By Duke Taber
You are still praying. That matters more than you know right now.
Maybe the silence has lasted days. Maybe months. You’ve kept your Bible open, kept showing up, kept whispering prayers into what feels like empty air — and nothing comes back. No sense of nearness, no quiet impression on your heart, no peace that defies explanation. Just silence. And beneath that silence, a question you’re almost afraid to ask out loud: Is He even listening?
If you’ve been there, or you’re there right now, I want you to know something before we go any further: you are not alone, and you are not broken, and you are not being punished. Some of the most faithful men and women in Scripture asked the same question. What you’re experiencing has a name, and it has a way through.
This article isn’t going to offer you easy answers — because this isn’t an easy thing. What I want to do is sit with you in it for a little while, help you understand what may be happening, and then offer you something solid to hold on to: not just comfort, but practical, biblical ways to keep praying when the silence is all you can hear.
When Silence Feels Like Absence
The first thing to say is that feeling God’s silence and being abandoned by God are not the same thing — even though every nerve in your body may be telling you otherwise.
Research published in the academic journal Religions found that more than 82 percent of Christians surveyed reported experiencing what they identified as God’s silence — meaning the felt sense that God was not present or responding to prayer. Eighty-two percent. This is not a fringe experience. This is the terrain of ordinary Christian life.
The Psalms knew this long before modern research did. David — the man after God’s own heart — wrote these words:
“How long, O Lord? Will You forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me?” — Psalm 13:1 (NKJV)
That’s not a verse someone writes who has never felt the silence. That’s raw, honest prayer from someone who knew God deeply and still experienced seasons of apparent divine withdrawal. And the Psalms are full of these laments — in fact, scholars note that there are more Psalms of lament than there are Psalms of praise. God did not leave them out of Scripture by accident. He put them there because He knew we would need them.
What the Psalms also show us is that felt absence and actual absence are two different realities. The darkness the psalmist walks through in Psalm 23 is real — the valley of the shadow of death is not a mild inconvenience — but the Shepherd is still there. The rod and the staff are still present. The comfort is still operative, even when it is not felt.
What the Silence Might Be Saying
Not all silence from God means the same thing, and it helps to try to understand what may be happening in your particular season.
Sometimes God feels silent because we’ve drifted — slowly, often without realizing it — into patterns of sin, distraction, or spiritual autopilot that have dulled our ability to hear. The biblical study on trusting God I often recommend starts right here: by asking honestly whether there is anything between us and God that needs to be addressed. Not in a spirit of self-condemnation, but in the spirit of the prodigal son, who “came to himself” and turned toward home (Luke 15:17).
But other times — and this is equally important to say — God is silent not because of any failure on our part, but because He is doing something in us that requires a season of quiet. Spiritual formation writers and counselors describe this as a “dark night of the soul,” a phrase borrowed from the 16th-century mystic John of the Cross but deeply applicable to evangelical experience. Soul Shepherding’s Bill Gaultiere describes it this way: in these seasons, God withdraws the felt sense of His presence not as punishment, but as invitation — to a deeper faith, one that no longer depends on spiritual feelings as its fuel.
Job did not sin to cause his suffering. Jeremiah was not faithless when he wrote Lamentations. Jesus Himself cried from the cross, quoting Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?” The Son of God, in the deepest union with the Father, experienced the darkest silence ever known — and He kept praying.
“Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit.” — Luke 23:46 (NKJV)
Even in the silence, He kept praying. That is the model we are given.
The Hard Truth About Prayer in Silence
Here’s something I’ve had to sit with personally over the years of pastoral ministry: the temptation in silence is not to stop believing in God, but to stop talking to Him. To let prayer quietly atrophy because it feels pointless. To read the Bible out of duty, if at all. To go through the motions at church while feeling like a stranger in your own spiritual life.
That temptation is worth resisting with everything you have.
One of the most useful frameworks I’ve encountered for understanding this comes from the world of aviation, of all places. Pilots who fly into clouds lose their visual references and can no longer trust their physical perceptions — they may feel they’re flying level when they’re actually descending. The solution is to trust the instruments, not the feelings. As one believer who walked through a severe season of spiritual darkness wrote for Desiring God: “I determined to fly by the instruments. I kept my habit of personal devotions, despite how Teflon-coated my soul seemed.”
The instruments, in our case, are Scripture, prayer, community, and worship. When we cannot feel God, we fly by these.
This is also where the power of praying Bible verses becomes indispensable — not as a formula, but as an anchor. When your own words feel hollow, borrow God’s words back to Him. The Psalms are especially designed for this. They were Israel’s prayer book, and they cover the full range of human experience including its darkest valleys.
How to Actually Pray When God Feels Silent
So what does this look like practically? Here are six ways to keep the lines open when the line feels dead.
Pray the Laments
Stop pretending in prayer that things feel fine when they don’t. God is not honored by spiritual performance. He is honored by honest communion.
David said what he felt: “I am weary with my groaning; all night I make my bed swim; I drench my couch with my tears” (Psalm 6:6, NKJV). That is prayer. Honest, raw, trust-in-spite-of-feeling prayer. You can tell God that you are confused, that you are hurt, that the silence is harder than anything you’ve faced. That is not faithlessness. That is faith that believes He is there and worth talking to.
If you don’t know how to begin, start with the Psalms. Read Psalm 13 out loud and let it be your words. Read Psalm 22. Read Psalm 88, which ends without resolution and gives you permission to do the same. Then, like David, bring yourself back around — not to a forced cheerfulness, but to a stubborn trust:
“But I have trusted in Your mercy; my heart shall rejoice in Your salvation.” — Psalm 13:5 (NKJV)
Keep Showing Up
One of the most counterintuitive acts of faith is maintaining a regular time of prayer when it feels entirely pointless. DTS Voice’s counsel on the dark night of the soul notes that for those walking through spiritual dryness, keeping the rhythms of prayer — even when they feel hollow — is itself a profound declaration of faith. You are telling God, by your continued presence, that you believe He is there even when you cannot sense Him.
This isn’t about logging hours to earn divine attention. It’s about love that doesn’t require a feeling to stay present. Think of a marriage where one spouse goes through a season of depression. A faithful partner does not leave simply because they aren’t receiving warmth in return. They stay. They keep speaking. They trust that the other person is still in the room, even when the room feels empty.
Pray Scripture Back to God
The role of prayer in Bible study becomes particularly vital in seasons of silence. When your own words dry up, lean into the language of Scripture.
“Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my anxieties; and see if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” — Psalm 139:23–24 (NKJV)
Praying this verse isn’t just recitation — it’s invitation. You are asking God to do what you cannot: to examine you, to lead you, to be active in you even when you feel nothing. When we pray Scripture, we’re aligning our words with God’s revealed will, and that matters even when our emotions are numb.
Recall His Faithfulness
Memory is a spiritual discipline. When Israel forgot what God had done for them, they fell into despair and idolatry. When they remembered — when they rehearsed the exodus, the parting of the Red Sea, the water from the rock — their faith was rekindled.
What has God done for you? Not in general theological terms, but specifically, personally. Write it down if you need to. The answered prayer from three years ago still counts. The moment of clarity that came when you needed it most — it happened. The psalmist models this in Psalm 77, where in the middle of desperate silence, he turns and says: “I will remember the works of the Lord; surely I will remember Your wonders of old” (Psalm 77:11, NKJV).
Remembering is an act of faith. It says to the silence: you are not the whole story.
Seek Community
Spiritual warfare is most effective against isolated believers. One of the enemy’s favorite uses of divine silence is to convince you that you are uniquely broken — that everyone else in your church is experiencing God’s nearness while you alone are locked outside. This is a lie, and community breaks it.
You don’t have to have it all together to go to church, to show up for a small group, to say to a trusted friend: I’m in a dry season and I need prayer. In fact, the DTS Voice article on the dark night of the soul notes that community — especially small, intimate gatherings — ministered more deeply during seasons of silence than corporate services did, precisely because presence and honesty were possible in a smaller setting.
James 5:16 is not just a suggestion: “Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed.” The prayers of the body of Christ keep the flame alive when your own flame is low.
Wait Actively
Waiting on God is not passive resignation. It is the active posture of someone who has done everything they can and now presses their full weight against the promise that God is faithful.
“I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in His word I do hope. My soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning — yes, more than those who watch for the morning.” — Psalm 130:5–6 (NKJV)
Isaiah 40:31 holds one of the most beloved promises in all of Scripture precisely because it speaks to the experience of exhaustion:
“But those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” — Isaiah 40:31 (NKJV)
Waiting, biblically, is not giving up. It is continuing to watch the horizon. And the remarkable thing about waiting on God is that, more often than not, the renewal comes not all at once but in the quiet moments of ordinary faithfulness — a sentence in Scripture that suddenly lands differently, an unexpected peace that settles in during a drive home, a word from a friend that carries more weight than they could have known.
What the Silence Is Not
It may help to say clearly what this season is not.
It is not evidence that your faith is fraudulent. The most genuine believers in Christian history — Augustine, Charles Spurgeon, Charles Finney, even Mother Teresa in her published letters — described extended seasons of divine silence and near-despair. Soul Shepherding notes that unlike depression (which is a psychological disorder affecting all areas of life), this kind of spiritual dryness is more specific: it is a trial in which God’s felt presence is absent, but life outside of spiritual experience can continue relatively normally.
It is not necessarily the result of sin. Yes, unconfessed sin can create distance in our relationship with God — this is real and worth examining honestly. But Job was not suffering because he had sinned. And God’s assessment of Job, even in his most raw and desperate prayers, was that he had spoken what was right (Job 42:7).
It is not permanent. Every biblical account of divine silence has an end. The 400 years between Malachi and Matthew were a silence of historic proportions — and then, in a stable in Bethlehem, God spoke again. More fully than He ever had before.
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory.” — John 1:14 (NKJV)
God is not done speaking. He is not done with you.
He Is Not Far
There is a verse in Acts that stopped me cold the first time I really read it. Paul is speaking to philosophers in Athens — people who don’t know the God of Israel at all — and he says:
“He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being.” — Acts 17:27–28 (NKJV)
He is not far from each one of us. Not in general. Not from humanity in the abstract. From each one. From you, in this season, in this silence. The God who is close enough for you to live and move within Him is not absent. He is simply, sometimes, quiet.
And He has promised something that silence cannot revoke:
“I will never leave you nor forsake you.” — Hebrews 13:5 (NKJV)
Keep praying. Keep showing up. Keep telling Him the truth. The silence is not the last word.
A Word Before You Go
If you are in a deep and prolonged season of spiritual dryness, please know that it is not weakness to seek support — from a pastor, a spiritual director, a trusted mentor, or even a Christian counselor. Sometimes what we interpret as God’s silence has layers that need a wiser conversation to untangle. That is not a lack of faith; it is wisdom. You can also explore the bible study on trusting God’s timing and our collection of Bible verses for hard times as starting points for ongoing Scripture engagement.
The important thing is this: do not pray less because God feels silent. Pray through the silence. That is what David did. That is what Job did. That is what Jesus did.
And God, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
Take a Next Step
If this article spoke to something you’re carrying, here are a few ways to keep moving forward:
- Begin a daily practice of praying with Bible verses, especially the Psalms
- Work through our Bible study on hope or our study on trusting God
- Bring one honest prayer to God today — not polished, just true
- Share what you’re walking through with one trusted person in your life
- Explore our Bible verses for when your heart hurts for additional scriptural grounding
You don’t have to feel it for it to be real. He is near.
— Duke Taber
Resources
- Soul Shepherding — Growing Through a Dark Night of the Soul
- Desiring God — My Dark Night of the Soul
- CCEF — The Myth of God’s Silence
- DTS Voice — 6 Ways to Help Those Suffering a Dark Night of the Soul
- Dr. Michelle Bengtson — Experiencing God’s Silence
- MDPI Religions — The Experience and Correlates of God’s Silence Among Christians
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