Spiritual Dry Spells: Causes and Cures

By: American Decency Staff

I’m willing to bet that most of us have experienced a spiritual dry spell—a time when we felt far from the Lord, unfruitful, unmotivated, and maybe a little lost. Feelings of closeness and communion with the Lord faded. That fiery desire to love and serve Christ dwindled. Maybe that’s you, now. Maybe you’re wrestling with the host of emotions that accompany a spiritual drought—anything from confusion to doubt, apathy, or even depression.

If we are Christians, if we have been freed from condemnation, united with Christ, and the Holy Spirit has taken up residence in our souls, then how is it that we still experience these dry spells? What causes them? How do we get through them?

Let’s look at three common causes and their cures.

Cause #1: Harbored Sin

In Romans 6:2, Paul asks, “How can we who died to sin still live in it?” The answer is…miserably. We cannot serve two masters. While “we know that our old self was crucified with [Christ]…so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin,” the battle between our flesh and our new spirit is still very much in play (Romans 6:6). The sinful part of our nature that is wired to respond to temptation is still a dividing force in our lives.

If you’re feeling far from the Lord, if you no longer feel drawn to spend time in his Word, if you’ve become hardened to serving him and maybe even hardened toward other people, odds are that there is a part of your life where sin is reigning free. Sin is always in the business of distancing us from the Father. Sin turns our focus inward instead of upward, and eventually downward into shame and despair.

The cure for this cause is simple — repentance. We have a painfully and yet beautifully clear picture of this in the life of David. David was a man after God’s own heart, who at one point sank so deeply into sin that he justified murder as a means of hiding his indiscretions (2 Samuel 11). Look at his prayer of repentance in Psalm 51:11-12. He says,

Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit.

David prayed for the Lord to restore the joy of his salvation because it had been lost to sin. He begged the Lord to not cast him away because he knew that sin has the power to divide and cut off.

If there is an area of habitual sin in your life, put it to death. As a believer, the cost to you is too great to continue in it, and the cost to your Savior was too great for you to ignore it. As John Owen so simply put it, “Always be killing sin or it will be killing you.”

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