“Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.” (Psalm 46:10) You’re not praying, praising, thinking, or in deep contemplation, you are like Moses in the cleft, He is coming.
There is great fear in the life of the born-again believer in the anticipation of the arrival of God in their lives, these do not often ask amiss, (James 4:3) they are of a contrite heart, they realize that being still before God means anticipating God to arrive, and there is great fear in these moments, as there should be. “And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last.” (Rev. 1:17)
How many times can you recall in the Word of God when men met God they fell as one dead? The Almighty is not just some shining light that you may have envisioned at the foot of your bed, He is Great and Terrible, (Deut. 10:17) He is the Creator and Sustainer of all that is, and if you truly want to meet Him, you must prepare your heart. Not just in the way that many Evangelical churches teach, not in the manner of dreams and visions that the Charismatics search for, He is not the dead and dying Savior the Roman Catholic cult preaches, professing to drag the Almighty Himself down from above the heavens and binding Him into a cracker.
To be still in front of the Most High is to take your life in your hands, to be still is to expect, and not in the transcendental ways of eastern mysticism, not in a sort of “sensory deprivation” sort of way, it is to wait on God, expecting Him to reveal Himself to you, and then in fear and trembling continue to work out your salvation (Phil. 2:12) in accordance to His will and Word.
If you’re searching for some visible manifestation of Him, of some “supernatural” event to occur while you in anticipation wait upon Him, then you will probably sit there for your whole life.
This isn’t some magic trick you’re looking for; you’re not expecting to come out of your closet with the need for a vail as Moses did, (Exo. 34:33) you are there for one reason and one reason only, so that He would teach you how to glorify His name even greater.
When the messengers got back to John the Baptist with the words of Jesus and His reply to John’s questions (Matt. 11:2-6) my guess would be that at that moment he was probably the most content person on the planet. Every question he had ever had, had just been answered. He had waited on God, and God Himself had given him the knowledge of the truth about Himself.
Every man of God wants to know if he is pleasing in the eyes of the Lord, if he is a profitable servant, these questions burn constantly within them, they must know, they cannot be wrong. “Wait on the LORD: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the LORD.” (Psalm 27:14) Above all in this area lives the fear that something they will do, or perhaps not do, will in some way dishonor His name, that because of them someone will not learn the truth, someone will be led astray. And so they are still before the Lord, many, many times, they wait patiently, and then they act in faith.
The Holy Spirit of God has been sent to us, He indwells those who have trusted their salvation to the Lord Jesus Christ, He is the only One that can lead us to those times, the only One that can teach us what it means to fear the Most High. The reverential trust that we desire cannot be permanent within us until our sin nature is removed from us, and so we must be still before Him, we must listen when the truth is revealed to us, and then in faith we must act, we must be obedient to His will and Word. There is no other way to be profitable.
