John Coe did the world a great service by coming up with an excellent 5-part introduction to spiritual formation, and then putting it online for free! Here is a summary of what he had to say about the dark night of the soul.

The Dark Night of the Senses

  • The Christian life begins in earnest when we personally appropriate our faith. For converts this happens right away, but for those raised in the church it typically happens in the teen years.
  • God wants us to desire to read the Word, pray, fellowship, etc., but we don’t have the character for it yet. So He gives us the “bottle” of spiritual pleasure in those activities to encourage them.
    • Converts usually get a “bigger” bottle than those raised in the church, which can make them look more mature. Those raised in the church do not need as big a bottle.
  • God is ultimately not interested in keeping you on the bottle, because it doesn’t do the transformation work of putting off the old person and putting on the new (Eph 4:22-24)
    • You drag the “old man” into the Christian life with you, and your pre-conversion/childhood vices simply take on a religious dimension
  • In the dark night of the senses, God starts to take the bottle away. He withdraws spiritual pleasure and you experience dryness or silence in spiritual things that used to be exciting and full. Then, the Spirit begins to push up the hidden material in your life so that you can see it.
  • The sign of a dark night is when all the following happen together:
    • You find that your mind wanders in the spiritual disciplines and you no longer feel anything in them. This is because God is no longer supporting it with the bottle. He’s giving you the gift of showing you your heart. It’s very
    • You find you don’t want to do them, either. Because they’re dry, they make you feel guilty: “Perhaps I’m doing them wrong or my sin is interfering?”
    • It worries you. This shows that you still want God, and are not merely backsliding.
  • The temptations of the dark night:
    • Causal thinking: Because you measure the presence of God by feeling, you feel guilty. You then engage in the disciplines or ministering even harder to make Christianity feel good again. This ultimately leads despair and burnout
    • The “gentle” Christian: You give up and say, “Well, I guess this is all there is to the Christian life. So I’m just going to ride it out and enjoy it as best I can.”
  • How to cooperate with God in the dark night:
    • Open to the fact that this spiritual dryness may be a sign of God working inwardly.
      • When you notice your mind wandering, instead of urging yourself to focus, a flag should go up: “Maybe God is doing a deep work right now.”
      • Resist the temptation to make your spiritual life “work” or to generate spiritual pleasure/excitement; that’s exactly what a dark night is trying to cure you of.
    • Watch what God brings up. Don’t get frustrated with your stuff, or try to change it or fix it. Instead, open up to your need for Him in it.
      • Feelings are lousy leaders, but they are excellent windows into the truth of our heart if we’re willing to look into them.
    • Get a spiritual director to help interpret what the Spirit is doing in your life

Dark Night(s) of the Spirit

  • If the dark night of the senses shows us how our vices have secretly smuggled themselves into the Christian life, the dark night of the spirit is for more mature believers where God begins to wean us of our virtues. God is now saying, “I don’t want you to trust in your goodness anymore. Apart from the Vine, you can do nothing.”
    • This lasts much longer than the dark night of the senses and it will come in little cycles of consolation and desolation on an ongoing basis.
  • God does three kinds of work in a dark night of the spirit:
    • Darkness in the intellect – Your theological mind map has helped you to understand God and how to live in response to Him; but now God wants to move you from depending in that mind map to depending on Him.
    • Vanity in the memory – Our memory is our character, the storehouse of all we’ve experienced. This accumulated wisdom is a roadmap we appeal to when in a pinch. Character can be a fruit of the Spirit, but it is often the result of our own fortitude, and we trust it to give us answers. God begins to show us the vanity of these roadmaps.
    • Dryness in the will – God works to break down our reliance on spiritual experience, to instead trust Him even in darkness, so the spiritual disciplines will feel flat. The Spirit is moving us to the love of God for God’s sake, and not for the benefits He gives.
  • The sign you are entering a dark night of the spirit is when the Holy Spirit turns you inward to ask the question, “Is there something missing in this?” Here are some marks this is going on:
    • A lack of zest from your own character and your former accomplishments
    • A new sense that this life is an inadequate home, that no finite thing can provide you the rivers of living water. The dark nights are little pangs of a deeper hunger.
    • An experience of loneliness because your goodness isolates you since you are not willing to see yourself as you truly are and genuinely open up to others
    • Your ministry may be good for others, but it doesn’t satisfy your soul
    • A deep dissatisfaction in my theological knowledge and my wisdom, my mind / road map, leading to the recognition that they are inadequate
    • The recognition that my will is more filled with myself than with God
  • The primary temptation of the dark night of the spirit is a deep fear that if I give up my goodness, God and others aren’t going to love me anymore. We imagine that our sin separates us from God, when the dark night is actually the Spirit trying to bring it up.
    • During dark nights we think the Spirit is not there, when actually they are what it means to be “filled with the Spirit” when He wants to do major heart-surgery
    • Leaders will also be tempted to create ministries of consolation; that is, ministries of worship and teaching where it’s always “up” and everyone’s doing OK
  • There is a distinction between depression and dark nights. Depression involves no particular object or focus, but dark nights are focused on your spiritual disciplines. You might actually be enjoying everything else, whereas depression affects all areas of life.
    • However, as a dark night goes on, it can begin to mingle with depression, because you’re seeing more and more of your stuff. If you resist entering into this, you can begin to get depressed.
  • To cooperate with God in a dark night of the spirit:
    • Learn to “sit amongst the weeds” (the truth about yourself), with God as the gardener. Your temptation will be to pull them up, to be your own gardener. Even my desire for transformation is often self­-centered, because I just want to be free of sin. I don’t want to just be free from sin anymore. Instead, I want to be connected to the Vine.
    • Let go of your goodness. Not that you go out and be bad, but let go of your goodness as your identity. You’re still going to retain your character, because others will be blessed by it. But let go of your character, your wisdom, as your roadmap for getting around in the world.
    • Continue to diligently practice the disciplines; just do them in such a way that opens your heart
    • Be willing to change to God’s power for your ministry, rather than your own character and cleverness
    • Join with others who are on the same journey and seek out a mentor or director