When He was alone the twelve ... asked of Him ...
Mark 4:10
His Solitude with Us. When God gets us alone by affliction,
heartbreak, or temptation, by disappointment, sickness, or by
thwarted affection, by a broken friendship, or by a new fnendship -
when He gets us absolutely alone, and we are dumbfounded, and cannot
ask one question, then He begins to expound. Watch Jesus Christ's
training of the twelve. It was the disciples, not the crowd outside,
who were perplexed. They constantly asked Him questions, and He
constantly expounded things to them; but they only understood after
they had received the Holy Spirit (see John 14:26).
If you are going on with God, the only thing that is clear to you,
and the only thing God intends to be clear, is the way He deals with
your own soul. Your brother's sorrows and perplexities are an
absolute confusion to you. We imagine we understand where the other
person is, until God gives us a dose of the plague of our own hearts.
There are whole tracts of stubbornness and ignorance to be revealed
by the Holy Spirit in each one of us, and it can only be done when
Jesus gets us alone. Are we alone with Him now, or are we taken up
with little fussy notions, fussy comradeships in God's service, fussy
ideas about our bodies? Jesus can expound nothing until we get
through all the noisy questions of the head and are alone with Him.
