This comes from T. Austin Sparks, Discipline Unto Prayer, Part Twelve: The Divine Ministry of Delay

The Lord is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in Him.  The Lord is good unto them that wait for Him, to the soul that seeketh Him.  It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord” (Lamentations 3:24-26)

Let us frankly admit at the outset that one of the great difficulties of life with many of us is concerned with the fact that God sometimes seems to delay His answers to our prayers…

…sometimes the only word that rises from our hearts when we come into God’s presence is almost the last word which came from the Saviour’s lips: “My God, why?”  This is not the first question of the Christian life.  Faith’s first question is usually “How?”…”How can a man be born when he is old?”  “How can these things be?”  “How can this Man give us His flesh to eat?”…These are some of the first question of the Christian life.  But as we go on with God, as life depends, as its necessities become heavier, its sorrow more acute, and our perceptions more alert also, the question which rises from the heart of many a disturbed and distressed believer is: “My God,” not “how?” but “WHY?”

…We are seeking some explanation, some interpretation from God Himself as to what He is doing in these our lives.  Some of us are distressed almost to the point of desertion – desertion of our own allegiance, and desertion of His colors, because He seems to delay, indeed almost to deny the things we ask Him.

…There are times in life when nothing but sheer belief in God’s goodness saves us from despair; when nothing but simple reliance upon God’s love, without any present evidence of it, can save us from hopelessness; when nothing but almost reckless faith in His omnipotent wisdom, will prevent us from sinking into positive moral apathy and spiritual lethargy…

Now these words were spoken by the Prophet Jeremiah in a day when the nation’s desire, its best desire, was perhaps never so evident.  The people had begun to see the fulfillment of God’s promises and the working of His providence.  Their foes were being pushed from their land, the beginnings of recultivation were taking place, and the broken-down altars of God were being rebuilt.  But all was being done so slowly that they could not reconcile the slowness of God with the implicit assurances upon which their faith in Him rested.  They were impatient and restive under His apparent inactivity.  Faith saw God’s beginnings and, like the disciples of later days, “thought the kingdom must immediately appear!”…

I am going to suggest three things, and they are mere suggestions; but may they bring light to you, as they have brought to me in past days.  The first thing I want to say about God’s delays is this: It is only by enforced waiting upon Him that we come to know God with that knowledge which is the foundation of all character.  I use the word enforced waiting upon God, because it is only by being forced to wait upon God that some of us ever do wait on Him.  We are naturally impatient, we are naturally impulsive, we naturally chafe at anything like slowness; and God, by withholding the answer for which we have looked, keeps us at His feet in order that we may come to know Him…For we cannot come to know God, and inferentially we cannot come to know ourselves, in an hour.  God’s delays do not indicate any caprice on His part, but rather His concern and compassion for us.  They are directed toward saving us from hurrying away from His presence before the lessons of His grace have been more than mentally received.  God is preparing us, by keeping us waiting upon Him, worthily to receive, to interpret, and then to use the gifts He will yet give in answer to prayer and in fulfillment of His word…

God is making us; do not let us be impatient under the process.  God is making us; do not let impatience and impetuosity take us, therefore, from under the hand of the Master Workman.  He is eliminating the flaws, and remaking the marred vessels.  The two qualities which we need most – endurance and radiance – are not imparted to any man in a single hour.  God keeps us waiting that in His presence, beholding His glory, we may be changed into the same image from glory unto glory.

The second thing I want to say is this.  Many of our prayers must be passed through the refining medium of God’s wisdom, that is, of God’s love; many of them must be edited by God before they are answered.  For well-intentioned prayer is not always well-informed…Our prayers have to be passed, I say, through the refining medium of God’s wisdom, sometimes with regard to their motive.  “Ye have not because ye ask amiss.”

…I have seen children – we have all seen them – who have been utterly spoiled by the weak good-nature of parents who gave them at once everything they wanted.  For human love may be entirely lacking in wisdom.  But the love and wisdom of God are one…The day will come to every one of us when we shall know that God’s silence was in reality His most loving speech to us.  For we shall see that while seemingly inactive God has all the time been working in us, bringing us into moral correspondence with His will, which alone capacitates men to receive His gifts.

Well do I recollect, some years ago, in the city of Dublin, a man coming into the vestry-room of a church and saying: “Sir, I want to thank you for that message about God’s love.  I believe every word of it now, but I did not six months ago.”  His eyes filled with tears; and as I said: “What does it mean, my brother?”  He went on: “Six months ago my home was bright and happy, and the shadow fell.  I prayed earnestly that God would save my wife and our infant.  But He took them; and I have come to know that He took them only in order to bring me back to Himself, from Whom I had wandered.”  God’s silence in that man’s life was His richest and kindest speech.  

…Paul learnt that there was something infinitely better than the removal of the thorn-pain – infinitely better!  Thrice he besought the Lord to remove it – with what interval between those prayers we know not.  But surely Paul, like the rest of us, was perplexed at God’s delay.  And he ultimately found that God was preparing something far better than the extraction of the thing which caused a throbbing wound – “My grace is sufficient for thee.”…

The third thing I want to say is this.  Faith can only be trained by being tested.  As a man’s muscles are only hardened by exercise, so his faith only becomes strong and ultimately invincible by being subjected to the discipline of strain.