Jesus Was Heard

God hears my prayers

    “During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission” (Hebrews 5:7). Jesus, God the Son, poured out His heart to His Father in the Garden of Gethsemane, begging to be spared the torture of bearing our sins on the cross. Not just once, but three times (Matthew 26:36-44). And He was heard by the one who could save Him from death.

    Doesn’t that imply that He was saved from that death? Anytime someone tells me that God heard their prayer, they always mean that He did what they asked Him to do.

    “My son was suffering from a life-threatening illness, but God heard my prayer and healed him.”

    “I didn’t know how I was going to pay my rent, but God heard my prayer and provided the money that I needed.”

    “I really wanted that job that I applied for. God heard my prayer. I got the offer yesterday.”

    Have you ever heard anyone say, “I prayed for God to save my friend’s life. He heard my prayer and said no”? I haven’t.

    That’s why I need this passage from Hebrews. “The one who could save him from death” heard Jesus and denied His request. If God could be so intent on doing what’s absolutely best and right even in the face of desperate pleas from His own Son, maybe I can trust Him to hear me and love me and hurt for me—and still do what’s best and right in every situation. Even when the answer is no.

    God has turned down so many of my appeals for help and healing in the last several years. It can be discouraging. I find myself waiting for the next shoe to drop, hesitating before asking for His intervention, expecting Him to deny every request. That’s my natural response.

    But reading that Jesus was heard restores my weary soul. Sometimes just being heard is a great blessing in itself. Sometimes having someone who listens ministers to me more than having someone who fixes all my problems. Being heard, even without receiving any answers, brings its own strength.

    Jesus was heard. I will be heard. That can be enough.

Even when I fail

    Then I move on to the next statement in the Hebrews passage, “because of his reverent submission.” Uh-oh. Does that mean that I have to be just as reverentially submissive as Jesus was, or God won’t listen to me? That could rule out a lot of answers to my prayers.

    I do my best to accept that He knows better than I do and that He loves me even more than I can imagine. But it will never be possible for me to exhibit the same reverent submission that Jesus displayed. Does that mean that God will close His ears to me? I’ve always had this fear, partly based on this verse, that if I don’t pray just right, God won’t listen to me.

    But now it hits me. Anytime I’m facing the impossible, I have to rely on His grace alone. Jesus had to be perfect in all that He did, including the way He dealt with His coming death, in order to provide an acceptable sacrifice for our sins. Anything less, and there would have been no resurrection. The privilege of bringing my needs to God is based on Jesus’ perfection, His reverent submission, not mine. Even when I’m at my worst, in His grace God will hear me.

And provides the best answers

    It doesn’t seem as obvious to me, but God also answered Jesus’ Gethsemane prayer on Easter Sunday. The gist of His request was that the Father would do whatever needed to be done to provide for our salvation. That’s exactly what He did. It involved an agonizing sacrifice on Jesus’ part, which He had asked to be spared from. But the ultimate result was exactly what Jesus wanted most. The resurrection proved that His sacrifice was exactly what was necessary to accomplish God’s purpose.

    With the toughest prayers that I send up to heaven, I’m usually aware of needing to ask for God’s will, not mine, to be done. (I don’t always remember to attach that thought to my simpler prayers.) But when He says no to my specific request, do I see the less obvious—that He has said yes to a greater good, the good of doing His will to accomplish His purposes?

    I don’t want to sugarcoat the pain here. I don’t want to tell a child that his father died because God needed him in heaven or because life on earth really is better without him, as I’ve heard some Christians say. That’s not the God of the Bible.

    As I try to wrap my mind around the issue of good and evil and suffering, my best understanding is that it was incredibly precious to God to create beings who could freely choose to worship Him or to deny Him. He knew the only way to do that would be to open the door to evil. But He also knew that the good to be accomplished would be far greater than all the evil Satan could muster.

    When bad times come into our lives, God doesn’t just sit up in heaven watching lazily, saying, “No big deal. I’ll make something good happen to balance it out.” No. He feels the grief at least as much as I do. And the anger. He is not indifferent to evil and hardship.

    But He overcomes that evil with good. For every pain and every sorrow, God offers Himself to His children, as Jesus offered Himself on the cross. He comes to us with tenderness and mercy, with kindness and love. He binds up our wounds and cradles us in His everlasting arms. This is the good that comes from, and far outweighs, the suffering.

    In the process, He restores and transforms our lives, as He restored and transformed His Son’s life on that first Easter Sunday. Because we live in a fallen world, a greater good is accomplished as a result of affliction than we could ever experience without it. If we’re praying, as Jesus did, “Not my will but yours,” that prayer will be answered abundantly more than all we could ask or think. The pain will be real. We will fall on our faces and cry out in agony, as Jesus did. But in God’s timing we will be lifted even higher as a result of the ordeal, just as Jesus was.