Week 35 Sunday
Week 35 Sunday
The Morning Quiet Time
Psalms 5:3; 88:13; 119:147; Isaiah 50:4
In order to have a continuous state of relaxed receptivity, we must have periods of quiet when we gain the poise and power that will go through the whole day. Those who say that they can live in a state of prayer without stated times for prayer will probably find themselves without both. Those who try to live on the notion that they can live in a state of physical nourishment without stated times for meals will perish.
I asked a couple who were living defeated lives if they kept the Quiet Time; and the naive reply came, “Yes, my husband and I sit and smoke in the quiet a half hour after breakfast.” The modern equivalent of the Quiet Time! No wonder the husband had a nervous break. Those sincere but defeated souls found release and victory when they set up a real Quiet Time in which they took in the resources of the living God instead of the pitiable substitute of nicotine. Breathing God deep into your inner recesses gives a lift with no subsequent letdown.
Set up the Quiet Time, preferably in the morning before you go out into the day. James Russell Lowell says:
If the chosen soul could never be alone
In deep mid-silence, open-doored to God,
No greatness ever had been dreamed or done;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.*
It is best to have the Quiet Time “in the pure, strong hours of the morning, when the soul of the day is at its best.”† Wash your thinking in the Thought of Christ before you face the day.
Every morning, lean thine arm awhile
Upon the window-sill of Heaven,
And gaze upon thy Lord.
Then, with that vision in thy heart,
Turn strong to meet the day.**
O God, “late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,”*** now we turn to you for repair and replenishment. Without you, we are empty and distracted and out of sorts. With you, we are calm and full and adequate. Then, “Without you, not one step over the threshold; with you—anywhere.” † Amen.
* James Russell Lowell, “Columbus,” The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1896), 56.
** Anonymous
*** William Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much with Us” (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), 135.
† Attributed to E. Stanley Jones.
Week 35 Monday
Quiet Expectancy in the Quiet Time
Psalms 62:5; 119:9-16; Jeremiah 15:16
We saw yesterday that we should choose the morning for our Quiet Time. Of course, if you simply cannot arrange a morning hour, then take any hour you can. But the morning is best.
A watch was running slow. The watchmaker asked when the owner wound it, and when told “at night,” replied, “Wind it in the morning. Give it the fresh spring at the hardest part of the day, when you are moving about.” Give your soul the fresh spring of the Morning Watch before you go out to face the hard part of the day, the daily tasks and problems.
In the Quiet Time, what do you do? I can tell you only what I do. When in college, I decided I would set aside at least an hour and a half a day to cultivate my resources. I usually take one-half hour in the morning and an hour at eventide. In the morning hour, I take my Bible, usually reading a chapter, sometimes only a few verses if they prove to be arresting. I take my pen; that pen is a sign of faith that something is going to come out worth noting on the margin. It seldom fails. If you do not write your inspiration down, it will fade out.
The Bible will be self-authenticating to you. It will find you at your deepest depths. You will know that it is inspired, for you will find it inspiring. You will know that God has gone into it, for God comes out of it. It is a revelation, for it reveals.
It is an inexhaustible mine. You think you have exhausted it, and then you put down the shaft of meditation and strike new veins of rich ore. Your very brain cells will be eager and alert with expectancy. You will have what seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza calls “an intellectual love of God.”
Perhaps you will have to be primed and prodded into thought by one of these “helps,” such as this book or other devotional literature. But they are secondary, and not a substitute for a firsthand contact with the Word of God. If the best Man that ever lived fed upon the Word of God, so must you.
O God, you have breathed into these words, and they have become the Word. You have touched these ways, and they have become the Way. Help me saturate my inner thinking, my inner motives, with your Mind until I cannot tell where my mind ends and your Mind begins. Then I shall live fully and safely. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 35 Tuesday
Life Not a Reservoir, but a Channel
Isaiah 40:29; Micah 3:8; Zechariah 4:6; Acts 1:8
Now that you have read the Word of God, you have done what the aviator does when tuning up the engine preparatory to the starting of the flight. The Word has started your thinking, your aspirations, going in the right direction, has prepared you to pray prayers that can be answered. It has aligned you with the will of God; and where the will of God is done, the power of God can come.
Now to the negative side of prayer: getting rid of accumulated hindrances that have blocked the flow of power. I say “blocked the flow of power,” for we are not reservoirs, but channels. Commenting on the words of J. A. Hadfield, David Seabury says:
Many people have the idea that in each of us there is a reservoir containing a certain supply of energy. This is supposed to be strictly limited in amount. If our expenditure is excessive, they say, our energy is depleted and we suffer from fatigue. So we take the attitude of economizing our little store of strength, conserving our resources, lest the stingy springs run dry. In contrast with this point of view is one akin to the teaching of Jesus. That is, our energies seem to be used up, not because the flow is checked, but because either the channel is blocked or we have not learned to use our capacities in the right way. In other words, we are tired not when we do too much but when we do too little. . . . Our hidden springs are not of body but of spirit; we are not receptacles but conductors. . . .
Jesus knew the human tendency to live far too frugally, to forget the source of our strength and fail to make God a perpetually sustaining power. Even more, he recognized our habit of hoarding both our material and our spiritual possessions.*
Jesus’ method was, “Give, and it will be given to you. A good portion, packed down . . . and overflowing” (Luke 6:38 CEB). Let that bum within us: “We are not receptacles, but conductors!”
O God, I’ve been meager and afraid—afraid my resources would run dry if I used them. But I see that only as I give, will I get. Help me to give, and give with complete abandon. And then I shall draw upon your resources and live by them. I thank you for this assurance. Amen.
* David Seabury, How Jesus Heals Our Minds Today (Boston: Little Brown, 1940), 170-72.
Week 35 Wednesday
Opening Blocked Channels
Isaiah 9:6; 14:3; Romans 8:15; Galatians 5:1, 7
If we are not reservoirs, but channels, then one of the first things to do in prayer, after reading the Word, is to become silent to God, and let God put the divine finger on any blocked channel. The tendency will be to try to pray around that blocked place, to slur it over, to act as if it were not there. That is a part of our inner defense. But don’t defend yourself, overtly or covertly. Face the blocked place frankly; confess where you have been wrong; turn over to God simply and frankly your problem, and tell God you will do anything at any cost to right it, with God’s help. Or better still, God will do it with your help. For God is taking the initiative to make you the best that you can be.
Here is what one happy, released soul did:
I have been a Christian—in spots, and a church member since I was about nine years of age. . . . But I lived by fears rather than by faith. . . . I decided I’d had enough of it, and that if you knew the way out, I’d certainly try to follow it. Well, you did, so I moved out all the accumulated terrors and panics and anxieties, and asked God to come in where I’d never let him come before. He did, and I am so happy, because I am sure life is never going to be the same again.
To be relaxed is to be released. Relax, then, toward God and be eagerly open to any suggestion for clearing up your life. But perhaps you are not relaxed toward people; you hold resentments toward them. Surrender those resentments into the love of God. That love will dissolve them.
Perhaps you are tense toward others because you want to live out their lives for them. Surrender those loved ones to God. I wrote my daughter and her husband when they were married: “I would like my attitude to be ‘Never in the way, and never out of the way.’ ” If you are fussily trying to manage other people in their supposed interests, surrender that fussiness—it is pure selfishness. That attitude ties up you and others.
O you Tender Silence, speak as I go into silence. Speak the word that will release me and heal me and make me adequate. I consent without reservation to the draining of every swamp of self-centeredness and fear. Clean me to my depths. For the world is sick, and I want to be a part of the cure instead of the disease. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 35 Thursday
When the Mind Wanders
Jeremiah 4:14; Luke 2:35; 2 Corinthians 10:5; Hebrews 4:12
Yesterday we saw that we tie ourselves up if we try to live other people’s lives for them. A mother did not want her daughter to be married; she was self-centered, wanted the attention of her daughter. The daughter waited until she was thirty-one before marrying. The mother fainted at the wedding. Through her self-pity, she developed all sorts of diseases. Then her husband developed cancer of the colon. In fighting for him and attending to him she forgot herself and became a well woman, and is well today. She shifted the basis of her relationships with others from self-interest to other-interest, and righted the relationships, and herself.
In prayer, let God show you the places where you have tensions. You will be as touchy as a boil as God puts a finger on them.
If God in the silence brings up nothing, then take it for granted there is nothing. Now you are ready for positive communion. But another difficulty arises. When you begin to enter into positive communion, your mind wanders. This greatly distresses some people. It shouldn’t. Suppose the mind does wander; then let the thing to which it wanders be the medium through which you commune with God. For instance, as I was writing this line, I looked up and saw a white pigeon through the window, and my mind began to wander, repeating to itself these lines:
Every morning her white thought did beat to God-ward,
Like a carrier dove, my name beneath its wing.
Suppose my mind did wander; in the end it wandered to God. Suppose, as someone has said, you are distracted by a siren. Then say: “Oh, that I might be warned by an even louder siren of the danger that besets torpid and careless souls!” Make the distraction into a direction: to God. Ride even on the wings of the storm: to God. After a while, you will be able to bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. For as you more and more obey him, Christ will become more and more the center of your affection: and “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Luke 12:34).
Beautiful, strong Son of God, you are becoming more and more my treasure. More and more I cannot think apart from you, love apart from you, be apart from you. You have me. And now, where my treasure is, there my heart is also. I am at rest, at poise, at power. Amen.
Week 35 Friday
Building Up from the Subconscious
Psalm 130:1; Isaiah 26:3; Matthew 12:35; Ephesians 3:16-19
Perhaps the greatest difficulty in meditation is that you feel that nothing is happening. You agree that prayer is communing with God, but nothing seems to come back to you from God. Gerald Heard, an expert in meditation, spending hours at it each day, says:
Do not be disappointed when nothing happens, when no lucidity appears, no sense of significance, no great quiet. This process which is working on us works, or should work, first on the subconscious. What we are building up, or having built up in us, is a foundation from the sea floor of the subconscious to the surface. Bag after bag of cement is poured in, and then it rises above the surface.*
The habit of practicing the presence of God is being formed; new grooves in the channels of attention are being cut.
Prayer will soon become an undertone as well as an overtone of your life. Of pastor and composer Phillips Brooks it was said, adapting the words of Tennyson, “His eyes were homes of silent prayer.”** His whole attitude began to be a prayer-attitude. Someone said of John Forman, a saintly missionary, “All his thoughts of people gradually turned to prayers.” This means that you need never waste time, no matter in what circumstances you are placed. If people are making you wait, thus wasting your time, you can immediately turn on your prayer attention and begin to pray for the people who are making you wait, thus dissolving your resentments and making you use constructively an otherwise wasted period. You can pull the world and its need into that blank moment.
Said someone regarding the Christians of Europe undergoing persecution: “Our people can stand solitary confinement better than others.” Why? Because even in solitary confinement, they could people the cell with people in need, brought there by reaching out hands of prayer and gathering them in.
So prayer can become habit, easier to do than not to do. But habits are formed by regularity. Pray by the clock, if necessary, and soon you will pray by inward urge. Then you will know the meaning of “detained in presence of the Eternal” (1 Sam. 21:7 Moffatt). You will not be able to tear yourself away.
Just now I would be “detained in presence of the Eternal.” Here, in your presence, O Eternal, I place myself—my affairs, my worries, my frustrations, my possibilities—into your hands, I have narrowly held them; now I lovingly entrust them to you. Amen.
* Published source unknown, but see Gerald Heard, Training for the Life of the Spirit (London: Cassell, 1941).
** See Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam (London: Bankside Press, 1900), 41. “Her eyes are homes of silent prayer.”
Week 35 Saturday
Relaxed Strenuousness
John 6:29; 9:4; Galatians 5:6; Philippians 2:13; Colossians 1:29
We are learning that relaxation is release; release not only from cramping inhibitions and fears but also for otherwise impossible tasks.
Relaxation of the personality is really an evidence of faith and trust. . . . The man who believes absolutely in God, in the divine reliability and goodness, does not hold himself mentally and spiritually rigid, fearful that any moment something is going to happen to him, but, on the contrary, rests in complete confidence that all things work together for good to them who believe in God. As a result, he has peace in his mind and quietness at the center of his life. . . . This relaxed and peaceful state of mind gives him a clear brain, makes possible the free exercise of all his faculties, and thus he is able to attack his problems with every ounce of ability he possesses. The relaxed man is the powerful man. The rigid, tied-up personality is defeated before the battle starts.*
The end of a period of relaxation is relaxed strenuousness. The worship becomes work. Instead of “Now I lay me down to sleep,” which too many grown-ups are prone to pray, we can say:
Now I get me up to work,
I pray the Lord I will not shirk.
If I should die before the night,
I pray the Lord my work’s all right.
As we arise from our morning communion:
Fronting my task, these things I ask:
To be true, this whole day through;
To be content with honest work,
Fearing only lest I shirk;
To see, and know, and do what’s right;
To come, unsullied, home at night.
Gracious Lord, lovingly into your hands I place my affairs, knowing that only that which is for my highest good shall come to me. But now that I have placed them in your hands, you and I shall work them out together. We begin the Great Cooperation. Amen.
* Smiley Blanton and Norman Vincent Peale, Faith Is the Answer (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1940), 84-85.