Why Our Needs Remain Unmet - Part 1

Welcome to this weekend's In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley. We often blame others for our problems, but we can be our own worst enemy. Discover today if you just might be the obstacle keeping you from receiving God's solutions. How often have you carried your needs to the Lord in prayer and asked Him to meet some specific need in your life and yet He didn't meet it?

How did you respond when that need remained unmet? You see, the truth is God delights in meeting our need. He desires to meet all of our needs.

Well, if He does, then why doesn't He? Why is it that God seemingly does not meet all of our needs? So that's what I want to talk about in this message, and that is why our needs remain unmet. So rather than just turning to a passage of Scripture, we'll just use Philippians 4 19 and turn to some other passages. And I want to begin by simply saying this, that God certainly desires to meet all of our needs. And you may be familiar with this verse, but in case you're not, turn, if you will, to Matthew chapter 6 for a moment. You recall this is the Sermon on the Mount. And right before we have the pattern prayer, you recall this is what Jesus said. He had been talking about people just using repetitious words in their prayers and saying the same thing over and over again.

In verse seven, He says, And when you're praying, do not use meaningless repetitions as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they'll be heard for their many words. Therefore, do not be like them for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him. God wants us to know that He is interested, committed to and able to meet every single need that we have. And so Jesus certainly came as the need-meeter to meet people's needs. And what you find in the Gospels everywhere you go, He's meeting somebody's needs. Now, with all these promises, the very life of Jesus Christ Himself, somebody says, Well, but I have needs and my needs are not being met. Why isn't He meeting my particular needs?

So that's what I want to talk about in this message. So I want us to think about something for a moment, and that is, we think in terms of the fact that He desires to meet our needs, and we ask ourselves the question, Why doesn't He? Well, let's look at some very evident reasons He doesn't. Then let's look at the big major reason that I want to talk about. Certainly one of the reasons He doesn't meet our needs is because He warns us of this in James chapter two, and He says, You have not because you ask not.

There are many people who have needs who never think to call upon their excuses. Well, God's too busy. Why is He interested in my needs? Because He says in the Psalmist that He will perfect the very thing that concerns us. He'll meet all of our needs, according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus. Therefore, we should ask Him, we should come to Him and say, God, this is the need of my life, and I'm trusting you. Therefore, He says, one of the reasons our needs aren't met, we don't ask Him. In the next verse, in that fourth chapter, the third verse, He says, a second reason your needs are not met is because you ask, He says, with the wrong motive. You ask with a selfish motive.

You're not asking in a way that would be pleasing and honorable to God, but a very selfish motive. So He says, therefore, not going to meet it for that reason. The third reason, He says in James chapter one, He says, because if you and I come to Him doubting, we come to Him doubting, He says, let not that man or woman who doubts, who wavers in their faith expect to receive anything from God. So therefore, one of the reasons He doesn't meet our needs is because we doubt Him.

We don't ask or we ask a miss. One of the primary reasons He doesn't meet our needs, because we have sin in our life, He says, if we regard iniquity in our heart, He'll not hear us, which is His way of saying, if I hold on to it, deliberately willfully choose to sin, the 66th Psalm, 18th verse, deliberately willfully choose to sin against Him, He says He will not hear us. And so here are some very basic reasons He doesn't hear. Of course, one of the primary reasons that He does not meet our needs is because oftentimes, we're asking for symptoms, not the need. And so we're not distinguishing between the symptom of our need, what our real need is, the root need, we don't ask Him for, we are asking Him for some symptom, and therefore, He's not going to do that. Another reason I believe our needs are unmet is because when God chooses to meet our need, we reject His method.

We don't like who the need is coming through or who the solution is coming through. We don't like the way God wants to meet it. Sometimes, God chooses to meet our needs through painful, difficult circumstances that you and I would never choose. So therefore, because we wouldn't choose it, we think this certainly couldn't be of God, oh Lord, if this is the way you're going to do it, forget it, I'll do it my own way. So one of the reasons He seems that He fails to meet our need is because we can't accept the method by which He chooses to do it. And then of course, I think one other way, and the primary thing that I want to deal with here is the fact that we want to do it our way. And so if I want to do it my way and I want to get my needs met my way, then God isn't going to interfere oftentimes, not I'm going to say always, He's not going to interfere with if I think I know how to do it best, God's going to let me make a mess of it until I come to the conclusion, God, I need you to meet this need in my life.

Now, that's the way oftentimes we choose to get our needs met and they're the reasons it doesn't happen. And so we want to blame God. And sometimes we get angry with God, Lord, you're not answering my prayer.

You said you'd answer my prayer, but some how you don't. Now, with that in mind, let's remember this, that when you and I grew up, we experienced all kinds of things. We came, many people came from families where they felt rejected, where they felt abandoned, they felt hurt, they felt pain, they did not feel a sense of worthiness because they were told you'll never amount to anything. They didn't feel very competent because they were told you can't do that.

Why do you think you can do this? They certainly didn't feel they belong because they said, you know, you were an accident. And so when you think about all the pain and the hurt and the ignoring that goes on of children and the kind of rebellion and the kind of disobedience that parents get into and neglect their children and overlook their spiritual needs and overlook oftentimes their physical and material needs, children grow up in very difficult circumstances, oftentimes verbally, physically or sexually abused by their parents. So what does that child do? That child does what every child does, what every single one of us has done in some fashion or the other. That child has to learn how to cope with hurt and pain and suffering. That child has to learn how to build emotional sort of mechanical defenses.

How do I handle this? Here's the pain. Here's the hurt. My parents are gone. My parents abuse me. How do I handle this kind of pain? He doesn't sit down and analyze that. But in that little mind, they begin to figure out what do I do?

How do I handle this? And what happens is all children develop mechanisms of coping. They build these emotional structures in their life in order to be able to survive. The tragedy is that those structures don't work. The tragedy is they don't cause the child to feel loved. The structures don't make them feel wanted.

The structures do not give them a sense of worth or competence or belonging. They have to live with, struggle with, fight over, defend, look for, search out anything possible to give them a sense of worth and belonging and a sense of competence. Now we've talked about how people usually respond and we've talked about how we look at needs in our life and why God oftentimes does not answer them. But the one that I want us to deal with primarily here is I want us to talk about this whole idea of trying to meet them our way and what we do. We go about building these structures, building these devices emotionally in our life in order to help us to survive. What I'd like to do is I'd like to mention several of these. Just say right up front, this is not the way that you deal with needs in your life, those emotional needs that are not being met. This is not the way to do it, but this is the way oftentimes we do it.

And so what I'd like to do is to mention several of these and give a brief explanation of them and then here's what I want to ask you to do. Now, if you're not willing to do this, then you know what? We're wasting our time, but I believe you are because I think you've already registered in your heart something that's somewhere along the way we've hit on something here and I know we have. What you've got to decide right now is am I going to be absolutely honest with myself and with God, or am I going to keep trying to fool myself because I don't want the pain. And sometime to discover what the real need is and to be willing to deal with it is very painful.

It's extremely painful. So I'm just giving you a little warning up front. You can either sit here and deny it and you can sit here and act like it's not happening. God knows it's happening.

God knows the kind of structures that all of us have built. And I'm going to use myself as the first example because I want you to know if you're not willing to be honest with yourself, you're going to miss it. And you know what? I don't believe you can afford to miss this. If you want a real sense of contentment and ever experienced real joy in your life and have wonderful, loving relationships, you cannot afford to miss what I'm about to say. So if you're listening, say amen.

All right. What is one of the primary ways we deal with hurt, pain, suffering, excruciating things that have been done to us, abandonment, being ignored? One of the first things we do? We deny it.

That's the first structure and probably the most prominent structure we build. We'll just deny it. Now, if I can cram it, stuff it and jam it to the point that I can deny that it ever happened, then I don't have to face it.

Then I'm not going to reach out to say to someone else, I need you to help me. Denial is my way of hiding. Denial is my protection. Denial is the structure I build and my emotional being that says somewhere along the way, if I put this aside long enough that I'm going to be able to just outgrow this and get over this. You see, denial is a form of control. If I can deny it, then I can control my feelings, I think. You can deny something like that so long and become so absolutely totally deceived about your own denial that you will in genuine honesty you think in your heart say, it never happened to me. No, that never happened to me.

That wasn't, no, I don't know why you got that. That never happened. You can deny it so long that you absolutely become fully convinced that it never happened. Now, I'll give you a personal example in my own life.

You've heard me say before that my father died when I was nine months of age, and I never knew him. Period. Closed conversation.

It's over. That's the way I thought. Well, God set me up for something because I'd been preaching a long time. And one day, one of our secretaries walked in one Sunday, brought her daughter in and wanted me to say, and I'd seen her lots of times before, brought her in and she said, she's nine months of age this week. Well, she reached out to me.

I didn't have to reach out. When she saw me, she reached out to me. I took her in my arms and held and talked to and sort of fathered up a little bit and tell how sweet she was and how wonderful, which she really was. And she'd grown up to be a grown girl today.

She's in college. So she hugged me a little bit and I hugged her and gave her back to her mom. When she walked out, all of a sudden it hit me. I thought she knew me. Nine months of age, I knew my father. Well, that was on Sunday.

So I sort of ignored that and walked away, shoved it down. On a Saturday afternoon, I was in the prayer room by myself and I remember something that happened to me just in a brief moment, just like that. I saw my grandfather and my father sitting on this log out in the woods talking to each other and they were just laughing. And all of a sudden it was just a brief momentary vision. And the only reason I knew it was my father was because I've seen a picture and they were sitting out in the woods on this and just laughing and talking.

All of a sudden I wanted to get in on that conversation real bad and it was gone. And I remember what I felt. I felt very angry with God.

Just anger just boiled up inside of me. God, what have you done to me? Why is it that, why did you take my father away?

Now up until this time, and I'm in my forties now, up in this time, here's my answer. It was the will of God. God took him. End of conversation, end of theology, end of it all. And so what had I been doing?

Jamming it, cramming it, stuffing it. Did I do it deliberately? No. Did I do it consciously?

No. But you see, I was in a state of denial. Well, I was denying that it had any effect on me at all.

Why? Well, it couldn't have had any effect on me because God did it. That is, if God took him and I was nine months of age and I never knew my father, God did it.

And this is another way you could reason. God doesn't make any mistakes. God didn't do anything in error.

God's an absolute controller, therefore if He did it, that was right, therefore ignore it and move on in life. The only problem with that is I knew Him. At nine months of age I didn't know much, but I must have known Him. If I could know this little girl that I didn't live with and she just, every once in a while I would see her and at nine months of age she reaches out to me with this big smile, I wonder how many times did I reach out to my father with a big smile? Well, it was that conversation with that little girl and that incident in the prayer room that God used to bring me to realization I had to deal with something in my life. Because up until this time I had felt God being very distant. Now I could pray, I could trust Him for big things, little things, all the things that were going on in my life I could rejoice about, and yet there was always this distance between God and myself. Well, He brought me to another experience later on, probably a year or so later, that I began to realize why I had felt all this distance. Because I denied it, unconsciously, but it was real.

Here's what I want you to see. Listen, you can be conscious or unconscious of it. If you do it, the effects are the same.

It's not a matter whether you choose to or not, the effects and the consequences are the same. I could never link up with God in my emotions. Theologically, I knew He loved me.

I mean, no question in my mind about that. But if you asked me, well, do you emotionally feel God's love, the answer would have had to have been no. I don't feel it.

I know He does, but I didn't feel it. Why? Because I denied the very fact about my father. Where do you get your first idea about God from your earthly father? Well, why was God distant from me? Because my father was gone at the age of nine months. He'd never been there. How was I supposed to believe that God was this infinite, loving, present father?

Well, I could tell you theologically and biblically that He was, but in my emotions, He wasn't. Now, I say all of that to say this. We can deny things. We don't even realize that we've denied them. And we think, well, they don't have any effect upon us. Yes, they do.

And I want to say this over and over and over again. You don't get healed by osmosis. You don't get healed simply because time goes by. These needs do not begin to be met simply because you have ignored them and denied them and time goes by.

No, they don't. They are there and until they're dealt with, the real basic need will not be met. And the basic need in my life at that moment was to feel an intimate personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ in my emotions, not just in my theological thinking. God knew that I needed a sense of acceptance by Him, that He unconditionally loved me. None of that was a part of my life until He brought me through these three experiences. This is why I've said this over and over and over again. Building an intimate relationship with Almighty God is such a wonderful foundation for building a relationship with someone else, open, transparent, all the rest. It's the bottom line. Building a relationship with the Heavenly Father is the bottom line. And I want to encourage you to begin to ask the Lord to show you how to do that.