The Mystery of the Stillness     Have you experienced the mysterious, the strange quietness of The Stillness? Not a stillness brought about by the absence of noise or of the cessation of auditory invasion, but the quietness brought about by the sealing of the ears by the Spirit of God. I’m talking about a quietness that comes, unannounced, unbidden, uninvited. It comes suddenly but with subtlety. It is the Silence of God; the Stillness of the Holy; The Silence of the Soul. The Stillness is not a comfortable place. It is not a place of rejoicing or of celebration. It is a place of humbling, of reducing; it is a place of death. We think we do not need these gifts. We think we require the gifts of power and of anointing and of fruitfulness. Yet our true need is to be humbled, to be reduced; to die. Until we have embraced these true gifts of the Father’s heart, we will not know true power, genuine anointing; productivity. So we must understand, accept, embrace The Stillness. We must render ourselves servants of the Quiet until the Season of Quietness has accomplished her full effect. How long must we endure? Until The Completion. How much can we bear? The Full Weight of His Counsel. The Quietness is created to serve us, yet it cannot serve what we will not surrender. So we must surrender; we must enfold ourselves with The Quietness without complaint and without resentment, and allow The Stillness to have her full course. Only when she has finished with us will we understand the Expression, the Sound; the Resonance of His Voice. Only when we have become one with the Quiet will we hear the sound of weeping, the sorrow of a world in travail and a creation crying for its redemption and its restitution.  The Book of the Revelation speaks of The Stillness and the Silence. In the eighth chapter, verse one are these words: “When He opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.” The Psalmist records God’s counsel, “Be still and know that I am God.” The Prophet sought out the declaration of the Lord “And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice” 1 Kings 19. Suspended by iron spikes, hammered through His flesh into splintered and rough hewn wood, the Son of God experienced The Silence from heaven and cried from the depths of a sinless soul, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabach thani” - “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” God is not always in the tumult, the shout or the volume of the congregation. There are moments, seasons of silence; times when Heaven is sealed, and none of our protestations can open the doors for our hearing or pry open the Mouth of God to speak to us great revelation or even a simple, “I love you.” And what are the purposes of The Stillness? In the Book of the Revelation, The Stillness comes as God prepares to act; to intervene in earth’s affairs in a magnitude man has never experienced or imagined: An intervention so awful that heaven itself is rendered mute. The Prophet sought the regal display of power and the overwhelming immensity of a God Who was superior to the gods of the heathen. He found instead that the Great God of the Universe would speak in the hushed tone of a mother’s breathed “I love you” to her child. God’s Son sought the solace of a word of confirmation, the timbre of the familiar Voice, a simple reminder of Father’s presence, and God reserved His Voice to press the Son to the fullness of the suffering necessary to produce the fullness of salvation. In the Quietness, in the mysterious Silence from heaven, in these uninvited and painful times of the absence of revelation and communication, it may be that God is merely preparing to intervene, to reveal, to produce through our lives His salvation for a world deafened to His invitation to “come.” When you find yourself in the quietness – where I now am abiding – be encouraged, be comforted and remain steadfast. The morning of the breaking of the silence will come, and having come, His voice will call, “Come forth!”   In His Grace,   Greg   23 February, 2006