My soul, wait silently for God alone,
For my
hope is from Him.
Psalm 62:5
Come, my people, enter into your
rooms,
And shut
your doors behind you;
Hide yourself, as it were, for a little moment…
Isaiah 26:20
“But you, when you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut
your door, pray to your Father who is
in the secret place; and
your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly.”
Matthew 6:6
That silence is first a silence of the
will. The plain meaning of this phrase is resignation; and resignation is just
a silent will. Before the throne of the Great King, His servants are to stand
like those long rows of attendants we see on the walls of Eastern temples,
silent, with folded arms, straining their ears to hear, and bracing their
muscles to execute his whispered commands, or even his gesture and his glance.
A man’s will should be an echo, not a voice; the echo of God, not the voice of
self. It should be silent, as some sweet instrument is silent till the owner’s
hand touches the keys. Like the boy-prophet in the hush of the sanctuary, below
the quivering light of the dying lamps, we should wait till the awful voice
calls, and then answer, ‘Speak, Lord! for Thy servant heareth.’ Do not let the
loud utterances of your own wills anticipate, nor drown, the still, small voice
in which God speaks. Bridle impatience till He does. If you cannot hear His
whisper, wait till you do. Take care of running before you are sent. Keep your
wills in equipoise till God’s hand gives the impulse and direction.
Such
a silent will is a strong will. It is no feeble passiveness, no dead
indifference, no impossible abnegation that God requires, when He requires us
to put our wills in accord with His. They are not slain, but vivified, by such
surrender; and the true secret of strength lies in submission. The secret of
blessedness is there, too, for our sorrows come because there is discord
between our circumstances and our wills, and the measure in which these are in
harmony with God is the measure in which we shall feel that all things are
blessings to be received with thanksgiving. But if we will take our own way,
and let our own wills speak before God speaks, or otherwise than God speaks,
nothing can come of that but what always has come of it—blunders, sins, misery,
and manifold ruin.
We must keep our hearts silent too. The
sweet voices of pleading affections, the loud cry of desires and instincts that
roar for their food like beasts of prey, the querulous complaints of
disappointed hopes, the groans and sobs of black-robed sorrows, the loud hubbub
and Babel, like the noise of a great city, that every man carries within, must
be stifled and coerced into silence. We have to take the animal in us by the
throat, and sternly say, ‘Lie down there and be quiet.’ We have to stop our
ears to the noises around, however sweet the songs, and to close many an avenue
through which the world’s music might steal in. He cannot say, ‘My soul is
silent unto God,’ whose whole being is buzzing with vanities and noisy with the
din of the marketplace. Unless we have something, at least, of that great
stillness, our hearts will have no peace, and our religion no reality.
As the flowers follow the sun, and silently hold up their petals
to be tinted and enlarged by his shining, so must we, if we would know the joy
of God, hold our souls, wills, hearts, and minds still before Him, whose voice
commands, whose love warms, whose truth makes fair, our whole being. God speaks
for the most part in such silence only. If the soul be full of tumult and jangling
noises, His voice is little likely to be heard. It is the calm lake which
mirrors the sun, the least cat’s-paw wrinkling the surface wipes out all the
reflected glories of the heavens. If we would mirror God our souls must be
calm. If we would hear God our souls must be silence.
The
silence of the soul before God is no mere passiveness. It requires the
intensest energy of all our being to keep all our being still and waiting upon
Him. So put all your strength into the task, and be sure that your soul is never
so intensely alive as when in deepest abnegation it waits hushed before God.
ALEXANDER MACLAREN
Expositions of Holy Scripture
SILENCE TO GOD ~Psalm 62
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