Practical Tips for Making Sense of God’s Direction in the NOW. (Part 1)
“I know God has a plan. I pray for direction to follow it, patience to wait on it, and knowledge to know when it comes.” (spiritualinspiration.tumblr.com)
Everybody Wants To Know That God Has A Plan. I just want to know how to figure it out.
If you believe in God and follow his path there has always been this thought—Why was I born or simple yet, what does the Divine have in store me? How can I know His Will that He has for me? We search and search for meaning through sacred text. We search for meaning through sacred prayer. And sometimes we come up answerless. Personally, I think that we have made it too hard to figure out what God wants. I believe the pathway to getting that answer is in the simplest ways.
Today’s lesson is designed for all, but especially the Christ-Follower. If I am to be that version of humanity that he expects, I need to figure out how to get there, and in a way that makes sense.
Knowing God’s Will – Through the Act of Stillness
Be still, and know that I am God! I am exalted among the nations, I am exalted in the earth.” (Ps 46:10, NRSV).
What does this mean? What does stillness look like? How can stillness be an act to knowing God’s will? When we look at the context in which this Psalm was written the focus was on being still so that God could enable his people to have victory. When we expand on this meaning in practical terms of everyday life we need God’s intervention. We need him to break through the noise of the day to give us direction.
This pause that we impose on ourselves is the act of being still. Rather than see him deal with our enemies he deals with our life. He speaks to it. This stillness is commonly called meditation.
Meditation = Reflection upon, pondering, thinking about. In meditation one meets with God and learns what God wants of his people.
Though meditation is commonly associated with Eastern religions, it is a Christian practice advocated in Scripture. Foster (1978) notes that in Eastern forms of meditation the emphasis is on detachment from the world, from oneself, and from God;
However, Christian meditation involves attachment, in which there is “detachment from the confusion around us in order to have a richer attachment to God and other human beings” (15).
Though Christian meditation has come to involve many practices, such as clearing and centering of one’s mind and developing concentration through focusing on some aspect of creation, the practice of meditation in a biblical context, primarily in the psalms, centers on God (Ps. 63:6), the law of the Lord (Pss. 1:2; 119:148), and the works of God (Ps. 77:12).
In the Psalms meditation is primarily concerned with the intentional, directed engagement of the Word of God as the means for coming into God’s presence. The psalmist declared one blessed whose “delight is in the law of the Lord” and who meditates on it day and night” (Ps. 1:2). The purpose of meditation on God’s Word is described in Joshua 1:8 as an intentional focusing on the will of God in order to do it.
Meditation is not passive, but it requires one to be actively engaged in listening to God, opening oneself to the will of God as revealed in Scripture, reflecting on it, permitting it to become the basis for judging one’s own character and actions and to lead to decisions regarding living out the Christian life.
Meditation is a focusing on Scripture for internalizing and personalizing the will of God in one’s own life, for one’s own discipleship and spiritual growth, rather than a preparation for preaching or teaching. Such a focus often necessitates dwelling on Scripture with one’s whole being—not merely on the meaning of the text, but on its mood, in order to make it present to oneself.
This requires reading Scripture slowly, with intentionality and deliberateness, so that when a passage makes an impression the reader is prepared to stop in order to reflect on and ponder it. In Evangelical dictionary of Christian education (pp. 456–457). Baker Academic.
Her are concluding thoughts about stillness int” Tozers’s Topical Reader.
Stillness; Meditation Our fathers had much to say about stillness, and by stillness they meant the absence of motion or the absence of noise or both.They felt that they must be still for at least a part of the day, or that day would be wasted. God can be known in the tumult of the world if His providence has for the time placed us there, but He is known best in the silence. So they held, and so the sacred Scriptures declare. Inward assurance comes out of the stillness. We must be still to know. (Psalm 46:10)
God Tells the Man Who Cares, 10. Tozer, A. W., & Eggert, R. (1998). The Tozer Topical Reader (Vol. 2, p. 221). WingSpread.
We have learned today that God’s Will can be known through the act of stillness. Take some time today and “Be Still and Know that I AM God.
The Revivalist 
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