Has God trusted you with a silence - a silence that is big with meaning?

God's silences are His answers. Think of those days of absolute silence in the home at Bethany! Is there anything analogous to those days in your life? Can God trust you like that, or are you still asking for a visible answer? God will give you the blessings you ask if you will not go any further without them; but His silence is the sign that He is bringing you into a marvelous understanding of Himself.

Are you mourning before God because you have not had an audible response? You will find that God has trusted you in the most intimate way possible, with an absolute silence, not of despair, but of pleasure, because He saw that you could stand a bigger revelation. If God has given you a silence, praise Him, He is bringing you into the great run of His purposes. The manifestation of the answer in time is a matter of God's sovereignty. Time is nothing to God.

For a while you said - "I asked God to give me bread, and He gave me a stone." He did not, and today you find He gave you the bread of life.

A wonderful thing about God's silence is that the contagion of His stillness gets into you and you become perfectly confident - "I know God has heard me."

His silence is the proof that He has. As long as you have the idea that God will bless you in answer to prayer, He will do it, but He will never give you the grace of silence. If Jesus Christ is bringing you into the understanding that prayer is for the glorifying of His Father, He will give you the first sign of His intimacy - silence.

And so the silence of God was itself an answer. It is not merely said that there was no audible response to the cry from Bethany; it is distinctly stated that the absence of an audible response was itself the answer to the cry—it was when the Lord heard that Lazarus was sick that therefore He abode two days still in the same place which He was.

I have often heard the outward silence. A hundred times have I sent up aspirations whose only answer has seemed to be the echo of my own voice, and I have cried out in the night of my despair, “Why art Thou so far from helping me?” But I never thought that the seeming farness was itself the nearness of God—that the very silence was an answer.

It was a very grand answer to the household of Bethany. They had asked not too much, but too little. They had asked only the life of Lazarus. They were to get the life of Lazarus and a revelation of eternal life as well.

There are some prayers that are followed by a Divine silence because we are not yet ripe for all we have asked; there are others which are so followed because we are ripe for more. We do not always know the full strength of our own capacity; we have to be prepared for receiving greater blessings than we have ever dreamed of.

We come to the door of the sepulcher and beg with tears the dead body of Jesus; we are answered by silence because we are to get something better—a living Lord.

My soul, be not afraid of God’s silence; it is another form of His voice. God’s silence is more than man’s speech. God’s negative is better than the world’s affirmative.

Have thy prayers been followed by a calm stillness? Well! Is not that God’s voice—a voice that will suffice thee in the meantime till the full disclosure comes? Has He moved not from His place to help thee? Well, but His stillness makes thee still, and He has something better than help to give thee.

Wait for Him in the silence, and ere long it shall become vocal; death shall be swallowed up in victory! GEORGE MATHESON

All God’s dealings are slow! Think not that God’s silence is coldness or indifference. When birds are on the nest preparing to bring forth life, they never sing. God’s stillness is full of brooding. Be not impatient of God!

When the Lord is to lead a soul to great faith, He for a time leaves his prayer unanswered.

This miraculous story begins with the following declaration: “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus” (v. 5). It is as if God were teaching us that at the very heart and foundation of all His dealings with us, no matter how dark and mysterious they may be, we must dare to believe in and affirm His infinite, unmerited, and unchanging love. Yet love permits pain to occur.

Mary and Martha never doubted that Jesus would quickly avert every obstacle to keep their brother from death, “yet when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days.”

What a startling word: “Yet”! Jesus refrained from going not because He did not love them but because He did love them. It was His love alone that kept Him from hurrying at once to their beloved yet grief-stricken home. Anything less than infinite love would have rushed instantly to the relief of those beloved and troubled hearts, in an effort to end their grief, to have the blessing of wiping and stopping the flow of their tears, and to cause their sorrow and pain to flee. Only the power of divine love could have held back the spontaneity of the Savior’s tenderheartedness until the angel of pain had finished his work.

Who can estimate the great debt we owe to suffering and pain? If not for them, we would have little capacity for many of the great virtues of the Christian life. Where would our faith be if not for the trials that test it; or patience, without anything to endure or experience and without tribulations to develop it?

Loved! then the way will not be drear; For One we know is ever near, Proving it to our hearts so clear That we are loved.

Loved when our sky is clouded o’er, And days of sorrow press us sore; Still we will trust Him evermore, For we are loved.

Time, that affects all things below, Can never change the love He’ll show; The heart of Christ with love will flow, And we are loved.

Every good gift, and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.—But Zion said, The Lord hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me.

Can a woman forget her suckling child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.

Thou shalt not be forgotten of me. I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions, and, as a cloud, thy sins.

Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus. When he had heard therefore that he was sick, he abode two days still in the same place where he was.—A woman . . . cried unto him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou son of David! But he answered her not a word.

The trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth.