By Kyle Strobel, TGC.
Have you had the experience of feeling like your prayers simply bounced off the ceiling? Or your Scripture reading ceased to feel as meaningful as it once did? Have you looked back at seasons that felt like lush gardens of excitement, passion, and zeal for the things of God—but now feel more like you’re in the desert, spiritually barren, dry, and lifeless?
You might be surprised to know that the doctrine of spiritual desertion was a standard teaching of Protestant spiritual theology for centuries. Spiritual desertion is God’s act to lead his people into experiencing his absence to awaken them to the truth of how sinful and broken they truly are.
Why would God do this? God leads you into your weakness to show you his power, he guides you into your desperation to more deeply reveal his grace, and he unveils how deep sin goes in your soul so you can know how much you’ve been forgiven.
When God Leads Us into the Desert
There isn’t standard language to talk about this phenomenon. Some have used images of the dark night. Others focus on the desert, deadness, or the experience of feeling abandoned. However, one term that eventually became widely accepted is “spiritual desertion.”
Spiritual desertion is a work of God to awaken the deep things of the heart to lead a Christian into deeper dependence on God. This teaching emphasizes God’s action and focuses our attention on his objective work seen biblically in the life of Israel, Paul, and, of course, Jesus as the ground of what we experience. Spiritual desertion addresses two errors that consistently plague us: (1) navigating life by the ebb and flow of felt experience and (2) believing we can ignore felt experience. Both are folly. Both lead us to be tossed by the waves of life rather than understanding our experiences in the light of Christ.