We are promised revelation, but sometimes we need to sit through the Lord’s silence to learn what we need to.
We are told in Matthew 7:7 that we will get revelation if we come to Heavenly Father with our questions: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” However, there are times when the promised answers are slow to come, and we are faced with divine silence.
When answers don’t come right away, it is easy to feel that we are lacking something or must be doing something wrong, but this is not always true. In “Divine Silence and Indirection,” adapted from her book Revelation, Janiece Johnson reassures us that sometimes this silence means Heavenly Father is inviting us to sit with him and act on our own. Sometimes, when we want to receive direction and get to work following that direction, he wants us to be still. The call to “‘be still and know that I am God’ is its own kind of action,” though it can be incredibly difficult to sit in what can feel like a broken promise.
God does fulfill his promises to us in his own time. In the book of Numbers, the children of Israel wander in the wilderness for 40 years waiting for God to fulfill his promise and take them to the promised land. While many interpretations view this as a punishment, some scholars refer to this period as the incubation of Israel, a refining period where God was forming them into who he needed them to be.
Similarly, as we sit in uncertainty and silence, as we wander through our own personal wildernesses, we can grow into who Heavenly Father needs us to be. It may be uncomfortable and sometimes feel painful, but in the waiting we can learn about God’s plan for us.
Read “Divine Silence and Indirection,” adapted from Revelation by Janiece Johnson, to learn about periods of divine silence in the Restoration.
Source: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship
—Eldin Ratliff, Latter-day Saint Insights
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Find more insights
Read “Patience is Active and Humble” by Abigail Ellis, former managing editor of Latter-day Saint Insights, to learn about what you can watch for while waiting on God’s timing.
Take a look at the Church Magazines article “3 Ways God Guides Us through Our Seasons of Wilderness” by Noelle Barrus to learn about how God can support us through periods of trial.