With shocking headlines appearing in the news almost every day, with a very critical election coming up soon, and shortly after that the holiday season with all the events and busyness that attend it, I felt my own spirit needed to be reinforced in its daily pursuit of quietness and times of stillness before God. These special moments provide a spiritual atmosphere for the heart to receive the deeply personal thoughts, desires, and feelings of God for us. And knowing our frame, He also understands the necessity for special enduements of His strength in the seasons of life, and just now specifically for the significant months ahead.

So I went back to my favorite poem on quietness and stillness, "Be Still," and because it always refreshes and encourages, along with it I am sharing in this month's letter a kind of testimony and running commentary that perhaps will impart some understanding of the experiences, thoughts, and questions to which the words of "Be Still" were an answer.

"...do you so soon forget that God is here?" is part of the opening verse, and sad to say, I did forget—more times than I care to tell, and it cost me a lot of setbacks and unnecessary pain. Especially when confronted with some sort of injustice or oppression, often I reacted without any awareness of God's nearness or willingness to help. But it's well said that when flesh gets flesh down, flesh is still on top and God is totally left out. And always after these encounters, when the dust cleared there was this haunting sense of loss. This bewildering sense of defeat drove me in tears to the Lord, for my cause was just.. .so why was victory so miserable???

So, the second verse opens with these words: "Be still in confidence that God still has control." This further establishes the need for quietness, especially when destruction is immanent. The senses lie to us and scream at us and tell us all is lost, blinding our minds to the promises of God, and causing us to doubt His faithfulness to perform them. Watchman Nee has said, "All temptation is primarily to cause us to act out of ourselves and independently of God" and so very often this was the case. Yielding to the temptation to salvage what happiness I could with my own human strength, I would try to take control of chaotic circumstances. In the end it profited me absolutely nothing except again that form of inner death which is always the reward of fleshly endeavor. And if there was anything good that came out of this mess, it was learning that "love (God's) is strong as death." Through the countless deliverances of this part of the learning process, He won my heart with a deathless love that covered a multitude of my sins. Selah.

"Let quietness of soul keep you before the Lord this day..." begins verse three. The lesson here was that unless I sought the Lord in a place of quiet intimacy, His keeping power would not be experienced in a conscious way through that day, (though in reality, it was always there). And there would be a distinct lack of sensitivity to the inner leadings and checkings of the Lord coupled with feelings of being removed from God. Contact is where everything happens that is of value to the Lord.. .fellowship, love, loyalty, understanding the Father's heart, insight and vision as to His purposes in everyday life, and so on. But all are lost on a day spent living selfishly with a personal agenda that allows no time for cultivating quietness and confidence in God.

And then the fourth verse asks this question, "Is it worth it?" Is it worth the striving, the frustration, the blood, sweat, and tears to do things our own way? After going around the block with these cruel companions of my soul, I finally said NO! "God knows the thoughts of man, that they are vanity." Because we are so quick to forget what God has done and shown and taught, we end up wandering in the wilderness of vanity, sacrificing our lives to empty nothingness in a self-willed determination to work our plan our way. How much more of a zero can you get? But the land of Forgetfulness is a desolate place of hunger and thirst and we either cry there for the God we forgot to remember, or die there, never having reached the Promised Land.

In verse five the Lord restores the forgetful and wandering ones to stillness, "...our souls are brought by God to see they must be still, be still." Yes, BROUGHT. He MAKES me to lie down in green pastures; He LEADS me beside the still waters. Earlier I mentioned the misery of waiting for God to act. The major part of that was the feeling of total helplessness, in body, soul, and spirit, and having to remain there until the Lord showed up. "...brought BY GOD to see we must be still." God will not work while the flesh is striving, so it is imperative to let Him keep it in a place of death. The due season of the Lord comes when death has done its work, and He may come while we're still grieving because He has not come, as the disciples did on the road to Emmaus. However, when all hope is gone, really gone, then we are ready to receive the revelation of His great faithfulness and love, and that He has never forsaken us, but is very present at every moment to bring to pass His will in ways we never thought possible. The conscious knowledge of His presence always brings the restoring grace of quietness, peace, and calm.

"For there in stillness He reveals the mystery of His power..." So starts the last verse, and mystery here does not refer to a secret message that needs to be decoded, but to the hidden power of the indwelling Christ. For though it is true that God hides Himself from our flesh, when we get through all the noisy questions of the head, and wait in the stillness of a willing surrender, when in silence our souls have truly surrendered, He will cause His voice to be made known. By His quiet yet powerful working, He will speak within us the life-giving words that produce the flowering of the character of Jesus and the fruit of the spirit. If we continue to sow ourselves to His sweet and sacred ministry, the beauty of Jesus will grow and expand into all the inner realms we leave open to Him. This will be the divine harvest for all the quiet moments, hours, days, weeks, and years that we have given up to stillness just so we could truly know that He is God to us, within us, and through us.

May your journey with the Lord be the daily discovery of the strength that is birthed in stillness and surrender.

Please enjoy this month’s poem, "Be Still My Soul" and also enjoy the video of it on the video poetry page.