Alone with God
George Macdonald, LL. D. Psalm 4:4 Stand in awe, and sin not: commune with your own heart on your bed, and be still. Selah. There is no religion, no praise, no worship, but of the individual. The text is what must be said to every single, solitary person. It addresses him ill the most solitary, silent time — when his day's work is done, and he is going to sleep. God spreads the curtain of darkness round about us, just that He may shut Himself in with His child. It is not bodily stillness alone. That is compelled. You cannot help going to sleep, God makes you. If it were not for this bodily sleep, we should all go mad. If there never be a silence in the soul, and a man goes on always with his own thoughts and schemes and endeavours, it brings about a moral and spiritual madness. It is not in the midst of the tumult of life that a man first of all is able to hear God. We have not got up to Jesus Christ yet; God was always with Him. So He is with us, but Jesus knew it and felt. But even He went out to the mountains at night, that there might be nothing between Him and God. I think God has sometimes great trouble in separating us far enough from Himself that He can look round and know us. It is the most natural thing that God and man should meet, and know and understand each other, that there should be the meeting together of the thought of the One with the thought of the other. If we do not do the will of God in the day, it is not likely that we will be still upon our beds that He may come and visit us. We need not be without Him during the day. Let us be jealous over ourselves. God will be readier to come to His child the next night if, during the day, he has been living childlike, walking in the steps of his Father, holding fast by Him. The one eternal, original, infinite blessing of the human soul is when in stillness the Father comes and says, "My child, I am here." (George Macdonald, LL. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Stand in awe, and sin not: commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still. Selah. WEB: Stand in awe, and don't sin. Search your own heart on your bed, and be still. Selah.