Jesus made us a promise that is hard to misunderstand: "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you" (Matthew 7:7, KJV).

And we know that God never lies. Whatever He says, He brings to pass.

So why is it that sometimes we pray and we don't see the result?

I want to be honest with you about this, because many believers quietly carry this question. Some have even walked away from God over it. But I believe that once you settle a few things in your heart, you will troubleshoot your prayer life with confidence instead of confusion.

Prayer Itself Always Works

Let's start with what we can rule out. We cannot say that prayer doesn't work, because Jesus said it does. In Mark 11:24 He said, "What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them."

Notice that the receiving happens in the praying. The moment you ask and believe, you have received. So prayer works all of the time. If the result isn't showing, something else is going on. Something is wrong somewhere, and it isn't God.

Take God Off the List

When something isn't working, you troubleshoot. You look at the variables. And the first thing every Christian must settle is this: God is never one of the variables.

The word of God has absolute integrity. God is always good. God is always true. "Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever" (Hebrews 13:8). His character does not change with your circumstances.

So what are the real variables? There are only a few:

• You, the person praying.
• The devil and his demons.
• Other people, those around you or involved in what you're praying about.
• The earth and its elements, even the weather, which God placed under man's dominion (Genesis 1:26).

This one simple fact will save you a lot of trouble. When you count God as part of the problem, you will never arrive at the solution. When you eliminate Him as a possible cause, you arrive at the answer much faster.

God Doesn't Use Sickness to Teach You

Healing is where this matters most. If you believe God gave you a sickness to teach you a lesson, or to keep you humble in ministry, that sickness will not be healed, because you've made God a factor in it.

Jesus bore our sickness and our pain, "and with his stripes we are healed" (Isaiah 53:4–5). Peter says the same thing: "by whose stripes ye were healed" (1 Peter 2:24). The same Jesus who died to take away sickness cannot be the one putting it on you. Jesus Himself said that a house divided against itself cannot stand (Mark 3:25).

There is no example in Scripture of Jesus or the disciples receiving sickness from God as a lesson. And a doctrine can't rest on one disputed reading of one man's experience. "In the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established" (2 Corinthians 13:1).

When you're going through a hard season, it's easy to ask, "Does God even love me?" He does, no matter what you're facing. Sometimes He is giving us signals and instructions, and we're either not hearing them or not acting on them. But no matter what happens, God is always good.

The Problem Is Always on Our Side

I think of Curry Blake. He prayed for his daughter. He read every book he could find, tried everything he knew, and she still died.

He could have said, "I prayed, I did everything, and it didn't work. I'm done with God." But he didn't. He knew the fault wasn't with God, so it had to be on this side. He went back to the Word and studied until he understood how healing really works. Through the ministry he leads, people have been healed in the hundreds of thousands, and many more have been trained to minister healing.

Picture a line. On one side is God. On the other side is us. The problem is always on our side and never on His.

The kingdom of God works by principles. They are almost mechanical. When we follow the principles of prayer and faith, we get results. When we don't, we don't.

People Can Delay an Answer

Here's a story Andrew Wommack tells. He and his wife Jamie had no food, and one morning he prayed and told her, "We're going to eat today."

God answered. He touched a friend's heart to bring them food that very morning. But Jamie had taken the car out to do laundry. When the friend arrived and saw no car, he assumed nobody was home and took the food back with him.

They went hungry until evening, when they happened to visit that friend, and he told them, "I came by your house earlier with something for you."

God answered the prayer on time. A person's assumption delayed it. That's what I mean when I say other people are one of the variables.

Four Reasons Prayers Seem Unanswered

In my teaching I walk through four major reasons we sometimes don't see the results of our prayers:

1. Not praying according to the will of God.
2. Addressing the wrong subject, or not following the right principle for that type of prayer.
3. Praying from the wrong position.
4. Missing the answer because it didn't come the way you expected.

Let's look at the first one.

Asking Amiss

"Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts" (James 4:3).

To ask amiss is to ask for something that has not been provided in the finished work of Christ.

When I worked at a multinational company, teams that delivered a project well were rewarded with vouchers. You could take a voucher into any outlet of a particular store chain and buy whatever you wanted up to its value. But you could only buy what that store stocked. If I wanted a TV and none of their outlets carried TVs, my voucher couldn't buy one.

The finished work of Christ is like that. There are things He has provided for us by His death and resurrection, and those are what we receive by faith. If something isn't in that provision, we can't receive it by faith.

James's word "amiss" also makes me think of archery. Imagine drawing a bow and shooting at a target that doesn't exist. You aim at nothing and you hit nothing.

What God Has Already Provided

So what has been provided? "His divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness" (2 Peter 1:3). The NLT puts it this way: He has given us everything we need for living a godly life.

That gives every request two boxes to check:

• Does it help me live a godly life?
• Does it avoid leading me into an ungodly life?

A car, for example, isn't ungodly. God has called us to a life of glory, a life that shines. Jesus said, "Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid… Let your light so shine before men" (Matthew 5:14–16). Living well in what God has provided is godly.

All of this comes to us through the eternal life God gave us (John 3:16). Everything that pertains to life and godliness is packed inside that life. That's why Paul tells us to "work out your own salvation" (Philippians 2:12). It's like someone at the gym. They're not adding something new; they're developing what's already inside. Inside that eternal life there are primary and secondary provisions, and I'll unpack those in the next teaching.

A Practical Takeaway

Next time you pray and don't see the answer:

1. Take God off the list. Settle it: He is good, and His Word is true.
2. Check your request against 2 Peter 1:3. Is it something Christ has provided, something that fits a godly life?
3. Look at the real variables. You, the enemy, other people and circumstances. Then keep standing until the answer shows up.

Prayer always works. Let's learn to work with it.

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God bless you,
Michael Adegoke