In our new series about the Lost Arts of spiritual discipline, we first look at the foundation of so many ways we connect with God – by putting away distractions and finding silence and solitude so we can hear God’s quiet whisper.
Finding Stronger Connections With God
Today we start a new series building on the great message Kirk gave last week. He encouraged us to make some New Year’s Resolutions to use four practices to help build a stronger connection with God in 2023.
- Pray Frequently. Believe that God can actually change our reality
- Worship, Praise and Rejoice in who God is and what He has done for us in both good times and bad.
- Study the Bible. Learn about this God we worship and what He wants for us.
- Share the Gospel with others instead of keeping our faith private. Let it flow out of us to make a difference in the lives of those around us.
These are “spiritual disciplines,” measures people have taken for centuries to help develop their faith. They are the “meat and potatoes” practices most people know and try to follow in some way or other.
This series will extend our knowledge of those practices and show us a wider, more diverse range of spiritual disciplines. You may find these helpful in reaching a deeper connection with God. Many of them were popular at different times throughout history and among different groups of people, but for one reason or another they have become “lost” to our modern culture.
Some people see older worship methods as too ritualistic and liturgical – boring routines – so they “throw the baby out with the bath water” and don’t give the practices a try. Some worship methods, like meditation, have been co-opted by Eastern religions and philosophies. Now, when we Christians hear a word like “meditation,” we think we can’t do it, although David talks about it several times in Psalms. Still other worship modes have simply been forgotten or passed over as too outdated in our world of comfort and convenience.
In the coming weeks, some of our study will be about varied and specific ways of doing the “meat and potatoes” practices Kirk talked about last week. For instance, when we talk of prayer, we find Breath Prayer, meditation, fasting, and an assortment of other things you can incorporate into your prayer life to make it richer.
Ultimately, my goal is to give each of you at least one new tool in your walk with Jesus, to offer you one new activity that feels fresh and new and helps you connect with God in a better and deeper way.
Notice that I said “tool.” We have to understand that these spiritual disciplines are only tools, not the goal. Fasting for forty days so you can say you did it once is not the end game; you fast to let your physical hunger drive you toward dependence on God. It’s not so you can pat yourself on the back because you are a more mature Christian who also fasts – plus you lost 20 pounds and look amazing in your new jeans!
The goal is connection with God. The disciplines are a way toward Him.
Where has the discipline gone?
There’s a problem with that last sentence. It includes a word not many people are interested in these days because they are not willing to be disciplined. They have a lazy, comfortable, soft faith; they don’t want the goal badly enough to stick with the growth plan.
I’m not trying to shame anyone, but I think last week’s message motivated a lot of people to start 2023 off on the right foot and try connecting better with God. However, I also know that many of you who had good intentions at noon last Sunday have come to church again today without taking a single step toward your goal.
Getting started is hard for several reasons.
Some of you never took the time to plan; so on Monday you dropped back into your regular routine. Nothing changed. That’s how life works – we always default back to the familiar routine unless we do something dramatic to break out.
For others of you, honestly, the goal of deeper connection with God is not yet that motivating. You have too many other tasks on your list, too many balls you’re juggling; so while you don’t think your connection with God is by any means great, you’re fine with the status quo.
Here is where the discipline comes in. Implementing a spiritual discipline is an intentional choice to do something different, to consistently and regularly commit to an action, trusting that God will meet you in your faithfulness to Him. Without choosing to implement any discipline, we are like the high school kid who dreams about being the starting quarterback on the football team and dating the head cheerleader, but who never leaves his room because his whole life is spent playing video games.
Maybe we hear stories about people who have a deep connection with God, and we are jealous. We wonder why God doesn’t speak to us like that. Meanwhile, we never give God a single spare moment of our time until we roll into church just as the music is beginning.
Dreaming about what could be and actually making it happen are two totally different things. The difference between the two is discipline. Are you disciplined to not only dream but to make a plan, work the plan, and stick with the plan?Discipline means sticking with the plan even when you don’t feel like it. It means commitment and perseverance.
I can tell you from experience that there is incredible benefit to sticking with something even on the days you don’t feel motivated. For those of you who have read through the Bible in a year I’m sure you have had days (like I have had) when you didn’t really feel like reading. If you keep going, though, and keep getting through a couple more chapters each day, at the end of the year you will have accomplished a monumental task and learned much, much more about God and what He wants for us.
In our world of comfort and convenience, discipline is no longer popular. Instead, people want to do things that are easy, take the least amount of time, and give instant results. However, if that’s the kind of relationship you want with God, I believe you are shortchanging yourself and missing the kind of relationship He wants to have with YOU!
Implementing Spiritual Disciplines
Before we get into today’s specific spiritual disciplines, I want to say a few more things about the spiritual disciplines in general.
You need to know about the wide variety of spiritual disciplines – probably many more than you have ever thought of. Many of them overlap with one another. For this reason, we will consider these disciplines in groups of similar ones. For instance, in one week we will look at multiple ways to pray.
You also need to understand that because there are so many disciplines, the goal is not to do all of them, or even one from each group. Different seasons and stages of life call for different disciplines. You need to figure out what works for you.
For example, I once felt pressured to join a friend in journaling, but I was not feeling it. About two weeks into it, I HATED journaling and resented every time I had to sit down and do it. It was the wrong discipline for me at that time. Don’t feel bad; stop forcing a square peg into a round hole. Instead, try something else that feels more life-giving.
Finally, don’t feel pressure to do any of these disciplines in a certain way or for a certain amount of time. Take your time to slowly develop the discipline. As Christians, we sometimes manage to turn gifts from God into competitions of our Christian credentials.
I remember once feeling really proud because I had had a focused time of prayer for five minutes a day for seven days in a row. Then my friend told me how he carved out sixty minutes every morning, thirty for prayer and thirty for Bible reading; and I felt completely inferior. My friend did nothing wrong, but I let Satan’s discouraging message (that my five minutes weren’t good enough) mess with my joy in what I was doing.
The moral of the story is that like setting a goal to run a marathon, you will have to start somewhere small. You don’t start with a ten-mile run, but maybe a five-minute walk. In the same way, if you are trying a new discipline, start small and stay consistent over time. Build up as you turn the new practice into a habit.
A World of Distractions
With all these caveats out of the way, I want to begin with the spiritual disciplines that are foundational to so many others – getting away from distraction through silence and solitude.
Have you ever noticed that we live in what is called “an attention economy”? This means that nearly everything in our culture works to captivate our attention to itself. Everything is trying to distract us from whatever we are trying to concentrate on. We live in a world of continual beeps and chimes and rings and buzzes. We live in a world of constant distraction.
My old boss was an Apple fanatic. Sometimes his wife called while we were meeting in his office; and the first thing we heard was his phone ringing, Then his watch started buzzing and his iPad and laptop started ringing as well. Everything would ring at least once more even AFTER he answered the call. It was humorous, and also the perfect picture of all the gadgets in our lives trying to gain more of our attention.
Some people are so accustomed to constant noise that they have to leave the television or radio on all day; they find silence deafening. Young people listen non-stop to music through their earbuds because a world with their new friends at youth group is too boring by itself.
Meanwhile, we now live in a social media world filled with endless scrolling interrupted by ads tempting us to buy what we don’t need or click on an image we shouldn’t see. The infinite scroll is filled mostly with meaningless drivel; and yet, like lemmings, we keep going back to the top and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling.
Perhaps, for some of you, your distraction is the news or sports. Both have multiple television networks giving you a 24/7 stream of “breaking news.” In our fear of missing out on the next MAJOR development or scoring update, we keep checking back.
Maybe some of you don’t care about the news but you love to research. With an unlimited amount of information at your fingertips (thanks to Google), you can spend hours researching any and every idea that comes into your mind. Or maybe you research something you are going to buy. Online shopping is so fun! What feels like “just a moment” later, you realize hours have flown by and your phone battery is down to single digits.
Finally, some of you may find that you hate being alone, and so you make sure you are always around people. From the time you get up until you go to bed, you make sure you are connecting with others throughout the day. Even if you don’t choose to always be surrounded by people, you may live in a busy, chaotic home where you feel like you never have a moment to just sit and think. We all live in a world of distraction, and each of us has his or her own temptation calling out our name.
Silencing the Distractions
All these distractions make hearing from God a real challenge. We wonder why we have never heard God speak to us as others describe; or maybe we haven’t heard His voice in a while and we don’t know why. The truth is that maybe He has been speaking but you just aren’t able to hear him.
Maybe your relationship with God is like this: Michelle walks into the room to tell me something. I have the television on and am scrolling through my phone. The timer is going off for dinner. And then I catch her saying, “Did you even hear what I just said to you?” UH-OH!
If you want to hear from God, you have to put down the distractions. You have to silence the noise. You have to find some semblance of solitude from everything vying for your attention. Many people find the only way they can consistently find this time is to do it early in the morning before others are awake and before the phone is ringing. Maybe you have a lot of car time or time in the tractor cab during various seasons. Instead of flipping on the radio, you could sit in the drone of the engine.
I have a 30-minute drive to work each day. I almost never turn on the radio and instead use this time to sit in the quiet with God. This is where many of my best and most creative ideas for the church come from. It’s when I realize who I need to check in with and follow up with. It’s not because it’s my work time, but because I’m quietly listening to what the Spirit is reminding me and showing me.
However you decide works best for you, if you want to be able to hear from God, you are most likely to have that experience if you find time to be alone with Him. You have to set the scene. While there is no guarantee that you will hear His audible voice, I can guarantee you that if you never slow down and turn off the noise, you never will.
Here’s something that may surprise you! Silence and solitude also mean no reading and no praying. These may be part of your time with God, but I encourage you to also include some time just sitting in the silence and focusing on His transformative power. As you sit there, pay attention to the ideas that begin to pop into your head . . . people to call . . . notes to write . . .needs to pray for. I find it’s sometimes helpful to keep a notebook and pen handy so I can write things down and then get back to the quiet without worrying that I will forget that thought.
God Speaks in the Quiet
The Bible is full of examples of God showing up not in the chaos and noise, but in the quiet.
When God makes a covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15, He takes Abraham outside to show him the number of stars in the sky. Since Abraham didn’t have children at that time, we can assume he’d had a quiet night at home. The sun had gone down, and it was just him and his wife at home. No phone to scroll; no television to binge watch. Just a quiet home for God to speak with him.
When God appears to Moses, it is the middle of the day; but Moses is out in the wilderness with his sheep. Alone
When God wants to lead His people out of Egypt at the Exodus, He has Moses tell Pharaoh that He needs His people to go to worship Him in the wilderness, away from all the distractions of daily life.
When Elijah is running from Jezebel, who wants to kill him, God tells him to go stand up on a mountain. In front of Elijah, God first sends a crazy windstorm, and then an earthquake, and then a fire. But scripture says God was not in any of these miraculous signs. Instead, we read:
1 Kings 19:12-13 – And after the fire there was the sound of a gentle whisper. 13 When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.
When God wants Elijah’s attention, He gets it through the sound of a gentle whisper. (Some of us live in such chaos God might need a derecho or an earthquake to get our attention!)
The life of Jesus models for us this exact practice of solitude and silence. We are told in Luke 5:16 that Jesus often withdrew to the wilderness for prayer. Even the night of His betrayal, when He knows the final hour has come, He withdraws to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray. While He takes some of His disciples there with Him, He leaves them behind so He can go and be alone.
It’s critical that we find time to be alone with God! Prayer, meditation, worship, focused Bible study, and many more practices flow out of setting aside time to be alone with God.
I know I’m not saying anything earth-shattering here. Likely every one of you already knew the importance of regularly spending quiet time with God. But if we all know this is crucial to deepening our relationship with God, what keeps us from doing it?
I can’t speak for all of you, but for me it’s that special badge some of us love to wear: “We are just so BUSY.”
I love this excuse, and I use it often. I can allow myself to go far too long without a focused time connecting with God aside from drive time on my way to work. I justify it with my self-importance and full schedule.
I know that going days without connecting with God is no way to build a strong and fruitful relationship. Suppose I went three days in a row without connecting with Michelle, and when she tried to talk to me I simply said, “Not now; I’m too busy.” I know where I would be sleeping – and it wouldn’t be next to her!
Here’s what I need all of you to hear today: while being busy is an easy excuse, we need to recognize it for what it is – a thief. That convenient excuse is not protecting you from feeling bad about what you are not doing, but it is actually robbing God’s blessing from your life.
We don’t do these spiritual disciplines because God needs them from us; we do them because they are God’s gracious GIFT TO US! God doesn’t want us doing these practices out of obligation; He wants us to do them out of adoration and a desire to truly know Him.
So – if you want to experience God’s gift of His presence and His voice speaking to you, then you need to make a plan, work the plan, and stick with the plan to practice silence and solitude.
What time of day works best for you? What days of the week can you commit to? How will you make sure you aren’t interrupted?
Think this through. Without an intentional plan, Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday will all fly by and you will have made ZERO progress. Make a plan. Work the plan. Begin your time of quiet with a short prayer, offering Jesus your presence. Invite Him to speak. Then see what happen; and when God shows up, tell your friends and your family – and me.
God wants to be in a personal, back-and-forth, life-giving relationship with every single one of us. It’s available and it’s incredible, but we have to be willing. We have to want it. We have to seek it and make time for Him. The world is trying to distract us and keep us too busy for the most basic relationship each one of us was created for. God is simply waiting for you to step away from the chaos and noise and give Him the most important thing you can give to Him, your presence.
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