Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Hidden Life


“Those whose hearts are locked up with Jesus walk this earth in the present age as princes in disguise. They move around in the temporal duties of life like private detectives in a distant and unfriendly nation. They are breathing prayers, and thinking thoughts, and nursing hot fires of love, and ruminating on vast and amazing events that stretch over coming times and distant worlds. They are silently loading themselves up with a divine dynamite, that Daniel and Jesus both tell us will sone day grind the kingdoms of this present world to powder. Their joys are hidden, for it is written ‘that a stranger doth not enter meddle with it’. And their sorrows, also, are cloistered in the ear and bosom of God, for they know they need not look to the people of the world, and not even to the people of the church, for heart-felt sympathy; and so, like venturesome pioneers, they leave the crowded walks of life and traverse the great, solitary mountains, and take up claims on new and unexplored territory, and hold communion with the unseen God, and are more at home amid the great snowy mountain peaks of the divine perfection, then with the crowds that live only for the flesh and time.
The saints are called in Scripture ‘the hidden ones’. Their life is doubly hidden, in the Son and in the Father. God says to them, ‘call unto me, and I will show you great and hidden things’. Their life is constantly fed by secret prayer…..... God is working, as it were, by stealth, in this present age, and moves softly amid the affairs of life, as if shod with wool.”
… George D. Watson, ‘The Heavenly Life’.