Sermon Date 11-11-2012 Silence & Solitude (Chuck Gohn)
Good morning. Did everybody have a good week? Did anybody have a bad week? Be honest. Frankly, I didn’t have the best week. I really had kind of a lousy week. By the time I got to Thursday when I start working on my sermon, I decided I don’t think I am going to work on my sermon. I think I am just going to get out of here. Early in the morning I decided to just leave the house and get in my car and drive to my little getaway, which I probably shouldn’t tell you, but it is down at the River Walk or Three Rivers Heritage Trail down there by PNC Park and Heinz Field. It is really a great place. There is a great place to park down there and I just walk. I start walking on the trail and I found this little place that sits below the trail that is really close to the river, and there are three benches there. I just sat there and decided just to kind of talk to God and just hang out and watch the ducks go by and the occasional kayaker would go by. I sat there and watched the people working on the bridge up there. I heard the traffic go by. After about an hour or so, I got up and decided I was going to cross over the bridge. I think it was the Roberto Clemente Bridge that I crossed over. I went to the other side and went up to Market Square and sat there and listened to some musicians. There was a guy that sounded very much like Willie Nelson. I really enjoyed listening to him. He was very good. I sat there for a while and then I got up and went farther up the street to I think it is the Pittsburgh Glass Building and that is where they put the ice skating rink and the Santa Claus display. I hung around there for a little bit, walked back to Market Square, crossed the bridge, made a left, and went all the way down past Heinz Field and walked all the way down to the casino. Some of you are thinking, Chuck, did you walk into the casino? My answer is yes I did, but I didn’t walk in there to gamble. I walked in there because by that time I really had to go to the bathroom and that was the closest place. They hide the restrooms. I don’t know why. Probably to keep guys like me from walking in there. All the way in the back I found them and came back out and came back down the trail and spent some more time just sitting there hanging out with God. Before I knew it, I had spent six hours down there communing with God. By that time my wife is texting me saying where are you? I didn’t answer. I wanted to make sure I was missed. Finally, I just came home and they were ready to send out a posse to find me, but I made it home. I just had a really great time just spending time with the Lord. I know some of you are thinking, well, that is nice Chuck that you have that luxury to be able to do that in the middle of the week. I don’t have that luxury. I guess my excuse is that I was doing research for today’s sermon. Actually, I was. I was trying to experience the discipline of silence and solitude. Hopefully, some of the things that I have experienced I can share with you in the next few minutes.
If you have your Bibles and want to follow along, we will be looking primarily at the passage out of Mark. Mark 1:35. As a refresher for those of you who haven’t been here for a while or those of you who are visiting, we are focusing on what I call the four core values of the church, which are worship, discipleship, outreach, and community. We are taking a week and focusing on one of those values. This week we are back around to the value of discipleship, deep-rooted discipleship. To be a disciple, to become a model disciple, you have to practice what is known as the spiritual disciplines. Has anyone here heard of the spiritual disciplines? A few people have heard of the spiritual disciplines. When you mention the phrase spiritual disciplines, I think a lot of people initially maybe respond kind of negatively to it. They equate these spiritual disciplines as something that a monk or a priest might do. At a minimum, they think of something that is difficult to do. Like trying to discipline yourself to go out and exercise or something like that. Really the spiritual disciplines, whether you want to call it a discipline or not it is connected to the word discipleship. Discipline and discipleship are from the same root. Whether you want to call it a discipline or a practice or a habit, these are things that you must do if you truly want to grow up in spiritual maturity. In fact, they are a necessity. You have things in the spiritual disciplines like prayer, Bible study, service, and even fasting.
As we see today, one of the key disciplines is this discipline of silence and solitude. In fact, I am beginning to think this is probably one of the most important disciplines of all of the spiritual disciplines because it is in the periods of silence and solitude where you have an opportunity to hear a direct word from God. I know some of you are probably thinking, listen, I can handle some of the other things you have said especially the things that are direct commands by Jesus to do, but I don’t read anywhere in the Bible where it says you have to have a period of silence and solitude. If I had the time, I could show you both in the Old Testament and the New Testament the importance of silence and solitude. But today, I just want to focus on Jesus because if we are trying to be disciples of Jesus, the thing we are going to do is follow the example of Jesus and Jesus, as we see, spent a lot of time in silence and solitude. I don’t have time to go through all the passages in the gospels, but I just want to go through four passages, including the one that we are going to rest on, which is Mark 1:35.
The first passage I want to think about though is a story that comes up when Jesus was selecting the apostles. Instead of just simply going out and randomly picking apostles and not thinking about it, you have to remember that Jesus at this time was fully God but he was also fully human, he felt that he needed to go and listen to God before he would go out and choose those various disciples. It says out of Luke 6 “Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray and spent the night praying to God. When morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose 12 of them whom he also designated apostles.” So here is one of the first instances of Jesus going off to a place of solitude where he can just pray and begin to hear from God and God would respond to him and help him make that selection process of those apostles.
Then you have the story of the leper. If you were here at the First Wednesday service this past week, you might recall that Jim told this story of the leper. The man was a leper and Jesus came up to him and the man said to Jesus “Jesus, if you are willing, you can make me clean. And Jesus said be clean, I am willing.” Sure enough the leper was cured of his leprosy. What happened following that was that Jesus told the man and told the crowd don’t tell anybody about this. At that point, he really wasn’t interested in becoming a sensation right away but of course the word got out of what he did and the people began to come around him. As it says in Luke 5 “Yet the news about him spread all the more so that the crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses, but Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.” Jesus was feeling the pressure of the crowd, so he often would withdraw to the lonely places to pray and kind of to get away from the crowd and to experience the presence of the Father.
Then there is the story of John the Baptist. Many of you know that John the Baptist was the cousin of Jesus and also a good friend of Jesus. John the Baptist was the man who inaugurated the coming of Jesus. John the Baptist wasn’t a very popular guy because he pretty much said it the way it was. He was very much a prophet. In the process at some point, he insulted King Herod but King Herod was afraid to have him killed. One day, it was Herod’s birthday party and Herod’s daughter did a dance and Herod was so impressed with the dance that he says to his daughter I promise to give you anything you want. She says what I would like to have is the head of John the Baptist on a platter. That is what happened. Jesus was a good friend of John the Baptist so when Jesus heard what had happened, he withdrew by boat privately to where? To a solitary place. Jesus went off and grieved for the loss of his friend.
Finally, that brings us to today’s passage out of Mark 1:35. The context if you read earlier in that section, you see that Jesus was beginning to do a lot more ministry. He was with James and John and he went to the house of Simon and Andrew and found out that Simon’s mother-in-law was sick with a fever, basically on her deathbed. Jesus took her hand and immediately she was healed. The word got out about that and before the night was over many people were coming to the house of Simon to have Jesus heal them of diseases. Not only to heal them of diseases but heal them of demon possession. Basically, Jesus stayed up all night taking care of the diseased, taking care of the demon-possessed. If anybody had a right to sleep in the next morning, it was Jesus because he was probably emotionally and spiritually spent from dealing with all these people, all these diseases, all this demon possession, and all this kind of stuff. Yet the passage today says “Very early in the morning while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place where he prayed. Simon and his companions went to look for him, and when they found him they exclaimed everyone is looking for you.” That is kind of a quick summary of the biblical passages that tell you that silence and solitude were a priority for Jesus. I could give you further passages about Paul. I could go back to the Old Testament, but silence and solitude were a priority of Jesus Christ.
Having settled that, hopefully, you may ask the question what is the purpose of silence and solitude? Really, in a nutshell, the purpose is to help you crowd out all the noises of the world so that you are in a position to listen to God. We know the noises of the world. Whether it is the constant blaring of the TV. Whether it is the constant ringing of the cellphone or receiving of text messages. Whether it is the constant screaming of the kids or possibly a boss or even a relative. Whether it is the emails coming through the computer that are screaming for your attention. Those are what I refer to as the noises of the world that we are trying to get away from in order that we can truly begin to hear from God.
But having said that, one of the challenges of silence and solitude is that although it is actually fairly easy to distance ourselves from those types of noises in the world, it is very difficult to distance ourselves from the noises that are in our head. Do you see what I am saying here? It is not just about getting around from the sounds that go in our ear. It is getting away from the sounds that are in our head. A lot of people I believe use the noises of the world as an escape from the noises that are going on in their head. When we are able to crowd out the noises of the world, the cellphones, the calls, the screaming kids, then we are alone and a lot of people don’t like that, so they go back to the noises of the world. It is very difficult to get rid of the noises in the head. There is a priest and a writer who passed away in 1996. Some of you may recognize the name Henry Nouwen. He really writes of this. He writes “Entering a private room does not mean that we shut out inner doubts, anxieties, fears, bad memories, unresolved conflicts, angry feelings, and impulsive desires. On the contrary, when we have removed outer distractions, we often find that our inner distractions manifest themselves in force.” Can anybody relate to that? It is pretty easy to exit from the world’s noise, but it is very difficult to exit from the noises that are occurring in our head. The question is how do we do that?
I guess the first step that in many ways is the hardest step is to make sure that you carve out time so that you can hear from God. Like any of the disciplines, there are no shortcuts. If you want to hear from God, you have to make sure you carve out time to spend with God. Some of you are thinking how much time do I have to give? Really it depends. It could be as little as a few minutes. It could be as lengthy as several hours or even several days. What it really depends on is what is going on in your life right then. How badly do you want to hear from God to help you deal with a particular situation? What is it you are trying to hear from God? Just like if you want to hear some sort of good advice from a good friend, you can’t expect to get that over a minute. You have to spend an extended period with that person. So you have to be willing to carve out some time to be able to spend time with God. Then you say when should I do that? Jesus says do it very early in the morning. Now I know some of you work pretty normal work schedules where you go in in the morning and you get off in the late afternoon or early evening. I think that for many of you, in order to spend committed time with God, you have to make sure that you get up very early. When I say very early, you only know what very early is. For me, early is 4 o’clock. I get up at 4 o’clock on Sunday. You know the point that all the noises start entering into your life. You have to determine when you can get up early enough to be able to set a dedicated time apart so that you can hear from God before all those noises get in. Do you get me? In fact, some of you are familiar with the writer C. S. Lewis. He talks about you have to get up early before those wild animals start coming in. We are not talking about the kids. We are talking about the things that start attacking at your mind. He says “The real problem with the Christian life comes where people don’t usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. The first job each morning consists simply of shoving them all back and listening to that other voice, taking the other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in and so on all day. Standing back from all your natural fussing and frettings; coming in out of the wind. We can only do it for moments at first but from those moments the new sort of life will be spreading through our system because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us.” You have to carve out time. It doesn’t have to be early in the morning. It works best for some people late at night. For some people it is going to work best in the middle of the day depending on their schedule. But you have to figure out what works for you. You have to figure out when you can carve a certain amount of time out that you want to meet and listen to God.
The other thing we have to think about is, okay, we have carved out the time, but where should we go to do this or to have this meeting with God? The obvious answer is in your home is a good place to start. Some of you have quiet rooms you can sit in. Some of you have dens. Some of you have man caves or whatever you want to call it. Some of you have places where you can go and sit and shut out the noises around the house. What Jesus said is sometimes you have to leave the house. In fact, he goes on to say “He got up, and he left the house.” We don’t know why he left the house he was staying in, but I suspect it was crowded. I suspect there was probably some snoring going on. There might have been some arguing going on. Whatever it was, Jesus knew that he had to leave the house to do it. I am not saying you always have to leave the house because it is not practical. On a regular daily basis with your quiet time with God, it makes sense to stay in the house. But if you have something really pressing on your mind that you want answers from, it makes sense to leave the house. Why? Because in your house you have all these things clamoring for your attention. Even if you are in a quiet place what happens? You start looking over at the pile of laundry that needs to be folded. You start thinking about the dishes that have to be removed from the dishwasher. You start looking at the unfinished projects or you start looking at the pile of bills that are sitting on the table. All those things are competing for the attention of God so what you have to do occasionally is get up and leave the house and go somewhere else. Where do you go? You can go anywhere. Like I said I like to go down to the river. I really enjoy it down there. I just found out there are like 24 miles of trails down there. I am amazed at what a nice spot that is down there on the river. I tend to be attracted to the water. A few weeks ago, we went down to Florida to visit our daughter and I spent six hours in a silent treat just walking around the bay and walking around the property and that sort of thing. I love being around water. Some people would maybe prefer to be in a park setting. Fine. Then go over to Schenley Park. Go to North Park. Wherever you like to go, go ahead and do that. You know there are plenty of places in Pittsburgh where you can go and experience solitude. Some of you may be saying it is cold outside and I don’t like the cold so where else can I go. Go inside. Go to a local library. Some of you know most libraries have what they call study rooms. All you do is need permission and get the key and you can sit in a study room all day long sometimes. Just you, God, and your Bible. I love going down to the Cathedral of Learning. It is a great place to go if you just want to sit and talk with God. If you feel comfortable and want to go to a church, we can open up the church for you and you can go to most churches they would allow you to sit in there and be able to sit there and reflect and listen to God. There are retreat centers in the area. Even possibly monastery. We have a monastery close by.
I remember back in the early 90s when my first wife, Dana, was diagnosed with cancer, I was really in a lot of turmoil mentally and looking for some sort of an answer. I lived in Portland which was about an hour from the Oregon coast so what I wanted to do was just get in the car and go to the coast. I didn’t know why. I was just going to go to the coast and I was going to go down there and pray. On the way to the coast, I saw a sign to a monastery. I had never been to a monastery. So I said I will go and see if the doors are open. Sure enough, the doors were open. I came in and sat quietly in the pews and there were a bunch of monks up there chanting or praying, and I sat there all day long and just prayed and reflected and listened to them. Even at about noon I think they were getting worried about me so they offered to feed me some lunch. They brought me into a little room, gave me a bowl of soup, gave me some bread, and then exited the room and I was in there by myself. They knew what I was doing. They knew that I needed that moment of silence and solitude, and it was the most refreshing day of my life. So there are plenty of places to go.
Even though the ideal situation is to be totally in solitude away from any people or any sort of distractions, really once you get used to doing this, you will find that you can have silence and solitude in the midst of a crowd. As I said, when I was doing my retreat this last week, I walked through Market Square and Market Square was very busy because a farmer’s market was going on and there was a guy playing a guitar and I sat there but I experienced silence and solitude. You say how can you do that? You can do that because it is a different setting. The people that were there placed no expectations on me. What you have to experience in silence and solitude, and this is where it is very hard, you sometimes have to leave your familiar community. You may have to leave your church, your work environment, and you may even have to leave your family for a day. People say I can’t do that. Well, you can and it’s important. If you are away from your family and the people that are in your immediate familiar surroundings of community, they often put subtle expectations on you that you don’t even know are happening. When you get away from that and you are sitting in an environment even though there are a bunch of people there, none of those people are placing one single expectation on you. That is why it was free. I knew when I was sitting there and I looked at other people that were sitting there and they weren’t watching the musician. They were daydreaming. I wasn’t daydreaming. I was having my silence and my solitude with God. The thing that kept me from daydreaming is really focusing on a scripture.
Some people say if I go out and do this thing what am I supposed to do? Do I try to get into some sort of Zen-like mode where I open my mind and empty my mind and just try to get in touch with some sort of abstract reality, some new age type thing? No. It is anything but that. You don’t empty your mind of the chaos in your mind. What you do is you invite the Spirit of God into that chaos to help you sort through it. When you are wherever you are and your mind starts wandering and going in many different directions, which it will, by having a scripture to focus on it centers you back. When you find yourself going in all these different directions, you focus back on that passage that you decided to focus on that day. It could be anything. It could be a familiar passage. It could be an unfamiliar passage. It could be a book of the Bible. It could be a Psalm. Whatever it is that you enjoy that you can keep focus on so when you get distracted you have something to anchor you back.
So really it’s not that difficult. All you have to do is find time, find a location, grab a scripture, and then ask yourself what is the most pressing concern that I have in my life today, one, two, or three things. What is the decision I have to make regarding work, regarding family? What is the health issue that is on my plate? What is possibly the grief or loss that I am experiencing? Do I just want to get into the presence of God because I am feeling spiritually empty? Whatever it is, bring that to the forefront and try to articulate that, and then take the scripture, take that issue and write it in a journal or write it in a notebook or write it on a piece of paper or whatever it is because that is going to be the beginning of your time with God. Besides your Bible and that issue, you need to have something to write on. You need to have a pen. Some people don’t like the journal so don’t call it a journal. Just call it taking notes. Take a yellow pad, take a napkin. Take whatever you want but have something to write on because God is going to give you something. I guarantee 100% he is going to give you something.
You say that is cool but what will I feel when I am doing it? What am I going to be experiencing when I am going through this? There is bad news and good news. The bad news about a spiritual or silent retreat or a period of silence and solitude is that the initial experience is that you are going to feel possibly new forms of anxiety. You are going in there to deal with one issue and all of a sudden you start feeling really anxious. If you are someone who is a workaholic and feels like they have to go, go, go, I guarantee you are going to feel anxious. Especially if you choose to do something more than two hours. If you try to sit for six hours and do completely nothing, I guarantee that you are going to start feeling a little bit anxious because I feel anxious. I feel very anxious because I have a hard time sitting still because I am thinking of the thousands of things that are going on. I feel guilty. I felt guilty when I was down there Thursday during a work day. All the rest of the world is working. What right do I have to sit there and just do nothing? You are going to feel a sense of guilt. It kind of reminded me of when I was a child. Did anybody ever skip school when they were a child? Somehow you pretend like you have a fever or whatever it is and you skip school. You say, man, I got away with it. I am at home. What happens about 1 or 2 o’clock? Don’t you start feeling kind of crappy? You start feeling like I’m tired. I’m bored. My friends are at school and then kids start coming home. They are going out to play and you can’t play because you played all day and so you are feeling like it just isn’t fun anymore is it? I guarantee if you go on a spiritual retreat and you are someone who is a type-A personality and have to work, work, work and you decide I am going to do nothing for six hours but just walk around and talk to God, you will feel anxious. That anxious feeling will probably manifest itself in something physical. In fact, I, almost every time, and I still have not gotten past this, start feeling this knot in the back of my neck. This is true. Always I feel this knot. I begin to think to myself what is it that is causing this knot, God? Tell me. What he says is, well, I’m not causing it. God says I’m not causing it; you are causing it. What keeps coming to me is that the reason I am feeling this knot is that I am fighting against God. God is saying just relax. Just sit with me for a while, and I am getting pulled back by the world. There is this tug of war that is going on in my brain that creates this knot, this tension, and God is speaking. He says, you know what, don’t worry about it. You’re with me. Everything will be fine. I get better at it and I get better at it, but I continually experience this. Sometimes I experience that knot almost during the whole retreat. But that is okay because when you are feeling those physical symptoms, write it down. Ask God. Tell me why I am feeling this way. Tell me why I am feeling anxious. Tell me why I am feeling guilty. Tell me why I am feeling this knot.
And not only that. What I pretty much guarantee if you are a people person and used to being around people, you are going to start experience loneliness. You might be able to sit down for two hours in your house but doing six hours or eight hours away from people or two days completely away from people and you are probably going to start feeling lonely. You are going to start missing your friends. You are going to start missing your family. Ask God why is that? Maybe God is trying to teach you something. Maybe he is trying to teach you that maybe you depend too much on your relationships. Maybe you have to realize that for right now I am the only community you need, the Triune God, the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. All you need right now is me. You will go back to those other people but right now I want you to learn that even when those other people are gone, which many of them will be in some way or another, I am with you. I am sitting there with you and you will be okay. If you get that, and you go back into your community whether it is your family, friends, or whatever, you will actually be a better person because what you may realize is that you are relying on other people to fill your need for community instead of filling it with God. That is a revelation that sometimes people are not going to want to hear, but it is true. You go back in the community creating less demand on people because you are trying to fill up some need that you have had since you were a little child that you have to have the affirmation of others constantly and the presence of others or you just feel incomplete. Those are revelations you get when you sit down and spend time with God. That is the bad news.
The good news is that if you are persistent and you stick with it, you will hear from God. You will. I am not saying the first time. If you are persistently doing this over and over and you are taking notes and writing things down, you could fill a journal in six hours because the stuff will come at you so fast. You say what will I hear? What type of things will come to me? God may give you a fresh revelation of himself. Maybe you are walking around in nature or whatever and you begin to appreciate everything God created. He may give you a fresh revelation of you. Something you didn’t go there expecting to get and he keeps bringing up the idea that maybe you got some hidden anger or resentment towards people or lack of forgiveness. He keeps pressing them. You want to get to the other topic and he says no today we are going to deal with you. We are going to deal with the things that you are struggling with. The character flaws of you. You may not want to hear that but he is going to tell you. And when he tells you, write it down. Oftentimes he is going to tell you what you need to do to go take care of that situation. Ideally, though, if you bring him a situation or crisis or decision that has to be made, he is going to give you something. He may not solve the situation, but he may give you a brand new way to frame it. He may give you a different perspective on how to view the situation. When he gives you those things, just start writing it down. You say that is great, Chuck, but how do I know all that stuff that I write down is from God? All I can say is I don’t know. I cannot tell you exactly how you know when he gives you something during those moments of silence and solitude that that is something directly from God or something you made up in your head or something that came from somewhere else, but the way I usually know that is that it is usually something that I could not have come up with on my own. I didn’t have enough information or even exposed to that information to come up with that sort of revelation. When I get one of those revelations, those get a little star in my journal and I say thank you God. That is clearly a revelation from you because I could not have gotten that on my own. He will give you those. He might just give you one the entire day. He might give you dozens of them. You might have a bunch of stuff in your journal that is more from you than it is from God, but when he gives you those little nuggets of revelation, cherish those things because those become treasures and those things that you can look back at for years.
I shared a while ago that a year ago January I went on a two-day retreat because I was feeling a little bit frustrated about the church. I wasn’t sure about the direction we were going. A lot of god things were happening, but I just felt like we were making it too difficult. It just was not working. I felt like I needed to get away and kind of get a fresh vision from God. So I went up to a retreat center and sat there for two days. I prayed, walked, talked with God and had a good time. I wrote a lot of notes, but I didn’t get what I wanted to get. The last day, and it seems like it was the last 15 minutes, but I don’t know. I was there praising God and I was saying God I came up for a purpose and I really wanted an answer to this particular situation. I am okay if I go back with nothing. I think I got past the point where I feel guilty about spending that time away, but can you just give me something. About that second he gave me the vision with these four values. He said, Chuck, you are making it too hard. If you just focus on these four values and that is all you do for the remainder of the time you are here, you are going to simplify your church and you are probably going to be a good, solid little church because you are going to have people who love to worship God. You are going to have people that love discipleship teaching each other and being taught by others. You are going to have people that understand the idea of outreach, and you are going to have people that really enjoy each other’s company. What more is there? He didn’t work through all the details of the banners and the inserts and all that kind of stuff. He just gave me the framework. He just said just focus on the core values. That is all you need to do. He leaves it up to me to fill in the blanks. Obviously, we are still kind of working it out, but that is what he gave me during that time.
In closing, when we think about it, if you stick with it not just one time, not just one hour, but if you are intentional about spending time with God, and you sacrifice a decent chunk of your day once or twice a year, I guarantee you will be blessed. When you come out of that retreat time, you may be feeling a little bit of nervousness about coming out of that retreat time because you realize that while you were gone, especially if you do it during midweek, a lot of people were looking for you. While I was sitting there, I didn’t turn off my phone completely so I would get a vibration from a text, a phone call coming in. I knew there were emails coming in. I knew my wife was looking for me. But I purposely stayed away because I wanted to experience what Jesus was experiencing. Jesus was experiencing the same thing because when he was in a period of silence and solitude what happened? His companions came to look for him and when they found him they exclaimed “Everyone is looking for you.” But you know what, Jesus found absolutely no reason to sit there and justify the fact that he was gone and that he was sitting with the Father. Absolutely no reason whatsoever. He just said, okay, let’s get up and go back to work. That is actually the next line. It says “Jesus replied, let us go somewhere else to the nearby villages so that I can preach there also. That is why I have come. So he traveled through Galilee preaching in their synagogues and driving out demons.” He picked up where he left off. He knew he was emotionally and spiritually spent, so he had to go into this time of silence and solitude and then when he came out of that, he came out of it better equipped to continue to do his ministry. He knew the importance of that. So really Jesus is our example. If you are someone that maybe you have got to get a break from the crowds. It could be your family, your work, employees. It could be anybody, from the screaming kids or whatever; you owe it to yourself to carve out time for God, an extended period of time for God. If you are an employee and you are constantly bombarded by all these demands and working overtime and overtime and overtime, you owe it to yourself to take a time of silence and solitude where you can, like Jesus, recharge your batteries. I know a lot of people take sick time for all sorts of reasons. Take a sick time for a silent retreat. In fact, I will write an excuse for you. That time of silence and solitude will probably do more for you than anything else because when you come out of that, you are going to be a better employee because you are going to be in a better frame of mind. Maybe you are somebody that is going through some grief or some major health issues and you need a fresh perspective on it, you owe it to yourself to go off and find that time and spend time with God. Maybe, like I said, you are just someone who has been dry on their spiritual walk and you just need to get back connected with God. You owe it to yourself to carve out that time and spend that time with God and listen to God. Silence and solitude is very difficult to preach on. This is one that I really didn’t even want to go there because I know it is so foreign to so many people. I imagine that some of you checked out from the very beginning and said waste of time. This one doesn’t apply to me. I get that. But I suspect there might be 10 or 20% of the people here that know what I am talking about and know what they need. The people that are serious about growing deep in discipleship, you will do this. You must do this because you cannot grow deep in discipleship unless you carve out time to listen to God. You have to. It is a priority. More than ever, I am just realizing how it is important for my own well-being. I cannot go through all this stuff and all the emotions and all the challenges that are facing me as a pastor constantly, constantly, constantly unless I get away and I spend alone time with God because when I go away, I come back recharged and ready to go at it again. You are all in your own ministry. You’re ministering at the workplace. You’re ministering at the home. You’re ministering to the schools. You need to do the same thing for yourself.
I close with a passage by one of my favorite authors, A. W. Tozer. He writes “We Christians must simplify our lives or lose untold treasure on earth and in eternity. Modern civilization is so complex as to make a devotional life all but impossible. It wears us out by multiplying distractions and beats us down by destroying our solitude, where otherwise we might drink and renew our strength, before going out to face the world again.” Let us pray.
