by Oswald Chambers
October 11, 2014
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.
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.
___________________NOTE:
I love Chambers, and I believe what he says here is on target, but there is much more to be said on this subject. Books could be written (and have been) about God's silence. Chambers writes about a small piece of the subject, a necessity in a daily devotional. I mention this to warn against interpreting all silence from God as an answer to prayer or even as a good thing. If you are looking for a good daily devotional you can't go wrong with Chambers. CMR
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