Be still, and know that I am God . . .
— Psalm 46:10
In coming to God we should place ourselves in His presence with the confidence that He is the aggressor, not we. He has been waiting to manifest Himself to us till such time as our noise and activity have subsided enough for Him to make Himself heard and felt by us. Then we should focus our soul?s powers of attention upon the Triune Godhead. Whether One Person or Another claims our present interest is not important.
We can trust the Spirit to bring before our minds the Person that we at the moment need most to behold. One thing more. Do not try to imagine God, or you will have an imaginary God; and certainly do not, as some have done, ?set a chair for Him.? God is Spirit. He dwells in your heart, not your house. Brood on the Scriptures and let faith show you God as He is revealed there. Nothing else can equal this glorious sight.
thought
Slow down! Be still! How good to be still. The quieter in heart we become the more we know that He is God and He is there.
prayer
Teach me to be still, Lord. To be still and know that You are God.
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer.
— Psalm 19:14
The worldly man can never rest. He must have ?somewhere to go?? and ?something to do.? This is a result of the fall, a symptom of a deep-lying disease, yet a blind religious leadership caters to this terrible restlessness instead of trying to cure it by the Word and the Spirit. If the many activities engaged in by the average church led to the salvation of sinners or the perfecting of believers they would justify themselves easily and triumphantly; but they do not.
My observations have led me to the belief that many, perhaps most, of the activities engaged in by the average church do not contribute in any way the accomplishing of the true work of Christ on earth. I hope I am wrong, but I am afraid I am right. Our religious activities should be ordered in such a way as to leave plenty of time for the cultivation of the fruits of solitude and silence. It should be remembered, however, that it is possible to waste such quiet periods as we may be able to snatch for ourselves out of the clamorous day. Our meditation must be directed toward God; otherwise we may spend our time of retiral in quiet converse with ourselves. This may quiet our nerves but will not further our spiritual life in any way.
thought
Our doing has value only as it expresses our being. Doing is easier than being. Being as God wants us comes from meditating upon Him our God, our Rock. He changes us.
prayer
Forgive me, O God, from driving myself and other people. May I take time and encourage others to take time for meditation pleasing to You.
Wait for the LORD; be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD.
— Psalm 27:14
I am convinced that the dearth of great saints in these times even among those who truly believe in Christ is due at least in part to our unwillingness to give sufficient time to the cultivation of the knowledge of God. We of the nervous West are victims of the philosophy of activism tragically misunderstood. Getting and spending, going and returning, organizing and promoting, buying and selling, working and playing ? this alone constitutes living.
f we are not making plans or working to carry out plans already made we feel that we are failures, that we are sterile, unfruitful eunuchs, parasites on the body of society. The gospel of work, as someone has called it, has crowded out the gospel of Christ in many Christian churches. In an effort to get the work of the Lord done we often lose contact with the Lord of the work and quite literally wear our people out as well. I have heard more than one pastor boast that his church was a ?live? one, pointing to the printed calendar as a proof ? something on every night and several meetings during the day.
Of course this proves nothing except that the pastor and the church are being guided by a bad spiritual philosophy. A great many of these time-consuming activities are useless and others plain ridiculous. ?But,? say the eager beavers who run the religious squirrel cages, ?they provide fellowship and they hold our people together.? To this I reply that what they provide is not fellowship at all, and if that is the best thing the church has to offer to hold the people together it is not a Christian church in the New Testament meaning of that word. The center of attraction in a true church is the Lord Jesus Christ. As for fellowship, let the Holy Spirit define it for us: ?And they continued stedfastly in the apostles? doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers? (Acts 2:42).
thought
There is Master Planning and there is the Master's planning. May we not confuse the two. To know His plan requires waiting before Him. Then we can be strong and take heart.
prayer
Lord, I sometimes substitute activity for waiting. May I patiently wait on You to know Your plan.
May my meditation be pleasing to him, as I rejoice in the LORD.
— Psalm 104:34
Among Christians of all ages and of varying shades of doctrinal emphasis there has been fairly full agreement on one thing: They all believed that it was important that the Christian with serious spiritual aspirations should learn to meditate long and often on God. Let a Christian insist upon rising above the poor average of current religious experience and he will soon come up against the need to know God Himself as the ultimate goal of all Christian doctrine. Let him seek to explore the sacred wonders of the Triune Godhead and he will discover that sustained and intelligently directed meditation on the Person of God is imperative.
To know God well he must think on Him unceasingly. Nothing that man has discovered about himself or God has revealed any shortcut to pure spirituality. It is still free, but tremendously costly. Of course this presupposes at least a fair amount of sound theological knowledge. To seek God apart from His own self-disclosure in the inspired Scriptures is not only futile but dangerous. There must be also a knowledge of and complete trust in Jesus Christ as Lord and Redeemer. Christ is not one of many ways to approach God, nor is He the best of several ways; He is the only way. ?I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me? (John 14:6). To believe otherwise is to be something less than a Christian.
thought
Gerhard Tersteegen spoke of prayer as "looking at God, who is ever present, and letting Him look at us." When did you last set aside time just to look at God and let Him look at you?
prayer
Lord, with Your Word open before me, I just want to spend time in looking at You and letting You look at me.
If you love me, you will obey what I command.
— John 14:15
ove for Christ is a love of willing as well as a love of feeling, and it is psychologically impossible to love Him adequately unless we will to obey His words. In seeking to learn whether we truly love our Lord we must be careful to apply His own test. False tests can only lead to false conclusions as false signs on the highway lead to wrong destinations. The Lord made it plain enough, but with our genius for getting mixed up we have lost sight of the markers.
I think if we would turn for a while from finespun theological speculations about grace and faith and humbly read the New Testament with a mind to obey what we see there, we would easily find ourselves and know for certain the answer to the question that troubled our fathers and should trouble us: Do we love the Lord or no?
thought
Love obeys what Christ commands. Less than love does not. Is our love emotional bubbles or uncompromising obedience? Our living will express our love.
prayer
How often my life contradicts my words. Forgive me, Lord. Teach me to love with Your love.
This is love for God: to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome.
— 1 John 5:3
The Christian cannot be certain of the reality and depth of his love until he comes face-to-face with the commandments of Christ and is forced to decide what to do about them. Then he will know. ?He that loveth me not keepeth not my sayings? (John 14:24), said our Lord. ?He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me" (John 14:21).
So the final test of love is obedience. Not sweet emotions, not willingness to sacrifice, not zeal, but obedience to the commandments of Christ. Our Lord drew a line plain and tight for everyone to see. On one side He placed those who keep His commandments and said, ?These love Me.? On the other side He put those who keep not His sayings, and said, ?These love Me not.?
thought
The commands of the one who so loved us are not burdensome. If we have experienced His love we can be sure that obedience to His word shows love and also results in our growth as His people.
prayer
O Christ, You gave Yourself for me. What love! I belong to You. May I show my love in obeying You.
And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.
— Romans 5:5
If we lived in a spiritual Utopia where every wind blew toward heaven and every man was a friend of God, we Christians could take everything for granted, counting on the new life within us to cause us to do the will of God without effort and more or less unconsciously. Unfortunately we have opposing us the lusts of the flesh, the attractions of the world and the temptations of the devil. These complicate our lives and require us often to make determined moral decisions on the side of Christ and His commandments.
It is the crisis that forces us to take a stand for or against. The patriot may be loyal to his country for half a lifetime without giving much thought to it, but let an unfriendly power solicit him to turn traitor and he will quickly spurn its overtures. His patriotism will be brought out into the open for everyone to see. So it is in the Christian life. When the ?south wind blew softly? (Acts 27:13) the ship that carried Paul sailed smoothly enough and no one on board knew who Paul was or how much strength of character lay hidden behind that rather plain exterior. But when the mighty tempest, Euroclydon, burst upon them Paul?s greatness was soon the talk of everyone on the ship.
The apostle, though himself a prisoner quite literally took command of the vessel, made decisions and issued orders that meant life or death to the people. And I think the crisis brought to a head something in Paul that had not previously been clear even to him. Beautiful theory was quickly crystallized into hard fact when the tempest struck.
thought
Since God's love is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, we can love with God's love in those love crises we experience. There is an enabling power to love far beyond our feeble human resources. Let's use it!
prayer
Grip me, Lord, with Your love. Squeeze Your love through me to You and those around me. For Jesus' sake.
Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him. — John 14:21
Our Lord told His disciples that love and obedience were organically united, that the keeping of His sayings would prove that we loved Him and the failure or refusal to keep them would prove that we did not. This is the true test of love, and we will be wise to face up to it. The commandments of Christ occupy in the New Testament a place of importance that they do not have in current evangelical thought.
The idea that our relation to Christ is revealed by our attitude to His commandments is now considered legalistic by many influential Bible teachers, and the plain words of our Lord are rejected outright or interpreted in a manner to make them conform to theories ostensibly based upon the epistles of Paul. Thus the Word of God is denied as boldly by ethought
The disciples awaited the coming of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost. What a difference His indwelling would make in their love and their obedience. The book of Acts records some of that difference.
prayer
O Lord, I want to lovingly obey You. You are my life. May I be sensitive today to Your Spirit's direction.
When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter, "Simon son of John, do you truly love me more than these?" "Yes, Lord," he said, "You know that I love you." Jesus said, "Feed my lambs."
— John 21:15
A century ago a hymn was often sung in the churches, the first stanza of which ran like this: ?Tis a point I long to know, Oft it causes anxious thought, Do I love the Lord, or no! Am I His, or am I not? Those who thus confessed their spiritual anxiety were serious-minded, honest men and women who could open their hearts to each other in this manner without self-consciousness or loss of face. It is an evidence of the essential frivolity of the modern religious mind that this hymn is never sung today, and if mentioned from the pulpit at all it is quoted humorously as proof that those who once sang it were not up on the doctrine of grace.
Why ask, ?Do I love the Lord, or no?? when any number of personal workers stand by to quote convenient texts from the New Testament to prove that we do? But we had better not be too cocksure. The gravest question any of us face is whether we do or do not love the Lord. Too much hinges on the answer to pass the matter off lightly. And it is a question that no one can answer for another. Not even the Bible can tell the individual man that he loves the Lord; it can only tell him how he can know whether or not he does. It can and does tell us how to test our hearts for love as a man might test ore for the presence of uranium, but we must do the testing.
thought
Vehemently Peter had declared that though all others fall away he would never disown his Lord even if it meant his death (Mark 14:27-31). In the intervening hours the test came and Peter failed. He recognizes the weakness of his love and the Lord begins
prayer
Easy enough, Lord, to sing hymns and choruses declaring my love for You. But do I love You with agape love? Perfect my love.