I have attended half-day prayer retreats with Open Hands Ministries for the last six months or so. If you live in or near South-Central Pennsylvania, you might really appreciate an Open Hands prayer retreat.
Each of the retreats has a different topic, and a couple months ago, the topic was The Dark Night of the Soul.
The Dark Night of the Soul refers to those times in life when it feels God has disappeared. Maybe you’re going through a hard time, crying out to God and you don’t seem to get any response. Maybe you’re going through a normal time, and it just seems like God is hiding.
You know the feeling? Perhaps this passage of Scripture describes what you are feeling:
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest.”
Israel’s great king David wrote that. See Psalm 22. Last year I blogged through the life of King David. Remember some of his dark nights? When King Saul was chasing David, trying to murder him. When David’s son Absalom was overthrowing him.
If that psalm sounds familiar, it’s because Jesus quoted that one from the cross. Talk about a dark night of the soul. It’s real. It is a common experience for Christians to have a dark night of the soul. For months and years even.
When you’re going through a dark night of the soul, is it possible to get closer to God?
What Paul has to say in 1 Thessalonians 5:5-11 relates to us when we are waiting on God, and it seems like he is not responding.
Last week we studied 1 Thessalonians 4:13–5:4. In that previous passage, Paul was teaching about Jesus’ return, saying that Jesus’ return will be sudden, unexpected. Look at what he says, though, in verse 4. “You, brothers and sisters, are not in darkness so that this day should surprise you like a thief.”
We Christians do not need to be surprised at the return of Jesus. Why? Has God told when he is going to return? No. So, is Paul wrong? Won’t Jesus’ return be a surprise for us too? Yes. So what does Paul mean when he says in verse 4 that we are not in darkness, and thus won’t be surprised? It seems to me that we are in the dark as to when Jesus will return. We have no idea when he will return. Jesus himself said we can’t know when he will return. So how can Paul say we shouldn’t be surprised?
In verse 5, Paul begins to answer that question. Here’s what he writes, “You are all children of the light and children of the day. We do not belong to the night or to the darkness.”
Sometimes I walk around my church family’s building, and I don’t turn the lights on, even at night. After 22 years, I think that I know the building well enough that I don’t need lights. The other day, I got a reality check.
I was walking down a dark hallway, and I chose not to put my hands out to sense how close I was to the walls. What you need to know is that the hallway walls are not empty, flat. We have tack strips on our walls.
The strips are one-inch cork board that we use to post notices or kids’ artwork to brighten up our hallways. The cork board is encased in a metal frame.
As I walked what I believed to be a straight line down the middle of the hallway, suddenly something caught my shirt’s shoulder and ripped it open. The ends of the metal frame of the tack strips are sharp. Frankly, I was fortunate they didn’t cut upon my shoulder.
But I must admit, it’s my fault. I was walking in darkness, and I was oblivious to how close I was to the wall. I could have taken precaution. I could have turned on the light.
In 1 Thessalonians 5:5, Paul is saying that we Christians have the light. Of course Paul is speaking figuratively here. He’s saying that the light we have is the awareness of what is true about Jesus’ return. Though we don’t know when, we know that he is coming again. We don’t need to know when. We just need the light of the knowledge that he is coming again, so that we can prepare for it.
How do we prepare? We learn what Paul advises us about how to prepare in the next post.
Engaging Scripture 