My Soul Waits for God Alone

62 For God alone my soul waits in silence; from him comes my salvation.
² He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be greatly shaken.

You might have seen the Facebook post that was being shared a few weeks ago, written by a teacher in Wuhan, who was recounting some of the positives she had taken from the experience of ‘lockdown’.  At one point she commented on the fact that she was able to hear birds singing outside her window for the first time ever.  I pondered on the fact that despite living in a busy city (directly beside an airport) I hadn’t really noticed how quiet it had become since our own lockdown began.  I hear very few planes or sirens or traffic or people and so it would be quite easy for me to spend my day, or even part of the day, in total silence before God.  And yet, if I’m honest, sometimes this seems like the hardest thing to do.  I realised that I had unintentionally filled my days and evenings with even more activity and technology than before- I had increased the noise!
Sitting in silence is difficult.  Spending time with God is an absolute privilege and blessing but I don’t know if, like me, you sometimes feel the need to fill the silence; to have worship music playing quietly in the background or a podcast playing while you journal.  None of these things are bad or wrong, I think we just miss out on so much if we do not embrace the spiritual disciplines of silence and solitude.

Reading through Psalm 62, I get the feeling that the psalmist (David), understood the importance of silence.  David repeats the phrase ‘my soul waits in silence’ twice throughout this Psalm (v1, v5) but what or who is he waiting for?  I think the follow up lines in both of these verses reveal the answer… David is waiting in silence for God because he says ‘from him comes my salvation’ and ‘for my hope is from him’.  When was the last time you waited in silence to hear from God?

I think we struggle with silence when we are ‘doers’, because we think of sitting in silence as equivalent to doing nothing.  Recently I have been reminded that silence is rather more of an ‘active sport’ so to speak.  In his book ‘Celebration of Discipline’ Richard Foster says this: ‘[silence] always involves the act of listening.  Simply to refrain from talking, without a heart of listening to God, is not silence.’  The Psalmist wasn’t simply resting his voice, he was spending intentional time listening to God. 

And what was the outcome? Again repeated twice in these verses, David says ‘He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be greatly shaken’ (v2,v6).  When we spend intentional time with God is silence and solitude we hear from Him, we learn more about who He is.  He is our rock and fortress.  And the thing about building on rock is that we therefore cannot be shaken.  David repeats this pattern of:

• acknowledging the importance of spending intentional quiet time with God
• acknowledging what that has taught him about God’s character
• and acknowledging how this leads to an unshakable faith

and I think we too can learn from this pattern.

Jesus sets the best example for us in relation to this.  Jesus was a popular, highly sought after figure with a schedule that was certainly more important than ours.  And yet we are shown throughout the Gospels that retreating to solitary places was a regular practice for Jesus.  It was so important to Him that He was able to spend alone time with the Father, and therefore, so it should be for us.

In this time of global pandemic everything around us seems a little uncertain and ‘wobbly’ to say the least.  The only way that we as Christians can remain unshaken is to build our lives upon the Rock, and an important practice for getting us there is spending intentional quiet time with God and hearing from Him.  It is my prayer that over the next few weeks of lockdown, we can all set aside time each day and echo the cry of David’s heart when he said ‘For God alone my soul waits in silence’.