God's Silence
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" 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.
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