WHEN THE LINE GOES QUIET, YOU CAN’T HELP BUT WONDER IF YOU HAD A BAD CONNECTION.
Overcoming fear, gaining clarity, or feeling comfort are all real desires in our relationship with God at one time or another. When we don’t experience these, doubts and discontent begin to bubble to the surface. Most of us start to look at our own life and try to put a finger on something that caused God to stop talking. We treat God as if He is another person, assuming that we ticked Him off somehow and He is giving us the silent treatment. Even our close friends give us the cold shoulder sometimes, so why wouldn’t God?
Then, if we can’t seem to pinpoint why He is mad or choosing to shut down, we start to get frustrated with Him. Our prayer life is filled with desperate pleas for Him to talk—or at least tell us what we did to make Him stop talking. Once again, we treat Him like another version of us, assuming His silence is an emotional reaction more than an intentional decision.
Yesterday, a woman came up to me, weeping, at the end of our church service. A saintly soul who has walked with God for more than thirty years, she mumbled through her tears, “I can’t feel God like I used to, and it’s freaking me out.” My stomach lurched and landed in my throat because I knew exactly how she felt. I’ve been there.
How do you make sense of a God who is supposed to be everywhere but seems to be nowhere? I am familiar with His promises to always be present—to never leave me nor forsake me. I have written sermons on that topic. However, knowing a truth and believing a truth can be two very different things.
With chagrin, I admit that much of my relationship with God has relied on feeling His presence. If I felt like He was with me, then He must have been. If I didn’t feel Him, then one of us had walked away. But what if God pulling away is not an emotional response? What if my feelings are really secondary to the primary purpose of God’s silence?
OVERCOMING GOD’S SILENCE STARTS BY UNDERSTANDING WHY HE IS SO QUIET.
This may not surprise you, but I hope it brings you comfort: You are not the first person who has experienced God’s silence. You are not the first to get frustrated with Him, fume at Him, and perhaps even shake a fist at Him. There are many examples of people in the Bible who waited on God when He seemingly went mute.
Abraham wanted God to say something as he marched up to Mount Moriah to sacrifice his son . . . but nothing.
Moses wandered in the desert for years, longing for God to talk and do something . . . but nothing.
Job’s life imploded before His eyes, and He wanted answers from God . . . but nothing.
Isaiah was an unpopular preacher, hated by his hearers for the judgment he kept yelling about. All he wanted was for God to back him up . . . but nothing.
The apostle Paul begged God to release him of suffering, or at least explain it . . . but nothing.
Many examples of God’s silence exist, but in all of them we see God do something great as the people waited or as a result of their waiting.
Trusting God is the antidote for overcoming fear and confusion associated with His silence. When I learn to trust the heart of God, then hearing His voice is seemingly irrelevant.
King David has the most recorded instances of praying for God to open His mouth. As we begin this journey, we also pray, “O God, do not keep silence; do not hold your peace or be still, O God!” (Ps. 83:1 ESV).
What we learn from these towering figures of the faith is that they had the same struggles we do. Many times, they felt not towering but tiny. Yet they demonstrated the courage and perseverance to push through their doubts about God. They endured their own times of asking, “Where’s God?”
My hypothesis is that God’s silence is one of His greatest tools for cultivating our dependence upon Him. We will explore together to see if this is true, biblically and practically. I will open my life to humbly offer some lessons I’ve learned on my faith journey—usually lessons learned the hard way—about what it means to develop trust in a God who can exasperate us with His reticence. More important, we will learn from biblical characters and other encouraging examples of faithful, though fearful, believers. They have much to teach us.
I dare to believe we can come to know that we are not, in fact, alone even though we feel like it. We can come to learn that God is exceedingly worthy of trust even when our hearts are full of fear and our minds full of doubt. Our faith can be fortified when we believe that God is true to His word: He will never, ever leave us.
This article about God’s silence originally appeared here.
