The Stillness

These are among the most quoted words in the whole Psalter, and among the most misunderstood. We have made them a gentle motto for pleasant moments, printed over calm waters and quiet fields, as though the verse were an invitation to relax. But look where the words actually stand. The psalm around them is a psalm of catastrophe. The earth is removed, the mountains are carried into the midst of the sea, the waters roar and are troubled, the nations rage, the kingdoms are moved, and God utters his voice and the earth melts. It is into that, into a world coming apart at the seams, that the command falls. Be still. The stillness of this verse is not the ease of a soul with nothing to trouble it. It is a command shouted over the noise of chaos, to a soul in the middle of the storm.

And the word we soften into be still is stronger and stranger than it sounds. It means to let go, to drop the hands, to cease, to desist. Cease striving, some render it, and that is closer to the bone. It is spoken to a soul with its hands full and its knuckles white, gripping and grasping and struggling to hold everything together by force, and it commands that soul to stop. Let go. Unclench. Put down the weight you were never meant to carry and were never able to. The stillness God commands is not first of all a quiet in the room. It is a ceasing in the will, the surrender of a heart that has been trying, all its life, to do the work that belongs to God alone.

THE WAR AGAINST STILLNESS

We cannot be still, and it is worth knowing why, for the reason lies very deep. We believe, somewhere beneath our thinking, that if we stop striving everything will collapse, that it is our own ceaseless effort and vigilance and worry that keep our small world from flying apart. We are, in our own estimation, holding it all together, and to be still would be to let it fall. This is why rest is so hard for us and why we feel a low guilt in it, as though we were shirking. We are trying, without ever saying it aloud, to be God, to be the one on whom everything depends, and the command to be still is unbearable to such a soul because it means laying that burden down and trusting Another to carry what we have been carrying.

The Lord met this very sickness in the house of a friend. Martha received him and then busied herself with much serving, and grew resentful of her sister Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and heard his word and did nothing that Martha counted as help. And when Martha complained, the Lord answered her with a tenderness that was also a correction. Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things, but one thing is needful, and Mary hath chosen that good part. He did not scold her for serving. He grieved that she was careful and troubled, cumbered, anxious, driven, and that in all her motion she was missing the one thing that was needful, which was to be still at his feet and receive him. Mary had chosen the stillness, and it would not be taken from her.

THE HARDEST LABOR

Let no one imagine that this stillness is idleness or that it comes easily to the quiet by temperament. It is the hardest labor there is, far harder than the busyness it replaces, because it is the active and deliberate surrender of control, and everything in us fights it. It is easier by far to keep working than to stop and trust. Return unto thy rest, O my soul, the psalmist commands himself, and the very fact that he must command it, must speak to his own soul as to a reluctant creature that will not come home on its own, shows how unnatural rest has become to us. The stillness must be fought for. The churning thoughts must be quieted, not by emptying the mind into a blank, which is the counsel of another road entirely, but by handing every anxious thought, one after another, to the One who invites it. Casting all your care upon him, the apostle says, for he careth for you. The stillness is not the absence of care. It is care cast onto stronger shoulders.

This is the inner quiet the old fathers sought and named, the stilling of the soul’s endless agitation so that it might rest in God. It is not a technique for producing a pleasant emptiness, and it is not pursued for the sake of the calm it brings, though calm may come. It is pursued for the sake of the second half of the verse, which is the whole purpose of the first. Be still, and know that I am God. The stillness is for the sake of the knowing. As long as I am striving to be God, I cannot know that he is God, for the two cannot occupy the same throne. Only when I cease, and drop my hands, and let him be God, do I come to know, not as a fact I already held but as a living relief, that he is God and I am not, and that this is the best news my straining soul could ever receive.

LET HIM BE EXALTED

And what do we come to know in the stillness? Not chiefly new information, but him, and one thing about him above all, which the verse names twice for emphasis. I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. God will be God. He will be lifted up and reign, among the raging nations and over the melting earth, entirely apart from our striving, whether we help him or hinder him or lie down and rest. There is a vast and settling relief in this for the anxious heart, once it truly lands. The world does not rest on your shoulders. It never did. God will be exalted with or without your worry, and your frantic effort to secure what only he can secure has been, all along, a kind of unbelief dressed up as diligence.

PEACE, BE STILL

The same word the psalm speaks to the soul, the Lord once spoke to the sea. When the storm rose on the lake and the waves beat into the ship until even fishermen were sure they would drown, he was in the stern, asleep on a pillow. They woke him with the reproach that fear always throws at God, carest thou not that we perish. And he arose and rebuked the wind and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. Mark how he slept through the storm before he stilled it. The peace was in him before it was in the sea, and out of his own deep rest he spoke rest to the chaos. He was still because he knew the Father, and knowing the Father he could sleep in a sinking boat.

That is the order of things, and we so often reverse it. We wait for the storm to be stilled before we will be still, and he would have us be still in the storm, because he is in the boat. The calm you are waiting for, the settled circumstances that will finally let you rest, will not come, or will not stay. The stillness offered to you is not the absence of the storm but the presence of the sleeping Lord, who is not anxious, who was never anxious, and who speaks to the raging within you and around you the same two words, peace, be still, if you will wake him with your prayer instead of your reproach.

THE REST OF FAITH

This stillness is at heart an act of faith, which is why the Scripture binds it to rest and to the Sabbath. There remaineth a rest to the people of God, the apostle writes, and then explains it, for he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his. To rest is to cease from your own works, to lay down the frantic labor of saving and securing and proving yourself, and to trust that the work which matters is already finished and held by Another. The refusal to rest is, at bottom, a refusal to believe this. It is the soul insisting that if it stops working, all is lost, which is only to say that it does not yet trust the God who rested on the seventh day and called it good.

Hear the lies that keep you from it, for they are quiet and reasonable and nearly always believed. If I rest I will fall behind. My worth is in my usefulness, and to stop is to be worthless. To rest is selfish while others toil. Each of these is unbelief wearing the mask of duty, and each dissolves the moment you remember that God will be exalted whether you strive or sleep. You are not the axle on which the world turns. You may rest because he does not. To lay down the work for an hour and be still before him is not laziness. It is the boldest confession of faith your tired soul can make, that he is God and holds all things, and that you may safely let go.

And the stillness he calls you to is never an empty one. There is a counsel abroad that would have you scour the mind clean of all thought and rest in a bare and vacant quiet, but that is not this rest and leads another way entirely. The soul was not made to be emptied but to be filled, and the stillness of the Scriptures is not a blank but a Presence, not the silencing of the heart into nothing but the settling of the heart upon God until it rests in him as a weaned child rests upon its mother. You do not empty yourself into the void. You still yourself before the LORD, and let him fill what the striving had crowded out.

So this is the stillness to carry into the shut door and out again into the raging week. Not a mood to be cultivated for its pleasantness, but a deliberate laying down, hour by hour, of the burden of being God. Catch yourself in the striving, the grasping, the anxious holding, and there, in the middle of it, drop your hands. Cease. Cast the care. And know, in the quiet that follows, that he is God, that he will be exalted, and that you were never the one holding the world together. You are free to be still, because he is not. Be still, and know that I am God.