It is here that Jesus dwells. It is that area which can never be beset with the storms of life. It is that area which is totally inaccessible to the attempts of the enemy, and the great call of God is for a retreat into the soul within.
It is not easy for us to retreat. We would much rather go out and conquer the world for Christ. We like to do great exploits. But the great call of God is to abide “under the shadow of the Almighty.” It is this place within that the Psalmist speaks of. Unfortunately, there are few that live there.
There are those who have come into inward experiences, experiences of the deeper life which are almost indescribable except to say that they have been the experiences of the presence of Jesus. I do not refer to necessarily the experiences of great glory, great ecstasy, great emotion, great feeling, or any of the other spiritual experiences which, wonderful though they may be, are yet outward. The latter pertain to that man which is the everyday man, the man which everybody sees. But I refer to the experience of Jesus within. It is the intimate recognition of the experimental habitation of God deep within the soul. It is the establishment of the contact between the world above and that undefinable world of the soul, which distinguishes us from the beasts and stamps us with the mark of the immortal.
But we have not developed that sense of seeing Jesus within. There are those who never even recognize the existence of this secret place; they have not found it, and can never live in victory except they do.
Then there are those who have come to its fringes and discovered this great secret but do not abide in it. They have such strong ties to the outward man that they have found a life within to be so lonesome (i.e. devoid of the fellowship of man) that it has been intolerable. They have had to burst forth from the hiding place and have been inevitably hit by the arrow of the Wicked One whose bow stands poised, waiting for the hidden one to come into the range of his fiery dart. And so, despite their discovery they have not learned to live in the secret place, and therefore must be content with defeat in the final analysis.
But then there are those who abide. They have found Jesus within, in the secret recesses. They have gotten a glimpse of the unspeakable privilege of experimental union with Him. And they have made the supreme personal sacrifice: death to self, in order to be prepared to abide. They have renounced all: their ambitions, will, desires, good works – everything – to have just Jesus. And the marvelous result is that when the storms blow, when the way seems dark, when there seems no possibility of victory naturally speaking, they have retreated to the innermost depths of the soul and seen Jesus. And thus they have frustrated the attempts of the enemy. They have been totally victorious as they have lived moment by moment. It is not that they have had great overcoming power, but rather that they have placed themselves in the “cleft of the rock” where troubles of the world and the sin of the world are completely excluded.
This is the secret of being hidden. Have you found it? Do you abide in it? It is the sum total of God’s plan for the Christian experience.