How do we praise God when we don’t understand what’s happening in our life and God is silent? How do we stay connected in a crisis without communication? How do we keep our eyes on Jesus when we’re full of tears? Is God real? Is He willing and able to help us?
The answer is; YES! God is real, no matter how we feel.
It is easy to worship God when things are going great in our life — when he has provided food, friends, family, health, and happy situations. But circumstances are not always pleasant. How do we worship God then? What do we do when God seems a million miles away?
The deepest level of worship is praising God in spite of pain, thanking God during a trial, trusting him when tempted, surrendering while suffering, and loving him when he seems distant.
Friendships are often tested by separation and silence; we are divided by physical distance or we are unable to talk.
In our friendship with God, we won’t always feel close to him. “Any relationship involves times of closeness and times of distance, and in a relationship with God, no matter how intimate, the anchor will swing from one side to the other.”That’s when worship gets difficult.
To mature our friendship, God will test it with periods of seeming separation times when it feels as if he has abandoned or forgotten us. God feels a million miles away.
David probably had the closest friendship with God of anyone. God took pleasure in calling him “a man after my own heart.”Yet David frequently complained of God’s apparent absence: “Lord, why are you standing aloof and far away? Why do you hide when I need you the most?“Why have you forsaken me? Why do you remain so distant? Why do you ignore my cries for help?“Why have you abandoned me?”Of course, God hadn’t really left David, and he doesn’t leave us. He has promised repeatedly, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”But God has not promised “you will always feel my presence.” In fact, God admits that sometimes he hides his face from us.There are times when he appears to be "MIA", missing-in-action, in our life.
It's like “We wake up one morning and all our spiritual feelings are gone. We pray, but nothing happens. We rebuke the devil, but it doesn’t change anything. We have our friends pray for us . . We begin to wonder how long this spiritual gloom might last. Days? Weeks? Months? Will it ever end? . . . It feels as if our prayers simply bounce off the ceiling. In utter desperation, our cry out, ‘What’s the matter with me?’
The truth is, there’s nothing wrong with us! This is a normal part of the testing and maturing of our friendship with God.
When God seems distant will we continue to love, trust, obey, and worship God, even when we have no sense of his presence or visible evidence of his work in our life?
The most common mistake we make in worship today is seeking an experience rather than seeking God. We look for a feeling, and if it happens, we conclude that we have worshiped. Wrong! In fact, God often removes our feelings so we won’t depend on them. Seeking a feeling, even the feeling of closeness to Christ, is not worship.
Yes, he wants us to sense his presence, but he’s more concerned that we trust him than that we feel him. Faith, not feelings, pleases God.
The situations that will stretch our faith most will be those times when life falls apart and God is nowhere to be found. This happened to Job. On a single day he lost everything — his family, his business, his health, and everything he owned. Most discouraging — God said nothing!
We do what Job did: “Then he fell to the ground in worship and said: ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised.’ Tell God exactly how we feel. Pour out our heart to God. Unload every emotion that we’re feeling. God can handle our doubt, anger, fear, grief, confusion, and questions.
Admitting our hopelessness to God can be a statement of faith. Trusting God but feeling despair at the same time,
This sounds like a contradiction.
Focus on who God is — his unchanging nature. Regardless of circumstances and how we feel, hang on to God’s unchanging character. Remind ourselves what we know to be eternally true about God: He is good, he loves me, he is with me, he knows what I’m going through, he is in control,he cares, and he has a good plan for my life.
Trust God to keep his promises. During times of spiritual dryness we must patiently rely on the promises of God, not our emotions, and realize that he is taking us to a deeper level of maturity. A friendship based on emotion is shallow indeed.
So don’t be troubled by trouble. Circumstances cannot change the character of God. God’s grace is still in full force; he is still for us, even when we don’t feel it.
When we feel abandoned by God yet continue to trust him in spite of our feelings, we worship him in the deepest way.
Remember what God has already done for us. If God never did anything else for us, he would still deserve our continual praise for the rest of our life because of what Jesus did for us on the cross. This is the greatest reason for worship.
Jesus gave up everything so we could have everything. He died so we could live forever. That alone is worthy of our continual thanks and praise. Never again should we wonder what we have to be thankful for.
“For God has said, ‘I will never leave you; I will never abandon you.’ ”
HEBREWS 13:5
