FactFaithFeeling

Caution - 1

There are five concluding cautions for the bringing forth of the inner life of faith. If we pay attention to these cautions, the result will be a life of holy joy and peace.

1. We must be still before God.
The life around us, in this age, is pre-eminently one of rush and effort. It is the age of the express-train and electric telegraph. (The author, F.B. Meyer lived in the latter part of the 1800s.)
Years are crowded into months, and weeks into days. This feverish haste threatens the inner life of faith.

The stream has already entered our churches, and stirred their quiet pools. Meetings crowd on meetings. The same energetic souls are found at them all, and engaged in many good works beside.
But we must beware that we do not substitute the active for the contemplative, the valley for the mountain-top. Neither can with safety be divorced from the other.
The sheep must go in and out. The blood must come back to the heart to be re-charged, and fitted to be impelled again to the extremities.

We must make time to be alone with God. The time of private prayer that shuts out everyone is indispensable. We must lose the glare of the sunny piazza that we may see the calm angel-figures bending above the altar.
We must escape the din of the world, to become accustomed to the accents of the still, small voice. Like David, we must sit before the Lord.
Happy are they who have an observatory in their heart-house to which they can often retire beneath the great arch of Eternity, turning their telescope to the mighty constellations that turn beyond life's fever, and reaching regions where the breath of human applause or censure cannot follow!

It is only in such moments that the best spiritual gifts will loom on our vision, or we shall have grace to receive them. It is impossible to rush into God's presence, catch up anything we fancy, and run off with it. To attempt this will end in mere delusion and disappointment.

Nature will not unveil her rarest beauty to the chance tourist. Pictures which are the result of a life of work do not disclose their secret loveliness to the saunterer down a gallery. No charter can be read at a glance.
And God's best can not be ours apart from patient waiting in His Holy presence. The superficial may be satisfied with a parable, a pretty story, but it is not given such to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Father,
thank You for the privilege of waiting quietly in Your holy presence.
Thank You for showing me Your priceless jewels of life at those times,
in Jesus' name,
Amen.