Dave’s Monday Blast – April 15, 2024
I have been reading a particular devotional for decades; My Utmost For His Highest by Oswald Chambers. I suspect many of you have also been admonished, blessed, challenged, directed, encouraged…etc; by Chambers. I no longer read it in order of calendar dates, I tend to use the read where it opens method. Here is where it opened recently: “After God’s Silence —- What?” “When He had heard therefore that he was sick, He abode two days in the same place where he was.” (John 11:6)
Has God trusted you with a silence…a silence that is big with meaning? Is it possible that God’s silences are His answers? Think of those two days of absolute silence in the home at Bethany! Is there anything analogous to those days in your life? Can God trust you like that, or are you still asking for a visible answer? The author comments: “God will give you the blessings you ask if you will not go any further without them; but His silence is the sign that He is bringing you into a marvelous understanding of Himself. Are you mourning before God because you have not had an audible response? You will find that God has trusted you in the most intimate way possible, with an absolute silence, not of despair, but of pleasure, because He saw that you could stand a bigger revelation.” (Do you believe that?)
Brothers, if God has “given you a silence”, praise Him, He is bringing you into the great run of His purposes. The manifestation of the answer in time is a matter of God’s sovereignty. (Can you accept that?) Time is nothing to God. For a while you said, “I asked God to give me bread, and He gave me a stone.” HE DID NOT! In that moment you find He gave you the bread of life.
The author comments: “A wonderful thing about God’s silence is that the contagion of His stillness gets into you and you become perfectly confident, ‘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 bless you in answer to prayer, He will do it, but He will never give you the grace of silence. If Jesus Christ is bringing you into the understanding that prayer is for the glorifying of His Father, He will give you the first sign of His intimacy – silence.”
