SILENCE and solitude are as needful to the soul as sleep is to the body. If we would be used much of God, we must be much with God.
In reading the Word of God, we find that all the mighty men of faith spent much time in secret communion with God. They waited upon God and renewed their strength.
Moses must go away into the desert for forty years that God might train and discipline him to be the Deliverer of His people; David, the anointed, must fly as an outlaw in daily peril, that he might develop courage and trust to fit him to be Israel’s king; John the Baptist must live in the solitude of the wilderness that he might be the Herald of the Messiah; St. Paul must tarry three years in Arabia before he was sent forth as the apostle to the Gentiles; St. John must be banished to the solitude of Patmos to behold the glory of the Lamb of God and see the vision of a new heaven and a new earth. Even the Man, Christ Jesus, must often seek the solitary place to be alone with His Father. In later times we find
Martin Luther must be confined
in the fortress of Wartburg that his soul might expand and bring forth in full measure the new light that God had given to him, and in his solitude alone with God he forged a mightier weapon and struck a deadlier blow for the truth than all else he ever spoke or did; John Bunyan must be thrown into Bedford Prison for his witness of the truth and there, sitting in solitude, his heart was “enlarged” as he thought upon the things of God and in his imagination he dreamed of the conflict of the human soul in its walk through life. “His Pilgrim’s Progress was the result of his meditation—a book which even today is read more widely than any other ‘book in the world excepting the Bible.
It is in the secret place that the soul learns to understand the things of God. It is there that we are fitted to do the will of God.