Here’s a risky confession for a pastor: I’ve found myself very recently spending much of my times of prayer calling out to my God as I ask Him where He is, what he is up to and why He doesn’t answer my cries with clarity. Have you ever found yourself in this place? Of course you have. Have you ever become increasingly more concerned as the season spent in that spiritual fog becomes prolonged? Most of the Christian biographies that I have studied include portions of testimony where the individual confesses that there are periods of life where God seems incredibly distant, silent or detached. It’s comforting to know that you and I are not anomalies but it does very little by way of practical results to alleviate the present discomfort that we feel when God seems distant. Charles Spurgeon once said, “God will not go forth with that man who marches in his own strength.” It would seem that God sometimes desires to take us deeper by stripping us of certain components of life which we treasure. Perhaps we even treasure these things too much. Pondering on the strange silence of God which whittles away at my life, I found the passage below from Isaiah yesterday to speak freshly to my heart.
“Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh? Then shall your light break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up speedily; your righteousness shall go before you; the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry, and He will say, ‘Here I am.’ – Isaiah 58:6-9 {ESV}
Though this passage is not a comprehensive answer to the dilemma of what to do when God seems distant, it does provide us something to consider. If you will reread the verses you will see clearly that God is instructing His own people concerning their relationships with others. God instructs them concerning those who are indebted to them – He says to let them go free. God speaks about the hungry, homeless and inadequately clothed and tells His people without qualification to meet their needs. God gets very specific and commands His own children to take care of their own family members and not to hide from them. God is saying in several different ways that He expects us to take care of the weak and vulnerable, the indebted and displaced, the bound and the bereaved. He tells us that these people are owed a debt of love from us and that He is calling us to pay. Notice what promise comes after those commands to us:
“Then shall your light break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up speedily; your righteousness shall go before you; the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry, and He will say, ‘Here I am.”
It seems that God is clearly saying that, upon meeting our obligations to one another, we will receive illumination and clarity along our life path. There will be an unspecified healing – physical? emotional? mental? relational? – that occurs with a quickness that we did not expect. We will have all things prepared ahead of us through the assigned righteousness of God while, simultaneously, God will protect us from unexpected rear ambush as He attaches His own name and glory to our lives. Most importantly for those who are in a season where God seems absent in intimacy and activity, we see that our calls and cries to Him will be answered with the most reassuring words in the divine vocabulary: “I’m here.”
Our sense of God’s presence and the reality of His power and protection in our lives is somehow attached to how we are regarding our relationships with one another. Interesting. Now, God is never obligated to us based on what we do, please hear me clearly on that point. I’m not inviting you to the elementary school think-tank which assures you of bartering formulas and marketplace equations in your spiritual journey. It is not a case of “take care of the poor and God magically reappears in your life”. The truth is that He has not gone anywhere nor has He stopped communicating to you. God’s present perceived silence often compels me to think on things He has spoken to me in the past – things that I might not be believing or obeying or both. Perhaps I’m not hearing anything fresh because I’ve not yet worked out the former. How easily we can become focused on our own desires, our own demands, our own assumptions and our own pressures. A better focus might be whether or not we have relieved the pressures, burdens, needs and desires of others in our lives. In essence, I do well to ask whether I have done for another the very thing that I ask God to do for me. Have I heard their cries? Am I liberating them from trouble? Is my forgiveness lavish in their direction so that they sense I am now for them? At times I am sobered by the little known Proverbs 21:13 which reads, “Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered.” When God seems silent to us there may be a need to consider whose cries to us we are tuning out.
“Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry, and He will say, ‘Here I am.’ – Isaiah 58:9