Episode #289 God’s Present Even When You Don’t Feel Him- Unforced Rhythms of Grace

Hey friends, it's Jen, and welcome to this episode of Good God Talks. The whole point of our podcast here is to help you experience daily life with God and to grow your habit of having these uncommon conversations with him in everyday life moments. But I feel like it's important at least every once in a while to remind us all, me included, that God is still there even if we feel nothing.

Now, we are made for life with him, and that includes noticing him and having a sense of him hearing him speak and engage with us in our day-to-day lives. But we don't always feel him or hear him in the exact same way. And sometimes the maturing of our faith requires that we believe God, we trust what he says about himself, even if we don't feel it.

If you think back over hard circumstances in your life, there are times when it has been harder to trust what God says about himself. It's harder when we're going through painful circumstances, when there's loss, when there's grief, when there's things that we don't understand— to believe our God who is beyond our understanding.

It'd be a whole lot easier if he just explained himself and he always showed up in the ways that we want him to, but then he wouldn't be God. And so this easier path would be death really to us. But I wanna talk about that today because sometimes when we're in wilderness heavy, dark seasons, those are actually invitations for deeper trust.

Our trust in God has to be independent of our feelings toward him, because otherwise our foundation would be on us, right? It would be on what I feel, what I think I perceive. Instead, it's trust in who God is based on his character and his nature and what he says about himself.

Now I wanna focus our episode on those harder seasons, and I mentioned a dark night of the soul in the last episode. According to Richard Foster in his book Celebration of Discipline, he describes a dark night of the soul as “We may have a sense of dryness, aloneness, even lostness. Any overdependence on the emotional life is stripped away. The notion, often heard today, that such experiences should be avoided and that we always should live in peace and comfort, joy, and celebration only betrays the fact that much contemporary experience is surface slush. The dark night is one of the ways God brings us into a hush, a stillness so that he may work an inner transformation upon the soul.

During such a time Bible reading, sermons, intellectual debate—all fail to move or excite us. When God lovingly draws us into a dark night of the soul, there is often a temptation to seek release from it and to blame everyone and everything for our inner dullness. The preacher is such a bore. The hymn singing is too weak. The worship service is so dull. We may begin to look around for another church or a new experience to give us “spiritual goose bumps.”

Foster exhorts us that God is lovingly drawing us away from every distraction so that we may see him more clearly. He's not referring to the dullness of spiritual things that comes from sin or disobedience, but he's talking of the person who is seeking hard after God and harbor's no known sin in his heart. And he references Isaiah 50 verse 10, which I'll read for us in the NLT. It says:

"Who among you fears the Lord and obeys his servant? If you are walking in darkness, without a ray of light, trust in the Lord and rely on your God.”

So in this verse, it shows us it's possible to fear, obey, and trust, and rely on the Lord and still walk in darkness without any light. Even if God is not felt emotively, in the same way that we typically experience him, God, his kingdom and his character remain unchanged. Our trust can rest in who he is, not in what we feel. Don't let the enemy use that as a lie against you, that God is far away. Ask God to search your heart to show you any offensive ways. If there is cause to repent, to think again and choose differently, do that as God guides you.

But don't mistake a sense of feelings as the only way that we can know he is near. We can know he is near because he tells us that he is. And sometimes we go through those seasons of not feeling him as much because he wants to offer us more faith and trust in him.

At the end of every episode, I always leave us with a question to go ask God, and I'm gonna do that again today. But I wanna encourage you, even if you ask, and God doesn't respond in the way that you would like him to, know that he is there with you. And this way of responding to him by talking, by asking the question, by sitting with an awareness of him, looking to notice him, this is an act of faith too.

And so our question today begins with statements of trust:

God, I trust that you are there. Even if I don't hear or feel you. I'm listening and trusting. Is there something more you want to share with me right now?

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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