The Missing Reformed Doctrine for Spiritual Formation

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.

In spiritual desertion seasons, God is unearthing the false belief that you can fix your spiritual life. You can’t. Any attempt to do so is to turn to self-help rather than to know the “growth that is from God” (Col. 2:19). It’s this fact that the flesh finds so offensive. Israel was led into the desert to be shown what was in their hearts (Deut. 8:2). In spiritual desertion, God leads us to feel abandoned and to feel the weight of how much we seek to live in our own power as a way to call us to himself.

In spiritual desertion seasons, God is unearthing the false belief that you can fix your spiritual life. You can’t.

Desertion pushes us into the experience of forsakenness to reveal the deep structures of vice, not only of our characters in general but especially in our spiritual lives. Commenting on 2 Chronicles 32:31, Wilhelmus à Brakel, a spiritual theologian in the Dutch Reformed tradition, narrates how God left Hezekiah to try him, so he might know what was in his heart.

This is the work we see in Scripture and our own tradition. Yet desertion is a teaching rarely addressed today, and if it’s named (often generically as a “dark night”), we tend to focus solely on the experience of absence rather than the positive nature of God’s developmental maturation.

Brakel, in contrast, shows how the Lord matures a soul through childhood, into adolescence, and then into adulthood. The Lord uses various experiences to prod us along this path of maturation. These experiences feel disorienting, but the goal is deeper intimacy, love, and holiness.

Developmental Maturation

Spiritual desertion isn’t an isolated event but a feature of how God matures us by grace.

Charles Spurgeon, for example, narrates God’s work through various seasons of the soul, claiming that “there are many who have rejoiced in the presence of God for a season” and “have basked in the sunshine God has been pleased to give them in the earlier stages of their Christian career” who suddenly find that “instead of ‘green pastures,’ they have to tread the sandy desert; in the place of ‘still waters,’ they find streams brackish to their taste and bitter to their spirits.” Spurgeon worries that when this happens, they’ll say, “Surely, if I were a child of God this would not happen.”

Spurgeon admonishes the Christian not to think this way, because all God’s saints are led through a “weary wilderness.” Perhaps, he suggests, the Lord met you in your youth and fragility with his kindness and tenderness befitting your maturity, but now has something more for you. “You were a young child,” Spurgeon says, “and therefore he wrapped you in furs and clothed you in the softest mantle. But now you have become strong and the case is different.”

We know from Scripture that God doesn’t relate to every Christian the same but addresses infants, adolescents, and adults in the faith developmentally (1 Cor. 3:1–2; 1 John 2:13–14). For both Brakel and Spurgeon, this developmental maturation is why God relates to us differently as we mature. In ways fitting to our stage of maturation, God leads us to himself in our brokenness, pain, and sin to redeem us in the truth.

Failing to name and address these realities can lead to vast confusion about what God is doing in someone’s life. It can cause faith to unravel. Spiritual desertion reminds us that sometimes hard experiences aren’t evidence we’ve been duped by false promises; rather, they’re an invitation to draw nearer to a God of love who calls us to be conformed to himself.

Pastoral Guidance for Those in Desertion

How should pastors counsel those who experience spiritual desertion, who feel that God doesn’t seem present or working in their lives? Puritan theologians have wisdom on this.

William Bridge, for instance, counsels a struggling Christian who expresses fear that he never had the grace of God: “I [am] afraid that I never had any truth of grace, because I do not find that I do grow in grace. . . . I do not find any such growth and increase, and therefore I fear that I never had grace at all.”

Spiritual desertion isn’t an isolated event but a feature of how God matures us by grace.

Bridge responds by wielding the gospel and pointing this struggling believer to Christ, who meets us in our frailty. Because we’re continually tempted to trust in our own graces instead of in Christ, Bridge explains, Christ will “put the sentence of death upon our graces, that we may not trust to or rest on them: Christ and Christ alone, and that as dying and crucified, is the object of our faith.”

Likewise, pastors should counsel those in spiritual desertion not to lose heart. Christ is both their righteousness and their sanctification (1 Cor. 1:30). The truth of our pain, brokenness, and sin is an invitation into the forgiveness, mercy, and grace of our Lord. Desertion reminds us that we don’t leave the cross to graduate into our own goodness; we embrace it more. Pastors should apply the gospel ever more deeply to those in desertion, helping them grasp the Lord by faith in this season.

When we forget this vision of spiritual desertion and how it’s situated in a developmental spirituality, we can be tossed by the waves of confusion and miss the call to draw near to God in every season.

We must learn to continually abide in Christ, knowing our growth is from God (Col. 2:19) and will look different in spiritual infancy, adolescence, and adulthood. We ought to trust that God is shaping us in seasons of profound joy and of severe sadness, when we feel Christ’s near presence and when we only experience his absence.

Without a mature grasp of this long-held but little-known teaching, we risk being lost at sea when the waves of desertion hit.