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Being ‘Still’ for God

Psalm 46:10  

“Be still and know that I am God, I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth”  

Throughout this year I’ve gone through periods of time where I have been worried and stressed. Whether it’s being broke, stressing about schoolwork, or simply how I will be perceived by others, I always found a way for my mind to run a thousand places. This mental workload clearly wasn’t healthy, and often times I found myself overwhelmed, isolated and hopeless. God doesn’t desire this life for us, in fact he wants the complete opposite.   

From the verse above, God requires us to be ‘still’. And when God says ‘still’ he doesn’t mean a physical stillness, he doesn’t want you to be motionless. Instead, he is asking for a mental stillness: a state of tranquillity and peace.   

If we dig into the Hebrew origin of being ‘still’, it gives words like ‘relax’, ‘let go’ and ‘stop’. All these words insinuate a form of surrendering, which is exactly the type of life God wants us to live. I know from hearing the word ‘surrender’ it can come across as quite restrictive, but there truly is freedom under the parameters of God. When we are outside the parameters of God, that’s when we start worrying and stressing about things that we don’t need to: and in my case it was financial, educational, and social.   

With God saying, “be still”, he is essentially telling us to ‘relax’, ‘let go’ and ‘stop’ all of our worries and cast it onto him. He wants us to trust him for who he is, which is sovereign over everything positive and negative in our lives.   

But what does being ‘still’ actually look like?  

Initially it can be quite hard to surrender and fully trust someone you don’t know. Imagine being 5 years old, you’re standing on a box and there’s two people below with they’re arms out telling you to jump. Person A is your dad, and Person B is a random stranger you’ve never met before. You’re most likely to jump towards your dad because you know him, there’s a familiarity to him and he has a track record of protecting you and keeping you safe.  

The same is with God, trusting God means knowing God. Reading his word will tell you who he is and who other people say he is. The other way to trust God enough for you to “be still” is talking to God through prayer: the more you talk to him, the more God will talk back, and the more God talks back, the more confidence you have in him to take control.

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