Be Still and Know: The Power of Waiting on God in a Restless World

The world does not wait. It whirs, wails, and whiplashes forward like a derailed locomotive. It scorns stillness. It baptizes busyness. It canonizes chaos. And in the midst of the machine—clanging metal and dopamine-driven algorithms—comes a whisper too ancient to be ignored:

“Be still, and know that I am God.”
—Psalm 46:10

This is not a suggestion. It is not a coffee-mug quote or a sleepy Sunday sermon tagline. It is a command. It is the sound of the sovereign slicing through the static. A divine ceasefire in the middle of your mind’s battlefield. Be. Still.

But who can be still when the world screams, when your phone pings prayers away, when your own breath betrays you with anxiety? To obey Psalm 46:10 is to wage war against the culture of movement. It is to turn your back on the tick-tock tyranny of time and say, “No. I will wait.”

Christ did.

Forty days in the wilderness, fasting until flesh fought spirit and spirit refused to break. No phone, no fans, no food—just the feral wild, the tempter’s tongue, and the slow burn of obedience. Jesus was not hurried. The Son of God stood in starvation and stared down Satan because He understood what we forget: the power of stillness when aligned with the will of God is more explosive than any action taken in anxiety.

And when His friend Lazarus died, Jesus didn’t rush. He lingered. Waited. Let death have its moment so resurrection could have the final word.

This is the divine irony we choke on: stillness is not stagnation. It is sacred strategy.

Consider the Desert Fathers, those early Christian mystics who fled the empire's clamor to find God in barren landscapes. They wandered into the wastelands not to escape, but to encounter. They fasted until their hunger spoke truths their intellect could not. They prayed in caves until silence became symphony. Their stillness sparked spiritual revolutions.

Julian of Norwich, cloistered in a cell, wrote visions of divine love that still ripple through the cracked concrete of modernity. She didn’t tweet. She tarried. She wasn’t a celebrity. She was still. And in the stillness, God thundered.

Even outside the bounds of Christianity, the principle pulses. Enter: Prahlad Jani.

An Indian ascetic who claimed to live over 70 years without food or water. Ridiculed, revered, researched. Whether you believe his claim or not, Jani's life is a paradox we must at least poke at. Doctors studied him. Skeptics scoffed. Yet he sat, still and unshaken, claiming divine sustenance from a goddess. While not our truth, his stillness challenges us. He is an echo, albeit from a different songbook, of the ancient understanding that something—or Someone—beyond the physical can sustain the soul. The difference? Our Source wears a crown of thorns.

Back in the realm of Christ, we find Brother Lawrence, a 17th-century monk who washed dishes and experienced ecstasies more profound than popes. He did not seek fame. He sought God in the still scrubbing of a soiled pot. He cultivated the “practice of the presence of God” in obscurity. This is the essence of Psalm 46:10: when you stop chasing, you start encountering.

But we hate waiting.

We scroll past stillness. We despise divine delays. We want Red Sea splits without standing still at the shoreline. We want Gethsemane glory without sweating blood in the garden. Yet the Kingdom is upside-down. It rewards the ones who sit. Who weep. Who wait.

Psalm 46 is not a lullaby. It is a call to arms—for those who understand that sometimes the most radical resistance is refusing to rush.

“Be still,” the verse begins—but it ends with power. “I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.” God is not asking for stillness because He is passive. He is preparing a stage for glory. Your pause is His prelude.

This is not passivity—it’s poised potential. Stillness is the lion crouching before the pounce.

I think of those who went into hiding with God before heaven handed them history-altering missions. Moses—forty years in Midian before confronting Pharaoh. Paul—three years in Arabia before shaking the Greco-Roman world. Even David—anointed king, yet hunted like a dog in caves. All had to be still before they could be sent.

This is where it hurts: when you know you’re called but God calls you to wait.

When your vision is burning but your steps are frozen. When the door stays shut while your soul screams for the sprint. That’s the cross before the crown. That’s Psalm 46:10 in real time.

But you’re not forgotten.

You’re being fortified.

Stillness is where God sands the ego and forges steel in your spine. He silences your flesh so your spirit can speak. It’s in the hush that you hear the holy. It’s in the wilderness that you meet the wild love of a waiting God.

Let the world rush. Let Babylon burn with its blue-lit distractions. Let the crowd scroll into oblivion. You—be still.

Because God doesn’t operate on algorithmic time. He is not transactional. He is transformational. And transformation takes time.

Time to fast. Time to fall apart. Time to cry out in the lonely night with no reply and still say, “You are God.”

This is not romantic. It’s raw. Grit under the nails. Sweat on the brow. The pain of patience and the slow sanctification of silence. But if you listen—really listen—you’ll hear it:

He is exalting Himself.

Not through your grind, but through your surrender. Not through your marketing plan, but through your midnight prayer. Not through your popularity, but through your pause.

So fast. Pray. Sit. Wait.

And in the stillness, you will know—not just intellectually, but viscerally—that He is God.

The God who is never late.

The God who is never unsure.

The God who speaks loudest when everything else goes quiet.