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Is God silent in your life right now regarding situations and circumstances? I can hear the proverbial crickets chirping in mine most days.
I want answers now. I want the pressure and uncertainty wiped from my life along with the sinking feeling in my stomach that says unless God shows up all is lost. Are you there too?
Last Friday morning I was completely blessed and encouraged by Oswald Chambers’ classic devotional My Utmost for His Highest
. I read the October 11th devotional entry a day early by mistake (not really, I believe it was God). Several times last week I had quoted Scripture to remind and encourage myself: 1. God does hear and 2. He never leaves. What a blessing that devotional was to my tired soul!
As sure as the earth is round, some of you reading today are praying, quoting Scripture, and standing on God’s promises in a valley too. One thing we all have to remember — and remind one another — is God is in control. Even in His silence His love and mercy covers us. His grace is sufficient.
Today, I pray Chamber’s devotional, excerpted below, encourages you in a mighty way, leading you straight to the throne of grace with praises overflowing.
Kellie
“When He heard that he was sick, He stayed two more days in the place where He was.” John 11:6
Has God trusted you with His silence? A silence that has great meaning?
God’s silences are actually His answers. Just think of those days of absolute silence in the home at Bethany! Is there anything comparable to those days in your life? Can God trust you like that, or are you still asking Him for a visible answer? God will give you the very blessings you ask if you refuse to go any further without them, but His silence is the sign that He is bringing you into an even more wonderful understanding of Himself.
Are you mourning before God because you have not had an audible response? When you cannot hear God, you will find that He has trusted you in the most intimate way possible — with absolute silence, not a silence of despair, but one of pleasure, because He saw that you could withstand an even bigger revelation.
If God has given you a silence, then praise Him — He is bringing you into the mainstream of His purposes.
The actual evidence of the answer in time is simply a matter of God’s sovereignty. Time is nothing to God. For a while you may have said, “I asked God to give me bread, but He gave me a stone instead” (see Matthew 7:9). He did not give you a stone, and today you find that He gave you the “bread of life” (John 6:35).
A wonderful thing about God’s silence is that His stillness is contagious — it gets into you, causing you to become perfectly confident so that you can honestly say, “I know that God has heard me.”
His silence is the very proof that He has. As long as you have the idea that God will always bless you in answer to prayer, He will do it, but He will never give you the grace of His silence. If Jesus Christ is bringing you into the understanding that prayer is for the glorifying of His Father, then He will give you the first sign of His intimacy–silence.
Excerpted from My Utmost for His Highest (Updated edition in today’s language) by Oswald Chambers.
About Kellie Renfroe
Kellie and her husband Greg have been married 32 years and have four children ranging in age from 17 to 28. She co-founded Mentoring Moments for Christian Women in 2005. Kellie is a homeschooling mom who enjoys reading, studying the Bible, writing, photography, and learning how to cook.
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