Devotional for March 24

“And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed” (Mark 1:35).

He [Jesus] knew should he wait till the sun rises and the day’s hectic demands settle in, time for meditation and prayer would be gone. To beat the press, he must beat the sunrise.  In rising early, he had the unhurried time needed for prayer. In seeking solitude, he had the undistracted context.

The practice of solitude and the discipline of properly arranging one’s schedule is absolutely necessary for the devotional life to survive and thrive. Solitude (as we are using the word) is the voluntary and temporary withdraw from the company of others to pursue spiritual fellowship with the Lord.

Moses, the leading character of the Old Testament, was a man given to solitude. The Apostle Paul, the leading character of the New Testament, practiced solitude.  Jesus Christ, God’s Son and our Savior, the central figure of both testaments, sought solitude.

And yet you and I presume to get by without it?  What folly.  Solitude is the foundational spiritual discipline of the earnest Christian life. In solitude we “enter into our closet and shut the door” to the influences of society and company that distract our inward focus on the Lord.  Solitude facilitates the other important Christian disciplines like prayerful and scriptural meditation which, if left undone, impede the flow of grace into the believer’s life. 

Solitude, with its accompanying silence, can impart the most important kinds of knowledge. “Be still and know that I am God.”  Solitude removes the intoxicating influence of our noisy world while clarifying and sobering our thinking.  Here we discover life-changing truth concerning God, ourselves, the meaning of life and personal purpose.  This is knowledge not found at the university or even in theology classes. That kind is theoretical, this is experiential.

To understand the importance of solitude, consider the aforementioned Moses and Paul.  It was alone on a mountaintop that the moral law was revealed to Moses.  In the seclusion of a desert, Paul came to understand the “gospel” he later preached to the Gentile world.  Both the law and the gospel were revealed in solitude.

It is indisputable that there are blessings for you and me that are unavailable unless we too get away from the crowds to be alone with the Lord.  If we are to know Him, enjoy His presence, receive His grace, be filled with the knowledge of His will, and experience the power of His Spirit, then we must be no stranger to solitude.