John 11: 6 ~ “When He had heard therefore that he was sick, He abode
two days in the same place where he was.”
The first part of this devotion comes from: My Utmost for
His Highest by Oswald Chambers…
Titled: “After God's Silence - What?”
He asks: Has God trusted you with a silence - a silence that is big
with meaning?
God's silences are His answers. …Think of those days of
absolute silence in the home at Bethany!
Can God trust you like that… or are you still asking for a
visible answer?
But His silence is a sign that He is bringing you into a marvelous
understanding of Himself… trusting you
in the most intimate way possible… because He saw that you could stand a bigger
revelation...
If God has given you a silence, praise Him, He is bringing
you into the great run of His purposes…
A wonderful thing about God's silence is that the contagion
of His stillness gets into you and you become perfectly confident – knowing God
has heard you!
And His silence is the proof that He has heard you...
As long as we have the idea that God will bless us in answer
to prayer… He will do it.
If
Jesus Christ is bringing you into the understanding that prayer is for the
glorifying of His Father, He will give you the first sign of His intimacy - silence.
Wow, When God says that his ways are not our ways, he really
means it (Isaiah 55:8).
Often, we have these encounters with the Lord where he
breaks into our lives with power and answers our prayers and wins our trust and
waters the garden of our faith, making it lush and green…
And then there are seasons when chaos ensues leaving us
shattered.
And we experience a dry and barren spiritual landscape, that
leaves our soul cracked and parched… And we cry to God in our confused anguish
and He just seems silent. He seems absent… distant.
Job in Job 30:20 said, “I cry to you for help and you do not
answer me; I stand, and you only look at me.”
King David in Psalm 22: 1-2 exclaimed: “My God, my God, why
have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my
groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I
find no rest.”
Atheists will tell us that the reason God seems silent is
because he’s absent. He doesn’t exist.
And often during these silent seasons, we can be tempted to wonder…
to doubt it ourselves…
Yet, if we look… …we see that existence itself is not
silent.
It screams God… just as Maria sang in The Sound of Music
said, “Nothing comes from nothing; and nothing ever could.”
God’s silence… is all about perception… just like how something may look and feel one
way but it isn’t how it is…
To help explain what I mean… it’s similar to how we
experience the world as flat when we’re walking on a huge spinning ball…
We can experience God as absent or distant when “in him we
live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
In reality, God isn’t absent or silent or indifferent toward
us just like he wasn’t silent to Job or King David. It’s just how it felt to
them at the time.
And when we feel forsaken by God… we are not forsaken... We
are simply called to trust the promise more than the perception.
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