God's presence in loneliness a sermon for Lent.
I. From the first dawning of conversion to the hour of death, it is in solitude mostly that God speaks to the soul. God's will, as Himself, is everywhere; within and without He speaks to our souls, if we would hear. Only the din of the world, or the tumult of our own hearts, deafens our inward ear to it. Stillness is as His very presence, for like the prayer for the prophet's servant, it opens our senses to perceive what was there to behold, only our eyes were holden. All God's works, because He made them, bear traces of His hand, and speak of Him to the soul which is alone with Him. All works of man directed or. overruled by His providence everything, good or bad, speaks of His presence or His absence. But chiefly, in the inmost soul He speaks, because there He dwells.
II. Once, we must be alone; and lonely, indeed, is that journey if He be not by us who first trod it for us, that in it we might fear no evil. Learn to be alone with God now. There shall He renew thy soul, hear thy prayer and answer it, shed hope around thee, kindle thy half-choked love, give thee some taste of His own boundless love; give thee the longing to pass out of all besides, out of thy decayed self; gathered upward unto Him, who came down hither to our misery to bear us up unto Himself, and make us one spirit with Him.
III. One thing only deafens us to the voice of God, untunes all, sets us out of harmony with all, that we should not, in all things, feel the thrill of His love, and behold there the earnest of heaven, sin. Labour, by His grace, to cleanse away this; pray Him to cleanse it with His precious blood; commend thyself morning by morning to Him, do thy daily work unto Him, and He will be with thee, as with Adam in the garden; and thy daily labour shall again be a dressing and keeping of the Paradise of God, where He shall walk with thee.
E. B. Pusey, Sermons for the Church's Seasons,p. 196.
References: Hosea 2:14 Spurgeon, My Sermon Notes: Ecclesiastes to Malachi,p. 306; W. Robertson, Sunday Magazine,1881, p. 47; J. N. Norton, Golden Truths,p. 134.