SPIRITUAL SOLITUDE
‘And He withdrew Himself into the wilderness, and prayed.’
The wilderness and the mountain—the two loneliest places He could command—appear several times to have made fitting retirement for Christ.
God provides wildernesses for us all, and He provides them in the same mercy and in the same intention with which He provided them for Israel, or for Moses, or for Elijah, or for Paul, or for Christ.
I. Where is the wilderness?—The many bright rooms of your house are the Nazareth, and the Capernaum, and the Jerusalem. But where is the wilderness? In the quietude of your own room, arranged for you in the kind Providence of God, that in your chamber you may follow Christ as He went, and do what He did, alone. All greatly need it. Nothing in the family, nothing out of doors, no intercourse, can compensate for the solitude of the soul. The spiritual life depends upon the sanctuary of the wilderness of your own private bedroom.
II. The purpose of the wilderness.—Christ went into the wilderness to ‘pray.’ Beware of sentimental solitude. Beware of prayerless solitude. Beware of idle solitude. There are prayers, such as we have been now offering, when we do right, as we pray, to gather into our mind the sense of the presence of every individual within the walls, and to embrace them all into one loving heart. But there is prayer which must be intense loneliness with God. What a man is to God, that a man is. You stand, it may be, in many relationships, and they are all dear. But one by one those relationships must pass away, that you may be related only to one, and that one God. Look well to it that you adjust, that you know your real position towards God and towards eternity.