A quiet heart was a rare jewel this year.
Fear, anxiety, anger, and complaining – so much complaining – ruled our hearts. As an older minister once said about himself to Charles Spurgeon, our souls were like “weaning rather than weaned” children.
What is the difference? The weaning child’s desires are at the center of his universe. Give me milk or I shall die, he cries to his mother who suddenly withholds her milk. But a weaned child has learned to say with David,
“O Lord, my heart is not lifted up;
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvelous for me.But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.O Israel, hope in the Lord
from this time forth and forevermore.” (Psalm 131)
Where is the calmed and quieted soul in 2020? Through the many, unexplained sufferings in this life, how do we keep a heart like the weaned child?
We must begin with humility.
Humble Yourself Before The Lord
In 1 Chronicles 29:14, David glorifies God and then asks, “But who am I?” He asks the question about his identity in light of God’s identity, and he does not confuse the two. Even as Israel’s king, he knows his place, because he knows God’s.
Pride falsely elevates ourselves, our desires, and our abilities. Pride deludes us into believing that we can plumb the depths of God’s wisdom, so we demand answers in our distress. What are you doing? What have you done? Why?
But who can explain to a weaning child, in terms he understands, why his mother suddenly says no or wait to his pleas for milk? How can he understand that comfort and nourishment must come in different ways as he matures? His knowledge and experience are not yet big enough to grasp why.
Sometimes, affliction’s purpose is to keep us from going astray (Psalm 119:67) and to loosen our grip on this world, even on God’s good gifts. But where human comprehension fails to explain suffering, the weaned child acknowledges that “the LORD is in his holy temple” (Habakkuk 2:20), and even pain and suffering are his servants for our good (Romans 8:28).
Receive What He Gives
Within a six-month span in 1757-1758, Sarah Edwards lost her son-in-law, her father-in-law, and her husband, the well-known Jonathan Edwards. Less than two weeks after losing her husband, she wrote to her widowed daughter:
My very dear child, what shall I say? A holy and good God has covered us with a dark cloud. O that we may kiss the rod, and lay our hands upon our mouths! The Lord has done it! … But my God lives; and he has my heart. (Noel Piper, Faithful Women and Their Extraordinary God, pp. 35-36)
Her daughter also died before receiving her letter. When God weaned her of her best earthly gifts, Edwards did not respond in tantrum but in trust – “Behold, I am of small account … I lay my hand over my mouth” (Job 40:4).
Had she lashed out in prideful anger, we would have understood her pain. But she did not elevate her pain to the place of God. She believed that his wounding rod was wielded by a goodness and wisdom superior to her own.
In the same letter to her daughter, she wrote, “We are all given to God; and there I am, and love to be.” In all her suffering, she was not only resigned but gladly resigned to receive whatever God gave. She postured her soul like a weaned child until her own death six months later. To the end, she was not only humble; she was content.
Learn Contentment
Every weaned child was once a weaning one. He is “calmed and quieted” now because he was once agitated and fussing. Like the Apostle Paul, he has had to learn contentment.
I have learnedin whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. (Philippians 4:11-12)
The weaned child has had to learn the contentment that Jeremiah Burroughs describes as “that sweet, inward, quiet, gracious frame of spirit, which freely submits to and delights in God’s wise and fatherly disposal in every condition.”
Life’s rhythms as he knew them are gone, but he entrusts his soul to his faithful Creator (1 Peter 4:19). No longer does he demand milk to his spiritual malnutrition, but in return, he receives something better – that precious “peace of God, which surpasses all understanding” (Philippians 4:7).
He is learning to keep a quiet heart.
Hope In God
The subdued, weaned child is not the end of the psalm – or of our story.
God does not wean us just to bow our hearts; he weans us to lift our heads again in joy (1 Peter 5:6). David’s call to hope in Psalm 131:3 is an invitation, a gift, in suffering. He calls Israel – and God’s word calls us – to no longer trust in idols that cannot deliver or satisfy but to wait for the Lord, because God will redeem every weaning pain.
Has God weaned us this year? With what loss, what pain, what irritation? Each one was carefully planned by a tender Father who disciplines us for our good (Hebrews 12:10), and “after [we] have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called [us] to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish [us]” (1 Peter 5:10).
Until then, we can wait on him with a quiet heart.