Quiet Thought, Planning and Prayer...

Quiet Thought, Planning and Prayer… by Cecil Rose for The Oxford Group

Of course, every thought that comes to us in the `quiet time’ is not God’s guidance. We need to test the voices that come to us along a line that has been so long disused or blocked. We have immediate cause to reject promptings which conflict with what we already know of His will. Nothing which is unloving, impure, dishonest, or selfish comes from God. Other suggestions which come to us may have to be talked out with some experienced person who knows how to listen to God. In other cases we may have to wait for clearer conviction in our own minds. Sometimes the only test is to make the venture and act. We shall make mistakes. But an honest mistake is of far more use to God than the timid inaction which makes no venture. God never fails to use an honest mistake, so that we and others learn from it more of His will and how to interpret that will better.

The guided life is a growth. Through the continuous experiment of listening to God, more and more of our thinking and action is freed from the guidance of self, hate, fear, indulgence, prejudice, ignorance, and all other forms of sin, and is made available to God.

And this guidance does work. That is its final confirmation. Listening to God takes time. It takes a lot more time than the brief address to God which we call `saying our prayers.’

It takes time because God has to get down through so many layers of our human, self-governed, sin-dulled thinking before He can communicate His thoughts to us. It takes time because God leads us in `quiet time’ into the thorough constructive planning of our life in partnership with Him. It is true that God intends us to live in such contact with Him that He can speak to us at any time; but the men and women who have known Him best have invariably found that they could not maintain that constant touch without daily time spent alone and quiet with Him. No one can live a full and vital Christian life who does not set aside a daily period for this quiet fellowship with God. Most of us, when we say we have not time, are simply dishonest. Some of us have not realized how much time later in the day is saved through added efficiency, through clearer selection of what is important and what should be left, through the greater strength and peace which come when we have listened to God and received His directions for our day.

And morning is emphatically the best time. The opening of the day with quiet thought, planning, and prayer, is so obviously the right start for the Christian that it hardly needs the backing of the universal experience of the men and women who have lived nearest God in every century.

Nearly all the objections from men and women in normal health resolve themselves into an objection to getting up earlier. Their difficulty is either laziness, undisciplined lateness the night before, or a sluggish physical condition which will disappear in a few weeks of new discipline and more careful attention to health. But we are on a quest which must not be held up by such things as these. We arc seeking God-controlled lives and a God-controlled world. No second-best in the time we give to listening to God will suffice.