Episode #288 Finding Light in the Dark Night – Unforced Rhythms of Grace

Have you ever had that experience where things are going great with God? You're excited about your faith, you're experiencing him more, you're learning to hear his voice. Things are new and life giving … and then all of a sudden, whether it's been days, weeks, or even years, things take a dark turn.

Some of us know this as a dark night of the soul or a wilderness season, but all of a sudden things just start feeling dry and dull. Things that used to be life giving in your walk with God just aren't anymore. You can feel dark spiritually and concerned even that you failed, that somehow you've just missed God and he's not looking to engage with you anymore.

Well, if that feels familiar to you, I am especially excited to encourage you through this episode because oftentimes those wilderness seasons are not indicators that God is farther away. They're actually indications and invitations that God is drawing you closer in. I'm reading a little bit about this in Richard Foster's book, the Celebration of Discipline, and he says, “It is a divine appointment, a privileged opportunity to draw close to the Divine Center. It is an experience to be welcomed, much as a sick person might welcome a surgery that promises health and well-being. The purpose of the darkness is not to punish or to afflict us. It is to set us free. "

Now, sometimes we remove ourselves from the sense of God. He gives us clear instruction and we don't want to obey him. He tells us, “Hey, this is what is good for you.” And we start separating and distancing ourselves from experiencing him, because we don't like what's being asked or required or even what those invitations to come closer in mean in our fleshly lives.

But sometimes it's actually a reorienting of our loves. We step into these seasons of grace, where God offers us greater freedom than we have known before. And that can come in by peeling away, tearing away the things that were comforts, that replaced the comfort we received in him. God invite us to abandon old things, that used to give us a false sense of identity, and instead to receive true identity from him and to trust him even when we're not feeling him in the same way that we used to before. To trust that his word is true and that he is still there with us.

Foster says, "Oh, then, spiritual soul, when you see your appetites darkened, your inclinations dry and constrained, your faculties incapacitated for any interior exercise, do not be afflicted; think of this as a grace, since God is freeing you from yourself and taking from you your own activity."

See, one of the markers that we can kind of focus on in these heavy dark seasons is, that lack of interest we have in the old activities. But perhaps it's in these wilderness seasons that God is inviting us to notice him more. To rest in him, to highlight our dependence on him so that we would see and experience him in a fresh way.

I wanna read for us from Hosea chapter 2. And the section heading in my Bible is the Lord's Mercy on Israel. And he's talking about the way that he wants to use the wilderness for the good of his beloved. And he says in Hosea 2:14:

“Therefore, behold, I will allure her,
and bring her into the wilderness,
and speak tenderly to her.”

Sometimes the break that we need from all of the things that used to fill our cup, that God doesn't want to fill our cup anymore, come because he wants to allure us. Because he wants to woo us away, to spend time with him. That he would speak tenderly to us in a way that we would receive and respond to him differently.

In Psalm 1:39 it talks about how God is everywhere. There's nowhere we can go apart from his spirit. And it says in verses 11 and 12:

“If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light about me be night,”
Even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is bright as the day,
for darkness is as light with you.”

This passage really jumped out at me in light of our topic today, because sometimes we go into the dark night of the soul feeling abandoned, feeling like, why would God allow me to go into this dark season? Why would he allow such heaviness to surround me? Why would he not meet with me here the way that he used to? Has the darkness overtaken?
But the darkness is not dark to God.

Even in our heavy seasons, even in the wilderness or the dark night of the soul, God still sees you perfectly clear. He sees where you are. He meets you in your needs. He will hold you and care for you as if it was bright as day.

And so don't let those circumstances discourage you. Instead, let them prompt curiosity in you for what more God might be inviting you to receive from him in this season. There's a grace for you to receive more goodness from the Lord even in circumstances like this.

And so here's a question you can take to him today:

God, how might I see spiritual dryness as an invitation from you, not a punishment?

Have a good talk.

And if you've been encouraged by this content, please share it with a friend and help them grow in their conversational relationship with God too!

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