Fellowshipping Silently With the Lord

There’s a view that one must use one’s mouth to exercise one’s spirit to truly touch the Lord and worship Him richly and fully. That is true, to some extent, at least when you are starting out on this deeper path. 

But once you have developed your spirit to a certain degree of what we might call, for lack of a better term, spiritual “fitness,” there is another dimension of relating to the Lord that does not depend on your physical mouth to exercise your inner man.

Here’s a reliable clue: If you are a Christian, it is common for the Lord to put a song in your heart, to find yourself humming the melody of a favorite hymn or spiritual song. The next time this happens, pay closer attention to it and use this as a prompt to turn within to your indwelling Lord.

If there are lyrics, let those words dance lightly across the backdrop of your conscious awareness. Let it run in the background of the operating system of your mind, as it were.

Now, you could stop right there and just continue along this way, and it would be good. But if you combine this with the deeper sense of the Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ that you have been cultivating over recent weeks, you take this subtle level of awareness of Him to a whole other level.

What is really happening here is that your spirit is worshipping the Lord, almost subconsciously, and the Lord is using this as a way to woo your conscious mind to turn to Him more fully and engage Him more completely.

Now, you could disregard this gentle little prompt and just go ahead and belt out this song that God has put on your heart, and the Lord Jesus would probably bless you as you do. But you can also go inside yourself with this tune or melody, and use it to help learn how to fellowship silently with Him.

One wonderful aspect of this experience is that, when you practice this exercise when you are out and about, it pulls you within, just enough, so that you can maintain, or resume, your communion with your Savior while being present in your immediate external, physical environment, and yet, remain unattached to it, and engaged with it enough to stay safe and accomplish whatever it is you may have to do, such as running an errand. In other words, it turns down the volume of the world. 

Another way of looking at this is it reduces the pull of the “lust of the eyes,” thereby diminishing the resulting temptations.

Now, you may ask, “Why should I bother cultivating this kind of practice, if the Lord is going to bless my singing unto Him anyway?” Well, there are times when you may find yourself in a physical environment where singing, even quietly, or even humming, would be inappropriate. 

For instance, perhaps you’re on a job-related conference call via Zoom, and the call turns in a direction that has nothing to do with you, yet your participation is still required or expected. Or maybe you just got pulled over by a state trooper and he’s giving you a hard time. Or perhaps in your home environment, you find yourself in the immediate proximity of a heated family quarrel. Or maybe it’s late in the evening, in the middle of the night, or before sunlight and your spouse is sound asleep. With this practice, in your spirit you can silently fellowship with Christ without any disturbance of your spouse.

In any of these examples, and likely countless others, once you get the hang of this practice, the Lord will keep supplying you with Him as your life, in a quiet, hidden, and one may say, “subterranean” manner without any external disruptions to your immediate environment.

Additionally, the more ways you have of knowing and experiencing and relating to the Lord, the richer your spiritual life will be. It will be easier for you to deepen your walk with Him and to extend your walk with Him into more of your day. And the more of these kinds of practices you cultivate, the more other kinds of practices may suggest or reveal themselves to you.

May the Lord be with your spirit always.