The Word of Almighty God | On Quieting Your Heart Before God
Quieting your heart in God’s presence is the most crucial step for entering into God’s words, and is a lesson that all humanity urgently needs to enter at present. The paths by which you enter into quieting your heart before God are:
1. Withdraw your heart from external things, be quiet before God, and pray to God with an undivided heart.
2. With your heart quiet before God, eat, drink, and enjoy God’s words.
First begin with the matter of prayer. Pray with an undivided heart and at a fixed time. No matter how pressed you are for time, or how busy your work, or what comes upon you, pray every day as normal, and eat and drink God’s words as normal. As long as you eat and drink God’s words, no matter what your surroundings are, you will have exceptional enjoyment in your spirit, and will not feel bothered by the people, events, or things around you. When you normally contemplate God in your heart, what goes on outside cannot bother you. This is what it means to have stature. Begin with prayer first: Praying quietly before God is the most fruitful. After that, eat and drink the words of God, and seek out the light in God’s words by pondering them, find the path to practice, know God’s purpose in speaking His words, and understand them without deviation. Ordinarily, it should be normal for you to be able to draw close to God in your heart, to contemplate God’s love, and to ponder the words of God, without being disturbed by external things. When your heart has become quiet to a certain degree, you will be able to muse silently and, within yourself, contemplate God’s love and truly draw near to Him, regardless of your surroundings, until finally you reach the point where praise wells forth in your heart, and it is even better than prayer. Then you will be possessed of a certain stature. If you are able to achieve the states of being described above, it will be proof that your heart is truly quiet before God. This is the first foundational exercise. Only after they are able to be quiet before God can people be touched by the Holy Spirit, and enlightened and illuminated by the Holy Spirit, and only then are they able to have true communion with God, as well as to get hold of God’s will and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. They will then have entered onto the right track in their spiritual lives. When in training themselves to live before God they have reached a certain depth, they will be able to forsake themselves, to despise themselves, and to live in God’s words. This truly is quieting their hearts before God. Being able to despise oneself, curse oneself, and forsake oneself is a result that is achieved by God’s work, and cannot be done by people on their own. Therefore the practice of quieting one’s heart before God is a lesson people should immediately enter. For some people, not only are they ordinarily unable to be quiet before God, they cannot quiet their hearts before God even when praying. This is altogether too far below God’s standards! If your heart cannot be quiet before God can you be moved by the Holy Spirit? If you are one who cannot be quiet before God, you can be distracted when someone comes by, or when others are talking, and your mind can be drawn away when others are doing things, in which case you are not one living in God’s presence. If your heart truly is quiet before God, you will not be bothered by anything going on in the world outside, or occupied by any person, event, or thing. If you have entry into this, then those negative states and all negative things—human conceptions, philosophy of life, abnormal relationships between people, and ideas and thoughts, and so forth—will naturally disappear. Because you are always pondering God’s words, and your heart is always drawing close to God and always being occupied by the current words of God, those negative things will fall away from you unawares. When new and positive things occupy you, negative old things will have no place, so don’t pay attention to those negative things. You need not make an effort to control them. You should pay attention to being quiet before God, eat, drink, and enjoy God’s words as much as you can, sing hymns in praise of God as much as you can, and let God have a chance to work on you, because God now wants to perfect humanity personally, and He wants to gain your heart; His Spirit moves your heart, and if, following the guidance of the Holy Spirit, you come to live in God’s presence, you will satisfy God. If you pay attention to living in God’s words and engage more in fellowship about the truth to gain the enlightenment and illumination of the Holy Spirit, then those religious conceptions and your self-righteousness and self-importance will all disappear, and you will know how to expend yourself for God, how to love God, and how to satisfy God. Without your knowing it, those things that lie outside God will completely dissipate from your consciousness.
To ponder and pray over the words of God at the same time that you eat and drink the current words of God—this is the first step to being quiet before God. If you can be truly quiet before God, then the enlightenment and illumination of the Holy Spirit will follow you.
All spiritual life is achieved by being quiet in God’s presence. In praying, you must be quiet before God, and only then can you be moved by the Holy Spirit. By being quiet before God when you eat and drink God’s words, you can be enlightened and illuminated, and can achieve true understanding of God’s words. When, in your usual activities of meditation and fellowship and drawing close to God in your heart, you become quiet in God’s presence, you will then be able to enjoy genuine closeness to God, to have genuine understanding of God’s love and His work, and to show true thoughtfulness and care toward God’s intentions. The more that you are ordinarily able to be quiet before God, the more you will be able to receive illumination, and the more you will be able to understand your own corrupt disposition, what it is that you lack, what it is that you should enter, what function you should serve, and wherein lie your defects. All these are achieved through becoming quiet in God’s presence. If you truly reach some depth in being quiet in God’s presence, you will be able to get hold of some of the mysteries of the spirit, get hold of what God at present wants to do on you, get hold of a deeper understanding of God’s words, and get hold of the essence of God’s words, the substance of God’s words, the being of God’s words, and you will be able to see the path of practice more thoroughly and more accurately. If you fail to achieve enough depth in becoming quiet in your spirit, you will just be somewhat moved by the Holy Spirit, and feel strengthened on the inside as well as a certain amount of enjoyment and peace, but you will not grasp anything deeper. I have said before: If one does not use all their strength, it will be difficult for them to hear My voice or see My face. This refers to achieving depth in being quiet before God, not to external effort. A person who can truly be quiet in God’s presence is able to free themselves from all worldly ties and arrive at being possessed by God. Whoever is unable to become quiet in God’s presence is assuredly dissolute and unrestrained. Whoever is able to be quiet before God is one who is pious before God and who yearns for God. Only one who is quiet before God is one who values life, who values fellowship in the spirit, who thirsts for God’s words, and who pursues the truth. Whoever does not value being quiet before God and does not practice being quiet before God is a vain and superficial person, excessively attached to the world and without life; even if they say they believe in God, they are just paying lip service. Those that God ultimately perfects and completes are people who can be quiet in His presence. Therefore, people who are quiet before God are people graced with great blessings. People who scarcely take time to eat and drink God’s words throughout the day, who are busily preoccupied with external affairs, and place little value on life entry—these are all hypocrites with no prospect of future growth. It is those who can be quiet before God and who can genuinely commune with God that are God’s people.
To come before God to accept His words as your life, you must first be quiet before God. Only when you are quiet before God will God enlighten you and give you knowledge. The quieter people are before God, the more they are able to gain God’s enlightenment and illumination. All this requires people to have piety and faith and only thus can they become perfected. The fundamental exercise for entering spiritual life is becoming quiet in God’s presence. All your spiritual training is effective only if you become quiet before God. If you cannot quiet your heart before God, you will be unable to receive the work of the Holy Spirit. If your heart is quiet before God no matter what you are doing, then you are someone who lives in God’s presence. If your heart is quiet before God and draws close to God no matter what you are doing, this proves that you are a person who is quiet before God. If, when talking with others or walking, you are able to say, “My heart is drawing close to God, and is not focused on outward things, and I can be quiet before God,” this is a person who is quiet before God. Do not come into contact with anything that can draw your heart away to the outside, or with people who can separate your heart from God. Whatever it is that can distract your heart from being close to God, put it aside, or stay away from it. This will be more beneficial to your life. Now is precisely the time for the great work of the Holy Spirit, the time when God is personally perfecting people. If at this moment you cannot be quiet before God, then you are not someone who will return before the throne of God. If you pursue things other than God, there will be no way for you to be perfected by God. Those who can hear such utterances from God and yet fail to be quiet before God today, they are people who do not love the truth, and who do not love God. If you will not offer yourself at this moment, what are you waiting for? To offer oneself is to quiet one’s heart before God. That would be a genuine offering. Whoever truly offers their heart to God now will be assured of being completed by God. Nothing, no matter what it is, can disturb you; whether it is to prune you or deal with you, or whether you meet with frustration or failure, your heart should always be quiet before God. No matter how people treat you, your heart should be quiet before God. No matter what circumstances you encounter, be they adversity, suffering, or persecution, or whether many kinds of trials come upon you, your heart should always be quiet before God. All of these are paths to being perfected. Only if you are truly quiet before God can you become clear about God’s current words, practice more correctly and without deviation the Holy Spirit’s illumination and enlightenment, grasp with greater clarity God’s intentions, and give your service a clearer direction, grasp more accurately the moving and guidance of the Holy Spirit, and be assured of living under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. These are the results that one achieves by truly being quiet before God. When people are not clear about God’s words, or lack a way to practice, or fail to grasp God’s intentions, or lack the principles of practice, this is because their hearts are not quiet before God. The purpose of being quiet before God is to be earnest and pragmatic and seek correctness and transparency in God’s words, and ultimately to arrive at understanding the truth and knowing God.
If your heart cannot be constantly quiet before God, God has no way of perfecting you. Being without will is tantamount to being without a heart, and a person without a heart cannot be quiet before God. They do not know how much work God does or how much He speaks, nor do they know how to practice. Is this not a person without a heart? Can a person without a heart be quiet before God? God has no way of perfecting people without a heart, who are just like beasts of burden. God has spoken so clearly and transparently, yet your heart is still unmoved and you are still unable to become quiet before God; are you not a dumb brute? Some people go astray in practicing being quiet in God’s presence. When it’s time to cook they don’t cook, and when it’s time to do chores they don’t do them, but just go on praying and meditating. Being quiet before God does not mean not cooking or doing chores, or not spending one’s days; rather it is being able to quiet one’s heart before God in all normal states, and to have a place for God in one’s heart. When you pray, you should kneel down properly before God to pray; when you do chores or prepare food, quiet your heart before God, ponder God’s words, or sing hymns. No matter what situation you find yourself in, you should have your own way to practice, you should do everything you can to draw close to God, and you should try with all your might to quiet your heart before God. When circumstances permit, pray single-mindedly; when circumstances do not permit, draw near to God in your heart while doing the work with your hands. When you can eat and drink God’s words, then eat and drink His words; when you can pray, then pray; when you can contemplate God, then contemplate Him; in other words, do your utmost to train yourself for entry according to your environment. Some people can be quiet before God when nothing is the matter, but as soon as something happens, their hearts go off after it. That is not being quiet before God. The correct way to experience is this: Under no circumstances does one’s heart depart from God, or feel disturbed by outside people, events, or things, and only then is one a person who is truly quiet before God. Some people say that, when they pray in meetings, their hearts can be quiet before God, but in fellowship with others they cannot be quiet before God, and their thoughts run wild. This is not being quiet before God. The great majority of people at present are in this state, and their hearts cannot always be quiet before God. For this reason, you need to put more effort into exercising yourselves in this area, enter step by step upon the right track of life experience, and get onto the path of being perfected by God.
Read more: Bible Study Topics ---- The Basic Beliefs of The Church of Almighty God
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