Why God Is Keeping You Hidden: The Purpose Behind Your Unseen Season
If you have been feeling confused, uncertain, or completely unseen, I want you to know something that might reframe everything for you: you are in good company. Before Jesus ever healed a sick body, before he cast out a single demon, before he preached a sermon that shook entire cities, he lived 30 years virtually unseen. No crowds. No platform. No miracles. No applause. Just carpentry, calloused hands, family tension, and ordinary days in Nazareth. And here is the uncomfortable truth about why God is keeping you hidden: most of what God does in you, he does where there is no one clapping. In a world obsessed with visibility, heaven is obsessed with your development. And if you skip Nazareth, you might get attention, but you will never get authority.
Why God Is Keeping You Hidden in a Nazareth Season
Most Bible teachers skip right over the first 30 years of Jesus' life. We love the exciting parts: the healings, the miracles, the Sermon on the Mount. But I see something that too many people overlook. There were 30 necessary years of development that made three years of world-changing ministry possible. Nazareth became the anchor, the stabilizing force behind everything that happened after it.
Luke 2:51-52 tells us that Jesus "went down with them and came to Nazareth and was submissive to them. And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and with man." Think about that for a moment. The Son of God submitted to human authority. He went into the temple and dialogued with intellectual giants about the Torah, and then he went home and did the dishes. He did both.
And some of you want to do the discourse but not the dishes. Some of you want to do YouTube, but you do not want to take care of "you too." God is trying to get you to be faithful in Nazareth before he releases you to Capernaum. For Jesus himself, sonship in Nazareth preceded savior work in Capernaum. The hidden season is not an accident. It is the prerequisite.
Your Hidden Season Is Preparation, Not Punishment
A lot of Christians look at their current circumstances and think God has forgotten them. You might be asking, "Why do I live where I live? Why do I work where I work? Why does it feel like nothing is happening?" I want to give you two statements to anchor yourself to.
Nazareth is not punishment. It is preparation.
It is not God's delay. It is God's development.
Somewhere along the way, we bought into the lie that if we have not "made it" by a certain age, we are behind. What Instagram fantasy are you measuring your life against? Those influencers you are comparing yourself to often do not have any more than you do. They just built a facade you did not spend the energy constructing. But Jesus spent 30 years in development, and then God's supernatural acceleration came upon his life. In three years, he changed the world. I would rather have three years with God's favor on them than 30 years without it.
Here is what I have learned: things that look random in the moment will make complete sense with distance. Think about standing too close to a painting at a museum. When your face is pressed against the canvas, it looks like a mess of colors and shapes. But when you step back, the masterpiece reveals itself. That is what God is doing in your hidden season. You are too close to your own life to see the full picture. But the distance that time provides will show you that God was making something beautiful all along. Even when you spilled the ink, he was still painting.
How the Hidden Season Trains You for What Is Coming
Here is a revelation that changed the way I understand the Nazareth season: Nazareth trained Jesus to carry power without needing to prove himself. This is why later he could stand in silence before Pilate, because he had already practiced silence in Nazareth. The seasons connect to each other in ways we cannot always see in the moment.
If you do not learn to be silent in obscurity, you will not know how to be silent in success. Not every season of your life calls for you to be running your mouth. Joseph shared his prophetic dreams too early with the wrong people, and the consequence was being thrown into a well by his own brothers. Sometimes the people closest to you are the ones least equipped to handle your God-given vision.
What Nazareth was really doing for Jesus went beyond theology. It was developing his central nervous system. His physical body had to learn how to wait. His body had to learn how to submit to authority. His body had to learn how to love people who misunderstood him. And let me tell you what I told someone just recently who asked me about being misunderstood in ministry: get used to it. We are a peculiar people, a royal priesthood, a chosen generation. If everybody understood you, it would be evidence that you were common. What makes you different is that you think differently, speak differently, and live by a different standard.
God Redeems Every Hidden Season of Your Life
One of the most powerful lessons I have learned came from a deeply personal experience. After my father passed away, I went through a season where I stepped away from ministry. I found myself in a bar, far from where I knew God wanted me to be. And a friend of mine texted over 20 people to track me down. He went into bar after bar until he found me. He did not condemn me. He looked at me and said, "Mike, I know who you are by the spirit. You are a mighty man of God. You are a preacher. And you are going to be back in ministry again."
That man did not call me out. He called me up. And that moment marked me deeply, because it showed me what the church is supposed to be. We should be the kind of community that hunts people down, not for church attendance, but for destiny appointments. We should be calling people up to who God says they are, not reminding them of what they have done.
God will redeem every season of your life. The dryness you experienced in that dead church you sat in for years? It was not wasted. That dryness was discipling you to hunger and thirst for the supernatural and for the Word of God. The season where you went without? It was cultivating a heart of generosity inside you. The pain you walked through was developing compassion you could not have manufactured on your own. And one day, when God brings you through to the other side, you will look back and say, "Lord, I would not change a thing."
Who Do You Say You Are?
There was a war over Jesus' identity in Nazareth. People had opinions about who he was. They saw Mary and Joseph's son, not the Son of God. And this is exactly why Jesus later asked his disciples that pivotal question: "Who do you say I am?"
That question is one you need to answer for yourself. Do you define yourself by your divorce, your failures, or the labels people have placed on you? Or do you define yourself by what God says about you? A healthy church, a healthy community, is a place that sees who you really are, even when your own family does not. Sometimes your family has expectations for you that are not from God. They want you to be small because that is comfortable for them. But God has a different vision for your life.
So if you are in a hidden season right now, I want to encourage you: do not despise it. Do not rush through it. And do not believe the lie that God has forgotten you. He is doing something in you that will make everything he does through you possible. Lean into the process. Let God develop your character in the quiet place. Because the day is coming when his supernatural acceleration will hit your life, and everything will change.
You would rather be prepared for that day than just visible before it.
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