Dear Friends,
Just outside the town of Dunoon on the Firth of Clyde is a little spot that we often visit when on holiday there. It's one of those places where, after a short walk along a well-kept path, you suddenly find yourself in a hollow surrounded by hills, and the words of the psalmist so readily springs to your mind: “As the hills are about Jerusalem, so is the arm of the Lord about them that fear him.” It can be very quiet there, and seldom fails to impress the heart with the truth of the necessity of some measure of “quietness” in the life of the believer.
We live in an age of noise. The world never seems to be happy unless every waking moment is filled with the din of T.V., or radio, or the general chatter and clatter of idle communication. The Church too, has somewhat relegated the place of quietness to a dim and distant past generation, and there appears to be little exhortation or desire to meditate, or muse, or think very deeply on the things of our God. We live in an age of “racket” evangelism, where religious beat-groups grind out their worldly music, pounding the senses (in exactly the same way as their worldly counterparts do) until the extraction of a “decision” becomes a simple matter of technique. Gone are the days when the unbeliever was left in quietness before his God with those religious impressions gained through the ministry of God's word in the gospel; left with his impressions on things eternal, so that they might, by God's Holy Spirit, mature in his heart and mind into the seeking and finding of life eternal in Jesus Christ. The plan now seems to be to pummel, and then, rush the “conditioned” listener into a profession and vague acceptance of a vague salvation formula. How different is the whole drift of the Word of God and the history of the gospel in an age earlier than our own.
Remember that word with regards to Mary the mother of our Lord, when the shepherds at the manger began to make their revelations known all around: “But Mary kept all these things,” it says, “and pondered them in her heart.” Joseph, too, set aside time to meditate on the whole scope of what lay before him, for, “As he thought on these things,” it says, “the angel of the Lord appeared unto him.” There is, surely, a sanctity in silence where, under the word of the Lord, we may come very near to the mind of the Lord for our lives. But like so much else, the spirit of the world is “too much with us.” Perhaps the old Highlander had a good word on the subject, when he related how he spent much of his spare time, “Sometimes I sit and think,” he said, “and other times I think and sit.”
You remember how it was when “all Judea,” as it says, went out into the wilderness to hear John the Baptist preaching? As they watched John's actions and listened to his preaching, we are told that they “mused in their hearts of John, whether he were the Christ or not.” It's a picturesque phrase: they “mulled” it over – like Mary, they “pondered” the things that their eyes were seeing and ears were hearing. The Psalmist, too, knew all about the art of musing in his own day; “I muse on the works of thy hands,” he told the Lord in one psalm, and in the only other psalm in which it occurs it offers us a wealth of advice for these days in which we live. “My heart was hot within me,” says David in the 39th psalm; “while I was musing, the fire burned …” David started off there with a wrong kind of musing – a human musing without the influence of the great truths of God. He was perplexed as he saw the prosperity of the wicked in the land of the living; and he resented their progress at a time in his life when he himself seemed to be downcast. His heart was “hot within him,” as he tells us there; his old carnal desires and ambitions were getting more and more kindled, and the more he mused, the hotter the oven burned –“While I was musing, the fire burned.” Ah, but then his musing moved from the superficial to the spiritual, and the outcome was a very different thing from the commencement – “Then spake I with my tongue, Lord, make me to know mine end.” Superficial musing can be a dangerous thing, for it amounts to little more than a carnal assessment of a given situation. So, the believing child of God must learn to cultivate the art in its right form, and muse and ponder on until it takes us to God and enables us to see the true “end” of all things.
Take old John Bunyan; he knew all about musing. When he was under the conviction of sin by God's Holy Spirit, how he mused then. “At another time,” he writes in his Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, “I sat by the fire in my house, and was musing on my great wretchedness …” And how we could do with gospel preaching that would make the unconverted muse on their great wretchedness. And then, when Bunyan came out of his wretched state, the whole of his Christian life became one long muse, for, as he says himself, “the whole of the Bible is one long muse.” “I mused, I mused, I mused,” he says.
As you may know, when you place the letter “A” in front of a word it can act as a negative, I wonder, have we so little “musement” in our churches today, because we have so much “A-musement”? I wonder!
Yours,
W.J. Seaton
This Page Title – The Necessity of Quietness – The Pastor's Letter September 1975 The Wicket Gate Magazine "A Continuing Witness". Internet Edition number 10# – placed on line May 2015 Wicket Gate contact address – Mr Cliff Westcombe cw@wicketgate.co.uk If you wish to be notified when each new edition goes on line please send an e-mail to the above address Magazine web address – www.wicketgate.co.uk |