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Cover Story
Habits
of
the
Heart
Three
stages
of a
joyful
journey
BY BILL KNOTT
“ I
have a continual longing for Christ
to be formed within, the hope of
glory. I long to be beautified every
day with the meekness and gentleness
of Christ, growing in grace
and in the knowledge of Jesus Christ up
to the full stature of men and women in
Christ Jesus.” 1
Solitude
It is perhaps the least practiced spiritual
habit of our harried age. Yet solitude
is preeminently the habit on which all our
progress as spiritual persons depends.
“Be still, and know that I am God” (Ps.
46:10), 2 the Lord says to His people
whenever they are anxious and fearful.
But we live and move as though we think
that just the inverse of His Word is
true—that we can know Him just as well
amid the roar and din we still somehow
prefer. “Speak to me instead through the
earthquake, wind, and fire,” we protest
to the God who prefers the “sound of a
gentle whisper” (1 Kings 19:12, NLT). 3
So it is that we shy away from time
alone the way a 10-year-old devises
ways to avoid piano practice. We invent
urgent duties—homework, even; we
recall other obligations; we volunteer
for otherwise unwelcome tasks, fearing
any environment in which we make the
only sounds.
The prospect of spending half a day
alone terrifies well more than half the
world’s population, for we have
absorbed the normative noise of our
overstimulated world. Without the
ambient sounds of our humming
devices and chattering companions, we
grow suspicious that something fundamental
is wrong, perhaps even dangerous.
A dozen Hollywood movies have
made us wary of anything “too quiet,”
for in just such moments, the dreaded
something lurks.
If we hear no human voices; if we hear
no digitized music; if we see no flickering
images upon a screen, we also feel
deprived, as though our senses are experiencing
unhealthy starvation. And so we
make of solitude an unattainable goal, an
accomplishment only for saints. The habit
of solitude becomes a virtue we take none
too seriously because it makes us feel
uncomfortable, ill at ease, or unsettled.
But it wasn’t so with Jesus. The Scriptures
tell us that He chose aloneness at the
beginning of His public ministry: “Immediately
the Spirit drove Him into the wilderness.
And He was there in the
wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan,
and was with the wild beasts; and the
angels ministered to Him” (Mark 1:12, 13).
After rejoicing in His Father’s audible
approval at His Jordan River baptism,
Jesus chose the prolonged quietness of
the wilderness in which only His Father
spoke to Him. Before He turned water
into wine at Cana, Jesus knew in the
desert that quiet could be turned into
strength. Before He gave a deaf-mute
man the power to speak again, Jesus
chose for Himself a fast from everyday
20 (836) | www.AdventistReview.org | September 19, 2013