When Prayer Goes Flat: Understanding the Dark Night
Jesus Way Ministries
There is a season in the life of a believer that nobody warns you about, and it arrives without explanation.
Prayer goes flat. The Word is silent on the page. The things that used to work stop working. Believers have described it for centuries by saying the heavens have turned to brass, and the first thing most people conclude is that they have sinned and God has withdrawn.
Usually they have not. And usually He has not.
What follows is the most important thing to know going in: in this season, the lesson does not arrive. There is no insight to extract on Thursday, nothing to write in the margin, no verse that lands and lifts it. That is not the night failing to work.
That is the night working. God is doing something in you that cannot be done while you are still able to understand it.
Job mapped it exactly
Job did not describe this in general terms. He gave the coordinates.
I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him. On the left hand where he doth work, but I cannot behold him.
Four directions, and God in none of them. That is a man searching properly and finding nothing, and it is in your Bible so that you will know the experience is not evidence of your standing.
Then, in the same breath, Job says the thing that holds a man together out there: but he knoweth the way that I take.
Job could not find God. God had never lost Job.
The concealment is not punishment
He hides so that you will come looking, because men look hardest for what they cannot easily have.
If that sounds like a convenient explanation, read what God says His own intention was. I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her.
He led her out there. He led her out there in order to speak to her.
Three tests for telling the difference
Dryness has more than one cause, and treating the wrong cause is how people stay stuck for years. It can come from sin. It can come from plain lukewarmness. And it can come from a body that is exhausted or grieving and needs sleep and food before it needs a diagnosis — Elijah under the juniper tree asked to die, and the first thing heaven sent him was not a rebuke or a revelation. It was a meal and a second sleep.
Where the dryness is God's own work, three things are true at the same time.
Nothing satisfies, above or below. If this were sin, the appetite would still run happily toward what is forbidden. Here it runs nowhere at all.
The mind stays fixed on God with a painful care. You are anxious that you are failing Him, grieved that you seem to be slipping back. That is the exact opposite of lukewarmness, because lukewarmness does not grieve.
The old way of praying stops working, and in its place comes an inclination simply to be still with Him without being able to think of anything in particular.
Learn to be quiet there. Striving to recover the old method will drive off the very thing being offered.
The milk is taken away on purpose
At the beginning God is gracious to fill the senses with sweetness. Worship moves you. Prayer is a pleasure. The page lights up.
That sweetness is real. It is also milk.
There comes a day when the Father takes the milk away, and it is not to starve the child. It is to wean him. When Isaac was weaned, Abraham made a feast — the household celebrated on the very day the comfort was withdrawn, because the withdrawal meant the boy was growing up.
So the sweetness stops and the believer panics. What is actually happening is a transfer. God is moving the nourishment out of the senses and into the spirit, and the flesh, which has no capacity for what is pure spirit, is left with nothing to taste.
The dryness is not subtraction. It is relocation.
The part that explains everything else
There is a deeper night than the first, and God brings into it those He is drawing toward Himself. Here is the thing to understand about it.
The darkness is not the absence of His light. It is the excess of it.
Clouds and darkness are round about him, the psalmist says — and not because God is dark. A weak eye turned toward the sun sees black.
When that light reaches a soul that is not yet clean, the soul feels every impurity in it with a clarity it has never had before. And it reads the pain as rejection. It concludes God has cast it off.
It is nearly always at that moment nearer to Him than it has ever been.
Jeremiah did not pretend
He hath hedged me about, that I cannot get out … also when I cry and shout, he shutteth out my prayer … he hath inclosed my ways with hewn stone.
There is no pious softening in that. He wrote down exactly what it felt like.
Then read the same man twenty verses later, in the same darkness, with nothing whatever changed in his circumstances: it is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not; they are new every morning.
He did not feel his way to that. He reckoned it in the dark.
He went first, and went further
At the ninth hour Jesus cried, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me. That is the cry of this night in its purest form, and the only time it has ever been literally true.
Mark that difference, because it matters when you are in it. You may feel forsaken while His light exposes what is in you. He was forsaken, in your place, so that the feeling would never become the fact for you.
Your cup is purging. His was wrath.
And see how His night ended, because that is the road out of yours. The same voice that cried why hast thou forsaken me also said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit. From the agony of seeming abandonment to the surrender of total trust.
He could not see Sunday from the cross. He committed Himself to the Father in the dark, and the third day proved the Father had never once let go.
What to do, and what not to do
Do not run. Do not numb it.
And do not accept shallow comfort, least of all from the friend who tells you that if you only had more faith this would lift. That is not the answer for this season and it does real damage.
When you find someone else in their night, do not be that friend. Sit down and stay until morning.
Then settle the following as matters of fact and not of feeling, because in that season your feelings will lie to you:
He is not against you. He is not destroying you. He is remaking you. And He hides Himself only until you have come looking.
Hold your ground until morning.
This article is adapted from Lesson 7 of The Progressive, First Edition: The Deep Work by Jesus Way Ministries — a workbook in four parts on what God does in a man He intends to send far.
This was very insightful and very helpful for my walk with the Lord. I look forward to these blogs and cannot wait for more of these to come out!