How are your times alone with the Lord at the moment?
This question is asked not as an occasion for condemnation. But it is a good question to consider; and indeed, it may prompt healthy reflection and repentance among us.
Is it possible to consider that perhaps one reason for some of the current deficiencies in our evangelical constituency might, just possibly, be due to an over-emphasis on activism, on busyness and on the leadership of strong alpha males – and an under-emphasis on all of us living in humble, intimate dependence on the Lord and enjoying His fellowship day by day?
In other words, have we been so keen on the externals (including our proclamation of correct doctrine, and contending for the truth with zeal against all error) that we have neglected our interior lives? Matthew 23:27-28 has some relevance here.
Rightly suspicious of experientialism, or the excesses of our age, have we forgotten that, as the hymn by 18th century Calvinist minster Joseph Hart says: ‘True religion’s more than notion – something must be known and felt’? It was a phrase picked up on Stuart Olyott’s 2015 book published by Bryntirion Press, Something must be known and felt: a missing note in today’s Christianity.
Hart himself was converted in 1757 after hearing a sermon on Revelation 3:10. He wrote of what happened after as follows: ‘I was hardly got home when I felt myself melting away into a strange softness of affection, which made me fling myself on my knees before God. My horrors were immediately dispelled, and such light and comfort flowed into my heart as no words can paint. The Lord, by his Spirit of love came not in a visionary manner into my brain, but with such divine power and energy into my soul that I was lost in blissful amazement.’ Hart’s hymn Come ye sinners poor and needy, is undergoing something of a well-deserved revival at the moment. Perhaps we could also benefit from reviving the hymn from which the phrase ‘something must be known and felt’ comes – Vain is all our best devotion, if on false foundations built. It may be as good a description of the inner life as anyone else outside Scripture has written.
