If you’ve followed Jesus for any length of time, you’ve probably have come to a time or two where you’re spiritually dry. You may feel like the power and intimacy of your prayer life has been sucked out and that your prayers are wasted time as you’re just talking to yourself.
Potential Causes:
Sin
First and most obvious, pervasive, undealt with sin will destroy our communion with God. Spiritual health will only come with confession and repentance. Secret sins especially are not secret to God.
Coming in Your Own Righteousness
On the flip side, we may not receive His grace. Rather than feeling both freed and humbled to come before God, we have set for ourselves a higher standard and are consumed by our own inadequacy (or worse yet our adequacy). We feel we must earn our way back into His good graces rather than receive His grace.
Unforgiveness
Perhaps this should go under the sin category, but failure to forgive others saps our spiritual vigor as quickly as anything. Time and again, Jesus reminds us that our own forgiveness is tied to our forgiving of others. Bitterness, anger, and jealousy will squash spiritual intimacy every time.
Pruning
For others, it’s a pruning time, where God is calling us deeper in Him-to not settle for safe faith but to seek Him with renewed vigor. Here He calls us to seek Him for His sake rather than our feelings. While difficult, hard, and inevitable, it’s often the period that proceeds tremendous outpouring of grace for those who keep seeking.
Routine
Sometimes it springs from “going through the motions” for so long we may miss a part of God. Like a couple that needs to switch things up to go on a date and relearn who the spouse is apart from the roles of mother and father, we can sometimes settle into our routine and miss a huge aspect of communion with God.
Busyness
Most often this is a subset of sin as it flows from our prioritizing all other activities over spiritual activities: work, school, kid’s sports, etc., leaving little time for communion with God. On occasion we go through short periods where varying emergencies fill our time and crowd out our communion with Him. Warning: prolonged experiences of emergency suggest the real issue is my priorities.
Others hide behind multiple activities done for God where they miss the opportunity to commune with God.
Spiritual Warfare
The demonic realm wants us to feel defeated and miss the point of our circumstances. So often they repeat the lie from the garden that suggests God doesn’t care about our suffering or circumstances. When we pray, we may feel anger, suspicion, bitterness, or disdain to the God we are praying to.
Apathy
While this may be under busyness or routine, often times we have a spiritual apathy that may run to God when we need something, but have no desire for real communion with Him. Consequently, our prayer time is little more than a list of circumstances that we want fixed with no desire for communion.
Conclusion
Spiritual dryness is often an indicator that there’s more available for us. For some, receiving more will go through a painful process of throwing off sin and prioritizing God beyond all else.
For others, it’s a time of allowing ourselves to receive God’s grace in a different way.
Therefore, be encouraged that your own dryness is not an anomaly, but an invitation to obtain a greater work of Jesus.
Stay tuned tomorrow for practical ways your staff deals with dryness.
Keep seeking
- Hospitality in a Covid World - December 17, 2020
- Jesus, the Liberator We Don’t Want - June 12, 2020
- Why I’m NOT an Inerrantist - June 11, 2020
