How Can We Listen To God When We Can’t Hear God? (Short Read)

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What does it mean to listen to God when we can’t hear God? How can we follow Christ during times of spiritual dryness? There is a silence at the heart of Christian life — and learning to sit in it may be one of the most important things we ever do.

The Heart of the Silence of God

Why words run out

Some things resist language. This is not a flaw in us — it is the nature of the things that matter most.

Grief. Love. The weight of another person’s pain. We can describe their effects, point toward them, circle around them. But to say the thing itself is often beyond us.

This is especially true of God.

No description of God can fully contain God. It can only move towards God. Our language is always limited, always reaching, always less than what it points toward. There is a depth to existence — a silence at the heart of things — that no amount of words can fill.

Some people try to fill that silence with noise. Others discover in it a form of worship.

How Can We Listen to God?

The discipline of not knowing

When everything falls apart, we want answers. But sometimes faithful listening begins with letting go of the need to explain.

If we take seriously any attempt to speak of God, we must accept that our words will always be limited. Flawed. Unfinished. Provisional. Our attempts to describe God are not God.

The mystics called this apophatic (ap-oh-FAT-ik) theology — approaching God through what cannot be said. The anonymous 14th-century text The Cloud of Unknowing describes a dazzling darkness at the heart of God’s presence: a light so bright it becomes impenetrable, a clarity so complete it overwhelms our vision.

This is not failure. This is the shape of faithful encounter.

We can and should respond to God’s self-revelation with everything we have — creatively, rationally, emotionally. But we must always do so as people reaching toward something larger than ourselves. Our speaking about God must be marked by deep humility.

The Writer and Wordlessness

When the theologian falls silent

Sometimes experience outstrips explanation. Here is what silence has taught me.

I am a theologian. I write theology. Which means I spend a lot of time searching for the right word to express what it has meant to meet Christ and to experience the Holy Spirit in scripture and in life.

But sometimes the words run out.

I remember sitting with someone whose mother was sick and possibly dying. There was nothing I could say that wouldn’t have been a cliché. Nothing she could say to make sense of things. So we sat together in silence.

That silence was not empty. It held something neither of us could name. In it, I encountered what Samuel Logan Brengle (1860–1936) heard — not in wind or fire, but in sheer silence: the quiet, unmistakable presence of God (1 Kings 19:12).

The silence of God is not absence. It is weight. Presence. The ground of being out of which everything else finds space to exist.

Speaking About God

Jesus as the ground of our silence

Christian silence is not emptiness. It is full — full of a Person.

Our contemplation begins and ends with Jesus. God came in human form so that we could know who God is. The silence of Christian apophatic theology is not an abstract void. It is a response to the mystery of the incarnation, the crucifixion, and the resurrection — things so large they will always exceed our words.

Paul tells us: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds” (Romans 12:2, NRSV). Our thinking, our searching — all of it is worship when it is being renewed by the Spirit.

The name of God is inexhaustible, ineffable, inexpressible — and yet it compels us to keep speaking. Our words become a song that echoes in silence and beauty and love.

N.T. Wright (1948– ) calls this movement transformance art — creative work that disrupts, re-orders, and opens space for Kingdom encounter. Alongside rational theology stands theopoetics (thee-oh-poh-ET-iks): theology expressed through poetry, music, and image rather than argument alone. What God has joined together — reason and imagination — let none rip asunder.

Worship Through and In Silence

Finding God beyond words — and at the Mercy Seat

Our silence has a shape. It leads us toward others, toward God, and toward a place of encounter.

This kind of silence takes many forms. It is worship expressed through feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, welcoming the stranger, befriending the friendless. It is music that speaks what cannot be spoken. It is art that portrays what cannot be formed.

And it is worship expressed in stillness.

In the Salvation Army Corps, the Mercy Seat stands at the front of the meeting hall. It is not an altar in the traditional sense. It is simply a place — a rail, a space to kneel. No one tells you what to feel there. No one gives you the right words. You come, and you kneel, and you wait.

The Mercy Seat is an invitation to stop speaking and to be spoken to.

That is what this post is finally about. Not technique. Not steps. Not spiritual success. But the willingness to sit in the silence — the way I sat with my friend when her mother was dying, and no words would come — and trust that the God who is beyond all our language is present in the very place where our language ends.

Be still. And know.

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