Left to ourselves we would have nothing more than restlessness, driven by the realization that there is something more to know and love. But God will not leave us to ourselves. According to Psalm 23:2, He makes us lie down in green pastures. He leads us beside quiet waters. The verbs suggest gentle persuasion - a shepherd patiently, persistently encouraging his sheep to the place where their hungers and thirsts will be assuaged.
In David's day, "green pastures" were oases, verdant places in the desert toward which shepherds led their thirsty flocks. Left to themselves, sheep would wander off into the wilderness and die. Experienced shepherds knew the terrain and urged their flocks toward familiar grasslands and streams where they could forage and feed, lie down and rest.
The picture here is not of sheep grazing and drinking, but at rest, lying down - "stretched out" to use David's word. The verb leads suggests a slow and leisurely pace. The scene is one of tranquility, satisfaction, and rest.
The common practice of shepherds was to graze their flocks in rough pasture early in the morning, leading them to better grasses as the morning progressed, and then coming to a cool and shaded oasis for noontime rest.
The image of placid waters emphasizes the concept of rest - the condition of having all our passions satisfied. Augustine cried out, "What will make me take my rest in You . . . so I can forget my restlessness and take hold of You, the one good thing in my life?"
The compulsion begins with God. "He makes me [causes me to] lie down in green pastures, He leads me beside quiet waters" (23:2). The Good Shepherd "calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice" (Jn. 10:3-4).
God makes the first move. He takes the initiative by calling us and leading us to a place of rest. It's not because we're seeking God; He is seeking us.
God's cry to wayward Adam and Eve, "Where are you?" suggests the loneliness He feels when separated from those He loves. G. K. Chesterton suggests that the whole Bible is about the "loneliness of God." I like the thought that in some inexplicable way God misses me; that He can't bear to be separated from me; that I'm always on His mind; that He patiently, insistently calls me and seeks me, not for my own sake alone, but for His. He cries, "Where are you?"
Deep within us is a place for God. We were made for God and without His love we ache in loneliness and emptiness. He calls from deep space to our depths: "Deep calls to deep" (Ps. 42:7).
David put it this way, "My heart says of You, 'Seek His face!' 'Your face, Lord, I will seek' " (Ps. 27:8). God spoke to the depths of David's heart, uttering His heart's desire: "Seek My face." And David responded with alacrity, "I will seek Your face, Lord."
And so it is: God calls us - seeking us to seek Him - and our hearts resonate with longing for Him. That understanding has radically changed the way I look at my relationship to God. It is now neither duty nor discipline - a regimen I impose on myself like a hundred sit-ups and fifty push-ups each day - but a response, an answer, to One who has been calling me all my life.
What are those green pastures and quiet waters to which God leads us? And where are they? What is the reality behind these metaphors?
God Himself is our "true pasture" (Jer. 50:7) and our pool of quiet water. He is our true nourishment, our living water. If we do not take Him in, we will starve.
There is a hunger in the human heart which nothing but God can satisfy. There is a thirst that no one but He can quench. "Do not work for food that spoils," Jesus said, "but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. . . . I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me will never go hungry, and he who believes in Me will never be thirsty" (Jn. 6:27,35).
Malcolm Muggeridge's confession is a striking expression of this thought:
I may, I suppose, regard myself as being a relatively successful man. People occasionally look at me on the street. That's fame. I can fairly easily earn enough to qualify for the highest slopes of inland revenue. That's success. Furnished with money and a little fame, even the elderly, if they care to, can partake of trendy diversions. That's pleasure. It might happen once in a while that something I said or wrote was sufficiently heeded to persuade myself that it represented a serious impact on our time. That's fulfillment. Yet I say to you, and I beg of you to believe me, multiply these tiny triumphs by a million, add them all together, and they are nothing, less than nothing, a positive impediment, measured against one draught of that living water that is offered to the spiritually hungry.
But how do we "graze" on God and "drink" Him in? Once more we're confronted with symbolism. What do the metaphors mean?
The process begins, as all relationships do, with a "meeting." As David said:
As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for You, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God? (Ps. 42:1-2).
God is a real person. He is not a human invention, a concept, a theory, or a projection of ourselves. He is overwhelmingly alive - real beyond our wildest dreams. He can be "met" to use David's commonplace word. A. W. Tozer wrote:
God is a Person and as such can be cultivated as any person can. God is a Person and in the depths of His mighty nature He thinks, wills, enjoys, feels, loves, desires, and suffers as any other person may. God is a Person and can be known in increasing degrees of intimacy as we prepare our hearts for the wonder of it.
That's the reality, but it's also the rub: Are we willing to prepare ourselves to meet Him? He responds to the slightest approach, but we're only as close as we want to be. "If . . . you seek the Lord your God, you will find Him," Moses promised, then added this proviso: "if you look for Him with all your heart and with all your soul" (Dt. 4:29).
We don't have to look very hard or very long for God. He's only as far away as our hearts (Rom. 10:8-9), but He will not intrude. He calls us, but then waits for our answer. Our progress toward Him is determined by our desire to engage Him in a personal way - to know Him.
We say, "Something's wrong with me. I'm not happy. There must be something more," but we do nothing about our discontent. It's this mood of resignation that keeps us from joy. Our first task is to get honest with ourselves. Do we want God or not? If we do, we must be willing to make the effort to respond to Him. "Come near to God," said James, "and He will come near to you" (Jas. 4:8). It's a matter of desire. "O God, You are my God, earnestly I seek You," the psalmist said (Ps. 63:1).
TAKING TIME ALONE WITH GOD
"Begin small and start promptly" is an old Quaker saying. The idea is to keep things simple and to begin soon. Simplicity begins with solitude - not mere time alone, but time alone with God.
Henri Nouwen wrote:
Solitude begins with a time and place for God, and Him alone. If we really believe not only that God exists, but that He is actively present in our lives - healing, teaching, and guiding - we need to set aside a time and space to give Him our undivided attention.
But where can we find that solitude? Where can we find a quiet place in the midst of the din and demands of this world? "In a crowd, it's difficult to see God," Augustine said. "This vision craves secret retirement." "Go into your room," Jesus said, "close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen" (Mt. 6:6).
There is a meeting place as close as our closet door - a time and place where we can meet with God and hear His thoughts and He can hear ours; a time for the two of us where He can have our full attention and we can have His.
Solitude is where we are least alone and where our deepest loneliness can be relieved. It's a healing place where God can repair the damage done by the noise and pressure of the world. "The more you visit it," Thomas A' Kempis said, "the more you will want to return."
"I will awaken the dawn," said David (Ps. 57:8). There's something to be said for meeting God before our busy days begin and our schedules begin to tyrannize us, though we must not understand this in some legalistic way to mean we have to get up before the sun to merit a meeting with God. For many, morning is the most opportune time; for others, it's more of an opportunity for the devil. There are times when it not only seems easier to meet with God, it is easier. It's something you have to work out with your body. The main thing is eagerness to meet Him. The advantage of doing so early is that we hear His thoughts before others invade our minds.
The first step is to find a Bible, a quiet place, and an uninterrupted period of time. Sit quietly and remind yourself that you're in the presence of God. He is there with you, eager to meet with you. "Stay in that secret place," A. W. Tozer said, "till the surrounding noises begin to fade out of your heart, till a sense of God's presence has enveloped you. Listen for His inward voice till you learn to recognize it."
LISTENING TO GOD THROUGH HIS WORD
Until we take time to be quiet, we'll not hear God. God cannot be heard in noise and restlessness; only in silence. He will speak to us if we will give Him a chance, if we will listen, if we will be quiet. "Be still," the psalmist wrote, "and know that I am God" (Ps. 46:10).
"Listen, listen to Me," God pleads, "and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare. Give ear and come to Me; hear Me, that your soul may live" (Isa. 55:2-3).
Listen to Him. There's no other way to take Him in. "When Your words came, I ate them" said Jeremiah (Jer. 15:16). Sit at His feet and let Him feed you. That's the "better" place to be (Lk. 10:38-42).
The problem with many of us is that though we read God's Word, we're not feeding on God. We're more intent on mastering the text - finding out its precise meaning, gathering theories and theologies - so we can talk more intelligently about God. The main purpose of reading the Bible, however, is not to accumulate data about Him, but to "come to Him," to encounter Him as our living God.
Jesus said to the best-read Bible students of His day, "You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about Me" (Jn. 5:39).
The scholars read the Bible, but they didn't listen to God; they "never heard His voice" (Jn. 5:37). We should do more than read words; we should seek the Word exposed in the words. We want to move beyond information to seeing God and being informed and shaped by His truth. There's a passing exhilaration - the "joy of discovery" - in acquiring knowledge about the Bible, but there's no life in it. The Bible is not an end in itself, but a stimulus to our interaction with God.
Start with a conscious desire to engage Him in a personal way. Select a portion of Scripture - a verse, a paragraph, a chapter - and read it over and over. Think of Him as present and speaking to you, disclosing His mind and emotions and will. God is articulate: He speaks to us through His Word. Meditate on His words until His thoughts begin to take shape in your mind.
Thoughts is exactly the right word because that's precisely what the Bible is - "the mind of the Lord" (1 Cor. 2:16). When we read His Word, we are reading His mind - what He knows, what He feels, what He wants, what He enjoys, what He desires, what He loves, what He hates.
Take time to reflect on what He is saying. Think about each word. Give yourself time for prayerful contemplation until God's heart is revealed and your heart is exposed.
Jean-Pierre de Caussade wrote, "Read quietly, slowly, word for word to enter into the subject more with the heart than with the mind. From time to time make short pauses to allow these truths time to flow through all the recesses of the soul."
Listen carefully to the words that touch your emotions and meditate on His goodness. "Feed on His faithfulness" (Ps. 37:3 NKJV). Think about His kindness and those glimpses of His unfailing love that motivate you to love Him more (Ps. 48:9). Savor His words. "Taste and see that the Lord is good" (Ps. 34:8).
Mother Teresa said, "Spend one hour a day in adoration of the Lord and you'll be all right." She might say something different to you and me. So much depends on our temperament, our family and job demands, the state of our health, our age and level of maturity. At first 10 or 15 minutes may be all we can manage. Then perhaps we will be ready for an hour every day. It's not important how much time we spend at first. The important thing is to make a beginning. God's Spirit will let us know where to go from there.
Our reading should be toward relishing God and delighting in Him - "to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord," as David said (Ps. 27:4). When we approach God in that way, it inclines us to want more of Him. "I have tasted Thee," Augustine said, "and now I hunger for Thee."
There's no need to worry about texts that we don't understand. Some meanings will escape us. Everything difficult indicates something more than our hearts can yet embrace. As Jesus said to His disciples, "I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear" (Jn. 16:12). There's much that we will never know, but some of the hard questions will be answered when we're ready for them.
God can never be understood through the intellect. Insight arises from purity of heart - from love, humility, and a desire to obey. It's the "pure in heart" who "will see God," Jesus said (Mt. 5:8). The more of God's truth we know and want to obey, the more we know.
George MacDonald wrote, "The words of the Lord are seeds sown in our hearts by the sower. They have to fall into our hearts to grow. Meditation and prayer must water them and obedience keep them in the light. Thus they will bear fruit for the Lord's gathering."
We shouldn't worry about our doubts either. How could God possibly reveal Himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? Madeleine L'Engle said, "Those who believe they believe in God . . . without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, not in God Himself."
Uncertainty is the name of the game. The best thing is to take our questionings and doubts directly to God, as David often did. His psalms are filled with discomfort and disagreement with God's ways. He fills page after page with confusion and disbelief. It's good to do so. God can handle our hesitancy.
Sometimes we're mentally dull or emotionally flat, weary, and tired. On such occasions it's worthless to try to make ourselves think more deeply or respond more intensely. If the value of our times alone with God depends on our emotional state, we will always be troubled. We should never worry about how we feel. Even when our minds are confused or our hearts are cold we can learn from our solitude. Don't try to make your heart love God. Just give it to Him.
If we're having a hard time with God, if we don't yet trust His heart, we should read the Gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There we hear what Jesus said and did and what was said about Him. There we see Him making visible the invisible God. When Philip, Jesus' disciple, asked to see God, Jesus replied, "Don't you know Me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'?" (Jn. 14:9).
One commentator has written, "Philip's request is the profound expression of deep hunger behind the whole religious quest, speaking for saints and mystics, thinkers, moralists, and men of faith of every age. 'He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father,' is Christ's staggering response. That is what the doctrine of Christ's divine Sonship really means, and why it matters. In His words we hear God speaking; in His deeds we see God at work; in His reproach we glimpse God's judgment; in His love we feel God's heart beating. If this be not true, we know nothing of God at all. If it be true - and we know it is - then Jesus is God manifest in the flesh, the unique, incomparable, only begotten Son of the Living God."
The main use of the Gospels is to help us see the character of God made real, personal, and understandable in Jesus. What we see Jesus doing - caring, suffering, weeping, calling, seeking - is what God is doing and has been doing all along. If you can't love God, try to see Him in Jesus. There He's revealed as One who has no limits to His love; One to whom we can come with all our doubts, disappointments, and misjudgments; One "whom we can approach without fear and to whom we can submit ourselves without despair" (Blaise Pascal). In the Gospels we see that God is the only God worth having.
RESPONDING TO GOD IN PRAYER
As we listen to God, we should answer. This is prayer - our response to the revelation and unfolding of God's heart. "My God, Thy creature answers Thee," said the French poet, Alfred de Musset. Prayer, understood in that way, is an extension of our visits with God rather than something tacked on.
Our meetings with God are like a polite conversation with a friend. They're not monologues in which one person does all the talking and the other does all the listening, but dialogues in which we listen thoughtfully to one another's self-disclosure and then respond.
One of my colleagues describes the process this way: If we're reading a note from a loved one in which we're praised, loved, appreciated, counseled, corrected, and helped in various ways and that individual is present in the room while we read, it's only right that we should express thanks, reciprocate love, ask questions, and in other ways react to the message. It would be rude to do otherwise. This is prayer.
Around 1370, a book was published with the title The Cloud of Unknowing. It's thought that the author was a spiritual director in a monastery, but we don't know his name. Much of what he wrote is hard to understand, but when it comes to prayer he was profoundly simple.
God, he said, can be known, even through "the cloud of unknowing" by responding to Him with "just a little word . . . the shorter it is the better." His book is a textbook of succinct and simple prayer:
It is good to think of Your kindness, O God, and to love You and praise You for that. Yet it is far better to think upon Your simple being, and to love You and praise You for Yourself. Lord, I covet You and seek You and nothing but You. My God, You are all I need, and more; whoever has You needs nothing else in this life.
If you don't know where to start, pray David's psalms. David's life was characterized by prayer. In Psalm 109:4 David wrote, "In return for my friendship they accuse me, but I am a man of prayer." The translators supplied "a man of," but the text reads simply, "but I am prayer." Prayer was the essence of David's life and his genius, as it is ours. We have this access to God, this intimacy with Him, this opportunity to receive all that the heart of God has stored up for us. It is the means by which we receive God's gifts, the means by which everything is done. David teaches us to pray.
Prayer is worship. Our praying should be full of adoration, affection, and fondness for God that He is who He is, that He created us in order to have someone on whom He could shower His love, that He stretched out His arms on the cross, and that He intends, in the fullest sense, to make whole men and women out of us. In worship, as the old word worth-ship implies, we declare what we value the most. It is one of the best ways in the world to love God.
Prayer is the highest expression of our dependence on God. It is asking for what we want. We can ask for anything - even the most difficult things. "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God" (Phil. 4:6). Anything large enough to occupy our minds is large enough to hang a prayer on.
Prayer, however, by its nature is requesting. It is not insisting or clamoring. We can make no demands of God or deals with Him. Furthermore, we're coming to a friend. Friends don't make demands. They ask and then wait. We wait with patience and submission until God gives us what we request - or something more.
David wrote, "I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me" (Ps. 131:2). David was in exile, waiting for God, learning not to worry himself with God's delays and other mysterious ways. No longer restless and craving, he waited for God to answer in His own time and in His own way. He is able to do far more than anything we can ask or imagine, but He must do it in His time and in His way. We ask in our time and in our way; God answers in His.
Prayer is asking for understanding. It is the means by which we comprehend what God is saying to us in His Word. The process by which we gain awareness of His mind is not natural, but supernatural. Spiritual things are discerned spiritually (1 Cor. 2:6-16). There is truth that can never be grasped by the human intellect. It cannot be discovered; it must be disclosed. Certainly we can understand the facts in the Bible apart from God's help, but we can never plumb its depths, never fully appreciate "what God has prepared for those who love Him" (v. 9). We must pray and wait for truth to come honestly into our minds.
Prayer moves what we know from our heads to our hearts. It's our hedge against hypocrisy, the way by which we begin to ring true. Our perceptions of truth are always ahead of our condition. Prayer brings us more into conformity. It bridges the gap between what we know and what we are.
Prayer focuses and unites our fragmented hearts. We have a thousand necessities. It's impossible for us to purify them and simplify them and integrate them into one. David prayed, "Give me an undivided heart" (Ps. 86:11). He wanted to love God with his whole heart, but he couldn't sustain the effort. Other interests and affections pulled him and divided him, so he asked God to guard his heart and unite its affections into one.
The prophet Isaiah wrote, "He wakens me morning by morning, wakens my ear to listen like one being taught. The Sovereign Lord has opened my ears, and I have not been rebellious; I have not drawn back" (Isa. 50:4-5). Centering on God each morning should be done as though it had never been done before. In that quiet place He comforts us, He instructs us, He listens to us, He prepares our hearts and strengthens us for the day. There we learn to love Him and worship Him again. We esteem His words and defer to Him once more. We get His fresh perspective on the problems and possibilities of our day.
Then we should take His presence with us all through the day - journeying, pausing, waiting, listening, recalling what He said to us in the morning. He is our teacher, our philosopher, our friend; our gentlest, kindest, and most interesting companion.
He is with us wherever we go. He is in the commonplace, whether we know it or not. "Surely the Lord is in this place," Jacob said of a most unlikely location, "and I was not aware of it" (Gen. 28:16). We may not realize that He is close by. We may feel lonely and sad and desolate. Our day may seem bleak and dreary without a visible ray of hope, yet He is present. God has said, "Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you." So we say with confidence, "The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid" (Heb. 13:5-6).
The clamor of this visible and audible world is so persistent and God's quiet voice sometimes is so faint that we forget that He is near. But not to worry: He cannot forget us.
In God's presence there is satisfaction. His lush meadows are boundless. His still water runs deep. "There," I say to myself, "[I] will lie down in good grazing land, and there [I] will feed in a rich pasture" (Ezek. 34:14).
