DAILY DEVOTIONAL – October 20, 2020

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Prayer:  Jesus, You are the Word of God made flesh.  You came to speak the very words of God to us; His words that give life and salvation.  Lord we admit that there are times in our distress that we feel the words You have given us are not enough.  God in Your mercy and by Your Spirit help us to always remember that You speak to us always and in many ways.  Give us eyes to see and ears to hear Your faithfulness to us.  In Jesus’ Name.  Amen.

Scripture: Psalm 34:15

The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous and his ears toward their cry.

Devotional – “                  …”

The sure hope and certainty of salvation that we know and trust as believers comes from the fact that God has indeed spoken and continues to speak through His Word.  God’s promises that we find preserved by the Holy Spirit in the Word of God have proven 100% true.

But what about those times in life where we pray and pray, we persist in faith that God has promised to hear our prayers and even answer our prayers, but yet the only reply we seem to get is silence?  We know God is with us, but He couldn’t seem farther away.

I’m pretty confident in saying that every believer, myself included, has experienced the joy and have been greatly comforted by the words that God has spoken and given to us.  I’m equally confident that we all have also been left paralyzed by what God hasn’t said.

The unbelieving world would have us believe that God is silent because God doesn’t have a voice to speak with – because God is absent.  He is not there.  And truth be told, in the midst of the arid desert of heaven’s silence it can certainly seem that way.  However, it only seems that way.  God has promised to and is always speaking to us.  When it seems that God is silent, I assure you my friends, He is not.

God is always speaking.  Through the Word He has put in our hands, through the millions of sermons preached each week, through creation itself, and yes, even through the silence of what God hasn’t said.  What we perceive as silence from God, is just that.  What we perceive to be silence. He is always speaking to us and always answering prayer, but sometimes, our perception is compromised.  Whether that be by our own sinfulness and doubt or the result of our own thoughts being scrambled and drowned out by the static of our circumstances, we all have those times when we perceive God to be silent.  But He is still very much with us and very much speaking to us.

Though we may perceive God’s silence as the absence of an answer, or as God’s absence altogether, the truth is we know that even silence is an answer.

God never leaves us or forsakes us and is indeed always with us and speaking to us, but sometimes God will answer us and speak to us through silence in order to draw us closer to Himself; closer still so that we may receive more of what God wants to give us out of His goodness and mercy.  I very much like what Jon Blook said about this in an article he wrote about this same topic.  Jon makes the astute observation that, “Deprivation draws out desire. Absence heightens desire. And the more heightened the desire, the greater its satisfaction will be. It is the mourning that will know the joy of comfort (Matthew 5:4). It is the hungry and thirsty that will be satisfied (Matthew 5:6). Longing makes us ask, emptiness makes us seek, silence makes us knock.”

You see my friends, we only perceive God’s silence to be the absence of an answer, when in fact silence can often times be God’s most gracious and loving reply given to draw us ever closer to His mercy and joy.

Jesus walked to Calvary’s hill and sacrificed Himself on the cross.  Nailed to a tree the Son of God Himself was abandoned and forsaken by God in that moment so that through faith in Christ’s death and resurrection you and I would never have to be.  Because of what Christ has done for us, God has never and will never abandon us or forsake us, especially in those times when we perceive His silence to be anything other than an answer to prayer.

God bless you my friends, and remember that God has forgiven yesterday, is with you today and has already taken care of tomorrow.  Amen.