How do you effectively live for God when you can't see Him working?
At times, we can start to live under the impression that we should see and understand God's works in all of our dealings. We begin to think that what God is doing should be relatively obvious, and, if we can't see it, there must be something wrong with us. Or perhaps God is not involved in that particular situation. Or maybe He has abandoned us to one degree or another.
Remember Deuteronomy 29:29: "The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our sons forever, that we may observe all the words of this law."
The lesson here is that God has secrets. There are many things that He alone knows. The fullness of His plan, the breadth of His providence, the high-ways of His work in the world (cf. Isaiah 55:9)--all of these details belong to His mind only. We don't get that insight as creatures. The Creator alone holds those secrets.
The other lesson here is that we must make it our ambition to obsess over what has been revealed. Setting aside those mysteries, there is plenty to embrace in the word of God that He has given to us for His glory and our good. Recognizing that we can never know Him or His will exhaustively, we also recognize that we can know Him and His will truly so far as He has revealed. We take His disclosure, seek to fully embrace it, and share it with our families and friends.
So, to answer the question posed at the top, we live effectively for God by believing and doing what He has called us to believe and do--even when we don't see or understand the reasons why. When we're going through those hard, hard times, we can find peace in knowing that God is up to something. When we're losing and drowning, we can take comfort in believing that God never leaves us or forsakes us. And He is working! He has put us there.
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