What happens when you pray for something to change—and it doesn’t? Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane shows us that prayer isn’t a way to control God but a relationship with God that changes us.
Scripture: Luke 22:39–46
How many times have you received bad news and found yourself praying, “God, please let everything be okay”? Some of our most honest prayers come when life feels beyond our control. The doctor says, “We found something on the scan.” Your child is in trouble, and you don’t know how to help. A relationship you care about is falling apart. Something inside us instinctively reaches out, saying, “God, please help. Please change this.”
These kinds of prayers matter because prayer is a relationship, and honesty is essential to any genuine relationship. If we don’t feel safe expressing our deepest desires, fears, and disappointments, our relationship with God can’t grow. But because God loves us deeply and wants to hear our hurts and heart’s desires, we can trust God with what matters most to us. We can bring our authentic selves into the relationship rather than offering only the parts we think are acceptable or spiritual enough.
But eventually, if we pray for any length of time, we face a difficult question: What happens when the thing we’re praying for doesn’t change?
We pray for someone to recover, but they don’t. We pray for a relationship to survive, but it ends. We pray for clarity, yet we still feel confused. We pray for a new door to open, but it stays closed. Does that mean God isn’t listening? Does it mean we lack enough faith or didn’t pray correctly?
I think Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane offers us another way to understand what prayer is and what it can do.
Prayer Begins with Honesty
In Gethsemane, Jesus knows that powerful people want him dead, that one of his friends has betrayed him, and that his arrest is imminent. So he goes to the Mount of Olives and, like many of us when life becomes overwhelming, he prays.
“Father, if it’s your will, take this cup of suffering away from me. However, not my will but yours must be done.”
Sometimes we rush so quickly to the second half of Jesus’ prayer—not my will but your will be done—that we miss the first. Jesus, wrestling with fear and suffering, tells God exactly what he wants. He doesn’t pretend everything is fine. He doesn’t pretend that being spiritual means he shouldn’t be afraid. He asks God to take the cup away.
That matters because we sometimes think we need to clean up our prayers before bringing them to God. We imagine that we first need to determine what God wants and then make sure we ask for the right thing. But that isn’t what Jesus does, and we shouldn’t either. We can say, “God, I want to be cured of cancer. I want my child to come home. I want this relationship to heal. I want another chance.”
Prayer begins with honesty.
Surrender Means Letting Go of Control
But Jesus doesn’t stop there. After asking for what he wants, he prays, “Not my will, but yours be done.”
That doesn’t mean, “Whatever happens must be God’s will, so I’ll just accept it.” Jesus spends his entire ministry resisting what diminishes human life. He heals the sick, feeds the hungry, welcomes the rejected, and confronts injustice and hypocrisy. Therefore, surrendering to God doesn’t require us to pretend that everything that happens is God’s will.
Instead, surrender means letting go of our need to control everything. It means being able to say, “God, this is what I want. This is what I fear. This is what I desperately hope will happen. But I know I can’t control everything. I don’t know what tomorrow holds, so I am placing what I can’t control in your hands.”
Of course, this raises one of the hardest questions in the life of faith: If God loves us and hears us, why doesn’t God simply give us what we ask for, especially when what we’re asking for is clearly good?
I don’t think Christians should pretend there’s an easy answer. And I don’t think it’s right to say that every tragedy happens because God secretly planned it. We live in a real world of natural processes, human freedom, choices, consequences, beauty, and suffering. Faith doesn’t give us access to a hidden explanation for why one person is healed and another isn’t, nor does it provide a magical fix for all our problems.
God doesn’t give Jesus an explanation in Gethsemane for why he will be arrested and executed. Instead, because Jesus trusts God, he releases his need for control and entrusts himself to God, convinced that God will be fully present with him, come what may. We can do the same. Even when we cannot control what is happening around us, we can entrust ourselves to God, knowing that we are not alone and that God suffers with us.
And then something important happens.
Jesus gets up.
The road in front of him hasn’t changed. The people coming to arrest him haven’t changed. The cup of suffering hasn’t changed. But Jesus has. His prayer has given him the courage and faith to face reality and take his next step.
Prayer Changes the Person Who Prays
This gives us another way to think about prayer. I’m not suggesting that our circumstances never change. Sometimes they do. Someone recovers. A relationship begins to heal. Help arrives from somewhere we didn’t expect. When that happens, we should receive it with gratitude and give thanks to God.
But sometimes our circumstances don’t change.
If the only purpose of prayer is to change our circumstances, we may conclude it has somehow failed. But what if, while we’re asking God to change our situation, God intends to use that situation to change us?
Maybe I begin by praying, “God, change my friend.” But as I continue to bring that relationship to God, my prayer slowly shifts: “God, help me better understand my friend. Show me how to love him while remaining honest about what I need.”
Or perhaps I begin by praying, “God, make this problem go away.” Eventually, my prayer becomes, “God, give me the courage to face it.”
The situation may not change, but the person praying does.
This makes sense when we remember that prayer is a relationship. Every meaningful relationship changes us. Think of someone you have deeply loved—a spouse, friend, child, teacher, or mentor. When you truly know someone, you begin to see things differently. You learn what matters to them. Their joys and sufferings come to matter to you, and sometimes they even reveal things about yourself you didn’t want to see.
Love changes us.
As our relationship with God grows, we can become more patient, compassionate, merciful, courageous, and generous, and more like Jesus. Prayer is one of the most important ways we open our lives to God’s transforming love. We aren’t trying to convince God to love us; we are making ourselves available to the love that is already there so we can be healed, set free, and empowered to grow.
Get Up and Take the Next Faithful Step
This is what we see in Jesus. He walks into the garden and asks that the cup of suffering pass. Then he surrenders himself to God, gets up, and takes his next faithful step. Prayer doesn’t give us control over every aspect of life, but it can give us the grace to face reality honestly and courageously and to move forward with faith, hope, and love.
One simple way to practice this is through a breath prayer, a form of prayer Christians have used for centuries. When you find yourself anxious about something you can’t control, instead of letting your mind race through every possible outcome, pause for a moment and breathe slowly.
As you breathe in, pray:
Lord …
As you breathe out:
… have mercy.
When we say “mercy,” we are asking for more than forgiveness. We are saying, “God, meet me here with your compassion, healing, strength, and grace.”
You can pray this way in the doctor’s office, when you’re lying awake at two in the morning, or before a difficult conversation. You can pray it when you’re angry, frightened, overwhelmed, or fixated on something you can’t control.
Lord, have mercy.
The situation may not change right away, but as you place yourself in God’s presence, something may begin to change within you. Your breathing slows. Your grip loosens. You remember that you’re not alone. You remember that you don’t have to control everything. Eventually, by God’s grace, you can get up and take the next faithful step. Pasted text
So when you pray, speak honestly from your heart and ask boldly for what you want. But leave enough space for prayer to be more than an attempt to control your circumstances by trying to control God. Instead of focusing only on what you want God to change around you, perhaps you can begin asking a different question:
God, who are you inviting me to become in what I’m facing?
Imagine the difference it could make if prayer increasingly shaped us into people who trust God more like Jesus—less controlled by fear, less consumed by anger, more grounded in grace, more courageous amid uncertainty, and more available to love.
The road in front of us may not always change, but by God’s grace, prayer can change the person who walks it.
Continue the Journey
📖 What Christians Do: Living Like Jesus in a Divided World
What if Christianity were known less by what Christians argue about and more by how we live?
My new book, What Christians Do, explores six practices rooted in the life and teachings of Jesus that can help us become people of greater humility, compassion, courage, justice, and love—especially in a divided world.
Coming October 6, 2026, from Abingdon Press.
Learn More & Preorder What Christians Do
✉️ Get My Free 5-Day Devotional
Want to go deeper? Subscribe to receive my free 5-Day Devotional, along with future articles and reflections on faith, spiritual formation, and learning to live more like Jesus.
Subscribe & Get the Free Devotional
