The Spiritual Silence: When You’re a Man Crying Out to God and Hearing Nothing Back

Ever feel like God is silent during prayer, especially in difficult times? It's not uncommon for men to feel like God has gone quiet.

We discuss ways to stay connected to faith, including being honest about emotions, recalling foundational beliefs, recognizing spiritual interference, and seeking support from other men of faith. 

We also emphasize the importance of perseverance in prayer and offers practical advice for engaging with God, even when it feels challenging. 

00:00 Introduction: Feeling Unheard by God
00:17 The Struggles of Modern Men
01:51 The Importance of Faith
02:20 When God Feels Distant
04:38 Steps to Reconnect with God
08:37 The Role of Spiritual Warfare
10:59 Biblical Examples of Struggle
12:25 Practical Tips for Prayer
16:42 Conclusion and Community Invitation

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Transcript

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Have you ever tried to talk to God and you felt like nobody was listening? Maybe in the midst of something really challenging. You have tried to pray and you've asked God for help, and it seems like nothing has really changed. You feel like you try to talk to God and all you get is silence. If you're a man who's been following along on this channel for a little while, you know that we've been talking about how difficult it is for men in our world right now that a lot of the culture seems stacked against us, and life in general just feels like it's more than we can bear at most times. For many men in the midst of those kinds of situations, we contend to try to lean on our faith. We turn to God and we often go to God in prayer with simple requests of things like, God, can you help me out here? God, can you show me a way forward? God, can you get me through this? God, can you just relieve the pain a little bit? This is too much. And yet many of those prayers often feel like they go unanswered and maybe even unheard. What's the point of praying? Where is God in the midst of all of this? When you're trying to reach out and connect to God and all you're met with is silence, what do you do with that? What does that do to your faith? What does that do to your perception, your understanding of God? How do you handle what your relationship with God looks like when it feels like. He's not really relating to you at all. I wanna try to talk about those things today here on the Manhood Tribes Channel. My name's Don. I'm your host here at Manhood Tribes, and my job really is to do a few things here on this channel. I want to give you a clear vision of what it means to be a man. I want to give you a clear challenge to build strong male friendships, and I want to try to provide you with a clear path for how to do both of those things. And part of doing those things well for many men is the way that we handle our faith. Now, if you followed along on this channel, you know that I've not been shy about talking about the fact that I'm a Christian, that my faith is really important to me, and that I also believe that it should be to any man that your faith, and especially the way that I talk about it in terms of your ultimate allegiance, will really shape who you are as a man. And so taking that seriously is important for all men. But today I wanna particularly address the challenge that many of us as men face when it comes to our faith, is that it kind of just feels like God isn't there right now. Especially as the world has gotten so hard and so difficult and the weight of all that we are carrying as men feels like it is insurmountable. In the midst of that kind of a season, God kind of feels like he's just sort of vanished. Is he just leaving us with our problems to say, you know, okay, you guys just go make the most of it. Or is he saying like, uh, yeah, you made this bed. Now it's time for you to lie down in it. You know that like we've created all of our own problems and so now we just have to deal with it. Is that kind of what we think of God? I think the challenge is that most men don't think of God that way, especially if you've grown up in a Christian background. You've probably had been told that God loves you, that he's present with you, that he's never leaving you, that he cares about, even the smallest things in your life. If all of that is true, that how do we reconcile that with the fact that in the midst of these really hard situations, when we try to talk to God, when we try to reach out to him, he just is quiet. He doesn't say anything. He not only doesn't seem to be answering our prayers, we're not even really sure if he's hearing them. Where is he? Where did he go? And what do we do with all of that silence? How does it shape our faith and how does it shape us as men? I. There's a few things here that I want us to really try to pay attention to today. If you're a man of faith, I hope that this is going to be really helpful for you and that it's gonna open your eyes to some of the things that can be true about your faith and your relationship to God if you're not. Yet a man of faith, that's okay. I don't want you to tune out because you feel like, ah, this episode just probably isn't for me. I think there's some things here that might challenge the way that you have maybe thought about faith or religion or God or prayer that might cause you to rethink some things and maybe go, ah, is there something to this that I've missed? Is this kind of a different conversation than I've been told is really what this is all about. So hang in there. Just pay attention. I think it'll be helpful for you no matter where you're coming from in order to try to figure out how do you incorporate faith into the midst of the challenges that we as men are facing today. The first thing that I'm gonna encourage you to do when you are faced with this situation where it feels like God is not answering your prayers or maybe even listening to you, is that number one. You need to be honest about it. You need to just name it. You need to be real about what's going on with you at a heart level. What is that causing you to think, feel, or even believe about God and about the way that you relate to him? Is it causing you to think? Hmm. Maybe this God thing isn't really real after all. Maybe there isn't a God. Maybe I've just made it all up in my head. Is it causing you to think or feel like maybe I've really done something wrong. Maybe I've sinned in some way, that God is mad at me or disappointed with me, and he's not gonna listen to what I have to say until I get things right with him. Is it causing you to think maybe God just doesn't care? Maybe. I'm not all that important to him, or maybe the things that I'm praying about don't really matter to him at all. Or is it pushing you to some other kind of emotion? Maybe it's causing you to be really angry with God and you just want to give him the finger and say, screw you God, and what the heck? You know? Like, why are you leaving me alone in this kind of a situation? Haven't you promised to be with me? I need you with me right now. In the midst of all of this difficulty and this pain, where did you go? Be honest, God can handle your emotion. Sometimes though you can't, and it's that being honest about it, that's really important. You need to recognize the effect of this situation and what it's having on you and what it's having on your relationship with God. Okay, so start there because it will help you be able to pay attention to what might be going on in this environment. The second thing that you need to do after that is just reorient yourself to who you know God to be. There's a saying that I've tried to teach to myself and practice so that I'll believe it many, many times over the years, which is that we shouldn't doubt in the dark what we knew to be true in the light. I. Meaning that in the midst of really difficult circumstances, in the midst of a lot of pain, it can be really hard to hang on to the things that we knew were true during easier or more lighthearted times. The things that were easy to recognize and believe about God when life wasn't as difficult. We can't let go of those things just because life has gotten difficult. God didn't change, but life did. And so we've got to figure out how do we continue to believe what we know to be true about God even in the midst of those really difficult kinds of circumstances. So go back to the things that you know are part of your foundational bedrock of your faith. If you're a Christian like I am, go back to the things that remind you that God is love. He loves you. He cares about you. He sacrificed his only son for you. He wants to do anything he can to help you know him. Read through some scriptures that remind you that God communicates with his people. God talks to his people. God hears prayers from his people. God answers prayers of his children. Okay. Go back and read those scriptures and remind yourself of those truths so that you can summon up that belief in you. Again, think about those experiences in your own life. When has God been there for you? When have you been sure of his love and of his comfort and of his? Presence in your life. Remind yourself of those things. Remember what that was like, so that in the midst of this pain, you can try to clinging to those things and help yourself remember and believe that those things still are true. It's just feeling more difficult at the moment, but that doesn't mean that you were ever wrong. Don't doubt in the dark what you knew to be true in the light. Okay, and because of that, number three, the third thing that we need to talk about is to recognize that there is darkness going on here. There are real forces that are opposed to you being able to communicate well with God. Now, this may be kind of a new or a different category in terms of the way that you think about your relationship with God and just the spiritual world in general. But the truth of the matter is, if you're coming from a Christian standpoint, you can read all through your Bible and see that the world is populated, not just with humans and physical beings, but with spiritual beings as well. Angels and demons and all kinds of spirits are readily present throughout our scriptures and throughout our story, but we don't always take them very seriously, and yet they take us really seriously. They're active in our lives in all kinds of ways, trying to persuade us for and against our relationship with God. And so know that in the midst of your darkness, in the midst of your pain, with things being really difficult in your life right now, there are intentional forces who want to use that difficulty and that pain to drive a wedge between you and God. One of the ways that they might do that is just to interfere with your ability to hear from him. They might, you know, do the spiritual equivalent of putting cotton balls in your ears so that it becomes really difficult for you to actually hear God's words. It's like the pain, the volume of the pain in your life has been ratcheted up so high that all you can hear is the pain and you can't really hear the words of God to you. So maybe in your prayers, what you need to do is pray against those spiritual forces of darkness. Pray that no interference would come between you and the voice of God, that no spiritual power would be able to hinder God's words to you. Pray those things. Begin with that and see if that might help. Let some light into the conversation might clear the fog away a little bit so that the voice of God becomes just a little bit more clear to you, just a little bit more obvious that yes, God does want to communicate to you, he is speaking to you. You might just be having a hard time hearing, and that's part of the challenge of learning to listen to God in the midst of some really difficult scenarios. Now. If this is you and you are going through this, I want to just remind you that you are in good company, okay? This has been men throughout time as we have sought to follow God, have had a hard time being able to communicate with him, especially in the midst of pain and difficult circumstances. Whether you look at stories from the Bible of. People like David as he was on the run from King Saul in the armies of Israel for many, many years before he ever became King. Or whether you look at someone like Job who dealt with the loss of nearly everything he owned and everyone that he loved, trying to figure out what was God doing in his life. Or you look at someone like Jonah who did hear clearly from God and then decided to run from that, and then had a hard time hearing from God until he repented and did what he knew God was asking him to do. Even Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before he died, wrestled in prayer with God over what he was supposed to do versus what he really wanted to do. All of those things are difficult for us. Pain and difficult circumstances make prayer difficult, and it's okay to admit that and to be honest about it. Now in the midst of those difficulties, what can we do to be able to help us get back to a place where we are hearing more clearly from God and where our communication and our prayer life with him feels like it's more consistent. Number one, just remind yourself that God's silence doesn't mean his absence. Just because it seems like God is quiet right now doesn't mean that God has abandoned you. Okay? That speaks earlier to, uh, reminding yourself about the truth of what you know about God. Okay. Don't come to wrong conclusions, just because it seems like God is quiet. His silence doesn't mean that he is absent. In fact, he's very near and wanting to communicate with you, so keep pressing in Number two. You probably need to get around some other Christian men who are also praying and can pray for you. Let them know that you're having a hard time hearing God. In the midst of all of this difficulty and pain, ask them to pray for you and to come alongside you as you pray as well, and ask them to pray specifically that you would better be able to hear the voice of the Lord, that whatever is in the way or interfering with your ability to hear from God would be cleared and that God would speak to you. Number three. Here's where you just need to be really honest about what it is that you're praying about and what kind of answer you're hoping for. Sometimes in the midst of a really difficult or painful situation, we might be praying for something and really wanting to hear one specific answer. Maybe you've got a family member who's sick and you're praying very specifically for that family member's healing. God doesn't seem to be saying anything about that. Maybe that's because you're not. Open to hearing whatever answer God wants to provide. You're really only open to hearing one answer and that's that. Yes, God is gonna heal that family member. Maybe he is, maybe he isn't. Maybe what he wants from you is not for you to clinging to that one answer, but to clinging to him. And then in the midst of drawing close to him, he will be willing to give you an answer to your prayer request. Be open and be honest about what it is that you're looking for, and if you can lay down your answer or your desired answer in humility, then you might clear a path for God to be able to be honest with you regardless of whatever answer it is that he's prepared to give. And last but not least, just be patient. Take time. Don't give up on praying. Pray. In many ways, if praying silently in your bedroom isn't working for you, then try a different way. Try walking around in a garden path and praying out loud. Try writing down your prayers in a journal. Try singing some worship songs that reflect the heart of what your prayers are about. Do other things that help you engage your body and your spirit and prayer in maybe a way that's different or new for you as a way to just. Try to get to God. Try to help your heart connect to the heart of God, and in doing so, you may open up that chain of communication that you're really longing to have restored with God. All of those things can be things that can help you and your ability to pray and to hear from him. As you continue to listen through the pain. Just know that the silence might be part of the shaping. God might be using this silence to draw you closer to him. It's not because he's mean or vindictive, or certainly not because he doesn't want to talk to you, but it might be that what he wants is a closer relationship with you, and in the midst of this pain, you're moving towards him in ways that you. Haven't recently, life was good. You maybe didn't feel like you needed God all that much, and now here in a really difficult situation, you really do want him close and he's, he's trying to say to you, I want you close at all times. I want you close in the bad times. And the good I. He might be using this silence to shape you, to move you closer to him, to help you develop the strength and the stamina to continue connecting and communicating with him, even on the other side of this darkness and this pain. So allow him to do that. That is a really good thing. You will enjoy your relationship with him even more, and you'll establish something that will be long lasting regardless of the outcome of this particular situation. Okay. I hope that this has been helpful for you today. I hope that in the midst of some difficulties, it's provided you with a way forward to be able to help you engage with God better. If you enjoy this kind of content, I would love for you to like and subscribe the video down below. And I would also try to encourage you that you need to be around some other like-minded men who are pursuing this same kind of content, who are looking to grow in their relationships with God as well, and to try to be close to him in ways that help them navigate this world as men. I've got just the place for you to do that. It's a part of our Manhood Tribes community. In fact, if you go to manhood tribes.com/community, you'll find a way to join the list for when the community is open. This community is going to help you be able to get better at being a man. It's gonna help you get better at following Jesus, and it's gonna connect you with other like-minded men who are trying to do the same. So again, go to manhood tribes.com/community and sign up for when that community is open for you to join. Now, I wanna leave you by encouraging you to comment about this video in the comments down below, just. Put something about what are you wrestling with in your relationship with God? Let me know the answer to that question, and I'm excited to be able to engage with you around those comments. I'll look forward to talking to you next time here on the Manhood Tribes Channel. I'll see you then.