Peace and Quiet of Worship

Jeanne Stewart, Oklahoma

 

What is peace and quiet?  For some it may be that moment just after the last person has left the workplace with that important paper they just had to have yesterday. You realize the phones are not ringing, or the fax beeping, the computer has finished printing, and the boss has finally gone to the meeting you have been working toward all day. For the first time, the ticking of an old fashioned alarm clock on your desk takes you back to a quiet grandma’s farm where everything stood still and for a moment in time, peace was there and quiet sat beside you.

 

In Isaiah 30, a word from the Lord is spoken to His chosen children, Israel, who are, as verse 9 reads, “. . . rebellious people, deceitful children, children unwilling to listen to the Lord’s instruction.”  And you realize as you continue to read into verse 15, they have a loving Father God who desires that all His children find a place of peace and rest in Him: “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength . . .” Trusting confidence is our Heavenly Father’s way of true peace and quiet when all around us is in chaos. We live in a sin-infested world with all the disease and arrogance of Egypt. The gods of this world often call louder than that still small voice of trusting confidence. When our hearts turn away from our Lord to look toward the turmoil of life, we are allowing our peace to leak out into the desert of life and our quietness screams in our ears, “failure!”

 

It is only the gentleness of a loving Father God that continues to reach to us. As Deuteronomy 4:29 reads, “. . .if from there you seek the Lord your God, you will find Him if you look for Him with all your heart and with all your soul.”  Here we see two areas we have to give unto our Lord:  the heart - the spirit of man, and the soulish realm - the emotions.  Seeking peace from outside sources is only in vain because this deals only with the outer person.  Our soulish part is controlled by emotions and is fed by the outward circumstances of life. Our emotions can be a hindrance to hearing God’s voice. Listening to our emotions keeps us from hearing His voice with our spirit.  When we start reasoning and doubting, this dominates our thinking and we will not hear the still, small voice of the Spirit. “For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline.” 2 Timothy 1:7.

 

  True peace comes from God.  That is, when our spirit person within is touched by God’s Spirit.  Encountering His presence through worship requires tuning out the everyday circumstances in our thought life.  Worship focuses our attention on God rather than our problems and our desires.  Worship is something we do, not something that happens on Sunday morning through the talents of the worship leader. It is an act of our will to worship our God anytime.

 

When we take the responsibility to seek and find His peace no matter what is occurring on the outside, we truly have learned the simple truth of trusting our God and we step into our spirit person and walk in Him in spirit and truth. “Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.  God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.” John 4:23, 24.

 

We seem to make everything so hard, even the simple truth of His Word.  The Word has told us to seek Him with all our heart and all our soul.  We make it hard because we often do not want to take the time to listen to what the Spirit is saying to us. We only want to feel with our soulish emotions.  The material world seeks with its emotions, but we as true worshipers seek with our spirit.  And when we truly are seeking, He comes in peace and quiet and we are not alone, for the Father is with us whispering truth to our spirit.

 

Let us then learn to discipline the soulish side of our emotions in hearing with our spirit as we do as Psalm 99:5 declares, “Exalt the Lord our God and worship at His footstool He is Holy.” Sitting at His feet we come with expectation of receiving into our spirits His divine presence through our worship unto Him. We begin to freely worship Him out of a heart exploding with love as the soulish realm responds readily and correctly.  We sense the peace and the quiet of being near Him and understanding better what true worship from the heart actually is. In worship peace comes and quiet sits beside us.

 

Jeanne Stewart

 

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