God's Restraint
I recently prayed with a person who felt lost. He was searching for God in his everyday life, and he was coming up empty. One relationship in particular was causing him a lot of pain and he longed to feel God’s reassuring presence. But try as he might, he couldn’t find God. As he turned toward God in prayer, he kept coming up empty.
Why does this happen? Why, often when we need God the most, does it feel like he is nowhere to be found?
I’m sure you’ve experienced this. At some point in your life, I imagine, you’ve prayed some version of one of these prayers:
“God, where are you?”
“God why won’t you reveal yourself to me?”
“God, could you just show up and give me a sign?”
We assume that if God loved us, he would show himself to us. This makes sense and it’s sometimes the case. But I think the opposite can be true too. If our faith is too weak, we may not be able to handle a powerful experience of God’s presence. God’s restraint can be an expression of kindness.
I’ve come to believe this because of my experience in prayer and because of what I’ve read about the dark night of the soul. There are times when God withholds our awareness of his presence because he wants to strengthen our faith. Until our faith is strong enough, we can’t handle an experience of God’s nearness.
How can this be?
This is because one of the fruits of an encounter with God’s presence is an awareness of our own sinfulness. Every spiritual writer confirms this. When we experience God’s nearness to us, we become aware of our own sin. This is nowhere more clearly articulated than in Isaiah 6. When Isaiah comes into the presence of the LORD, his first words are, “woe is me; I am a man of unclean lips.”
This is why God restrains himself. In order for us to be able to make it through an encounter with the Lord’s presence, our faith must be strong enough to believe that God’s love for us is not contingent upon our behavior. We must come to believe that God loves us unconditionally. When we come into his presence and awaken to our sin, we must have a faith that believes strongly enough in God’s love to stay put. Otherwise, we will run from God.
You may doubt me saying this, but it’s hard to believe in unconditional love. That is why God is at work forming us into people who can believe in grace. He is shaping us into people who believe deeply in his unconditional love so that we will be able to be intimate with him without running away from him for shame over our own sin.
Not long ago I experienced this on a small scale. I needed to do something that I wasn’t sure I could do. I prayed and begged God for help. He graciously met with me through a powerful encounter of his presence. This helped me to get through what I needed to do, but it also created some hesitancy in my realtionship with God. For the next few days after this powerful encounter, I didn’t want to pray. I avoided prayer. Why does that happen? How is it that after a deeply meaningful encounter with the LORD, I became reticent to pray? It’s because I also became more aware of my own sin, and this was uncomfortable. I was avoiding this awareness more than anything else.
God’s desire for you and me is in fact that we would see him and know him intimately. In order to accomplish this goal, you and I must grow in our faith to believe with unwavering conviction that God loves us by choice. It is his free choice to love you. It’s a choice he makes apart from our sinfulness. It is only when we believe this that we are able to be near to him more intimately. So, the work that God is doing when we feel his absence is the work of increasing our faith in preparation for nearness.
He does this by stripping away all the other things that we think we need. He does this by humbling us. He increases our faith by destroying our idols, or any other thing that you and I might be tempted to believe makes us good and worthy of God’s love. It is in this stripping away of successes and strengths that we keep returning to the LORD’s love based only in faith for we have nowhere else to go.
With each stripping, he typically gives us tastes of his presence to keep us going. These tastes are in line with the measure of our faith, the degree to which we believe he loves us unconditionally. These experiences give us the strength to accept our stripping and move more deeply into intimacy.
Can you see the way the LORD’s “absence” increases your faith and prepares you for the intimacy of presence?