When God Feels Silent: Learning to Walk With the Holy Spirit Again

• Friends, I want to talk to you tonight about a prison. Not a prison of stone and iron bars. Not a cell you can see with your eyes. No, I want to talk about a prison that can be built in the most beautiful home that can exist in the middle of a crowded church that can hold you captive while you smile and say, “I’m fine.
• ” It’s the prison of the mind, the invisible tormenting prison of evil thoughts. You know of what I speak, it’s not the grand wicked deeds the world sees, but the silent secret battleground within. The thoughts that come unbidden like poisoned arrows shot from the shadows. Thoughts that accuse you day and night.
• Thoughts that fill you with fear about tomorrow or shame about yesterday. Thoughts of jealousy, of bitterness, of impurity, of despair. They swirl and they press and they whisper. This is who you are. You are this darkness. And you try. Oh, you try with all your might to be free. You clamp the door of your mind shut. You say, “I will not think this.
• ” And for a moment there is silence. But the moment you grow weary, the moment you let down your guard, they come rushing back in stronger than before. And they bring seven more with them. And the shame deepens. Because you believe somewhere deep inside that these thoughts are you, that they define you, that if anyone really knew the traffic of your mind, they would recoil.
• So you live a double life, a composed exterior and a private interior war zone. You confess it once, and you feel a moment’s relief, but soon the cycle begins again until you feel that even God himself must be wary of hearing it. You’re fighting an enemy you cannot see, with weapons that have no power.