HAVE YOU EVER BEEN ALONE WITH GOD?
"When they were alone, He expounded all things to His disciples." Mark 4:34
Our Solitude with Him.
Jesus does not take us alone and expound things to us all the time; He expounds things to us as we can understand them.
Other lives are parables. God is making us spell out our own souls.
It is slow work, so slow that it takes God all time and eternity to make a man and woman after His own purpose.
The only way we can be of use to God is to let Him take us through the crooks and crannies of our own characters.
It is astounding how ignorant we are about ourselves! We do not know envy when we see it, or laziness, or pride. Jesus reveals to us all that this body has been harbouring before His grace began to work. How many of us have learned to look in with courage?
We have to get rid of the idea that we understand ourselves, it is the last conceit to go.
The only One Who understands us is God. The greatest curse in spiritual life is conceit. If we have ever had a glimpse of what we are like in the sight of God, we shall never say - "Oh, I am so unworthy," because we shall know we are, beyond the possibility of stating it.
As long as we are not quite sure that we are unworthy, God will keep narrowing us in until He gets us alone. Wherever there is any element of pride or of conceit, Jesus cannot expound a thing.
He will take us through the disappointment of a wounded pride of intellect, through disappointment of heart. He will reveal inordinate affection - things over which we never thought He would have to get us alone. We listen to many things in classes, but they are not an exposition to us yet.
They will be when God gets us alone over them.
"When He was alone the twelve . . . asked of Him . . ." Mark 4:10
His Solitude with Us.
When God gets us alone by affliction, heartbreak, or temptation, by disappointment, sickness, or by thwarted affection, by a broken friendship, or by a new friendship - when He gets us absolutely alone, and we are dumbfounded, and cannot ask one question, then He begins to expound.
Watch Jesus Christ's training of the twelve.
It was the disciples, not the crowd outside, who were perplexed.
They constantly asked Him questions, and He constantly expounded things to them; but they only understood after they had received the Holy Spirit (see John 14:26).
If you are going on with God, the only thing that is clear to you, and the only thing God intends to be clear, is the way He deals with your own soul.
Your brother's sorrows and perplexities are an absolute confusion to you. We imagine we understand where the other person is, until God gives us a dose of the plague of our own hearts.
There are whole tracts of stubbornness and ignorance to be revealed by the Holy Spirit in each one of us, and it can only be done when Jesus gets us alone.
Are we alone with Him now, or are we taken up with little fussy notions, fussy comradeships in God's service, fussy ideas about our bodies?
Jesus can expound nothing until we get through all the noisy questions of the head and are alone with Him.