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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October 11, 2010

Journal Entry for Today-JDV

And so I wonder if lessons like this one by Oswald Chambers were simply lessons for the newly trained missionaries to try and explain unanswered prayers so they would not be disheartened when God did not respond to their prayers? Or is this God’s lesson for me to be patient and trust His timing and love completely?

And God says…”Time is not my environment and neither is imperfection. When you feel as if I am not answering your prayer, it has already been answered and I give you the Holy Spirit to comfort and make you confident of my love. Lazarus was raised and the waiting had had a glorious result. Take heart, trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not rely on your own designs. Let patience have its reward. Those who wait on the Lord will rise up with the wings of eagles.”

“And you can wait in eager anticipation, knowing….”