When God's Answer Looks Like Silence

How our expectations can keep us from recognizing God's work.

We like to think we enter conversations with open minds, ready to hear whatever the other person has to say. But more often than we'd like to admit, we step into those conversations with our conclusions already formed. We aren't simply inviting dialogue—we're expecting the other person to confirm what we've already decided.

And that's exactly what happens when we come before God. Before we ever ask Him to answer, we've often decided what His answer should look like.

But what happens when God's answer doesn't fit the conclusion we reached before we ever prayed?

Most of the time, it catches us off guard because our expectations have become so deeply rooted that we never stop to question them. Instead, we find ourselves saying things like,

"God isn't listening," "God didn't answer my prayer," or "God has gone silent.

We rarely stop to examine our own presuppositions, our own attitudes, or our own beliefs. We don't ask whether our expectations were shaped by Scripture or simply by our own assumptions. Instead, we immediately look to God. If His answer doesn't fit our expectations, we assume the problem is with Him, not with the expectations we brought into the conversation.

But what if the silence isn't in heaven at all?
What if it's in the expectations we never stop to question?

The more I think about it, the more this bothers me. We seem absolutely convinced that we know what an answer from God should look like. But where did we learn that? Did God teach us what His answers look like? Is it written somewhere in the scripture?

You don't have to look very far to see this happen.

Brenda never questioned whether God could answer her prayer.
She questioned whether He had answered her prayer.

She spent the last three years begging God to rescue her son Marcus from the streets of Philadelphia. She imagined a dramatic escape, a scholarship, a job out of state.  Anything that would pull him away from the influences that were slowly destroying him.

In her mind, she already knew what that rescue would look like.

But the miracle she prayed for arrived as a police call. Marcus was arrested, then sentenced not to relocation but to probation and community service at a worn-down boxing gym in the heart of North Philadelphia.

Sitting in her car after court, Brenda felt her hope collapse. Marcus was still in the same neighborhood, still near the same temptations, and nothing looked like the miracle she had prayed for. As she watched him walk away beside a probation officer instead of a college recruiter, one thought echoed through her heart: “God… this isn’t what I asked You for.”

Brenda reached a conclusion that God hadn’t answered her prayers.

But had He?

At least, that's how Brenda saw it. The question is: was she right?

Most of the time, what we call God's silence is actually God not answering according to our expectations.

If we're honest, Brenda's story isn't unusual. I would argue that most of us have come to this mistaken conclusion in the same way. In fact, one of the greatest men who ever lived reached this very same conclusion

John the Baptist had spent his life announcing that the Messiah had come. He called people to repentance and boldly declared that Jesus was "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." Yet when John found himself sitting in Herod's prison, he began to wonder if he had been wrong all along.

So he sent messengers to Jesus with a question that still echoes today:

Matthew 11:3 (NASB) "Are You the Expected One, or shall we look for someone else?"

John's question did not come from a lack of faith in God. It came because God's actions no longer matched what John expected the Messiah to do

John expected the Messiah to bring judgment, overthrow evil, and establish His kingdom. Instead, Jesus was healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, cleansing lepers, and preaching good news to the poor while John remained in prison.

From John's perspective, heaven had gone silent.

But heaven hadn't gone silent at all. John simply expected the Messiah to work differently.
Instead of explaining the prison, Jesus pointed John to the evidence of God's work.

Matthew 11:2-5 “Go and report to John what you hear and see: the blind receive sight and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.”

We make the same mistake today.

We pray for healing and expect recovery. We pray for provision and expect a promotion. We pray for reconciliation and expect an apology. Before we ever bow our heads in prayer, we've already decided what God's answer should look like. When His answer takes a different path, we often conclude He hasn't answered at all.

No one standing at Golgotha thought God was answering the prayers of His people. They saw a condemned man hanging on a Roman cross. His followers felt defeated, His enemies celebrated what they believed was victory. Even His closest disciples thought the story had come to an end.

Yet while the world concluded that God had failed, God was accomplishing the greatest act of redemption in human history. The cross was not evidence of God's silence. It was the moment God answered humanity's greatest need, even though almost no one recognized it.

The next time you find yourself wondering whether God has heard your prayers, remember Brenda. Remember John sitting in prison. Above all, remember Golgotha. The greatest answer God ever gave looked nothing like the answer anyone expected.

Before you conclude that heaven has gone silent, ask yourself one question:

Am I waiting for God to answer... 

or am I waiting for Him to answer the way I expected?

 

If you've ever struggled to reconcile God's promises with your present circumstances, you're not alone. John's story reminds us that Christ is worthy of our trust, even when His ways are different from our expectations.

▶Watch the full message  " When Jesus isn't Who You Expected  "

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