Himself Alone

Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself.” John 6: 15.

The Gospels frequently tell us of Christ’s going in to solitude for prayer. Luke mentions his praying eleven times. Mark tells us in his very first chapter, that after an evening when all the city had been gathered together at the door, and He had healed many, “And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed.” Before He chose His twelve apostles “In these days he went out to the mountain to pray, and all night he continued in prayer to God.” This thought of complete retirement appears to have deeply impressed the disciples, giving rise to John’s use of a significant expression, “Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself.” as Matthew also had written, “He went up on the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone” Christ felt the need for perfect solitude. Let us humble seek to find out what this means.

1. Himself alone. Entirely by Himself, alone with Himself. We know how much oneness with men draws us away from ourselves and exhausts our powers. The man Christ Jesus knew this too and felt the need of coming to Himself again, of gathering all His powers or renewing the consciousness of what He was and what He needed, of realizing fully His high destiny, His human weakness, and His entire dependence on the father. How much more does the child of God need this? Whether it is amid the distraction of worldly engagements or religious service, whether it be for the maintenance of our own Christian life or the renewal of our power to influence men for God, there is ever an urgent call to every believer to follow in His Master’s steps and find the place and the time he can indeed be with himself alone.

2. Himself alone, with spiritual realities. It is in the entire withdrawal from contact with the things that are seen and temporal that we are free to yield ourselves fully to the powers of the unseen world and allow them to master us. Jesus needed time and quiet ever afresh to realize the power of the kingdom of darkness which He had come to contend with and to conquer, the need of this great world of mankind which He had come to save, the presence and the power of the Father whose will He had come to do. Nothing is more indispensable in Christian service than that a man should at times set himself to think intensely on the spiritual realities with which as a matter of knowledge he is so familiar, and which yet often exercise so little power on the heart and life.

The truths of eternity have an infinite power; they are often so powerless because we do not give them the time to reveal themselves. Himself alone— this is the only cure.

3. Himself alone, with God the Father. It is something said that work is worship, that service is fellowship. If ever there were a man who could dispense with special seasons for solitude and fellowship, it was our blessed Lord. But He could not do His work or maintain His fellowship in full power, without His quiet time. He felt the need as a man of bringing all His work, past and future, and put it before the Father, of renewing His sense of absolute dependence on the Father’s love, in seasons of special fellowship. When He said: “the Son can do nothing of Himself,” as I hear so I speak,” He was but expressing the simple truth of His relation to God; it was this that made His going apart from a necessity and an unspeakable joy. Would God that every servant of His understood and practiced this blessed art, and that the Church knew how to train its children into some sense of this high and holy privilege, that every believer may and must have his time when he is indeed— himself alone with God. Oh! The thought to have God all alone to myself, and to know that God has me all alone to Himself.

4. Himself alone, with the Word. As man our Lord had to learn God’s Word as a child; during the long years of His life in Nazareth, He fed on that Word and made it His own. In His solitude, He conferred with the Father on all that that Word spoke of Him, on all the will of God it revealed for Him to do. In the life of the Christian, it is one of the deepest lessons that he has to learn, that the Word without the living God avails little; that the blessing of the Word comes when it brings us to the living God; that the Word that we get from the mouth of God brings the power to know it and to do it.

Let us learn the lesson: personal fellowship with God in secret alone can make the word be life and power.

5. Himself alone, in prayer. What an unspeakable privilege prayer is as it allows a man to lay open his whole life to God, and to ask for His teaching and His strength. Just try for a moment to think what prayer meant to Jesus, what adoring worship, what humble love, what childlike pleading for all He needed. As little as we can conceive of this aright, can we realize what blessedness awaits the man who knows to follow in Christ’s steps, and to prove what the utmost is that God can do to one who makes this his chief joy—to be with Him, Himself alone?

Himself alone. How deep the words open up to us the secret of the life Christ on earth, and of the life that He now lives in us. Of the life that He lives in us His Holy Spirit, this is one of the most blessed elements, that He reveals and imparts to us all that the Word means—Himself alone.