Quietness Before God
Quietness before God, especially/ in dark hours of trial, is one of the most rare and difficult of graces. Yet when it is gained, it proves one of the most wholesome in its influence. None pleases God more; none renders religion more beautiful in the eyes of men.
Yet how we dread the hour of trial! How fervently we beg that “this cup may pass from me.” No one loves to be afflicted. No one loves to have his plans defeated, or his hopes dashed; to be stripped of his property or to be cast down from his perch of ambition; or to be bereaved of his household treasures.
We shudder at the sight of that surgical knife which God employs upon us. Our self-love rebels against the excruciating “operation.” But when God — who wounds in order to heal — is engaged in His providential process of amputating a darling lust or cutting out an ulcer of besetting sin, our “strength is to sit stillJ’^ “Keep still, my friend; be quiet,” says the army-surgeon to the writhing soldier under his keen knife. Restlessness only endangers a false cut of the knife and only aggravates the wound. So, when God is operating on the heart by sharp trials, the first duty of his child is perfect, submissive, unquestioning quietness.
“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” is the very core and essence of our model prayer. When a sabbath-school teacher once asked of his class, ^“^ How do the angels in heaven do God’s will?” one child answered, “Immediately.” Another said, “Diligently.” A third answered, “With all the heart.” A fourth said, “Always.” A fifth said, “They dc it altogether.” After a pause, a little girl spoke up and said, “Sir, they do it without asking any questions.^’’ Here was a perfect definition of quietness before’ God. It is a rare grace, because it is so difficult to exercise. A score of Christians can pray and give and work for God, where one can be found ready to sit down and suffer. To go into battle, with the bugles sounding and the very blood leaping to the fingers’ ends under the impetuous charge, is full of thrilling exhilaration. But to be picked up bloody and mangled, and borne back among pitying comrades to the rear; to be laid down helpless in the hospital, and await your slow turn for the surgeon’s probe; to be transferred from his knife (with one limb the less) into the nurses’ silent “ward” of sufferers, — to do and bear all this, calls out the loftiest qualities of true heroism. The battle-field costs less than the hospital. So, in the spiritual conflict, God puts especial honor on the grace of passive submission. He commends the “strength to sit still.” He approves that patient quietness which “behaves itself like a child that is weaned of his mother.” And the loftiest saints in the Bible are those who have become the most “perfect through suffering.”
Quietness under God’s discipline is simply the willingness to let God have His own way. It is ready to go where He sends us, to bear what He lays upon us, to sit still just where He places us.
Why should we try to get away from His blessed discipline? When you would fill a vessel with water from a hydrant or a rain-spout, you do not remove the vessel while the stream is pouring in. It is filled by sitting still. And if God’s storms are filling your heart with heaven-descended graces, why should you seek to move away from beneath its blessed out-pour? If God is refining your heart, why seek to be taken out of the furnace?
“Pain’s furnace-heat within me quivers,
God’s breath upon the flames doth blow, And all my heart in anguish shivers,
And trembles at the fiery glow; But yet I whisper, ‘■As God xvill! ‘And in His hottest fire sit still.”
We have seldom met with a finer illustration of this grace of quietness than was presented by an aged lady, who, after a busy life of doing good, was at length laid upon her bed, pain-worn and helpless. A good minister went to see her, and asked if, after her active habits, she did not find her confinement hard to bear. “No, sir,” said she: “not at all. When 1 was well, I used to hear the Lord say day by day, *Betty, go here; Betty, go there; Betty, do this, and do that;’ and I used to do it as well as I could. But now I hear him say, ‘Betty, lie still, and cough.’” Which of these two acts of obedience was the most difficult to perform, we leave our readers to testify, from their own experience.