Mark 1:35

IN A SOLITARY PLACE

‘He went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed.’

Mark 1:35

We have only to turn over the pages of the Gospel and note, as we go, the similar allusions, and we feel that we have here what is in fact an incidental glimpse into the habitual practice of our Lord’s secret and separate life.

I. Private prayer part of the common life.—In this passage we read that He departed into a solitary place, and there He prayed; in another, by and by, that He departed into a mountain to pray; and then again that He spent the whole night in prayer; and we see all this not in some crisis of His life, but as a part of that which corresponds to the common daily round in your life or mine. And the inference to be drawn, the lesson to be learnt from it is, I think, sufficiently obvious. This secret, separate devotional exercise of the soul was His habitual spiritual food. It was thus that He recruited His moral and spiritual forces, those forces of the spiritual life which constitute at once the beauty, the attraction, the power of His character, and His Divine and awe-inspiring separateness.

II. If Christ needed these exercises, these secret and silent hours, what shall we say of our own lives? And what do we expect to make of our moral and spiritual character unless we, too, are careful to cherish under all circumstances some such recurring moments in our round of life and occupation, at which we retire into the sanctuary of separate communion with God the Father? You may take it as a moral certainty, proved by all experience, that unless you hold to a fixed habit of thus bringing your life into the secret and separate presence of God, in private prayer and thought, you incur the risk of sinking to any levels that happen to be the ordinary levels, and of drifting with any currents that happen to prevail.

—Bishop Percival.

Illustration

‘The spiritual is always near us. But in the solitude of nature, where all is peaceful, and pure, and lofty, our heart is often made more accessible, accessible as it had not been, to the impressions and inspirations of the spiritual. Having departed to a solitary place, there He prayed; there, at last, the distant visions passed down into His soul, put Him above all fretting, all fuming thought and care. There He was able to pray to His full clearing and calm, as He could not in His chamber in the town. There He felt anew the overreaching and encompassing of the Father, and poured Himself out in prayer, which was all that He wanted to set Him right. And how only another place or other surroundings now helps us sometimes, helps us to think more healthily, helps to bring us to a better mood, to raise us aloft above what we are!’