When You Don’t Feel God’s Presence
God is faithful in every circumstance.
Seriiously? God is faithful in every circumstance?
A common theme in the Psalms is the faithfulness of God. Even the songs we sing at church are about His faithfulness. But do you ever catching yourself just mouthing the words—whether it’s the classic hymn Great is Thy Faithfulness or something a little more contemporary like Chris Tomlin’s Faithful—without really sensing His faithfulness?
- Where is God when it hurts?
- Where is God in my job loss … and my job search?
- Where is God in a world content on ignoring Him?
- Where is God when I feel lonely?
It’s hard to say with the psalmist, “I will sing of the Lord’s great love forever” (Ps. 89:1) when you don’t sense His love.
Such thinking is flawed. It’s based on what we sense—what we feel—in the moment. Feelings are finicky, and feelings can change as fast as the circumstances that caused them.
So when my feelings about God change, the best thing I’ve learned to do is to reflect further on the very thing I may question: His faithfulness.
Look up. “The heavens praise your wonders, Lord, your faithfulness too, in the assembly of the holy ones” (v. 5). The creation above me and around me reflects the unchanging faithfulness of God. I may not immediately see His hand at work, but the consistency of the created order points to the Creator. Jesus is “before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17).- Look back. In those moments when I question what God is up to, I have learned to reflect on how He has worked in my life in the past. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and I remember how He got me through the last crisis—and the one before that—oh, and the one before that. He was there then—even when I didn’t see His hand at first—and He is with me even now.
So, yes, I can honestly say God is faithful in every circumstance. With each succeeding year of my life, I find it increasingly easier to sing along with David, “I was young and now I am old, yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken” (Ps. 37:25).
God has been faithful to me in the past. So I can trust Him with today.
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post supports the study “God is Faithful” in Bible Studies for Life.
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