Do You Want a Quiet Heart?

Thus it comes to pass often that appearances are most deceptive.  People who look as if they are supremely happy and carefree are full of some great grief and carry a tragedy within them.  We put on a bold face very often, and sometimes it is exceptionally bold because of the acuteness of the problem that is within.  So it follows that anyone who is truly Christian will never take people merely as they appear to be but will feel a great sense of sorrow for men and women who are trying vainly to find a quiet heart by refusing to think.  This includes all the people who plunge into a round of pleasure, who give themselves to the cults and commit intellectual suicide, who rush away for treatment to some psychologist or other, who drug themselves or take up certain ancient Eastern religions.  All are simply trying somehow or other to find this peace that ever seems to elude them, this quiet heart that never seems to become an actuality.

But, of course, we do not stop at it negatively like that.  We are concerned to give a positive exposition of what the Bible has to tell us about this vital and all-important subject, and I would remind you again that the bible claims that it and it alone can really show us this quiet heart.  I do not apologize for that.  I state and assert it.

We cannot mix the gospel of Jesus Christ with anything else; it is either this or nothing.  No compromise, no coalition is possible.  Unless we realize that we have to submit and surrender ourselves entirely to God's way, we shall never, as we have seen, experience the blessings that he wants to give us.  Our Lord constantly said that very thing.  he laid it down at the very beginning that this is the way to know his love and his blessing: "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me" (Matthew 16:24)--that is it.  The two words "follow me" in a sense say it all; what you have to do is to forsake yourself and everything else and go after him.  his claim is for total allegiance.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled, p.45-46