, but God was doing a work in our heart saying it was time to move. And we didn't have any reason to think we were going any place. There were no invitations, but we just had that sense God was going to move us. Well, a couple of months later, I got a letter, and it was from the pastor search committee of a church in another state, the largest Baptist church in that particular state. And it was a very inviting kind of a church. They had a multimillion-dollar budget, many staff members, a growing television ministry, and to us, it just sounded like paradise. And so they said they wanted to come visit with us on a particular Sunday. So we made arrangements for them to come. Amy planted new flowers in the flower bed outside the parsonage. We got the church spotless. I pulled out my best sermon I thought that I could preach, and we had a big Sunday, and after the service, they came over to the parsonage to visit, and they said, we're more convinced than ever that you're supposed to be our pastor. Let's work out a date for you to come preach in view of a call so the church can vote on you. And I said, wait, just a moment. That's a little quick. We need to at least come visit your church and see what we're getting into. I mean, what experience we were going to have. And they said, okay, if you want to come visit, you can come visit. We'll go back home and we'll call you this week and set up a time for you and Amy to come visit. So Monday, I was huddled around the telephone waiting for the phone call. No call. Tuesday, no call. Wednesday, no call. I thought this is not good. Thursday, a friend of mine called. He was a friend I had used as a reference on a resume, and he called and he said, Robert, I got the strangest call from the chairman of a search committee of this church, and he named the church I was talking to. And he said, they asked me if I might have the telephone number of another pastor they were interested in. A famous pastor who had just left his church. They wanted to see if he was available. I can't tell you what that did to me. I mean, it crushed me. We had had our bags packed. I mean, we thought we were on the way. And I moped around for several days, and Sunday came, the next Sunday, and I tried to get enthusiastic about preaching, and I couldn't do so, and the next Monday, I was at the barbershop getting a haircut, and my secretary called the barbershop and told me I needed to return an urgent call, and she gave me the man's name. I didn't recognize the name, so I got back to the office, and I called, and the man answered the phone. He said, this is Harold Warren. I'm the chairman of the search committee for the First Baptist Church in Wichita Falls, and we'd like to come talk to you about being our pastor. And I was pretty jaded by that point, and I said, well, I guess you want to come hear me preach. Here we go again. He said, not really. We don't want to hear you. We've already heard you three times. In fact, we were in your church last Sunday, and we're more convinced than ever that you ought to come be our pastor. And I said, well, when do you want to talk to me? They said, what about this afternoon? And they got in the van, that whole search committee drove from Wichita Falls to Eastland, spent the whole night almost literally with us in our living room talking about their church. Julia was about four. She'd get up in the middle of the night, wander in to see what was going on and go back to bed, and they said, we're ready for you to come. And so they arranged a time for us to come up there. We spent a weekend there, agreed to come to the church. We came back to Eastland on a Monday evening, and as I walked in the front door, the telephone was ringing, and I picked up the phone, and it was the chairman of that First Search Committee in the other state. He said, where have you been? I said, what do you mean? He said, we've been trying to get hold of you all weekend. I said, well, I don't know why I had heard you were interested in another pastor, so we want another direction with the church that wanted us to come. No, he said. That was all a big mistake. We all were unified that you were to be our next pastor, but one man on the committee had heard about this other pastor who had left his church and thought we ought to at least look at him and talk to him. So to keep peace on the committee, we agreed to let him do that, to chase that rabbit. And quickly we realized that was not for us, that you were the pastor for us. I said, well, I'm sorry, but it's too late and we've already made a commitment. And God used that disappointment. He used that disappointment to allow us to spend 15 years of the happiest years of our life at the First Baptist Church in Wichita Falls. God had another path, another plan for us. Now, you may be thinking, well, that's a real nice story, Robert, and I'm glad it worked out for you, but what in the world does that have to do with me? Don't miss the point. Many times, God will not only move in another direction, he will shut a door that looked like it was opening. Maybe you've experienced that before. You have an illness, a sickness in your life or the life of a loved one. It seems to be incurable, and then the doctor says there's a new medication that's just been released and approved. People are having luck with it. Try it out, and you begin to take that new treatment, that new medication, and it begins to have positive results until it doesn't and it stops working. You were filled with hope, and those hopes are crushed. Or maybe you have a prodigal child who has wandered away from God and wandered away from you. The child hasn't been in contact with you for months or years, and one day out of the blue, you get a phone call from them, and they indicate they're interested in reconciling and meeting with you, and you're so filled with hope. But that second phone call never comes and you never hear from them again. Why does God do that? Is he being cruel with his creatures? No. 1 John 4:8 tells us God is love. The point is many times he's working in our life, in other people's lives when we can't see him working, but he's working. And what I found out is that God is an ultimate multitasker. He can do more than one thing at a time. While he's working in your life, he's working in somebody else's life you don't even know yet to bring you together for your lives to intersect at just the right time. As somebody said, even when we can't see God's hand, we can trust God's heart. And that's why we need to learn to trust God's timing when our miracle doesn't come. Even when we can't see God's hand, we can trust God's heart. Friend, hold on to that because it's the very reason I wrote Divine Invasions. When I was 16 years old, I experienced something I couldn't explain, a healing that defied every medical expectation. That moment set me on a lifelong journey of asking one question. Does God still invade our ordinary lives with the miraculous? I'm convinced he does, but I didn't shy away from the hardest question of all, the one we've wrestled with today. What do you do when the miracle you've prayed for hasn't come? Well, I want you to experience God's power in your own life too. My book Divine Invasions will walk you deeper into what scripture teaches about God's miraculous power. Friend, this may be one of the most important books I've ever written. So much of what people believe about miracles simply isn't true. Myths that leave you either chasing sensationalism or missing God's hand all together. In the seven chapters I've written for you, I clear away the confusion. I'll show you what scripture actually teaches so you can tell the counterfeit from the real thing. So today, would you stand with me? Give your generous gift to Pathway to Victory, and I'll send you Divine Invasions with my thanks. It'll arrive at your home with a collection of eight encouragement cards. Each one includes a reminder to be looking for God's divine invasions in your life and a Bible verse to encourage you. Here's David to tell you more.
David J. Mullins: You're invited to request a hardcover copy of Dr. Jeffress's brand new book Divine Invasions when you give a generous gift to support the ministry of Pathway to Victory. Just call 866-999-2965, visit ptv.org or text PTV to 78800. And when your gift is $100 or more, we'll also send you in addition to the book this month's teaching series on audio and video disc along with the companion study guide. To request these resources, call 866-999-2965 or make your request online at ptv.org. You could write to us if you'd like, PO Box 223609 Dallas, Texas 75222. That's PO Box 223609 Dallas, Texas 75222. I'm David J. Mullins inviting you back for part two of the message When Your Miracle Doesn't Come. That's Thursday on Pathway to Victory.
Guest (Male): Pathway to Victory with Dr. Robert Jeffress comes from the pulpit of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas. What if your next vacation changed the way you read your Bible forever?
Dr. Robert Jeffress: Join me for nine nights sailing the Mediterranean with every detail taken care of. When you stand for Paul stood, your Bible comes alive in ways it never has before.
David J. Mullins: Sail with us on the Pathway to Victory Journeys of Paul Cruise May 2027 and ask about our optional Athens pre-extension. Call 888-280-6747 or visit ptv.org. You made it to the end of today's podcast from Pathway to Victory, and we're so glad you're here. Pathway to Victory relies on the generosity of loyal listeners like you to make this podcast possible. One of the most impactful ways you can give is by becoming a Pathway partner. Your monthly gift will empower Pathway to Victory to share the gospel of Jesus Christ and help others become rooted more firmly in his word. To become a Pathway partner, go to ptv.org/donate or you can follow the link in our show notes. We hope you've been blessed by today's podcast from Pathway to Victory. Oh, and one last thing before we go, don't forget to reserve your spot on the 2027 Journeys of Paul Mediterranean Cruise. Now, you've heard me and Dr. Jeffress talk about this Bible Conference at Sea, and cabins, well, they're going quickly. Just picture yourself aboard the beautiful Celebrity Infinity sailing round trip from Athens. Now, each day you'll gather for biblical teaching, worship, and fellowship, and then you'll step ashore to stand where Paul stood in Ephesus and walk the streets of Thessaloniki where his letters still speak to the church today. Nine unforgettable nights with more biblical destinations along the way. Every meal prepared, every detail taken care of, plus the joy of traveling with like-minded believers. There's also an optional pre-cruise extension in Athens. To book your spot, go to ptv.org.