When God Seems Silent

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Dannah Gresh says that sometimes when God seems silent, he actually may be sending us a very important message.

Dannah Gresh: In my own life, the times when I cannot seem to hear God’s voice, well, I have come to understand that those periods in my life when God is seemingly silent are usually a wake-up call—a time when God is saying, “Look and see!”

This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, co-author of You Can Trust God to Write Your Story, for Thursday, September 24 2020. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Nancy: This spring the world was in lockdown because of the coronavirus. For most of us, we’re still not back to “normal,” whatever that is! But one survey revealed that 44 percent of Americans believe the pandemic was a “wake up call” from God. People started reading their Bibles and listening to sermons online—some for the first time in their lives. There’s been a 50 percent surge in Google searches for the word “prayer.” People wanted to talk to God in difficult times. And that’s exactly what the book of Habakkuk teaches us to do.

This Old Testament book of prophecy helps us see that God is good and at work all the time. That’s something we need help remembering on difficult days and in times that seem evil in some ways. The year of 2020 sure could qualify. So let’s dig into the book of Habakkuk with my co-host, Dannah Gresh.

We’re on our second day of her teaching series which we recorded to support her new Bible study Habakkuk: Remembering God’s Faithfulness When He Seems Silent. Today she’ll posit the thought that when we think God is silent, He may just be sending us an important message. Here’s Dannah.

Dannah: Have you ever been homesick? I can’t say that I’ve experienced a whole lot of that in my life, because I tend to just be happy wherever I am. But I remember one time when I was very homesick.

One of the great adventures of our lives was a time when Bob and I were assigned by the Lord to do some missions work in the country of Zambia. We actually call it, “the home of our heart.” We love the people and the land so very much! God invited us into a three-year project where we could strategically share the gospel in the public schools.

Our children would go with us as we would go back and forth, but on one particular trip because of some school things, we felt like they needed to stay home. And that trip happened to take place over the Thanksgiving holiday. I thought I would be fine. 

I knew that I was going to miss my mother’s Norman Rockwell-esque Thanksgiving table, I knew that I was going to miss the cool, brisk promise of snow on a Thanksgiving morning, and I knew I would miss slipping into one of my first sweaters of the holidays. But I really wasn’t prepared for just how hard it would hit me!

I woke up on Thanksgiving morning, and instead of a cool day, it was ninety-five degrees and way too hot! My Zambian friends were so sweet They knew that it was a special day for us, they wanted to celebrate with us, so they picked us up in a taxi. They drove us to The Hungry Lion (which, of course, sells fast-food chicken) and we sat there at this outdoor picnic table feasting on our chicken.

And I just remember thinking, This doesn’t feel right! And for one of the first times in my life, significant homesickness just fell on me! I knew we had important work to do that day, so I went about my work. But as we were progressing through the day, I kept having to fight back tears.

I guess it was kind of noticeable, because one of my Zambian sisters walked up to me and she just said, “Sister, I can see!” She said it with such compassion. I knew what she meant, but I still was like, “Oh, no, I wasn’t . . . not me; I’m fine.”

And she said this: “I see that you are not home.” Well, there was no holding it back after that! I cried, and she held me. I cried through most of that day and as I fell asleep that night in bed. But here’s the thing: I chose to go to Zambia. My actions took me to that place where I was longing for home. 

I bought the plane ticket, I boarded multiple airplanes; I went there of my own will, of my own choice. In the same way, sometimes we find ourselves in a place of feeling homesick for the Lord because our actions have taken us far away from Him!

Have you ever felt that way? Been spiritually homesick, where you just miss the Lord? It’s been a long time since you’ve heard His voice, felt His nearness, received a new sense of His presence? And you get there and you think, How did I get here? And then you think, Oh yeah . . . that.” That decision, that person, that moment, that stronghold, that sin. Been there? I know it all too well!

But here’s the thing: the story of the Bible is a story of exile—starting with the story in Genesis. Adam and Eve lived in the perfect home, and then their sin, their actions, meant their banishment. They were in exile from the place where God intended for them to call home.

I wonder, did they ever feel homesick? Did they miss a certain tree and a certain fruit? Did they miss a certain flower that bloomed in just the right place? Did they cry because their actions had taken them from home?

The book of Habakkuk is just one of many points in Scripture where we’re reminded of a very important truth, and that’s this: we are in exile. This world is not our home. And the sense that it’s not quite enough; it’s not really what we’re longing for. Well, that’s because we’re longing for home, we’re longing for heaven. We’re longing for where God intended for us to live and to dwell.

I want to dive right into Habakkuk today, chapter 1, beginning in verse 5. We’re going to begin to see that the nation of Judah will once again be walking off into captivity. It’s not the first time we see that they were in captivity—in Egypt and then the Exodus came, and God brought them into the Promised Land.

Habakkuk writes his book in the Promised Land, and he’s saying, “God, don’t You see all the corruption around me!? Don’t You see how your people have forgotten You!? Don’t You see their actions and their sinfulness are taking them far away from Your heart? Do something!” 

And it’s been a really long time, because Habakkuk says, “How long shall I cry for help!?” He’s been praying for a long time; he’s been feeling like God is silent. Well, in this verse that we’re going to read today, God answers.

He says, 

[Habakkuk . . . He doesn’t actually say his name; that’s Dannah adding that], Look among the nations, and see; wonder and be astounded. For I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told.

For behold, I am raising up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation, who march through the breadth of the earth, to seize dwellings not their own. They are dreaded and fearsome; their justice and dignity go forth from themselves.

Their horses are swifter than leopards, more fierce than the evening wolves; their horsemen press proudly on. Their horsemen come from afar; they fly like an eagle swift to devour. They all come for violence, all their faces forward. They gather captives like sand” (Hab. 1:5–9).

And here we find the Chaldeans, the people that we talked about God describing in the verses we looked at in our last session, when we talked about a people who were proud and puffed up. And you can see that they are not only proud, but they are fierce, and they are mean!

So when Habakkuk cries out for help, “God do You see that You’re children are not behaving well? Why don’t You do something?”. . . God says, “I do see, and I am doing something. . . and it’s going to get worse!” That is probably not what Habakkuk wanted to hear! It wouldn’t have been good news.

God is telling the prophet that He is going to take His people (which is the nation of Judah, because Israel has split into two nations by this point) into captivity at the hands of a very evil people.

Now this would have been amazing to Habakkuk for one reason: the Chaldeans were a teeny, tiny little people group with not very much power. But God was going to plant them in the Babylonian nation and He was going to make one of the Chaldean people the king of the Babylonian empire. And when He did that, He would use that empire to take His people off into captivity.

Essentially, what God was doing was saying, “Your hearts are already far from Me. You’re emotionally and spiritually in exile and you don’t care! Your hearts are hard!” Sometimes God takes us into difficult, painful places because He’s concerned about the condition of our hearts. That’s exactly what He is telling Habakkuk in these verses.

“I’m going to let them feel the pain of a physical exile so that they will see the sin of their spiritual exile.” The Babylonian captivity is a picture of something supernatural: we are all longing to feel like we’re home! We can learn so many things from the pages of Habakkuk, and if it’s anything, we can learn that we are like both the nation of Judah and the nation of the Chaldeans, and we are very much like Habakkuk, too, and capable of walking by faith. 

But here’s what I want you to hear today: there’s often a message in the silence. In all those months, years . . . I don’t know how long it was that Habakkuk was praying, I just know it was a long time, because he said, “How long do I have to cry out to You, Lord?!” In all that time, in all that silence, I think there was a message.

I think God was saying something. I think He was saying, “Turn to Me! Repent! You are emotionally far, you are spiritually far. How can I speak to you when you are living that way, with those actions and those choices?”

Sometimes the Lord allows us to go into difficult times, too—times when things seem evil and difficult. It also seems like God doesn’t have anything to say and isn’t doing anything about it. Is it possible there’s a message in that silence?

I had a period in my life where I realized that God felt really silent. I was in my teen years, and I have to tell you that I was a teenage girl who loved the Lord like crazy! From the age of eight onward, I wanted to serve Him, and I did.

By the time I was fifteen, I was a missionary for Child Evangelism Fellowship; I was actively involved in my youth group; I was a teacher for Sunday school—three- and four-year-olds. I loved them so much! Somehow in the busyness of it all, I stopped reading my Bible.

Now, let me back up and say that that’s kind of what happened in the nation of Judah. Because, as we will see in our homework, King Josiah who was reigning right about or at the beginning of Habakkuk’s life was a king who was good. And when he was reigning, he discovered a scroll laying in the dust in the temple. It was God’s Word, and it had been ignored and neglected.

And when he found that scroll, he wept, because he saw what Habakkuk saw—that these people were not living to honor God. They were not living by faith; they were living in sin and rebellion and disobedience. And when he saw it, he wept and reformed the nation and called them back to live for the Lord! But it was short-lived.

His son took over and didn’t really care about the Word of God anymore, and it once again went back to lying on a shelf. 

When I was fifteen, I thought because I was so busy preparing Sunday school lessons and lessons for Child Evangelism Fellowship that I was in the Word of God. But I wasn’t in the Word of God for my heart to be reformed. 

Every time we open the Word of God, we should have the heart of Josiah: “Lord, what is this saying, and how do You want me to change my life?” Habakkuk had Josiah’s heart. He saw the evil and the sin in this nation, and he wanted to see change, too.

Now, I have to tell you that when I stopped reading God’s Word, I started to get proud and puffed up and I started to believe that I could control things in my life, that I was in charge of my life. At the time I was in a seemingly-innocent high school dating relationship. Not everything about it was just right, but I thought I could control it.

Do you know what? Any time there’s a sense in our spirit that things aren’t right, we should run to the Lord! We should run to the Lord. In fact, let me say this: I beg you two things: one, read your Bible, read your Bible, read your Bible! When we stop reading our Bible, that is the first step, the first action we take to move in the direction of exile.

And the second action we take is allowing our hearts to be so proud that we think that when God does send us a message that says, “Watch out for this!” and we say, “I can handle it!” we’ve begun to become like the Chaldeans, proud and puffed up. That was me, fifteen-year-old Dannah—proud and puffed up.

Well, I couldn’t control it. I wasn’t in control of that situation, and I eventually ended up in a very sinful relationship. I call it the great heartache of my life. I felt so lonely, and God seemed so silent! You know what, though? In His silence He was still pursuing me. There was a message in the silence; He was inviting me back!

One of the strange things that happened during that time was, I kept having the same dream over and over again. I don’t know whether it was a dream from the Lord, or if it was just Dannah processing what Dannah realized on a subconscious level.

But the dream went something like this: I was walking down a busy highway and my sin was represented, I was aware of it in my dream. And then, this shaft of light came down from heaven and there was this sense in my heart that God wanted me to step into it. He was inviting me back, inviting me to His heart!

There was this distinct awareness that I was having a dream, but I knew that God was saying, “Wake up, Dannah, wake up! Step back into My presence!” I didn’t. In the dream, I walked in the direction of my sin. Maybe there’s a message in the silence. Maybe God is saying, “Wake up!!”

One of the things I’ve noted is that when the world or a nation goes through trials on a larger scale, people turn back to the Word of God. They start reading their Bibles; they start praying again! In March of 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic, there was a fifty-percent surge in people Googling how to pray.

I assume that these were people for whom it had been a really long time since they had prayed, since they didn’t remember how. Or maybe it was people who never had prayed. They were waking up in the silence and wondering, God, where are You? What are you doing? They were getting a wake-up call, and they were responding to it.

Do we do that when we feel like God is silent? Do we understand that that is an alarm in our spirits telling us to wake up? Oh, I am hungry to hear God’s voice as we open the pages of Habakkuk! And one of the things I hear from women as I disciple them through maybe learning to have a prayer life, maybe refreshing their prayer life, or maybe they’re new believers and they’ve never really had one . . . They ask me, “How do I hear God’s voice?”

Well, first and foremost, we get into God’s Word, the written Word, because this [the Bible] is God’s voice. As we become familiar with God’s voice through what He’s written in His Word, then we can begin to trust wise advisors around us who are also in God’s Word—good, godly Bible teachers who are teaching us how to study and understand God’s Word. And we start to read circumstances, and we see God’s hand and how he speaks to us through circumstances converging to direct us. But He still does speak to us in a still, small voice, a very quiet voice.

Now, He never says anything that’s contrary to His [written] Word, and that’s really important. But as I’ve considered how He sounds in my spirit, and as I have discipled other women in that, I’ve come up with a few qualities of His voice that I’d like to share with you so that you can recognize it.

The first one is this: He often says something contrary to my nature, but it is never a contradiction to His nature. In Isaiah 55:8–9 the prophet writes that God says, “My thoughts are not your thoughts . . . my ways are not your ways.” Many times I just have a thought in my head that’s just much not very much like Dannah. It’s not in my nature to think the thing I’m thinking.

Recently, a teenage boy who attends the high school that my husband founded, Grace Prep, walked up to me after chapel and he said, “Mrs. Gresh, I think I have heard God’s voice. It felt really distinct and different. Can you help me know if it was God’s voice?” 

And I said, “Well, sure, I’d love to! What did He say?”

“He said, ‘Do the dishes!’” 

And I said, “What?” But, knowing that it’s not the first go-to for a teenage boy to do the dishes, I thought, We-e-ll, that sounds about right. Tell me more.

He said, “Well, I did the dishes. I obeyed, because I thought it sounded like God. And then my mom got teary and she said, ‘I was just thinking, I can’t keep up with it! I’m so stressed out! I wish I had somebody to help me with the kitchen.’ When I heard what she said, I thought, Maybe that was God!”

And I affirmed him; I said, “Yes, that is God!”

Many times God speaks to me actions or things He wants me to do that are just a little bit contrary to my natural nature, because His ways are not my ways and His thoughts are not my thoughts. 

The second thing is that God’s voice: He uses it to confront my sin. 

Jesus said in John 16:8 that, when the Holy Spirit came, He would convict the world concerning sin and righteousness. You know, so many times we want the “bells and whistles” of the Holy Spirit. We want the Holy Spirit to do cool things in our life. But the first thing He does is a hard thing: He convicts us of our sin, because He wants to draw us home to the heart of God.

Recently, I had an encounter with someone who kind of rubs me in all the wrong directions, all the time! I couldn’t wait for my husband to pick me up, jump in the car, and tell him how aggravated I was! I knew that there was a check in my spirit that I had a heart of gossip. That’s not really a vice of mine; I don’t struggle with a lot of gossip. But right away the Holy Spirit swept in, and what I felt Him say in my heart was, “You can choose to hold your tongue.” 

I want to tell you, that was the longest ride home of my life! I did obey the Lord, but He comes and He convicts us of our sin. And it is a sweet thing when He convicts of it before we have to repent of it!

Another thing is: He speaks to me more frequently when I’m obedient. First John 2:3–6 tells us that if we love God, we obey Him. When we love Jesus, we do what He says. We read His Word, and we reform our hearts. We line ourselves up with what we read in His Word.

Conversely, sin—disobedience—separates us from God, and that’s when we begin to experience what the people of Judah did when they felt like God had been so silent for such a long time. 

The fourth thing is: He tells me things I didn’t realize I knew or could not possibly know.

In John 14:26, Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would help us and He would teach us all things. And sometimes when I’m counseling a woman, I won’t really quite know what to say to her, but the Lord will bring things to my heart or to my mind that help me ask questions, and she will look at me as if, “How did you know?” Well, I didn’t.

Once when my husband was in a life-threatening jet ski accident (he was driving safely, so they tell me), I didn’t know what it was going to look like when I got to the trauma ICU in Camden, New Jersey. I was four hours away. I didn’t really know all the results of the accident; I just knew that he was on his way to the trauma ICU . . . something a woman never wants to hear about her husband!

My mom jumped behind the wheel and I got in the passenger seat, and we prayed our way to New Jersey. As we were praying, I kept hearing this word in my spirit, the word, “sinews.” Now, I knew that it was a medical term, I knew it was a part of the body. I really didn’t know specifically much about it.

But I just turned to my mom, I said, “I keep feeling this word, sensing this word.” 

She said, “We need to pray it!”

So we prayed, “Lord, heal Bob’s sinews. Lord, hold together Bob’s sinews. Lord, let every cell in Bob’s sinews glorify and honor You.” We had no idea what we were praying about!

When we got there, we discovered that he had broken his pelvis, but in kind of a unique way: there wasn’t actually any bone broken. Rather, his hip bone had been completely ripped away from his pelvis bone, because the sinews had been shredded. How did I know that? Because I’ve become familiar with God’s voice.

And finally, there’s a weight to it. Many places in Scripture describe the voice of God, and there’s always this power and magnificence to it. Psalm 29:3 says, “The voice of the Lord is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, the Lord, over many waters.”

I don’t really know how to tell you how this one works, except to say that it just sounds different, especially when I’m reading Scripture. It’s like the Lord says, “I’m going to put weight in this verse, because I’m not only having it written down decades, centuries, eons ago for all My people. But right now, this one is for you . . . right now!” 

Have you ever had that happen, where a verse of Scripture just jumps off the pages at you? It was that time, that I shared with you in the last session, that Bob and I were looking bankruptcy in the face. We had made some poor choices, but we also had been deceived in some business transactions that made it even more painful and more difficult. 

But we decided we wanted to walk in honor and in integrity, and we were going to pay every penny of our debt, if it took us forever!

Part of that included selling our precious little ranch home, the very first one we’d ever purchased, on Sycamore Drive. It was the house where we had a pool with a wrap-around deck so our children could invite all the neighbors over, and we were the center of activity and joy. My father and my husband had built a sky fort for my children. There were so many precious memories in that house!

As we prepared to obey the Lord in selling this home so that we could walk in integrity, I just said, “Lord, why!? Why did we have to be deceived? Why did this complication have to happen? Why do we have to carry this burden for who-knows how long?”

I was willing to sell the house, except the painful part for me was my children. I said, “Lord, this is going to ruin them! Lord, this is going to be a painful thing for them. Lord, they might be angry at You forever!” 

I sat there on the deck looking at the pool and the sky fort. I said, “Okay! Now that I’ve said my piece and I’ve wrestled with You, Lord, what do You need to say to me, to my heart?” I opened my Bible that day to Proverbs 14; it must have been the fourteenth day of the month, because I read one Proverb a day.

That particular day, all the verses were treasures, but none of them had that weight that I’ve been talking about, where it’s like God says, “Stand at attention! I’m speaking to you now!” That is, until I got to verse 26.

Proverbs 14:26, in the NIV version, says, “Whoever fears the Lord has a secure fortress, and for their children it will be a refuge.” That sounded like the voice of God to me. He said, “Dannah, this little ranch house that you love is not their real home. I am!”

God is always inviting us home, because we are prone to wander, our hearts tend to go the direction of exile. But He is our true home, and He is always inviting us back! And you are going to see that that is the invitation that Habakkuk receives from the Lord, and that the nation of Judah receives in the book of Habakkuk.

Because in difficult times, when God seems silent, well, there’s usually a message in that silence. He’s inviting us home! I don’t know what silence you’re struggling with right now. I don’t know what pain you’re dealing with, but I encourage you to press into the silence and say, “Lord, are You speaking? Are You trying to tell me something?” Listen for the message in the silence!

I have a hard question to ask you: Is your heart right?

Nancy: That is a difficult question, Dannah. Earlier, I mentioned how many people began reading their Bibles and praying as a result of this pandemic. Those are people who got the message in the silence! They were beginning to get their souls right.

Are you? Am I?

Though we may have been pressing into prayer and God’s truth in the early days of this difficult time, are we still doing it as the weeks have turned into months?

Yesterday as we studied Habakkuk, we learned that the book contrasts two kinds of people. The first—those who walk by faith. This is who we want to be—women who live with their hope in Christ during hard times and who pass faith on to others.

The second type of person is proud and fearful. They have souls—or hearts—that are not right within them. Often when God doesn’t seem to be at work in our world and it’s all falling apart, it’s because He is warning us that we could be heading down the path of becoming this kind of woman.

Difficult times when He seems silent might be invitations for us to participate with Him to work on something very important: our hearts. God wants us to be people who walk by faith. Honestly, sometimes easy times make us complacent. But difficult seasons make it very clear if we are walking by faith or fear. So, which type of woman are you?

More than God wanting to fix the broken circumstances in your world or in my world, He greatly desires to help us get our souls right.

What do you need to do in order to cooperate with Him? Do you need to start reading your Bible again? Confess some sin to Him? Perhaps an older, wiser woman can hold you accountable. Get back into Christian community, even if it’s online, during these days of physical distancing. I encourage you to do whatever it takes to respond to God right now. Here’s Dannah to pray as you consider what that might be.

Dannah: Lord, I pray for these women as they do this study. God, this book of Habakkuk has been such a treasure in my heart, in my life . . . and such a lot of hard work! It’s a lot of hard work for them to study it, too. But will you reward them, especially those women who are in difficult times, who feel the vacuum of Your silence? Would you help them to hear the message? Would you bring their hearts home? In Jesus’ name, amen.

Nancy: If God is prompting you to read your Bible more, I want to consider beginning with the book of Habakkuk.

Dannah: Nancy, can I recommend some support for understanding this book of the Bible. It’s in poetry form and also references a lot of ancient customs, habits, and people groups.  This makes it difficult to understand if you don’t have a little bit of help. Something that helped me was a series you taught on the book. It’s easy to find in the archives at ReviveOurHearts.com or on the Revive Our Hearts app. Just search "Habakkuk: Moving from Fear to Faith" to find that series. There’s also a link to it in the transcript of today’s program.

Nancy: Another great tool is Dannah’s new Bible study. I’d love to get a copy of this into your hands, because this book of the Bible really is a help in difficult and fearful times. The study is titled Habakkuk: Remembering God’s Faithfulness When He Seems Silent. We’ll send you a copy when you make a donation to support the ministry of Revive Our Hearts with a gift of any amount today. 

Visit ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1–800–569–5959. When you make your gift of any amount, be sure to ask for the Bible study on Habakkuk.

Well, in these challenging days you may have some questions: God, what are You doing? Why are You allowing this to happen? Why don’t You fix it. Habakkuk had questions like that too.

Tomorrow, Dannah will write you a permission slip to wrestle with God when you don’t understand why life looks the way it does. But, she’ll teach us how to bring our concerns to God the right way.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth invites you to consider if you’re walking in faith or fear. It’s an outreach of Life Action Ministries.

*Offers available only during the broadcast of the podcast season.