Pray… How long, O Lord, will I go on feeling this distance between us? How long will this feeling You have hidden Your face from me endure? Shall I take lonely counsel within my soul? My heart feels the numbness as the shadows grow. Shall I go on, day after day, harboring these questions in my heart? How long will You allow the enemy to mock as the weight of anxiety and temptation weigh so heavily upon me?
Hear my prayer, Lord Jesus. Consider my desperate state and answer me, O Lord my God! Be the light in me that overcomes the darkness and chases the shadows of doubt away. Be my abiding hope that makes the hopelessness flee, lest the numbness continue, my enemy win the day, and have a good reason to boast. Don’t let Satan rejoice in times of confusion, as I stand before You with trust shaken. How I long to feel Your abiding presence and Your tender mercies, and rejoice in the steadfast love I once knew! How I desire to know the peace of standing in Your righteousness and Your kingdom once more. Forgetting what lays behind me and reaching forward to what lays ahead, let me press on again toward the goal for the prize of Your upward calling! Oh, when will my heart sing to You once again, knowing You have dealt graciously with me?
Consider… So do not despise the discipline of the Almighty, for He inflicts pain and gives relief—He wounds, and His hands also heal. It is hard to embrace the kind of despair that comes when we feel like God has turned away from us. We feel alone and without divine counsel. Yet it is those who have experienced this sort of spiritual drought and endured in faith who come to know God more fully. There is not a true kingdom saint who fails to understand that He sometimes inflicts pain and suffering, for through enduring trials from many sources true disciples are birthed. To know Jesus is to know all of Him, not just His comforts. If the Father was pleased to crush Him at the Cross of Calvary, can we who have been entrusted with the furtherance of His kingdom on earth expect anything less? Wounding and healing are God’s patient path to sanctification for His chosen ones. Do all to find it in your battered and doubting soul at times like this to praise the pruner, convinced that nothing shall separate you from the love His pruning brings to bear upon you. Learn in every trial to count it all joy as you endure, knowing that only in the kiln does the unfinished pottery become shining, perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. This is God’s power perfected in our weakness.
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