142 – Markus – “I’m falling further and further away. How can this be His will?”
“Hi Michael,
First off, big thanks. Thank you for allowing the Lord to use you in the way he has!
I’m a long-time follower of your ministry, and your ministry has been truly helpful, strengthening and deepening my faith. I have been and will continue to pray for you and Lisa and your future.
I have been following along in all your journal series, though this is the first time I’m reaching out to you. I have been putting it off for a long time, trying to follow the principle you often mention, not to seek men for counsel but seek it from God. Now though, my strength, and sometimes also faith, is failing me and I’m getting desperate for help.
I was raised in a Swedish devout Christian family, not culturally Christian, but really Christian family. Came to faith as a young boy and decided I wanted to be baptized. In my teens, I really searched a deeper relationship with God, to not only intellectually believe in God, but also to experience him, as He promises in his word. After many years of searching with nothing happening, I gave up the search and settled. I never really lost my faith, but I had a long period where I lived my own life and took my own decisions. Later in life, when it started to fall apart, I (as a true hypocrite) turned back to God asking for his help to fix my mess. In this process, when after a while I saw that nothing really changed in my circumstances, I shifted focus and instead fully searched God, not his help fixing my circumstances. This time it was wholeheartedly and after about a year, confessing all my (known) sins and fully surrendering my life, including what was my biggest idol at the time, I finally got to really experience God’s presence. All that I have earlier had decided to believe in, became truth for me. His word and promises were true!
This was the starting point for a period where God was near every moment, both during prayer and bible reading, but also in the everyday life. He spoke and gave guidance, answered questions, convinced me the steps I needed to take, steps that were really challenging. But after living my life according to myself before, I decided to let him lead this time, and have done my best to follow his directions. Some of the things God told me to do, and believe for, have been the toughest things in my life, but when God was close, I felt I could manage. I could focus my time on being with him, growing in faith and understanding, and not on what I was lacking in my circumstances.
Then, it felt like he started to pull away and disappear. After I experienced God’s closeness and guidance for over a year, I felt how He more and more distanced himself from me, and now He feels completely distant and have done so for almost that last 4 years. There have been occasions where he has been close, but not as during the first year and I’m now starting to despair. Is this the Christian life? No power, no grace, no answered prayers? I know he has promised to never leave, and promised streams of leaving water, bread from heaven, but I feel and experience nothing. At the same time, the circumstances are becoming tougher and tougher and his promise seems more and more impossible in the natural.
I know we should not live by feelings, but by faith, but how can one build faith when the very promises on closeness/guidance/peace are not realized?
I have been and am more and more struggling to keep the faith in this situation. I feel that he has given me promises for the future that I long to see realized, but the main problem for me, is not the currently unfulfilled promises, rather it is the feeling that God has left me alone during my time in the wilderness. The first year after me really going after God, was wonderful. Then, when I started feeling God distant, prayer became a burden, rather than joyful and refreshing. First I tried just to “power thru”, thinking the presence will come back again, but it never has, not as it was and now I’m on my 4th year of “silence”.
I recall and have listened multiple times on your story of your year of rest in 2018, how you felt the Spirit’s grace leave you and you couldn’t be a nominal Christian that year. I have a similar experience. My heart is growing hard, struggling with feeling love, showing patience, ability to feel empathy with others etc… all the things that I saw and really experienced growing during my “honeymoon” experience, is now very distant. I’m asking God what he wants to teach me in this season, if I have things left to surrender, if I have sin that I have left or asked for forgiveness for. I have and am continually asking God if I have offended him, disobeyed him, or what else that is hindering him from being close. I’m questioning If I’m not doing enough, praying enough, reading enough, fasting enough, but I know that the Christian life is not a life of achievements that will warrant his presence, it is a relationship with the Father and the Son. Then I turn to trying to rest, expressing my longing for a deeper relationship with Him, stating that I’m here waiting for him to move, but when that does not work, I cannot avoid considering if I have to achieve something.
Studying the word and prayer becomes mechanical, not Spirit enabled, like I experienced before. Then I longed for reading the word, now I feel that no new truths have been given me for so many reading sessions, so what is the point? I have not fallen back into my earlier main sin, but I’m struggling staying away from things that steal my time. Though this also becomes harder and harder for every occasion where I feel that I’m giving him the opportunity to meet me, but apparently decide not to. I know his ways/thoughts are higher than mine, and I can’t always require to understand his ways, but it feels I’m falling further and further away, even though I don’t want to, and that no good fruit is produced. How can this be his will? Does he want me to fail or give up entirely?
I know I should not grumble against God, but it is a challenge not to. If I want to and have given him my life, when I can’t feel him or hear him, how do I then know if I’m doing his will and not my own? How can I know when he wants me to stay still or move forward, and move forward with what?
How can I have faith for the big promise he has given me, when the all “small” prayers seem to go unanswered, again and again and again.
And even if I can have faith, (after all, I have not yet acted to satisfied this need in my life), how do I get the patience to live by faith, waiting for him to fulfil his promise, when it is the most challenging I have ever done, and he feels so distant and his power and grace to endure is not near?
Honestly, I feel I have no one else that I can talk to, that would ever understand and possible be able to relate to my situation, but you. How did you survive your year of rest? How did you keep the faith in God and for the promises he had given you at that point in time? Looking back, can you see anything you did that could have resulted in God giving you grace again, or was it all in his timing and by his grace?
If you feel God has something to say to me, please share it. I want the light to shine through the “cracks in the jars of clay” but for that, I need his light in me and currently it feels like it is nowhere to be found.
Again, thank you for all you have done (so far). May God be with you and your family
I’m praying for you and Lisa to finally be together and that God will continue to use you as he has planned.
BR / Markus”
The Wilderness Within: Navigating Spiritual Dryness
Have you ever walked through a season where your faith feels like a barren wasteland? Where the vibrant connection you once felt with God seems distant and cold? Many faithful followers of Christ, including the French mystic Madame Guyon, have traversed this desolate landscape. She described a seven-year period of "total privation," a time of spiritual darkness that far surpassed any trial she had previously encountered. She wrote, "I seemed to myself cast down like Nebuchadnezzar to live among the beasts…a deplorable state." (Autobiography of Madame Guyon)
We can see in the life of King Hezekiah, that this is indeed an intentional way of God, when it reads, “God left him to test him and to know everything that was in his heart.” (2 Chronicles 32:31). This feeling of being cast down, of wrestling with God in the darkness, can be agonizing. We may cry out, like Madame Guyon, "Is it possible that I have received so many graces and favors from God only to lose them?" We may strive, employing human effort to recapture the intimacy we once knew. We may try harder to pray, read Scripture, serve others, yet the dryness persists.
In such times, we are called to embrace a profound paradox: finding life through death. Not a physical death, but a death of self. A surrender of our will, our expectations, our very understanding of how God should work. Jesus Himself modeled this surrender in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying, "…yet not as I will, but as you will." (Matthew 26:39)
Madame Guyon discovered that even in the apparent barrenness, God was working. She wrote, "I have since experienced that the prayer of the heart, when it appears most dry and barren, nevertheless is not ineffectual, nor offered in vain. God gives what is best for us, though not what we most relish or wish for."
This wilderness experience, this refining fire of privation, is often God's way of stripping away our self-reliance and drawing us into deeper dependence on Him. It's a time to relinquish control, to stop wrestling and simply say, "Have your way with me." It's in this surrender, in this death of self, that we truly find life, a life rooted not in feelings or experiences, but in the unwavering faithfulness of God. As Zechariah 4:6 reminds us, it's "Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,' says the LORD Almighty."
