[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":4},["ShallowReactive",2],{"reading-0405":3},"APRIL 5\r\nThou shalt shut the door upon thee and upon thy sons (2 Kings 4:4).\r\nThey were to be alone with God, for they were not dealing with the laws of nature, nor human government nor the church, nor the\r\npriesthood, nor even with the great prophet of God, but they must needs be isolated from all creatures, from all leaning\r\ncircumstance, from all props of human reason, and swung off, as it were, into the vast blue inter-stellar space, hanging on God alone,  in touch with the fountain of miracles.\r\nHere is a part in the programme of God's dealings, a secret chamber of isolation in prayer and faith which every soul must enter that\r\nis very fruitful.\r\nThere are times and places where God will form a mysterious wall around us, and cut away all props, and all the ordinary ways of\r\ndoing things, and shut us up to something Divine, which is utterly new and unexpected, something that old circumstances do not fit into, where we do not know just what will happen, where God is\r\ncutting the cloth of our fives on a new pattern, where He makes us look to Himself.\r\nMost religious people live in a sort of treadmill life, where they\r\ncan calculate almost everything that will happen, but the souls\r\nthat God leads out into immediate and special dealings, He shuts in where all they know is that God has hold of them, and is dealing\r\nwith them, and their expectation is from Him alone.\r\nLike this widow, we must be detached from outward things and   attached inwardly to the Lord alone in order to see His wonders. --Soul Food.\r\nIn the sorest trials God often makes the sweetest discoveries of Himself. --Gems.\r\nGod sometimes shuts the door and shuts us in,\r\nThat He may speak, perchance through grief or pain, And softly, heart to heart, above the din,\r\nMay tell some precious thought to us again.",1783499792051]