Day 18

“God’s Silence—Then What?”

“So when He heard that Lazarus was sick, He stayed where He was two more days…” (John 11:6 NIV)

DOES GOD trust you with His silence—a silence that has great meaning? Is it possible that when God is silent, that’s His answer? Just think of those two days of absolute silence in Lazarus’ home at Bethany! Is there anything comparable to those days in your life? It wasn’t that they didn’t know where Jesus was, they went to Him and experienced His presence. It’s just that His answer wasn’t audible. He was silent. Can God trust us like that, or are we still asking Him for a visible answer? God will give us the very blessings we ask if we refuse to go any further without them, but His silence is the sign that He is bringing us into an even more wonderful understanding of Himself. Are we mourning before God because we have not had an audible response? When we cannot hear God, we will find that He has trusted us in the most intimate way possible—with absolute silence, not a silence of hopelessness, but one of pleasure because He saw that we could hold out for an even bigger revelation. If God has given us a silence, then let’s praise Him—He is bringing us into the mainstream of His purposes. The actual evidence of the answer in time is simply a matter of God’s authority. Time is nothing to God. For a while we may actually believe and say, “I asked God to give me bread, but He gave me a stone instead” (see Matt. 7:9). He didn’t give us a stone, and today we find that He gave us the Life giving bread (see John 6:35). A wonderful thing about God’s silence is that His stillness is contagious—it gets into us, causing us to become perfectly confident so that we can honestly say, “I know that God has heard me.” His silence is the very proof that He has. As long as we have the idea that God will always bless us in answer to prayer, Even though He will do it, He will never give us the grace of His silence. If Christ is bringing us into the understanding that prayer is for the glorifying of His Father, then He will give us the first sign of His intimacy—silence.