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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Journal DJR
Good Morning Lord,
This is a hard lesson, that when we ask for bread, and we receive what looks like a stone… that it isn’t really a stone, but actually it’s bread, the bread of life. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that it sounds backwards and upside down. Most of your Kingdom does operate that way, The last shall be first, die in order to live, the poor are rich, etc. So who is the great Magician? Turning these stones into bread, the bread of life? Is it you? or is it me?
When you are ready… It is us. We work together. But I can only work this way with those who are ready, those who will allow the space for my greater plan to work in their lives, even when circumstances seem like it’s not. You need to be ready to receive the full truth of your favorite verse, that I have plans for you, plans for good.
Jeremiah 29:11 For I know the plans I have for you,” says the Lord. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.
If you are a black and white thinker, thinking that your way of seeing is the right and only way of seeing… you will miss what we are discussing here.
Isaiah 55:8-9 …my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.
But when you have apprenticed in my school of life to the point where you can allow and welcome my ways and my thoughts, counter-intuitive as they may be… to exist along with your natural thoughts, with curiosity about how this is going to work out, and expectation that it will be for good… Then the magic can happen. You are ready for stones to become bread. At first you may only recognize it in the rear view mirror, looking back. But as we move on together, you will come to expect your stones to become bread. It’s a fuller understanding of another verse that confuses black and white thinkers.
Romans 8:28 …God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.
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