With the chaos and uncertainty happening, we want our redo for godliness to bring peace to our souls. To do that, we need to silence our souls. This devotion begins our look on what that means.
Nuggets
- When we have silence in our soul, we allow the peace of God to counteract Satan’s chaos of this world.
- We need to sit in silence and listen to God when He is calling us to salvation and regeneration.
- God’s priority is our salvation.
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I came across Edwards’ sermon Of Taking Up the Cross when we were doing the What Should We Do about Who Jesus Is? devotion. Edwards talked about the hindrances and impediments of Christianity. While he also talked about the outward hindrance, I want to focus on the inward hindrance.
Edwards talked about patience and submission. I really liked one of the phrases he used when talking about being patient. He wrote, “There is not only a silence of the soul, but of the tongue, which is another ingredient of this duty.”
On the flip side, Edwards wrote, “Consider, that impatience and fretting are no ease at all to us in our calamities, but, on the contrary, they render our grievances heavier and more intolerable.” Oh, yeah! Impatience and trials don’t mix well.?
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I really loved the phrase silence of the soul. We need that, but I don’t know if we get there very often. I read all of his other components that made up patience, and I really thought they hinged on silence of our soul.
So, how do we get from impatience to patient? How do we switch the other chaos of our souls to silence?
Let’s start off with what silence of the soul is.
Devotions in the Silence of the Soul series
Promoting Silence in Our Souls
Improving Silence in our Minds
Mastering the Silence of Our Tongues
The Silence of Humble Confession
The Silence of Waiting on God
The Silence of Cheerfulness and Rejoicing
Let's Put It into Context
Our soul is our spiritual part that is immortal. The mind is a component of the soul that controls our will. It is in our minds that we process and make judgments and decisions.
What Is Silence of the Soul?
“Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!” (Ps. 46: 10 ESV)
When we have silence in our soul, we allow the peace of God to counteract Satan’s chaos of this world.
Yeah, we’ve just had a year where sheltering at home made many who were going full speed ahead to slow down, if not stop all together. Even so, the chaos was still felt.
But I think being still with God is more than that. Maurice said this: “Only the belief of a Presence near us, with us, can inspire habitual awe, can keep us steady when all things are rocking around us, can take away the eagerness to move, or the cowardice which paralyzes movement.”
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Silence of our soul starts out with being in the Presence of God. The Holman Bible Dictionary defines the Presence of God as “God’s initiative in encountering people.”
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Yes, it is God knocking on the door of our hearts, so that we will accept Him. He comes to us, offering His peace.
But that is something that we have to accept. We can only accept when we know. We can only know by being still.
Moffat made a good point. Most of us think “Be still, and know that I am God …” (Ps. 46: 10 ESV) is an invitation.
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We also sometimes think we will only hear “be still” in times of trials. The way we read this is to not fear anything.
Instead, we should look at “be still” as a command that we have to obey every day.
Thomas made an interesting comment. He wrote, “Self-knowledge, God-knowledge — these can never be had until we have learned to be still.”
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Look at it this way. God has an individual relationship with each of us. No two relationships are alike.
The only way we are going to build and strengthen that relationship is to listen to what the Holy Spirit has to tell us. We only hear when we settle down and are still.
We should be willing to listen because He is God. Thomas wrote , “… there is a knowledge which is to be had only in the stillness of devout meditation — the soul’s personal knowledge of God.”
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Oh, that is so against our nature. We are doers. We want to be able to depend on ourselves, do it ourselves, earn our salvation because of our works.
It doesn’t work that way.
We need to sit still. We need to keep the focus on God. O’Meara called it “… silence from all other voices …” Jowett argued that we can only gain knowledge about God through silence.
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The only work we do is to work out our salvation. We are to work in a specific way. Macleane wrote, “When we are called upon to work out our own salvation it is with fear and trembling indeed, but with the calm assurance nevertheless that it is God which worketh in us to will and to do of His good pleasure.”
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There are different ways that we need to know God. First, we need to know He exists. “… know that I am God …” (Ps. 46: 10 ESV).
Second, we have to know God really does possess all the attributes. We have to acknowledge His greatness.
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Third, we need to personally know God. That is the only way we will be able to take the focus off the chaos of this world.
That is where the work comes in. We have work to settle ourselves so that we can be taught by the Holy Spirit.
Waiting in Silence for God
“Let him sit alone in silence when it is laid on him” (Lam. 3: 28 ESV)
We need to sit in silence and listen to God when He is calling us to salvation and regeneration.
Lamentations 3 is an interesting chapter. It talks about a person who has been punished by God. The first 20 verses are all gloom and doom.
Then comes verses 21-23. “But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness” (Lam. 3: 21-23 ESV).
Jeremiah wrote that God wants us to wait quietly. What we are waiting for is His salvation (Lam. 3: 26).
Once we are alone with God, we can truly search for and seek Him. He will spend the time with us to convict us and to answer our questions.
Searching for and Seeking God
Hearing His Word (Rom. 10: 17).
Reading His Word (Rev. 1: 3).
Praying to Him (Heb. 4: 16).
Studying His Word (Ac. 17: 11).
Meditating on His Word (Ps. 1: 1-2).
Memorizing His Word (Ps. 119: 11).
To me, this just fleshes out how we are to “be still, and know that I am God …” (Ps. 46: 10 ESV). We are to
• Sit alone (Lam. 3: 28).
• Keep hope (Lam. 3: 29).
• Give up our sense of entitlement and arrogance by turning the other cheek (Lam. 3: 30).
• Self-evaluate (Lam. 3: 40).
• Praise God (Lam. 3: 41).
• Call upon the name of the Lord (Lam. 3: 55).
I love what Spurgeon called it. He called it submissive silence. I think that is what silence of the soul is all about.
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Silence of the Flesh
“Be silent, all flesh, before the Lord, for he has roused himself from his holy dwelling” (Zech. 2: 13 ESV)
God’s priority is our salvation.
This verse takes silence a different way — but does it?
Watson took being silent before God as accepting either His mercy or His judgment. He wrote, “When wickedness prevails, when error spreads, when the Church is wasted, then the Almighty is represented as shutting His eyes, turning away His face, withholding His hand, and resting in His holy place. But when He makes Himself manifest in judgment or mercy, when He has nations to punish or to bless, when His Church calls for protection and help, then He is ‘raised up out of His holy habitation,’ and ‘all flesh’ is commanded to ‘keep silence’ before Him.”
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I can see that. When we are corrected, we generally do not feel like talking. When we are shown mercy, sometimes we are overwhelmed and can’t talk, either.
But if we look at the rest of Zechariah 2, we see Zechariah is sent to witness to someone. This is about calling the Israelites back from the Babylonian captivity.
That speaks to me. If we think about it, the flesh is our human nature. When we do the substitutions, it makes sense to me.
Be silent, human nature. Stop sinning before the Lord, for he has judged you and sentenced you to the Babylonian captivity. But now He has mercy on you and is calling you to salvation.
That is what happened. Adam and Eve were God’s children. Then, they caved to Satan’s temptation. God passed judgment on their sin and they were cast out of the Garden of Eden.
But God showed mercy on them. He designed the Plan of Salvation. He sent His Son Jesus to die to pay the penalty for our sins.
Glossary
God is always going to put our salvation experience as a priority. Our spiritual translation is more important than anything in His eyes.
Making the Connections
It is really important that we chill and let God work His salvation and regeneration in us. “This is what the Sovereign LORD, the Holy One of Israel, says: ‘Only in returning to me and resting in me will you be saved. In quietness and confidence is your strength …’ (Isa. 30: 15 NLT).
Only in resting in the Sovereign God will we be saved. We can do nothing on our own to save us — only God can. Remember, after conversion, we are working out our salvation through regeneration.
Yet, we try to work it out ourselves. “We sometimes leave too small a part for God in our work. We think that our carefully prepared sermon or lesson will do its own work, and forget to pray that the Holy Spirit may carry it home. We can teach truth. God alone can make that truth life-giving.”
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How Do We Apply This?
- Look for God working in our lives, not making sure God is working our plan out.
- Take a step back when we want to get judgmental.
- Practice submissive silence.
- Humbly confess our sins.
- Don’t run ahead of God.
- Don’t sit back and wait for God to give us everything. We serve Him.
- Don’t practice idle talk.
- Don’t make excuses for our sin.
- Don’t judge God and complain about Him.
- Bag our arrogance and holier-than-thou attitudes.
- Don’t try to elevate ourselves to be equal to or above God.
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Really, what it all boils down to is when we are still and focused on God, we are submitting to Him. Whatever God calls us to do, whoever He calls us to be — we need to say, “Yes, Lord.”
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Silence of the soul is a fancy way of saying focus on God. There are several other things we need to silence to have the best focus. In the next devotion, we will be talking about silencing our minds.
Father God. We want to silence our souls. We want to take our focus off the chaos of this world and put it firmly on You, the giver of peace. Help us tune out everything except Your still small voice. Amen.
What do you think?
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