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.
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