When God Seems Silent

When God seems silent, was the topic Pastor Bob chose to preach this morning. A great subject to teach I thought because who in the world hadn't  experienced God's silence from time to time to their pleas and petitions.   We may have raised so many Why?s looking up at the ceiling and weeping, when our requsts  seemed bouncing back instead of getting through to the Throne room.


I'd like to share what Oswald Chamber has written about God's silence in his devotional book My Utmost for His Highest.

"If God has given you silence, then praise Him- He is bringing yu into the mainstream of His purpose... His silence is the sign that He is bringing you into an even more wonderful understanding of Himself.
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. ... 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."

Wow! What a lover of God Oswald Chamber must had been to come to that level of trust in God. In comparison, I stand in faith like a Liliputian in faith. We all want our prayers answered promptly, mostly with a big Yes. A "No," or a delay make us anxious, downhearted, and even to give up praying and quit on God.

If I could summarize last Sunday's sermon into a few paragraphs, it would read like the following:

"Persist on your prayers!" Jesus' stories of persistant widow who went to  the judge and the man who put up his friend at night to get some loaves of bread to feed the stranger who came to his house. In otherwords, we're required to persist in our asking until we get a clear 'No ' from God. Tha't something new to me for I usually stop asking the same thing after a few times thinking that it may not be God's will.

Deal with your sin before you expect to hear an answer from heaven. Confess, repent and wait patiently for God to answer you.

Our falling world and satan's demonic power in the world are real and because of that we face with problems, disasters and attacks along with the rest of the world and those times we may see God as silent and distant. A perfect example is what happened on 9/11. Believers as well as non believers died on that day when the plane hit the twin towers. Many would have prayed before they left for work at the Towers on that day, and many of the family members must have prayed for their loved ones protection on that morning. It did seem God to be silent and far away to many of the prayers that was raised later that day. Yes, we live in a rotten world where evil exists and people chose to kill and destroy innocent people for their own reason and justification.

Sometimes God's silence remind us who God is. Otherwise, it's easy for us to fall into pride and arrogance if we get our way all the time. God's silence sometimes mean that the miracle is just a day or two away, but have we got the faith to believe that God could turn around anything for good at His timing.

God is silent at times in order to save us from ourselves. Yes, it sounds crazy, but it's true. Looking back on our lives, how many of are so thankful that God say "No"  to some of our desperate prayer requsts. How many disasters and distreses were avoided because God kept silent to our wants.

God chooses to be silent to train us for His ministry. His silence teaches us to trust Him completely. He doesn't want us to see Him as a Genie who grant all our wishes to appease us. Instead He wants us to see Him as a loving Father who know what and when to give His children what they ask. He doesn't want to grow up like bratty kids who shouts " I hate you!" when the parents refuses to give or allow them to do what they want. Instead, He wants us to be loving and understanding children who trust the Father's unconditional love rather than loving Him for His gifts and yeses.

I pray that you and I will grow to have the faith like Oswald Chambers who saw love, faithfulness, and intimacy in God's silence