How to Be Still in God — and the Old Warning About Stillness

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Anyone asking how to be still in God will find that the tradition answers in two halves, and the second half is rarely quoted. The first is a long line of writers — Andrew Murray, Mary Wilder Tileston, Charles Spurgeon, Thomas à Kempis, John of the Cross — who commend stillness plainly and without hedging. The second is John Wesley, who looked at a room full of people practising stillness and told them to beware of it. Both halves are genuine. Anyone who takes only the first has half a doctrine, and it is the half that goes wrong quietly.

What Does “Be Still and Know” Mean?

The phrase everyone reaches for is the line in Psalm 46 where God tells a frightened, war-weary people to be still and know that He is God. It is not addressed to someone with an empty afternoon. It is addressed to people watching nations rage and the earth give way, and it lands as a rebuke to panic rather than an invitation to leisure. The Hebrew verb behind the English “be still” carries the sense of dropping something, letting the hands fall — which is why the older writers heard the verse as a word about striving rather than about silence.

Andrew Murray heard it that way. In Waiting on God he sets the psalmist’s parallel down without comment, because it interprets itself:

Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him; cease from anger, and forsake wrath.

— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God

Rest is set beside the forsaking of wrath. The stillness in view is not the absence of activity; it is the absence of self-defence. Mary Wilder Tileston, whose Daily Strength for Daily Needs taught two generations how to begin a morning, put it as an instruction short enough to carry into a working day:

Keep quietly to God, and think Upon the Eternal Years.

— Mary Wilder Tileston, Daily Strength for Daily Needs

That is the whole of it — a quiet holding to God while the day proceeds, not a withdrawal from the day.

The Old Writers Who Commended Stillness

Thomas à Kempis frames stillness as a posture of receiving, in which the soul stops arguing and lets God speak and act:

Do, Lord, as Thou sayest; and let all evil thoughts fly away before Thy face.

— Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

John of the Cross goes furthest, describing a state in which the ordinary machinery of thinking and willing falls quiet. He is careful to present it as something God brings about, and to insist that the deliberate work of meditation comes first:

In order to reach this state, it will frequently need to make use of meditation, quietly and in moderation; but, when once the soul is brought into this other state, it acts not at all with its faculties, as we have already said.

— St. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel

Spurgeon, who was no mystic, arrives at a similar place from the direction of exhaustion. His counsel to a tired believer is to pray for one thing and hand over the rest:

Pray to be revived thyself, and leave the rest with the Lord, who performeth all things for thee.

— Charles Spurgeon, Faith’s Checkbook

Alexander Maclaren gives the clearest image of what this stillness is. It is not the will switched off; it is the will held level, loaded and waiting:

Keep your wills in equipoise till God’s hand gives the impulse and direction.

— Alexander Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture: Psalms

Equipoise is not inertia. It is readiness.

John Wesley’s Warning: Beware of Stillness

Then there is Wesley, and honesty requires that he be quoted too. In 1739 and 1740 a party at the Fetter Lane society in London, influenced by the Moravian teacher Philipp Molther, began teaching that a person without full assurance of faith should abstain from prayer, from Scripture, from the Lord’s Supper, from doing good — should simply be still until faith was given. Wesley watched people he loved stop praying on principle. The quarrel split the society, and produced the sentence that belongs beside every gentle piece on quiet:

Beware of stillness; ceasing in a wrong sense from your own works.

— John Wesley, Sermons on Several Occasions

Note what he preserves. He does not say beware of stillness, full stop. He says beware of ceasing in a wrong sense — which concedes a right sense, and makes the difference between them everything. Wesley himself preached the old battlefield command to stand still and watch God work:

Set yourselves: Stand ye still, and see the salvation of the Lord.

— John Wesley, Sermons on Several Occasions

“Set yourselves” and “stand ye still” arrive in the same breath. That is not a contradiction; it is the definition.

A Stillness That Receives, and a Stillness That Refuses

The distinction turns on what is being ceased from. A stillness that receives ceases from self-reliance, from anxious managing, from the attempt to produce in oneself what only God gives. A stillness that refuses ceases from obedience — from the duties and the means of grace that are still standing there whether or not the soul feels warm.

Samuel Rutherford, writing from exile to people with hard lives, kept putting the second thing back in their hands:

Christ seeketh your help in your place; give Him your hand.

— Samuel Rutherford, Letters of Samuel Rutherford

In your place. Not in a better one, with more assurance and fewer interruptions. Henry Scougal, whose small book shaped Wesley and Whitefield both, is blunt that inward work and outward effort belong together:

But now, that I may detain you no longer, if we desire to have our souls moulded to this holy frame, to become partakers of the divine nature, and have Christ formed in our hearts, we must seriously resolve, and carefully endeavour, to avoid and abandon all vicious and sinful practices.

— Henry Scougal, The Life of God in the Soul of Man

Resolve and endeavour, in the same sentence as being moulded. Fénelon, the most delicate of these writers, describes a soul quiet and quick at once:

A pure soul, on the other hand, which is humiliated, and rises promptly after its smallest faults, is always fervent and always upright.

— François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress

Rises promptly. Stillness has not made the soul slow to get up.

How to Be Still With God Without Leaving Your Post

The tradition’s version of stillness is small and unspectacular. It means keeping an appointed quarter of an hour and not filling it with plans. It means reading slowly enough to be addressed. It means letting a grievance lie unanswered — the concrete stillness Rutherford asked for, which costs more than silence does:

Keep your tongue from cursing and swearing; refrain from wrath and malice; forgive all men for Christ’s sake, as you would have your Lord forgive you.

— Samuel Rutherford, Letters of Samuel Rutherford

It also means continuing when nothing is felt. Johann Arndt names that season honestly, without promising it will pass quickly:

But when God withdraws his hand, then, indeed, it is a heavy burden.

— Johann Arndt, True Christianity

Tileston’s counsel for that stretch is the sentence that divides the two stillnesses:

And if God do not give him thus to feel His hand in all things, let him still simply yield himself up, and go without, for God’s sake, out of love, and still press forward.

— Mary Wilder Tileston, Daily Strength for Daily Needs

Yield, and press forward. The false stillness yields and stops.

A Test for Telling the Two Apart

The test is not how quiet a person feels. It is what the quiet produces. Stillness that receives leaves someone praying more simply, forgiving faster, working at the duty in front of them without frenzy. Stillness that refuses leaves someone waiting for a feeling before obeying, the Bible unopened and the duty postponed until conditions improve. J.C. Ryle, who had no patience with comfortable religion, keeps the horizon in view:

You will have to leave this world and to stand before a holy God.

— J.C. Ryle, Holiness

That is not a threat against rest. It is a reason to make sure the rest is the real one.

The Stilling Waves journals are built for the first kind of stillness. Each day gives a short passage, one question that must be answered in writing, and a wide margin — enough structure that the quiet has somewhere to go, and enough room that it is not hurried. Over 140 days the practice tends toward what the old writers describe: fewer words, less self-defence, and a slightly quicker readiness to get up and do the next thing.

This article belongs to a series on what the older devotional writers actually taught about the body in prayer. The overview is here: Does the Body Matter in Prayer? What the Old Writers Said.