We have covered a lot of ground in seven weeks. Standing, shape, intercession, persistence, honesty, refusal.
None of it is the thing some of you came here for. Because a no is at least an answer. You can grieve a no. What you cannot do much with is nothing at all, and nothing at all is where a fair number of believers actually live. You pray, and the words go up into the ceiling, and the ceiling is where they stop.
I am not going to explain that away. I have sat with people in it and I have been in it, and the explanations people offer usually make it worse. God is teaching you something. He is growing your faith. Maybe. And maybe those sentences are just what we say because the silence embarrasses us and we want it to stop being awkward.
What I can do is show you that the Bible does not pretend it away either.
He Cried and Was Not Heard
My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? Why are You so far from helping Me, and from the words of My groaning? O My God, I cry in the daytime, but You do not hear; and in the night season, and am not silent.
Psalm 22:1-2 NKJV
Read verse two again slowly. I cry in the daytime, and You do not hear. Night after night, and no answer.
That is in your Bible. Not as an example of weak faith to be corrected, but as inspired Scripture. And the man hanging on the cross reached for that psalm when He had one breath left to spend, which means the Son of God has personally been in the room you are describing.
Whatever the silence is, it is not proof that He has stopped caring, because He went through it Himself and He went through the real version.
Somebody Else Carries What You Cannot Say
There is a season in this where the words themselves go. Not just the answers. The prayers. You sit down to pray and nothing forms.
Paul knew about that, and he wrote one of the most practical verses in the New Testament for it.
Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.
Romans 8:26 NKJV
Helps is sunantilambanomai (συναντιλαμβάνομαι), Strong’s G4878, and it is a triple compound worth taking apart. Sun, together with. Anti, over against. Lambanomai, to take hold. To take hold together with somebody, from the opposite side.
Picture two men lifting a beam that neither could carry alone. Luke uses the same verb when Martha asks Jesus to tell her sister to come help her in the kitchen. It is a working word. It means the other party grabs the far end.
And groanings is stenagmos (στεναγμός), G4726, which is not language at all. It is the sound a body makes under a weight.
So when your prayer has degraded into a sound with no sentence in it, the text says that is not a failed prayer. That is the Spirit on the other end of the beam.
Three Things to Do While It Is Still Quiet
Here is what I tell people, and I have watched it hold.
Keep the appointment even when it is dead. Show up at the same time in the same chair and say what little you have. This is not going through the motions in the bad sense. A man who keeps sitting down across from someone who is not talking is making a statement about the relationship, and the statement is that he is not leaving.
Borrow words. Israel handed her children a book of prayers, and we somehow decided that praying somebody else’s words is less sincere than praying our own. That idea is modern, it is American, and it is wrong. When you have nothing, open the Psalter and pray it out loud until the words start belonging to you. Jesus did exactly this from the cross.
Take up a watch. Habakkuk complained bitterly in chapter one, got no immediate answer, and then did this.
I will stand my watch and set myself on the rampart, and watch to see what He will say to me, and what I will answer when I am corrected.
Habakkuk 2:1 NKJV
He climbed up on the wall and waited. Not passively. A watchman is on duty. He posted himself in a place where he would see the answer coming while it was still a long way off, and he stayed there until it came.
Four Hundred Years and an Old Man’s Prayer
There is one silence in the Bible longer than any of ours.
Between Malachi and Matthew, roughly four hundred years pass with no prophet. Empires rise and fall over Israel. Faithful people are born, live their whole lives, and die inside that silence without ever hearing a word from heaven. If anybody had grounds to conclude that God had lost interest, it was that generation.
Then Luke opens his Gospel, and the silence breaks in the most ordinary way imaginable. An elderly priest is doing his shift. His name came up in the lot, so he is inside the holy place burning incense while a crowd prays outside, and an angel is standing to the right of the altar.
Do not be afraid, Zacharias, for your prayer is heard; and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John.
Luke 1:13 NKJV
Your prayer is heard.
Which prayer? Luke has already told us they were both well advanced in years and that Elizabeth was barren. That prayer was prayed decades earlier, by a younger man, in a house that still had hope in it. By the time the angel came, Zacharias had almost certainly stopped praying it. When he hears the answer, he argues with the angel, because he no longer believed it was on the table.
The prayer had been heard the whole time. He just could not see the file it was sitting in.
The Last Word
I want to be honest with you at the end of this series, the way I have tried to be all the way through.
I cannot promise you that your silence breaks this year. Some of them do not. Moses died on a mountain looking at a country he never entered, and Psalm 88 still ends in the dark.
What I can tell you is what the whole series has been building toward. Your access does not depend on your feelings, because it was purchased. Your standing does not fluctuate with your last week, because it is an adoption. Your words do not have to be good, because Somebody is carrying the far end of them. And the silence is not a verdict on you, because the only man who ever prayed perfectly prayed into it too, on a Friday afternoon, out loud, and the Father did not answer Him either.
Sunday was still coming.
So go back to the chair tomorrow morning. Say what you have. It is heard.
Going Deeper
Read Psalm 22 all the way through, start to finish, without stopping. It begins in abandonment and ends with the ends of the world turning to Jehovah and a people not yet born being told what He has done. The same psalm. Do not quit reading at verse two.
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