When the Lord Takes Longer Than We Expect

There are many ways in which God answers our prayers. What we have to do is leave that part to the Lord and do our part, which is to pray to Him, cry out to Him, and present our needs.

In the last segment, we were talking about how the Lord invites us to make our needs known to the Lord in every prayer and supplication, as the apostle Paul says. Instead of becoming anxious and fearing, what we have to do is unload our needs onto the Lord, and He promises to respond and answer our petitions.

And that is why we see Martha and Mary asking the Lord: help us, come to our aid. Instead of remaining there in their crisis, they appeal to that friendship, just as we should appeal to that relationship which, in a sense, we have preferentially with Jesus through His blood, through the fact that we love Him and believe in Him, and worship Him and serve Him, and have an ongoing relationship with Him.

We should take advantage of that, not waste it, but ask, because the Lord tells us, ask and it will be given to you. It is the Lord, the Word Himself, who invites us to ask the Lord and pray to Him, and not waste that resource we have in every situation. In every prayer and supplication, the apostle Paul says. That is, in any situation, prayer should always be a resource.

We should pray as constantly as we breathe: in the car, at the supermarket while we are shopping, before eating, before going to bed, when we wake up, in the morning before leaving for work, when we have a big problem, a small problem. Our life should be a continual breathing in prayer, continually presenting every need to the Lord, and seasoning and saturating every aspect of life with that relationship of continual dialogue with the Lord.

So I said in the last program: our part is to submit our petitions to the Lord and then rest, and leave it to Him to respond as He sees best. Because many times He has a plan that we do not understand, so many times He will respond with silence, with waiting. It may be with a red light saying no. It may be with a yellow light saying: hey, little by little I am going to answer your need. It may be with a green light saying: you know what? Before you asked Me, I had already begun to answer that prayer that I knew you were going to pray to Me.

Because notice what happens in this part. It says: "When Jesus heard it," meaning that Martha and Mary’s prayer reaches the Throne of Grace, "When Jesus heard it, He said: this sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it." It says that Jesus loved Martha, her sister, and Lazarus, but here is something interesting in verse 6 of chapter 11 of John. It says: "When He heard that Lazarus was dead, He stayed two more days where He was."

How strange this is. The Lord hears Martha and Mary’s request, in which they tell Him that Lazarus is very sick and that He should hurry to see him, and then that Lord whom we are told loves Lazarus, Martha, and Mary—Jesus—instead of immediately rushing to their aid, says that He decided to remain two more days in the place where He was, as though, in a sense, He did not care about what was happening to Lazarus.

I think that is why John clarifies and says that Jesus loved Martha, her sister, and Lazarus. In other words, what John is saying here is: Jesus had great love for these siblings, and yet, before doing so, He decided to remain two more days before granting the urgent request they were making to Him for immediate help. What is going on in Jesus’ mind at this moment?

We can see what is happening behind the scenes in light of the Word. The Lord is, as it were, setting the stage for a great miracle. He wants many people to believe in Him; He wants the faith of many—including us, reading this passage two thousand years later, our faith and that of countless generations who would read about this incident—to grow. He wanted our theological knowledge to expand and our understanding of Him—His power, His Glory, His love, His Lordship, His complex way of working in human events—to be enriched.

All of this is in Jesus’ mind when He decides to remain two more days. Why two more days? Because that was the time required for Lazarus to die, for the process of the body’s decomposition in the heat of the Middle East to take place, for it to seem as though there was no longer any hope, and so that the Lord could then perform a miracle of incredible proportions—the resurrection of a dead man—and so that His Glory, His Lordship, His power, and His deity would then be fully manifested to all who witnessed this great miracle.

What is happening here? The Lord is setting the stage to demonstrate His Glory. And He does so, in a sense—I am not going to say by playing, because that word is too light—but He does allow Himself certain liberties with the feelings of Martha and Mary, and even Lazarus, who are saying: come immediately, take the first plane, and get here as quickly as You can, right?

Doesn’t that sometimes happen in our lives? We ask the Lord for something and we want an answer now! Yet the Lord takes longer than we expected, and then we tend to doubt Him, tend to question His love, tend to question His mercy. But if we could see behind the scenes, as we can in this case because we have the benefit—the benefit of Scripture—what might we see? Perhaps God setting the stage for something greater in our lives.

And sometimes what we believe to be a loss without any redemption is the necessary setting for us to see the Glory of God manifested in a greater way, and then to grow spiritually, and for Him to be glorified through our need and our trial. God is sovereign; let us trust in Him and never doubt His love or His mercy.