I packed my bags, put on my comfy clothes and chose one book for the long international flight to Israel. The book I chose to read was entitled, “Night” by Elie Wiesel. I’d heard good things about it and thought it may enlighten my heart to the history of the people who I was going to visit. I wasn’t expecting it to strike an emotional cord in my relationship with God. Let me explain.
Wiesel, a Jewish man who survived the concentration camps, including the infamous Auschwitz, at just sixteen years old, wrote with the kind of unflinching honesty that forces you to sit still and reckon with things you’d rather not think about.
One story caught my attention more than any other. Two adults and a child — maybe ten or twelve years old — had been hiding weapons inside the camp. They were found out. Death was their sentence. They were to be hanged from gallows with the entire camp watching.
Wiesel remembers being marched out. The gallows. The nooses. The chairs beneath them. The prisoners brought forward, stood up on the chairs, the rope placed around their necks, everyone knowing what was coming. In the silence and the muffled weeping, someone behind him spoke: “Where is the merciful God? Where is He?”
The two adults cried out, “Long live liberty!”” — and the chairs were kicked away. Their bodies swung and grew still within seconds. But the boy didn’t die instantly. He wasn’t heavy enough for the strangling to occur quickly. For thirty minutes he hung there, swaying, his eyes not yet glazed over, looking into the faces of every prisoner forced to walk past him.
Wiesel says he heard the voice — perhaps the same man — ask again: “Where is God? For God’s sake, where is God?”
My hope is that none of you ever experience the kind of evil that took place in those camps. But I have no doubt that all of us, at some point, have asked the question — or will — where is God now?
Discouragement seems to be woven into the fabric of life. I’ve lived long enough to experience that. Also, I’ve been following Christ long enough to know that discouragement is even a part of the Christian life. We follow God. We believe in God. Yet we still get hit by waves of discouragement that come in like a tsunami — unexpected, but never invited. No one wakes up in the morning and says, “I sure hope I’m discouraged today.”
But when it hits, we have all sorts of questions, and most of them are aimed at God:
Where are You?
Why are You allowing this?
Where is this merciful God we believe in?
Job might be the most discouraged man we read about in all of Scripture. He lost seemingly everything. Trial after trial (allowed by God), crept into his life. And yet he never cursed the name of God — even when the people closest to him told him to. He trusted that God was still present in the midst of his discouragement.
In Job 35:10 he says something remarkable: “But none says, ‘Where is God my Maker, who gives songs in the night?’”
In other words — you can’t even ask that question fairly. God is in all things. He’s working through all things. Every bout of discouragement, every tornado of depression that rips through your life is overseen by a sovereign God who is in control of circumstances, relationships, and even the consequences of our own sin. He’s over all of it.
God Gives Song in the Night
The last few years of my life have been plagued by sleeplessness. It’s not just because we have six kids, though that doesn’t help. I struggle with sleep. I find myself up in the middle of the night, thinking about things, praying about things — or sometimes my body just decides that three o’clock in the morning is a perfectly fine time to start the day. So most mornings, while it’s still dark, I give in. I go downstairs. I stand at the window before I heat up the water for my pour-over coffee. And I look out into the darkness.
And I hear the birds.
If you’ve been up at night, especially in the summer months here in Colorado, you know what I’m talking about. The birds are already chirping hours before the sun is anywhere near the horizon. And I couldn’t help but wonder — even standing there at four o’clock this morning — why are they singing? It’s not morning yet. Everyone should still be asleep, including you crazy birds. Is their singing helping something? Do they think the more they chirp, the faster the sun will come?
But put it in the context of Job 35:10, and I can’t help but think that maybe the birds sing in the night because there is a song put within them. A song that must be sung — even in the darkness. Especially in the darkness.
I think the same is true for those of us who belong to Christ. There is a song put within us in the midst of night that we still must sing to our Maker. And I want to show you what that song sounds like from one of the most discouraging seasons in the apostle Paul’s life.
A Discouraged Man in a New City
In Acts 18, Paul arrives in Corinth. He’s come from Athens, about fifty miles away, and he’s beat up — not just physically, but in every way a person can be. He’d been beaten in Philippi. I’d guess his bruises were still healing, his scars not fully closed.
He’d faced rejection in Thessalonica and Berea. He’d met the cold indifference of Athens, where the philosophers basically shrugged him off.
Paul probably felt like a football that had taken all the right bounces and refused to be fumbled, but every time his team scored, he was spiked to the turf mercilessly — and then kicked the length of the field. The better he performed, the more he was spiked and kicked.
He later wrote to the Corinthians about his arrival there. He told them plainly: “I came to you in weakness and in fear and much trembling” (1 Cor. 2:3). He wasn’t the boisterous street preacher he’d been in other cities. He was broken, beaten, and fearful. That’s how he showed up.
But God didn’t leave him alone.
He found Priscilla and Aquila — this couple with the cute rhyming names who would become some of his dearest partners in ministry. They took him in. They went into business together making tents — or more accurately, working leather. They housed the church. They risked their necks for him. Paul says as much later in Romans 16:3, “Greet Prisca and Aquila, my fellow workers in Christ Jesus, who risked their necks for my life.”
One of God’s greatest sources of encouragement for us is His presence found in other people. That’s how the shot in the arm comes. Not always in a vision or a voice from heaven — but in a friend who shows up. A couple who says, “Stay with us. We’ve got you.”
I have men like that in my life. A man in our church who literally moves me to the inside of the sidewalk when we walk together so that if a car jumps the curb, it hits him first. A security volunteer who told me every single Sunday, “I will take a bullet for you today.” A mentor I still meet with regularly who protects me — not just physically, but spiritually.
Do you have that person? The one who pours into you, who does everything they can to help you stand when your legs are giving out?
So here is Paul, battered and bruised, arriving in Corinth with nothing eloquent to say — and God surrounds him with people. Then Timothy and Silas finally catch up. They bring a financial gift from the church in Philippi, generous enough that Paul can quit his side gig and become, as the text says, occupied with the Word (Phil. 4:15-18). He had friends. He had provision. And then he had something else entirely.
A Voice in the Night
In Acts 18:9–10, Jesus speaks directly to Paul in a vision. If you have a red-letter Bible, these words are in red. Christ Himself says: “Do not be afraid, but go on speaking and do not be silent. For I am with you, and no one will attack you to harm you, for I have many in this city who are my people.”
Where is God in the midst of discouragement? He’s right in it with you.
That phrase did something to me this week. I was out golfing with my brother-in-law, my dad, and my son, Chandler. And even in the middle of that afternoon, I was dealing with discouragement about some things. It was my turn to putt, and I turned to Chandler and said, “Do you know how to work the Bible app on my phone?” He said yeah. I said, “Look up Acts 18:9–10 for me, will you?” Not because my golf game was that bad — though it wasn’t great — but because even in the middle of a round of golf with the people I love, I just needed to hear those words again. Do not be afraid. Do not be silent. I am with you. No one will harm you.
There are three pieces to that command, and each one matters.
First: Do not be afraid. Not afraid of the vision itself — afraid of the circumstances. Afraid of what’s ahead. Christ was telling Paul, and telling us: stop being afraid of what you’re walking into.
Second: I am with you. This is the greatest promise God can give. Anytime you see a “be with” promise in the Old Testament — Joshua 1:9, Isaiah 41:10, Jeremiah 1:8 — it’s never God watching from a distance with His bow drawn. It’s God standing in it with you. Right there. Present. Active.
Third: No one will attack you to harm you. Literally, no one will lay a hand on you. And when I studied it out, it held true — in Corinth, this promise was fulfilled. God was saying, “I know your wounds. I’m going to give them time to heal.”
Abraham Lincoln was once asked whether the country was ready for civil war. He answered with a story from his days as a circuit rider. He and his companions had crossed so many swollen streams on horseback that they grew terrified of the largest one still ahead — the Fox River.
One night they bunked down in a log tavern and met a Methodist preacher who had crossed that river many times. They asked him about it. The preacher said, “Oh yes, I know all about the Fox River. I cross it often and understand it well. But I have one fixed rule: I never cross it till I reach it.”
I think I’ve spent most of my life crossing Fox Rivers long before I ever stand on their banks. Worry is like trying to go somewhere in a rocking chair — it never gets you anywhere. But the call of a Christian is to let the tune of our song be confidence. Not confidence in ourselves, but confidence in Christ, who has everything under control.
Keep Singing
Jesus told Paul to keep on speaking and not be silent. That’s the lyric of the song. When discouragement sets in, silence usually follows. I know that’s true for me. And Jesus was saying to Paul, in no uncertain terms: “Don’t let the discouragement win. Keep on speaking.”
But Paul could only do that because he knew who he was in Christ. Telling others about Christ requires first understanding who you are in Christ. It’s not just about reciting lyrics. It’s about letting your soul sing.
I’ve had people come to me and say, “I don’t know how to lead my neighbor to Christ.” And I say, “Do you know Jesus as your Lord and Savior?” They say yes. And I tell them — start there. Tell them what He’s done in your own soul. No one can argue with your story.
I recently heard about someone going through cancer treatments who led their oncologist to Christ. The doctor asked, “How is it that you have so much joy?” And this person didn’t hesitate — they spoke of the hope they have in Jesus. I’ve sat with men in jail who told me, “I got myself here. I did some really bad things. I’m discouraged. But I still have Christ, and I’m not going to stop talking about Him.”
And why do we keep singing? Because Jesus said, “I have many in this city who are my people” (Acts 18:10). Paul couldn’t see the harvest yet. It didn’t look like dozens and hundreds were coming to faith. But God could see what Paul couldn’t. He had the whole picture in mind — the church, His called-out people, the ones He had already purposed to bring to Himself through Paul’s continued faithfulness.
We sing in the night to help others have the assurance that the dawn is coming. Maybe that’s why the birds sing before sunrise. Not to make the sun come up — God doesn’t need help with that — but to chirp to one another and say, It’s coming. It’s coming. The dawn is coming. And in the same way, Christians speak of Christ to one another and to the world around us to say: He’s coming. The true Son — S-O-N — is coming.
So what song is your heart singing? Are you letting the song God put within you be heard in the darkness? Or are you singing something far below the greatest song ever written — that God so loved us that He sent His one and only Son?
Psalm 40:3 says, “He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God. Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the Lord.”
We sing in the darkness because God has put a song in our hearts. He takes our grieving and turns it to rejoicing, by faith. So this week — hum. Sing. Hope. And don’t you dare go silent.
