Is this not the essence of worship? What more can we desire of a worship experience than to KNOW that God is God? And does being still define our worship services today? If we take honest inventory, we are all too often more aware of each other than we are of God. Being still is a multidimensional task, quieting not only noise but also movement. Do we enter God's house quietly? Do we even have a chance just to sit and pray? Or do we run into a wall of noise?
Have we considered the sounds God created? All of these sounds come from His little creatures' own throats and wings or from the heavens themselves. The layered sounds are distinct but also harmonious. All of them speak of our great Creator's personality. We can hear a bird singing against whirring rain; we can hear frogs croaking against katydids squawking--and it all sounds so soothing--even the seagull screaming against the unceasing whisper of surf at sunset.
When I toured Europe many years ago, our tour guide, one of my most favorite former English professors, reminded us to keep our place. "Americans are so loud." He didn't need to say more. We understood--at least, I did. And when we stepped inside Cologne Cathedral at 10:00 of a glorious, dewy August morning and saw the fanning rays of sunlight streaming through Gothic stained-glass windows and spotlighting the altar of this centuries-old chancel, all I wanted to do was to sit down and pray. Oh, what a breathless moment! The beauty instantly stung tears to my eyes. That day I caught a vision of reverence for the holiness of God that I have treasured ever since as more valuable than any of my souvenirs.
And then I learned that these great European cathedrals did stay open to the public and that people actually did slip in for evening vespers to escape the world and pray. Oh, my--what would life look like if we actually did that?
In our rejection of ritual, we have lost our holy habits. "Evening, and morning, and at noon, will I pray" David writes in Psalm 55:17. This unswerving ritual landed Daniel in the lions' den, but I have no doubt he thought of David's conclusion to this Psalm, "Cast thy burden upon the LORD, and He shall sustain thee: He shall never suffer the righteous to be moved" (Psalm 55:22). Peace--stillness--amid the lion's den! But such stillness is possible only if we find it first in the marketplace, in the hallways, in our own living room, in our own souls.
There is in any hour that hidden spring that we may touch to open the secret staircase ascending to the Upper Room--this eternal world in which we ought to live and move and have our being. Jacob found it in the pastoral mountains of Bethel in the middle of the night as he dreamed of a Ladder to heaven. David found it in green pastures while tending his sheep. Jesus found it on the mountaintop in the middle of the night. Susannah Wesley found it behind her apron, despite faithfully mothering eleven children. My grandmother found it in her closet behind the curtain. My mother found it in her favorite chair with her open Bible on her lap. My father found it in his study at his squeaky roller chair. Perhaps you have found it in a long drive to work, just you and Jesus at the wheel. But have you found it? Where is your oasis? Is it closed for repairs?
Pity the person who is afraid of the quiet. "It's too quiet in here," sometimes I have heard students say across the years when they were working silently on a writing assignment or test. "I focus better when I have music," the complaint goes. To a teacher, any moment of quiet in this notoriously multitasking career is golden, a treasure to be remembered. Sometimes in such moments when the sun streams in just right as I stand at the back of the room monitoring thinking in progress, I feel myself lifted above the unending burden of work and sense my Master Teacher standing near me, crowning my weary spirit with His grace. Those moments when we forget all about the clock--when we pretend that time doesn't even exist--are quiet moments, moments of destiny. And if these moments can find us even at work, should we surely not find them in God's House?
We are not advocating the kind of contemplative stillness popularized by the centering prayer craze that swept the Emergent Church Movement a generation ago. This isn't a mindless stillness but a mindful stillness, where real thoughts--eternal thoughts--have time to transcend the nuisance noise of the immediate, the ubiquitously urgent, the deafeningly demanding. Well did Elijah listen to the still, small Voice. And well did Jesus overturn the moneychangers' tables and condemn the marketplace bartering that made His Father's House no longer a House of Prayer but a den of thieves. Our society is noisy because it is prayerless. We spend almost no time at all in God's House actually praying. And even when we do, we are asking, asking, asking--in our so often trite, worn out, and meaningless clichés that take no thought to string together at all. Just add water and mix. Oh, it is past time we took stock of our empty shelves.
The truth is, we crave stillness but fear silence. Silence makes us feel alone with an intruder in the house--when that intruder is the self we don't really know. So we fear the silence because it confronts us with ourselves, when real stillness confronts us instead with God. This is precisely why the centering prayer techniques do not work and are, in fact, utterly dangerous and misguided. They pretend that we can find God within ourselves--in that quiet space that is the "divine spark" in all of us. In fact, Oprah Winfrey reads Psalm 46:10 as "Be still, and know that I [Oprah Winfrey] am God." Yes, this is true, she does. And the "little gods" heresy of the Word of Faith Movement is not far behind this abhorrent self-worship that began with Satan. So, no, we are absolutely not finding God within ourselves. But--but--I can hear the protests. What about the Christian who has the Holy Spirit abiding within? Yes, the Holy Spirit indwells the believer in a wonderful, mysterious way as we abide in Christ and in His Word. But let us never, ever forget the transcendence of God--the "wholly Other," awesome Presence of the One in Whom we abide! We find Him--ever and ever--not within ourselves, but within His Word that must abide in us (John 15:1-10).
So we can find an active stillness that teems with the voice of God as we shut the door (Matthew 6:6) against all other noise--even in church--and open our hearts to God's Voice in His Word. But can we read His Word with a distracted mind? I would say, "No, we cannot." We may read the words, but our spirit will not process what has no time to penetrate. Being still means not just reading but meditating and, for some, journaling. This kind of stillness alone makes us know that God is God. Our minds will never be more alive than when reading God's Word. Our greatest creativity inevitably flows from this hidden spring. With good humor and truth, A. W. Tozer said he learned to read Shakespeare on his knees. He found in his quiet time with God the key to all learning. So, the stillness that requires a focus more intense than we give anything else must characterize our time with God. This time is a sacrifice, yes, but it is never lost. The old saints used to say, "Time spent in prayer is time saved."
We don't need to fear this stillness--this holy MRI where we dare not move under God's search into our souls--because the silence otherwise haunted with fears, regrets, worries, and failures now emerges from the shadows with a purpose: every restless murmuring and moaning of our souls that we would otherwise drown out with noise can be stilled in the knowledge that God is God. His thoughts for our future, His translations of our past, His transformations of our present all grant us peace in silence and safety in stillness. Do we remember that first peace that inundated our souls the moment we were born again? And those who have had near-death experiences testify of a peace they didn't want to leave. But what has happened to this peace in the long interval in between--that space of time called life itself? Jesus promised, "Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid" (John 14:27). And Christ could tell His disciples this before the Last Supper, after which He would face the Cross.
"Be still, and know that I am God" (Psalm 46:10). Let's look at this amazing psalm from which this soul-stilling promise comes. Psalm 46 sounds to me like echoes of oral tradition dating back to Noah's flood. "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof" (Psalm 46:1-3). Far from poetic hyperbole, this is exactly what happened. Who would not be terrified almost to the point of death? And yet these verses leading to the great culminating promise of this psalm include as the eye of the storm a picture of the river and streams that "make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the Most High," and the permanence and stability of Zion anchor the center of the psalm (Psalm 46:4-5). In this sanctuary, the storms of life can neither overwhelm nor move us (Psalm 46:5), even though everything around us is falling apart.
If we picture this "tabernacle-sanctuary" that the psalmist has sandwiched between the turbulent verses of Psalm 46:2-3 and 6-8 as the ark amid the Great Flood, how much more meaningful it becomes! Noah's ark is the floating "city of God"--that one safe place in the storm that "shall not be moved" (Psalm 46:5). A simulation of this effect at one of the kiosks at the Ark Encounter shows the ark climbing almost vertically as waves of tsunamic proportions rise like mountain ranges, yet the ark always stays afloat. All around this floating city--indeed, this microcosm of society and nature combined--the mountains shake and the waves roar; the "heathen" rage and "the kingdoms" are "moved," for "He uttered His voice; the earth melted" (Psalm 46:6). If ever there was a time for terror to reign, this was it, and yet Noah knew that "the LORD of hosts is with us" (Psalm 46:7). And when he finally sees daylight, Noah can say, "Come, behold the works of the LORD, what desolations he has made in the earth" (Psalm 46:8).
Can we even imagine stillness amidst such cataclysmic chaos? And yet wherein does our stillness reside? In God alone, Who "makes wars to cease unto the end of the earth; He breaks the bow, and cuts the spear in sunder; He burns the chariot in the fire" (Psalm 46:9). He who destroyed the first world with a flood will destroy this present world with fire. It seems like a total non sequitur that it is in this very knowledge of impending doom that we must "be still, and know that I am God" (Psalm 46:10). And yet Noah found exactly such stillness in the ark amid the Flood. Can we not, therefore, find amid the deluge of noise in our madly driven culture this ark of stillness, this sanctuary of the knowledge of the Holy One?
When we read of the building of Solomon's Temple, we read that "the temple, when it was being built, was built with stone finished at the quarry, so that no hammer or chisel or any iron tool was heard in the temple while it was being built" (I Kings 6:7). What an intentional, holy reverence Solomon preserved for his people, so that, when they entered this House of Prayer, they should not remember the toil of Eden's curse but only that sinless walk with God in the cool of the day when all we ever wanted was to "be still and know that I am God."
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