Turn on Timer! Pray for the Leadership Team. Good morning! Happy Valentine s Day! [Slide 1] We are in the middle of a series on prayer entitled, A Prayer-FULL Life. [Slide 2] Today s sermon title is, Dark Night of the Soul. Last Sunday, we talked about contemplative prayer, how to go from where we are in our prayer life to where God is calling us to be. From talking to God to listening to God, and ultimately being with God. The experience of God s presence through prayer is powerful. It is one of the most powerful things we can experience. Some of us have never experienced that presence of God. If you have never experienced the presence of the Holy Spirit in your life, I want to invite to a journey of prayer. Going from talking to God to listening to God and being with God. I want to ask you to try it out. I pray that you will experience the beauty of his presence. Yet, for some of us, our experiences of God s presence are in the rearview mirror. Many of us go through seasons of spiritual dryness when we feel like God is absent and distant. But, it is tragic that we quit praying during these seasons. Often, it is at these seasons that God is calling us to a deeper and more mature relationship with him. He actually wants to take us to the next level in our relationship with him. We will see that spiritual dryness, the feeling of distance from God, is not unique to us. The Bible is full of people who experienced this. [Slide 3] David cried out in Psalm 22:1-2: 1 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? 2 My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest. [Slide 4] Jesus cried out on the cross, as recorded in Mark 15:34: 1
34 And at three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani? (which means My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? ) [Slide 5] I want to explore some causes of spiritual dryness, and in so doing, explore some ways to approach it. [Slide 6] (1) Depression. Depression can have a physiological cause that you should see a doctor about. But, even if there is a medical cause, there is often a spiritual aspect to our depression as well. Sometimes, God heals you through doctors, sometimes through prayer, and sometimes through the community of people who care. So, we need to approach this issue from multiple angles. Continue to seek God in prayer, seek help in community, and seek help from doctors. Depression sometimes has a way of taking us to a tunnel vision that leads us to hopelessness. [Slide 7] 1 Thessalonians 5:14 tells us to encourage the disheartened. We need to be a community that knows one another to know when someone is struggling, and go down and meet with them and just spend time with them and encourage them. As you may know, Eugene struggled with depression for a few months. (He gave me permission to share this) He is the most lively and interesting person I know; but, without any real cause, he fell into depression. He started to experience tunnel vision and suicidal thoughts and even relapsing, which to him was suicide. He resigned from leadership and closed himself off from other people. But, we didn t leave him alone. We met with him and prayed for him. We encouraged him to see a doctor, and he got some medication and some sleep aid. People kept on calling him. We prayed for him. It has been a few weeks now since he recovered. I asked him how he came out: he said it started with Hannah coming down to Long Beach to meet with him, then others calling and caring. He came to realize that isolation was perpetuating his depression; he said it was the love and prayer of the community that helped the most. Let s continue to keep our brother in prayer. [Slide 8] (2) Boredom with a Form of Prayer. 2
It could be just that you are tired or just bored with the way you have been doing your spiritual practices, including praying. At college, I learned to pray as a part of quiet time. I was always at a desk. I read a passage, and I journaled; I ended with prayer. It was great and really helped me develop a relationship with God in a deeper way. But, somewhere along the line, I got bored with it. It was so difficult to do my quiet time and pray. I felt guilty about it. I would try to get accountability partners and punish each other for missing quiet time and prayer times. This went on for a while. But, later on, I found different spiritual practices and ways to pray that brought life back into the process. I see this with new mothers in particular. Some of you have had amazing spiritual practices, but after the baby came, you were living in that world of sleep deprivation and you couldn t really do what you did before. And you live in guilt and feel like you had to go back to that time when it was sweet. Well, maybe God is calling you to broaden your prayer life. Maybe he is calling you to pray in silence and meditation as you hold you nurse your baby. Maybe, God just wants to talk to you as you nurse. You need to figure out a new way to pray. [Slide 9] Psalm 96:1 tells us to sing to the LORD a new song. This means we need to use some creativity and sometimes do something new. Talking to others who went through it is a critical part of getting some support. And as you try different ways of praying, your prayer life might become vibrant again. I heard of this one guy who always felt too tired to pray. He lived an extremely busy life and every time he sat down to pray, he felt tired. So, he always rushed through. He felt dry because he was so tired. And his spiritual director told him to try something different. The spiritual director asked him what he loves to do. He said, I love to take walks on the beach. So, the spiritual director said, why don t you invite Jesus to go with you when you go walk on the beach? So, he did. And he said that it felt natural to pray as he walked. He didn t feel tired. He started to talk to him about various things going on in his life. The stream of living water was coming back into his life. [Slide 10] (3) Our Sins. 3
Sometimes, our spiritual dryness can be caused by sin in our life. [Slide 11] Isaiah 59:2 says: 2 But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear. It could be a sin that we know about. We feel guilty about the way we are living. Maybe, you are in a sexual relationship outside of marriage and you feel this sense of guilt and you don t really want to hear God s voice and experience the fullness of his presence. Maybe it s something that you are only subtly aware of. It takes some selfexamination to find it. Maybe, you are serving something that so consumes you, you don t have time or desire to seek God in your life. In a way, you are serving an idol. This could be drugs, relationships, job, or whatever. In fact, it can even be serving in ministry. I see this often with pastors. They get so absorbed with serving God that they forget to be with God. Ministry can be an idol in their lives. John Coe, Director of Spiritual Formation at Talbot Seminary said this: In those in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70 s there is a storehouse of potential for growth if they are willing to journey into the cauldron of the sins of the heart to discover a deep love beyond what we imagine or think. However, this journey is being swapped for a pottage of ministry in dry bones! Sometimes, the sin is so deep, you are not conscious of it. As we grow as Christians, we sometimes start to rely on our goodness, rather than on God s goodness. It s true that God produces good character in our lives, and we start to live on that good character, instead of the love and grace of God. We stop going deeper, and we get satisfied with the amount of change God has brought in our lives. And we get bored with ourselves and wonder if this is all there is. All of these things can cause dryness in our spiritual life. 4
The way out of this is not to seek to change your life so that your prayer life can go back to normal. No. That would be trying to earn your way back to God s presence. That is the life of the living by the law. The life of living by the spirit is completely different. Even though you are a sinner, even though you just messed up, even though you might be working for an idol, you just come to Jesus. I think the biggest problem we have is that we feel like we have to change to be accepted back. We force ourselves to get more passionate about Jesus. This happens at a very subconscious level. I remember when I went on a mission trip to Dominican Republic. I had an amazing time. I saw God at work and I felt his presence all the way through. My prayer life was vibrant. Then, I came back. I felt into depression afterwards. I expected more of myself, but somehow, I couldn t perform. The big thing was prayer. I couldn t pray. I felt guilty about not praying. I was disappointed with myself, and I felt like I fell into a vicious cycle of condemnation and shame. Then, I went to a retreat where someone shared with me about God s grace. She said that I was trying to earn my place with God. I don t have to get it all together to come to Jesus. It is by grace I live, not by earning my way to God. Somehow, what she said just clicked. That was the beginning of coming back to God. God, thank you for your grace! Thank you for accepting me as I am. For those of us struggling with sin, we need preach the gospel to ourselves constantly. I am a sinner. I must acknowledge and repent of my sins. But, God loves me anyway. There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. He has adopted me as his child. He is my daddy. He has given me the Holy Spirit, his presence. None of these things depended on me doing good or being good. They all came by grace, undeserved gift from the Father. We have to continue to preach the gospel to ourselves. You have to remain in community to hear the gospel over and over again. And I believe you will see his love for you, and this love will start you back on a journey of being with God. [Slide 12] (4) Difficulties of Life. 5
Sometimes, spiritual dryness could be caused by something that s going on in our lives. Maybe a relational breakdown. We lose a job. Difficulties with our health. Someone we loves dies. Things are not going well. We often think that God is not present when things are not going well. When we are happy, we feel like God is with us. When we are not, we don t feel like God is with us. So, we go through spiritual dryness. Underlying this cause is the belief that God is there to make us happy. And so, we actually desire happiness more than we desire God. Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith says the fastest-growing religion in America today is neither Christianity, Islam, nor some eastern religion. It is what he calls Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD). In MTD, the most important "truth" about God is that he wants us all to be nice, to feel happy, and to be delivered from pain (that's the therapeutic part). Outside of being available when I need him, God will not interfere much with my life (there's the deism). We are drawn to MTD because we want our life to be nice, happy, and uninterrupted. Smith says that MTD is in our culture including our churches like fluoride is in our water. But, this is actually not biblical. The Bible teaches us that God can use difficulties of our lives to build us up. [Slide 13] James 1:2-4 says: 2 Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, 3 because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. 4 Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. What the Bible says is that God can use even bad things that happened to us to build us up so that we may be mature and complete. We have to ask ourselves whether we are really looking for God or just happiness. The irony is that as we seek God, and live in the Spirit, we experience happiness; but if we seek happiness more than God, we will get disillusioned. 6
[Slide 14] (4) Dark Night of the Soul. It could be that our spiritual dryness does not come from our depression, sins, circumstances, or just being bored with a form of prayer. Here is what Mark Thibodeaux (author of Armchair Mystic) said: In fact, the dryness may not be a problem at all but rather a calling from God for me to enter into a very special phase of my prayer life. God may be calling me into the desert. [Slide 15] Saint John of the Cross, a 16th Century writer, called it the dark night of the soul. These dark nights that St. John of the Cross talked about are a particular kind of darkness. It is the darkness that comes not because of sin or circumstances of our lives but because God is calling us to go deeper with him. There are times when our prayer life leads us to exciting places. It s like God is calling us to the beach to bask in his glory, to just soak in his love. It is so good. So good that sometimes you feel drunk in the Spirit. But, sooner or later, God calls us to the desert. It is a prolonged period of dryness. You don t experience him even when you seek him. It feels like there is nothing there. You might feel all kinds of emotions along with it: a sense of loneliness, restlessness, doubt, frustration, sometimes boredom and indifference. Consider the story of Agnes. I read this in an article written by John Ortberg. From the time she was a young girl, Agnes believed. Not just believed: she was on fire. She wanted to do great things for God. She said things such as she wanted to "love Jesus as he has never been loved before." Agnes had an undeniable calling. She wrote in her journal that "my soul at present is in perfect peace and joy." She experienced a union with God that was so deep and so continual that it was to her a rapture. She left her home. She became a missionary. She gave him everything. And then he left her. At least that's how it felt to her. "Where is my faith?" She asked. "Deep down there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. My God, how painful is this unknown pain I have no faith." She struggled to pray: "I utter words of 7
community prayers and try my utmost to get out of every word the sweetness it has to give. But my prayer of union is not there any longer. I no longer pray." She still worked, still served, still smiled. But she spoke of that smile as her mask, "a cloak that covers everything." This inner darkness continued on, year after year, with one brief respite, for nearly 50 years. She felt like God was just absent. Such was the secret pain of Agnes, who is better known as Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa wrote letters (intended only for her spiritual directors) on the thirst of her soul. After her death, the process of canonization made these public. They were published to much astonishment (Come Be My Light, ed. by Brian Kolodiejchuk, Doubleday, 2007). How are we to understand Agnes's story? Here are some thoughts about why God might be calling us to dark night of the soul. [Slide 16] (i) It could be that he wants to mature us through it. I have noticed that people who go through this tend to be more mature Christians. It s like God wants to take them to the desert to make them stronger. We sometimes rely on emotional and passionate experience to grow. We see how good he is and we continue to grow. We got used to drinking milk, and God thinks that it s time to wean us from milk and start eating solid food. And that feel uncomfortable for us. It feels like we are being abandoned. The soft comfort of the breast is gone for the hardness of the spoon. But, it will actually help us grow. It might be like when the mother walks away backwards when the baby starts to wobble when learning to walk. It feels like distance, but it is actually a way to help us grow. Remember the story that I told of the father who walks hand in hand with his child a park. The father tosses his child up in the air and catches him and embraces him and tells him how much he loves him, and then, he puts the child down and holds his hands and continues to walk in the park. Even when the feeling of being tossed in the air is gone, the dry times are learning to live with his hand in ours. 8
The dark night of the soul actually seeks to bring us closer to God. As we mature in Christ, we sometimes think that God is only in the light--when things are going well, when you feel blessed to be alive, and when your family and job are going well. But, the darkness of the soul actually teaches us that God is even in the darkness of our lives. Even when we don t feel him, he is there. Even when we are bored with him, he is not bored with us. Even when we feel numb, he continues to love us. It actually helps us develop our faith in Jesus instead of faith in our circumstances. He is taking away a blessing to help us grow more dependent on him. It s not because he loves us any less; it is because he loves us more than we can imagine. One author (Ruth Burrows) says that, through prayer, God is transforming us to be a new creation in his image. But, I cannot become someone new, until my old self dies. As Jesus said in [Slide 17] John 12:24, Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. This means that the dry periods may be a way to die to ourselves. What we are seeking in prayer is union with God, just as Jesus and Holy Spirit and God were united as one in fellowship with one another, we are called to that dance, and the only way to learn to dance is when we become truly selfless. In this purification process, the first to go are my emotions. It s not that my emotions are bad, but they must be deactivated in order for me to begin to turn my focus from myself to God. If I still judge my prayer time by how much they bring me joy and happiness, then I still have not yet become selfless. I am not sure how to process this right now. But, I think the important thing to keep in mind is that I must trust that God is present and active even when I don t feel anything. Here is one song that demonstrates this thought: I believe in the sun, even when it isn t shining; I believe in love, even when there s no one there. And I believe in God, even when He is silent. Going back to the story of Mother Theresa, she came to see that "feeling" the presence of Jesus was not the only or even the primary evidence of his presence. She had to learn to live on faith on the promise of God that he was with her. 9
[Slide 18] (ii) Sometimes God leads us into the desert to develop our hunger for God. Gardner C. Taylor, a legendary African-American preacher, said this in an interview towards the end of his life. The interviewer asked him: What is produced in the human soul during dry times that can't be produced during "flood" times? Rev. Taylor said: The feeling of need. The feelings of lack, of inadequacy, of insufficiency. Loneliness. I believe these things are for our good. I believe that dry times are preparation for the flood time. For if winter comes then spring is surely on its way. Our richest spiritual experiences follow those times of aridity. Many people who experienced this said that the dark night of the soul actually is an opportunity to develop spiritual hunger and purge our hearts of things that used to satisfy us. We used to rely on God, but as we grew in character, we started to rely on our goodness, and that gets boring. Something is off. The dark nights help us see that something is off and make us continue to hunger for God. Going back to Mother Teresa again, she came to see that her hunger for God, the very craving for God was "sure sign" that God was present though in a hidden way in her life. [Slide 19] (iii) Sometimes, we come to realize that our pain in the dark nights can be redemptive. Another thing that Mother Teresa came to see is that the pain she was going through could be redemptive. That Jesus himself had to experience the agony of the Absence of God: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Jesus didn t just suffer at that moment on the cross. He suffered as he paid for our sins by being separated from God. Three days in our time, but infinite in God s time. His suffering redeemed us. Like him, Mother Teresa saw that she could suffer redemptively by clinging to God in the midst of darkness. [Slide 20] Maybe that s what Paul meant when he said in Philippians 3:10: 10 I want to know Christ yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 10
We want to know the power of his resurrection, but there is also power in participating in his suffering. Closing thought. St. John of the Cross: Oh, then, spiritual soul, when you see your appetites darkened, your inclinations dry and constrained, your faculties incapacitated for any interior exercise, do not be afflicted; think of this as a grace, since God is freeing you from yourself and taking from you your own activity. Let s pray. Invite Prayer team. 11