How to Stay Close to God During Trials
Written by the Scripture Guide Team
Trials have a specific tendency to create distance from God — not because God withdraws, but because the trial produces conditions that make sustained engagement with Him genuinely difficult. This article examines the biblical practices for maintaining closeness to God in exactly those conditions.
There is a pattern observable across the life of faith that is worth naming honestly: the seasons when closeness to God is most needed are often the seasons when it is most difficult to maintain. This is not because God is absent from the difficult seasons — Scripture consistently teaches the opposite. It is because trials produce specific conditions that make the practices of closeness — prayer, Scripture engagement, community — genuinely harder. Physical depletion makes concentration difficult. Emotional distress makes it hard to sit with God without the distress dominating the engagement. The disorientation of suffering makes familiar spiritual practices feel unfamiliar or hollow.
What this means is that staying close to God during trials is not simply a matter of wanting it enough. It requires the recognition that the trial is actively working against the conditions that make closeness easy, combined with the deliberate decision to maintain engagement with God in spite of those conditions — not waiting until the conditions improve before engaging. The psalms of lament are precisely the resource for this: they are the prayers of people whose conditions were actively working against spiritual ease, and who engaged God anyway, in exactly the form the conditions made possible rather than in the form that easier seasons would have permitted.
James 4:8
Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded.
The bidirectional character of the drawing near — I draw near and He draws near — establishes that the movement is not unilateral. God is not passively waiting for the person to perform sufficient spiritual effort before extending His presence. The drawing near of the person toward God initiates a response from God that is Himself drawing near to the person. In trials, where the person's movement toward God may be weak and halting, the God who responds by drawing near meets the halting movement with His own.
Psalm 34:18
The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.
The specific recipients of the LORD's nearness in this verse are not the spiritually strong or the emotionally stable. They are the broken-hearted and the contrite in spirit — the people whose interior condition has been broken by the trial's weight. This establishes that the brokenness the trial produces does not disqualify from closeness to God. It qualifies for a specific form of it. The LORD draws near specifically to the broken heart — not waiting for it to heal before approaching.
Psalm 73:28
But it is good for me to draw near to God: I have put my trust in the Lord GOD, that I may declare all thy works.
Asaph's declaration comes after one of the most extended spiritual crises in the Psalter — the near-collapse of his faith in the face of the apparent prosperity of the wicked (Psalm 73:1-16). His resolution — "it is good for me to draw near to God" — is not the conclusion of someone whose circumstances have resolved. It is the conclusion of someone who has made a deliberate evaluation: the nearness of God is good, specifically in the conditions the trial has produced, and drawing near is the right response regardless of whether the trial has ended.
Matthew 11:28-30
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
Jesus' invitation is specifically addressed to those who are labouring and heavy laden — the burdened and exhausted are precisely the ones He is calling toward Himself. The rest He promises is not the rest that comes after the trial is over. It is the rest that comes from remaining under His yoke during it — the relief of shared load rather than the relief of unloaded condition. Staying close to God during trials, in this framing, is coming to the One who offers His yoke as a relief from the load rather than as an addition to it.
Hebrews 10:22-23
Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering; for he (that promised) is faithful that promised.
The writer of Hebrews pairs the call to draw near with the call to hold fast — both involve deliberate, sustained activity rather than passive waiting for conditions to improve. The ground of both the drawing near and the holding fast is not the person's spiritual stability. It is the faithfulness of the One who promised. During trials, the wavering that holding fast counters is precisely the wavering that the trial's pressure produces. The faithful character of God is the anchor that the holding fast is attached to.
Romans 8:38-39
For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Paul's catalog of the things that cannot separate from God's love is specifically structured to address the conditions that trials most threaten to use as separators. Things present — the current trial. Things to come — the anticipated future difficulty. Neither the acute present nor the feared future can insert itself between the person in Christ and the love of God in Christ. The closeness the trial threatens is a closeness that the trial lacks the power to permanently dissolve.
Deep Dive
What Trials Do to the Practices of Closeness
Understanding why trials make closeness to God difficult is the first step toward maintaining it anyway. Trials typically affect the practices of closeness in several specific ways. Exhaustion — physical, emotional, or both — reduces the concentration and the energy that prayer and Scripture engagement require. The person who could sustain thirty minutes of focused prayer during a normal season may struggle to sustain five during a prolonged trial. This is not spiritual failure. It is physical reality. Emotional distress has a different effect: it tends to dominate the prayer space rather than to clear it. The person who comes to prayer in acute grief, fear, or anger often finds that the emotion fills the space that the prayer was supposed to occupy. This too is not spiritual failure — the psalms of lament demonstrate that emotion brought honestly to God is not a contamination of prayer but one of its most genuine forms. The difficulty is that it does not feel like prayer the way quieter engagement does. The disorientation that accompanies severe trials can also make familiar practices feel hollow or disconnected. The Scripture passages that produced life in easier seasons may feel flat. The prayer that came naturally before the trial may feel mechanical or unanswered. Recognizing that this disorientation is a common feature of trials rather than evidence of God's withdrawal prevents the person from adding the anxiety of apparent spiritual failure to the existing weight of the trial.
Adjusting the Form Without Abandoning the Practice
The most practically important insight for staying close to God during trials is that the form of engagement that works in normal seasons may not be available during the trial — and this is acceptable. The person whose sustained Scripture engagement has been reduced by exhaustion to a single verse read slowly before sleep is not less engaged with God than the person whose circumstances permit extended study. The prayer that consists entirely of "Lord, I don't have words — be near" is not a lesser form of prayer than the person's normal practice. The willingness to come to God in the diminished form the trial makes possible is more honoring than the waiting for the full form to be available again. This principle prevents the perfectionism that often operates in spiritual practice from adding additional weight to the trial. The person who cannot pray "properly" during the trial and therefore stops praying has misunderstood what proper prayer is. The psalms of lament are proper prayer — some of them are barely coherent cries to God. The form that is available in the trial is the form that God is receiving, and the receiving is not contingent on the quality of the form.
The Community as a Channel of Closeness
One of the primary channels through which God maintains closeness with the person in trials is the community of people who can pray when the person in the trial cannot, who can speak what God has said when the person cannot hear it above what the trial is saying, and who can be present in ways that embody the nearness God promises. Withdrawing from community during trials — which the isolation that trials often produce makes natural — cuts off one of the primary channels through which closeness to God is maintained. The writer of Hebrews connects the call to draw near with the call not to forsake the assembling of believers precisely because the community is the context in which the drawing near is sustained. The person in trials who maintains connection to the community of faith has more resources for maintaining closeness to God than the person who, understandably but at significant cost, retreats into isolation.
Practical Application
- Adjust the form of your spiritual engagement to what the trial makes possible rather than waiting for the form of your normal season to become available. If exhaustion limits prayer to five minutes, pray five minutes honestly rather than spending the prayer time feeling inadequate about not praying thirty. The diminished form offered honestly is more than the full form withheld.
- Practice Psalm 34:18 as a specific theological anchor during the acute moments of the trial: the LORD is nigh to the broken heart. You do not need to produce a condition of spiritual stability before God draws near. The broken-hearted condition is specifically the condition of His nearness. Let that truth reframe the brokenness as a place of encounter rather than a barrier to it.
- Identify the specific practice of closeness that has become most difficult during this trial — prayer, Scripture, community — and address that specific practice rather than waiting for the general spiritual condition to improve. The difficulty of a specific practice is precisely the signal to give that specific practice attention rather than to defer it.
- Bring one person into full awareness of what the trial is doing to your spiritual life — not just the external circumstances but the interior experience of God feeling distant or of prayer feeling hollow. The honesty required for this conversation is itself an act of spiritual vulnerability that tends to open the channels of community that the trial has been closing.
- Read Romans 8:38-39 specifically with reference to the trial you are in, naming the specific elements of the trial in Paul's catalog. "I am persuaded that this specific situation cannot separate me from the love of God." The act of naming the specific trial in the context of the promise is the theological grounding exercise that keeps the promise from remaining abstract while the trial is very concrete.
Prayer
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