When God Feels Far Away at Christmas

Devotional

You know the words. You've sung them since you were a kid.

And tonight your mouth is making them and nothing is happening underneath.

The candle's lit. The room is warm. The whole season is built to radiate a closeness you're supposed to be feeling.

You bow your head and the ceiling feels low.

Christmas is here and God is far away.

If that's where you are, you're not the first person to stand there.

"As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God."

That's not mild disappointment. That's the ache of somebody who has tasted the presence of God and can't find it now.

And notice something about that thirst.

It's real precisely because the memory of water is real.

You don't long for something you've never had.

Now watch where the psalmist takes his honesty.

He doesn't pretend. He doesn't perform a contentment he isn't feeling.

But he also doesn't turn inward and let the emptiness have the last word.

He talks to God about the absence of God.

That's an act of faith, whether or not it feels like one.

And there's a particular cruelty to spiritual dryness in December.

The rest of the year you can carry it quietly. Nobody has to know.

December won't let you hide. Every service, every gathering, every song about joy and peace presses right on the bruise.

And if you're not careful you'll start believing the distance is telling you the truth about God. That his silence is his absence. That your emptiness proves he doesn't care.

But the gospel tells you something else entirely.

The God you're reaching for has already reached for you.

John writes that "the true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him."

He came into the world that couldn't see him.

He came knowing he wouldn't be recognized. He came knowing he'd be refused.

And he came anyway.

That's the staggering thing at the center of Christmas.

God did not wait until you felt close before he came near.

He didn't make your spiritual readiness a condition of his arrival.

He came into a world thick with darkness and indifference, and he was driven not by our longing but by his own relentless love.

So what does that do to your dry season?

The incarnation is God's answer to every felt absence.

You feel like you're reaching across a distance nobody could cross.

He already crossed it. In flesh and blood. In a stable. On a cross.

The distance you feel is real. It just isn't the deepest thing that's true.

The deepest thing that's true is this: "I will never leave you nor forsake you."

And that promise does not run on your emotional state. It doesn't require warm feelings as proof of purchase.

It's a covenant word from a God who cannot lie, and it holds whether or not you feel held.

Your dryness is not a verdict on your faith.

Sometimes the soul goes through a season of thirst not because God moved but because he's drawing you to want him more than the usual comforts let you want him.

And listen to Isaiah calling across the centuries: "Seek the LORD while he may be found; call upon him while he is near."

That invitation assumes something.

It assumes he can be found. It assumes he is near.

God doesn't taunt dry souls with invitations he has no intention of honoring.

So what do you do in the meantime?

You don't wait for the feeling to come back before you come to God. You come in the dryness itself.

You open the Scriptures, not because they thrill you right now, but because they're true.

You pray, not because the words come easy, but because the one hearing them is faithful.

You show up with God's people, not because the room fills the void, but because Christ promised to be with his people when they gather.

And you preach the gospel to yourself.

Not a gospel of your own making. Not a promise that the feelings return on your timeline.

The gospel that God took on flesh and entered this world. He entered the distance. He bore the silence.

On the cross he went into the deepest darkness of divine absence, and he cried out into it, so that you would never be actually forsaken.

The one who knows exactly what felt abandonment costs endured it in your place.

And the psalmist, after all his wrestling, lands here:

"Why are you cast down, O my soul... Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God."

That word again is carrying everything.

Again. Not because the feelings came back. Not because his circumstances turned around.

Because God is still God, and his character doesn't bend to your emotional weather.

So hope in God.

He came near. He is near.

He will not leave.