Knowing Him In The Darkness

This morning, as I prayed on the hay loft steps, I asked God to grant me spiritual eyes that I may see. After I said that, He began to minister to me about sitting in the darkness.

There have often been times when I go through things or I pray about things and I find myself saying to God, “I feel like I’m just sitting in a dark room trying to feel my way around.” I think for many of us, we can sometimes feel that we are just sitting there in the dark, praying, trusting, waiting for the slightest movement or the faintest light to break forth. But we just get that awful silence and seemingly never-ending darkness instead.

This morning, I thought back over my prayer life and marveled that so much of it seemed like I was just groping along in the dark, trusting that God was listening and that He was there with me even though I couldn’t see Him with my eyes. And then the Lord ministered to me in that very moment, that during all the time I have spent praying over the years, He was teaching me to “see” His form with spiritual eyes. I realized in that moment, that I know what His hand “feels” like. I am intimately acquainted with the “shape and feel” of it because I have held it so often in the darkness. I know His form because I have clung to it in the darkness for so long.

That is true spiritual sight—when you don’t see Him with your eyes, but you know His form in the darkness. When a thousand hands could try to pass themselves off as the Lord’s, but you forsake them all because you only know the feel of His and His alone. When a thousand voices call your name, but you hearken to only one. I can tell you this, if there were a hundred people with me in a dark room, I could easily tell which one was my husband just by the touch of his hand. And so it is with us and our beloved Lord. Once we put our faith in Him, we belong to Him and we see Him in the darkness as if we were in the light, because He is our light regardless of where we are or what we are going through.

Just like a baby knows only darkness while in the womb as it grows, yet it is surrounded by its mother the entire time and hears her voice day after day—so it is with us, as we are shaped and formed into the image of God’s Son. And just like once a baby is finally born, it knows its mother instinctively and intimately—her touch, her smell, and especially her voice—so it is with us and our beloved Lord.

(John 10:3-5) The gatekeeper opens the gate for Him, and the sheep listen for His voice. He calls His own sheep by name and leads them out. When He has brought out all His own, He goes on ahead of them, and His sheep follow Him because they know His voice. But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will flee from him because they do not recognize his voice.

(John 10:26-28) But because you are not My sheep, you refuse to believe. My sheep listen to My voice; I know them, and they follow Me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one can snatch them out of My hand.

(Psalm 139:11-13) If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me, and the light become night around me”— even the darkness is not dark to You, but the night shines like the day, for darkness is as light to You. For You formed my inmost being; You knit me together in my mother’s womb.

(Posted on Facebook 12/17/2020 Talitha Koum)