Sermon July 18
When God Seems Silent
You can listen to the
message here: https://youtu.be/Kt_JnE8Dg_0
Who will separate us from the love of Christ?
Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine,
or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Just as
it is written, “For Your sake we are being put to death all day
long; We were considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” But in
all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. For I am
convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor
principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other
created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which
is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans
8:35-39)
The focus of my message today is once again
God’s love for us. This time that focus is in context with the question, “Why
does God sometimes seem silent to my prayers?”
Such
silence has happened to me far more often than I like to remember. And the same
has happened to so many others with whom I have spoken during the nearly
half-century I have walked with Jesus.
Why
does God sometimes seem so silent when we are so desperately in need?
No
Christian has not at one time or another – and often at many times – tried to
wrap their minds around God’s apparent silence in the face of bone-shattering
tragedy. A child develops cancer – and then dies. A husband is horribly injured
in a car accident – and never fully recovers. A woman or a man pray for years
that God would bring them a godly spouse – and yet they remain single. A wife
develops debilitating dementia – and gets progressively worse.
There’s
no end to the horrible things that CAN go wrong and DO go wrong in life. And
like Job, who in one fell-swoop, lost his ten children, his wealth, and his
health, we melt into a pile of mournful depression, wondering why God is
treating us so.
Certainly,
there are times God says yes to our prayers. But my message today looks at the
other side of our prayer life – when God seems silent to our prayers and we ask
the question again and again, ‘Why.’
I remember very well asking that question
of God back in the winter of 2019 when Nancy had her stroke. I’ve told that
story many times, and will not repeat the story, except to say this –
because it segues into the larger point of my message.
I’d never known such emotional trauma
in all my life as Nancy lay there in her ICU bed for three weeks. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop
crying, could hardly pray or even read the Scriptures. My entire being focused
on fear – fear of what would become of Nancy and trying to understand what God
was doing with us. I was at the absolute lowest point in my Christian walk – a
walk that had been by then some 45 years.
And then, suddenly and quite
unexpectedly – unexpectedly because God had seemed so silent to me during those
weeks – suddenly God asked me two questions: “Richard, what do you know about
Me?” And the second, “Why do you know
it?”
It is those two questions I want us
to examine now before I try to answer the one about God’s silence. Those
two questions – and our answers to those two questions – will be the
foundation for how we will ultimately deal with God’s silence to some of our
prayers.
That foundation will be either firm
because we have come up with the right answers to those two questions BEFORE we
need to deal with out next desperate life-struggle, or it will falter badly if we
don’t settle those two questions.
So, Christian, what do we
know about God? And why do we know it. Let me answer the second
question first:
Why do we know what we know about God?
That’s easy. It’s all there between the covers of the Bible. Surely the heavens
and nature itself declare to us God’s existence and His glory and His
handiwork. It is only the willfully self-blinded who look at it all and
convince themselves it all ‘just happened.’ But about God and His character, we
find those specifics – at least the specifics He wants us to know – in
the pages of Scripture.
So, now to answer the first
question: What do we know about God? Specifically, what is it we know about God
AND His character upon which we can confidently rest when we struggle with the
fear that God is silent to our heart cries?
This is IMPORTANT because without this confidence, no other answer to
the question of why God seems silent can ever satisfy.
First, we know God is omnipotent. All-mighty.
He is utterly sovereign over nature, over nations. Nothing slips passed Him – not
corrupt politicians at every level of government. Not corrupt news
broadcasters, not corrupt business leaders or corrupt religious leaders.
Nothing gets passed His gaze. Not
our loneliness, our fears, our confusions, our heartaches, our pains – He knows
it all because He is All Mighty and omniscient.
What does Scripture tell us about
His authority? For example,
Isaiah 40:7-8 “The grass withers, the flower fades, when
the breath of the Lord blows upon it; Surely the people are grass. 8 The
grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever.”
There are hundreds of such
assurances throughout Scripture that testify to God’s unequaled power and
authority, but let’s just let these two suffice for the sake of time.
What ELSE do we know of God’s
character? He loves YOU. Whoever you are, whatever you have done, however often
you have done it – He loves you. In it all, through it all. How do we know
this?
Romans 5:8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we
were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” John 3:16-17 “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten
Son . . . And finally for our purposes here: Jeremiah 31:3
– “I have loved you with an everlasting love;
Therefore I have drawn you with lovingkindness.”
We’ve got to get this. This same omnipotent God loves us so deeply, so
passionately, so warmly, that He demonstrated His love by willingly and
lovingly sending His dear Son to pay the requisite punishment of death for our
rebellions and sins. What more could even an almighty omnipotent God do to
prove His love for us?
And there is one more thing I want
to remind us of about God’s character before we get to the question of why He
seems so silent when we need Him most.
Scripture assures us that this same
almighty and omniscient Creator actually wants to enter into a loving
RELATIONSHIP with us. He wants to be our Father. He wants to adopt all of us
into His family as His children.
When we talk about God wanting us to
be His children, Scripture does NOT mean ‘children’ in a generic sense, as in ‘all
humanity are His creation.’ No, this is an actual ADOPTION into His eternal
family as a true Father to sons and daughters brought specifically into the
family by their faith in the salvation and forgiveness of sins which He
initiated through Jesus’ sacrificial atonement, death, and resurrection.
St. John tells us: “He [Jesus] was in the world, and the world
was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and those who were His
own did not receive Him. 12 But
as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of
God, even to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh
nor of the will of man, but of God. (John 1:10-13)
So, I say it again – because it
is vitally important to our walk with Christ – without a rock-solid trust in
God’s omnipotence, sovereignty, love, and our relationship to Him as His
adopted sons and daughters through faith and obedience to Jesus – we will not
be able to move toward successfully wrapping our minds around the inevitable
questions when God seems silent to our prayers.
Which now brings
us to that question of His silence – WHY does it seem so?
Well, again, back to Scripture
for our answer. The Bible gives us several possible reasons for His silence. For
example:
1. The Lord will not hear me if I hold on to sin in my heart. (Psalm 66:18, New Life Version) In other words, if I am persistent in
choosing my way above His commandments – why should I expect our Holy
God to hear my prayer? That is nothing less than insolent presumption and
arrogance. St. Paul tells us, “Do not be deceived, God
is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap.”
(Galatians 6:7)
The remedy to that barrier to
answered prayer? Confession, repentance and changing our direction.
Second: We ought not expect our holy God to hear our prayers if we harbor an
unforgiving attitude toward someone or some ones. We must never gloss over this
problem because God does not gloss over it. When the Lord Jesus taught His
disciples to pray what we call the Lord’s Prayer, He taught them: “Forgive
us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” And then
almost immediately He follows on with this warning: “For if you forgive other people when they sin
against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15 But if you do not
forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. (Matthew 6:14-15)
Third. Sometimes God does not answer our prayers in order to test us, to see what is in our
hearts . . . not that He does not know what is there, but so that WE might come
to terms with what is in our heart. Deuteronomy 8:2-3 is
one Biblical example. John 6 is yet another. You may remember the incident in
John 6 when the Lord said what seemed to everyone unbelievable words about
eating His flesh and drinking His blood. Many of His followers turned and
walked away from Jesus. And then the Lord turned to the Twelve and asked: “You do not want to go away also,
do you?” 68 Simon Peter answered Him, “Lord, to whom
shall we go? You have words of eternal life. (John 6:67-68)
When God does not answer our prayers – what shall
we do? Some walk away when they do not understand what He is doing with us.
What will we do?
A fourth possible reason for His silence: Scripture tells us that sometimes
we just will not know why God does or does not do anything. For example,
Isaiah 55:8-9 “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your
ways My ways,” declares the Lord. 9 “For as the heavens are higher than
the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your
thoughts.”
Such a recognition and
acknowledgment to ourselves that we cannot know all there is to know about why
God does or does not do anything – our acceptance AND our acquiescence
to His higher ways and higher thoughts will go a long way in our learning to trust
our omnipotent and loving Father to do what is right for us – even when he
says, ‘No” – which brings us to the last reason we will look at today about why
God may seem silent to our prayers.
5. Sometimes God flat-out says
‘No’ to our prayers. He said No to St. Paul when the great apostle asked Him
THREE TIMES to remove his thorn in the flesh. Many of you remember that text in
2 Corinthians 12. And let us not forget, the Father also said flat-out No to
His beloved Son, Jesus in that Garden of Gethsemane. So, we should not be
shocked if God at times also tells us flat-out – ‘No’ to our prayer.
I do not know if I have
adequately answered to your satisfaction the question about God’s sometimes silence
to our prayers. But my message today is quite honestly the best I come up with
for myself when I ask that question.
As I said earlier, there are
other reasons we could come up with from the Scriptures that might also help us
understand His silence in those circumstances. But all of our answers – both
the ones I have listed today, and the ones we could debate for a long time –
all of those answers must be rooted in the correct answers to the questions God
asked me when I was at my lowest ebb: What do you know about Me? And why do you know it?
We ALL must come to an
unshakeable understanding deep in our souls, that God loves us. And that He always,
always has our best interests at the center of His heart. We MUST get that in
the deepest recesses of our souls.
And this is IMPORTANT: Such unshakeable
confidence and trust in God’s omnipotence and love is NOT something we can gin
up on our own. Such confidence can ONLY be born and sustained by God’s grace
and gift of the Holy Spirit. The weapons of our spiritual warfare are NOT of
the flesh, but they are divinely powerful and divinely provided.
And when we come to a place of
spiritual maturity, that place where we know with absolute certainty that He
always has our best interests at the center of His heart, then it will be as
natural for us as breathing to thank Him – yes, even to PRAISE Him – regardless
of how He answers or does not answer our prayers.
Oh, God the Holy Spirit – move
in Your supernatural way in each of our souls, that we will all come to that
place of absolute trust in our heavenly Fathers unchanging love for us. Amen
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