Sabbath & Solitude

Over this past year I’ve been compiling information, ideas, Bible verses, etc that have challenged me deeper spiritually than I’ve ever known personally and pastorally. I spend a lot of time reading this document and praying for clarity.

We all want to go deeper with God. We must slow down, or we won’t go deep. I’ve spent many hours reading, researching, praying, writing, etc. These things are becoming increasingly deep within me as a result of taking time to reflect on them, rehearse them, read them, ultimately praying into them.

I’ve compiled over one hundred pages of these ideas. This is not a well-constructed or fluid document. These are headline concepts, and I would like to encourage you to make some room and take some time to spend reading through this asking the Holy Spirit to awaken all of our hearts.

Please continue to pray Philippians 2:13 over us all, “God is working in us giving us the desire and the power to do what pleases him.” TLB

Are your greatest desires aligned with your deepest desires? #EmbracingGodsDesign

Spiritual practices and spiritual disciplines revealed just how much you do and do not desire God. Many people allow their greatest desires to take control rather than exploring their deepest desires. Do you worship God? Are you really sure? What do the practices of your life reveal about this vitally important question? Examine yourself to see if you are in the faith

If the church could re-capture this ancient practice of Sabbath, it would have a transforming effect on the world as it awakens a level of worship from followers of Christ that otherwise simply will not be awakened. Believers throughout the ages have practice this day of growing deeper in a heart and the attitude of worshipping God.

We must take time once a week to worship, rest and meditate in community. The human being was designed to run six days. Then it would be out of gas--needing refueling. Don’t mess around with God’s carefully engineered design.

Saturday night quieten your soul, shutting off all sources of potential distraction, allowing yourself to have 12 to 15 hours of focus in preparation to stand before God‘s people having preserved the place of your imagination solely for him. This is the essence of Sabbath for me as a pastor, but so much more.

There is such a thing as a seared conscience, and to continually neglect, this important area of your existence is potentially problematic on every area of life

Why don’t we just hear God shouting for our attention and giving us information that we could so effectively use? He requires us to quiet our souls because he wants our focus and our attention in an intimate place of affection, and that doesn’t happen when we are racing through life getting announcements from God.

It has never been more difficult to be still in all the history of the world than it is right now in the digital age, where access to the entire world is always within your reach

Learn to practice stillness, even in noisy situations where you purpose to encounter this living God, who is with you always. Nearness and awareness. Practice the awareness of the newness of God by closing your eyes breathing in breathing out everywhere we go we bring God‘s presence to real life. This all is a part of legacy, legacy of being a non-anxious presence.

The practice of quieting yourself multiple times throughout every single day just to learn to practice God’s presence, so that it truly becomes your way of life and your way of living.

Circumstances can rage around you, but they do not have the power to take control of your faculties. If you do not allow them to do so. Faith, when she was a child with a very concerning beehive, looking yellow rash, and she saw my face and then she saw my calm after she freaked out. No matter what the circumstances may be reaching toward you. Practice, calm and listen to him. Legacy. Listen and pray. The practice of quieting ourselves as a family.

In a fallen world, we all contend with the chronically, dissatisfied desire. Thomas Aquinas was asked what would it take to satisfy human desire, and his answer was everything. All of us deal with chronically, dissatisfied desire, so removing all restraint to find satisfaction is a losing strategy. Learning to celebrate discipline and embrace healthy restraint is actually the key that unlocks a satisfying life.

The idea of craving and aversion is actually though root cause of suffering. Most of our strategy for living is to simply chase what we want and to run away from what we don't want. Even if you can successfully achieve everything you set out to accomplish the heart will still never be satisfied and you will always want something more. You were Born for something more.

Sabbath is a line in the Sand you draw where you throw down the gauntlet and say I am going to learn how to practice being free from work and from want This is where you don't work and you don't think about work and it is much more difficult than you can possibly imagine. Deactivation of the imagination by disconnection The J curve applies. Anything you try at first gets worse before it gets better and then you come back to where you were and then you excel to a higher place. Don't get all caught up in evaluating your Sabbath thinking about if you liked it or not thinking about if it was successful or not just put the practice into Place, because you're obedient to the Lord And trust him to help you grow in the revelation of Sabbath, and the result of God's blessing, he promises to bring

In Exodus, the Sabbath is explained in terms of creation, but then, in Deuteronomy, the sabbath explained in terms of pharaoh in Egypt. Sabbath is a revelation of creation in the image of God, and Sabbath is a revelation of liberation from the worlds system of Egypt, where we put this into practice to keep from getting sucked back in to the worldly empire system. To be liberated, and then to be devoted to these practices and purposes of God is the only way we continue being liberated and free from producing structures that bring others into bondage, because our way of thinking isn't different from the system of the world, which we are conquering in the pursuit of successfully coming out from under the oppression of others building their empire. We must be careful not to emerge into a mindset of building, our own empire and system that is contrary to God's kingdom, impressing others to make our dreams happen. There is a difference between your greatest desire, and your deepest desire, and the sabbath is where God addresses and awakens our deepest desire to control our greatest desires. In Sabbath rest is resistance. If you are not learning to rest, you are not resisting the system that's trying to take control of your life and your legacy.

When we resist the Egypt of our day, we will be met with resistance, because when you resist you are picking a fight against some form of system External resistance deals with our society, but internal resistance is a trickier source of resistance that comes from within our own heart, Drive, ambitions, desires, passions, idolatry, etc.

Sabbath is living against the inertia of culture. There is no cultural architecture for Sabbath that exists in our day but that has not always been the case. Stores used to be closed on Sunday. Throughout the ages this has been the case and never has the Sabbath fallen under such attack as our generation With pathological busyness And chronic exhaustion.

The digital availability keeps us from being fully present. is FOMO. In the realm of marketing the last thing companies want you to do is to think critically and deeply about how you will live your own life.

A culture of reactivity and passivity results from being overstimulated, and under developed in our ability to critically think for ourselves

Reactivity is the exact opposite of discernment. The attractional path of least resistance very quickly, and very easily takes you to a place you do not want to go.

Honoring the Sabbath is truly recognizing the world does not center around me. Jesus is the one who is holding all things together, and I am cooperating with the rhythm of God dismantling anxiety that is born from the fear of missing out FOMO.

Studies compared a concentrated focus of a 25 hour work week where phones had to be turned in and Internet. Browsers were strictly limited to the focus of work in comparison to a 50 hour work week with no focused restrictions. Productivity did not remain the same, it went up! There is something about coming to a focused, understanding that I am an image bearer of God with an assignment that deserves my full and undivided attention that releases productivity and fruitfulness. Remember activity is not the same as productivity. Chronic and obsessive activity is in no way a pathway to productivity.

The whole idea of consumer capitalism is built on going faster and becoming more efficient. Are you allowing the anxiety of FOMO to drive you deeper into the cultural paradigm that has become the basis for even the way we do church?

In the 60s labor, saving devices began to emerge like electric skillets, vacuums, hair dryers, etc emerged, with the promise of leveraging our time. The idea was that we would have more recreational time by accomplishing more work in less hours.

Problem: People chose money over time. When they were able to leverage their time, they invested their newly discovered extra time to make more money. It is interesting but studies show still today people who choose money over time experience less happiness than people who choose time over money.

Instead of working less hours, we actually now work more hours even though technically we have less work to do because our time has been leveraged in accomplishing more tasks in fewer hours.

The average American house has 300,000 items in it. People who simplify live happier lives. People who choose to have less money, refusing to chase after all the things to buy in the pursuit of finding happiness actually find more happiness choosing time over money, relationships, family time, community in a variety of ways. This is an investment in the things that matter most

When you truly begin to Sabbath, a restlessness will be awakened. This restlessness is not to be rejected, but rather to be befriended, understanding you are aligning your inner being, and your outer being to the rhythm of God, and that is a process constant recalibration. When you are feeling restlessness in your Sabbath, it is a great reminder that your body attempts to cooperate with the system of the world and has been so well trained that it produces an almost violent reaction to God's directives.

Give understanding to where your body is and why. Don't just reject it actually befriend it and begin to walk your body into a deeper communion with God. This restlessness is the inner dissatisfaction that exists within a soul. If you could hear a sermon on being satisfied, and simply choose to be satisfied as a result, you would've done that a long time ago.

You need a practice to implement that helps train the behavior of the spirit. I heard a great sermon on being satisfied. I am now going to be satisfied. It just does not work that way. Learning to create a space for nGod to do what you cannot do is what this is all about. I can will to turn off my phone. I can will to devote myself to growing in the understanding of a Sabbath, but I cannot will to no longer feel dissatisfied as a matter of or act of my will. It takes a pattern to implement this principle in a way that it shapes, conditions, and recalibrates my heart and my soul. God, and his spirit through this practice can create in you what you cannot; na heart that is at rest and a soul that truly is content and well.

When you begin to implement practices that go against the grain, and or countercultural, people will react. You need to prepare yourself for that, and be ready to give a gracious response, so you do not come off as self-righteous as a result of your newly discovered position. Eating with a vegetarian can make me feel judged. The reality is faithfully practicing Sabbath out of personal conviction and not just casual. Preference set you free from the fear of men. You find yourself in a place of disappointing people not because you are being unkind but because you refuse to participate in some thing, they want you to participate in and try to convince you to do so. To say no to people, because you have said yes, to God is a tremendous practice of getting free from the fear of man.

Be prepared for a sabbath sadness that results when you stop self-medicating, and you're nervous system starts to go into shock. When there is less anesthesia, there will be the ability to feel things more. We live in a society that helps teach us the ability to master the neglect of deeper desires by empowering the pursuit of greater desires. Just like working out resistance, will produce something in you that cannot be produced in you without it. You can't do it yourself you must purpose resistance in working out to grow in greater strength.

Give yourself a chance! We believe sin is wrong but if we never dismantle the reactionary disposition we believe what we believe but we love what we live more than we believe what we believe. Deeper desire is always trumped by greater desire in a reactionary disposition! Outrageously loving people are only those who control a hurried disposition. Time in God's presence will transform your life. Turn page is awesome to build rhythm of gaining information but making room and taking time to rehearse what God reveals is pivotal!!! Hearer doer! You can't become on your own even if you learn the principles of what to be. Solitude. Community.

Sacrifice disposition unveils deeper desires taking precedence over greater desires. Deep well in my life is this digging, drawing out and digging more. Come from this place in empowering others.

If worship in our gatherings are the extent of your worship you are underdeveloped and incapable of truly becoming Christlike because this is not something you can do on your own by sheer determination no matter how many sermons you hear!

Delighting in Sabbath: You don't walk into deep relationship without work, surrender and pursuit.

This is not just about what you are choosing not to experience, but this is about what you are choosing to experience. Happiness is circumstantial, so it comes and goes according to the circumstances you experience. Joy is something deeper that comes from a place we discover only if we are willing to dig. Delight is not the absence of all tension. Delight is the willingness to face the tension, digging deeper, to discover those ancient wells that are available to those who hunger and thirst, for God's kingdom beyond this world, deepest desire, greatest desire. We are talking about the inner dispositions of the heart. There are joyful feelings, but the feelings themselves are actually not the joy. There is the discipline of joy. Joyful people are more loving and loving people are more joyful. In the Greek rejoice is both a noun and a verb so in essence when Paul says rejoice, he's simply saying to Joy. In the Greek language, rejoice is both a noun and a verb so when we translated in English as a verb, we say rejoice, but it literally means with the choice of your Will Joy with the choice of your will to joy. Sabbath is a discipline of celebration, which makes it a mechanism of delivery for Joy. Sabbath is one of the most important disciplines by which we become people filled with joy like God, who is filled with joy. Sabbath is about purposing, a greater awareness of the nearness and presence of God, in which there is fullness of joy.

Dan Allender writes in his book, The Sabbath: "The Sabbath is an invitation to enter delight. The Sabbath, when experienced as God intended, is the best day of our lives. Without question or thought, it is the best day of the week. It is the day we anticipate on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday - and the day we remember on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. Sabbath is the holy time where we feast, play, dance, have sex, sing, pray, laugh, tell stories, read, paint, walk, and watch creation in its fullness. Few people are willing to enter Sabbath and sanctify it, to make it holy, because a full day of delight and joy is more than most people can bear in a lifetime, let alone a week."

To understand Sabbath you need to understand:

God is joyful - the One we get to be with on Sabbath.

God is the most joyful being in the universe. Any deep relationship takes time and work.

We are very naturally drawn to joyful people it is a wonderful prayer to enter into conversation with God saying, I have only seen you this way, whatever that is as angry or harsh, or whatever it may be, would you help me to learn more about knowing you as my joyful father?

Just as a picture is worth 1000 words a practice is worth 1000 principles. Sacred practice born from kingdom principles awaken eternity in your life and legacy.

Are you living in light of eternity? You'll never leave a legacy until you live a legacy.

One year from now you will view this differently if you are willing to grow in the revelation allowing God to make you awake and engaged!

Sabbath meal is central to this! Community around food in a meaningful way. Light candles, eat, read, pray. This does involve community so explore what that could look like, but be very careful not to confuse hospitality with entertaining. Entertaining is more of a showing off and trying to impress while hospitality is more of an inviting in and experiencing something meaningful together before the Lord.

Sabbath is a day of worship. What does this look like for you as you begin to explore, understand, and grow in a deeper understanding. An American Sunday experience is not a Sabbath. A Christian day off where are you? Are working in every direction continues to leave you exhausted and never addresses gods deeper plan to teach you to be rested.

Sabbath is set apart for or dedicated to the Lord and should have little to no resemblance to the other days of the week. This day should be characterized by a biblical prescription or rest, joy, delight, Worship, meals, where you allow your nervous system to recalibrate along with your brain, emotions, And your spirit

The tabernacle has various utensils that the Bible described as holy. It does not mean it is not wicked, because a pot or a utensil cannot be wicked or good. The reason it can be holy it's because it can be set aside for the purpose of devotion to God. The Sabbath is to the week what special China is to cookware. It's simply serves a purpose that is not for common use, and it has a special meaning when you experience it with its intended purpose.

Worship is more than attending a church service, though that is Worship. Worship is an entire life of orientation to in surrender to God. This is why it is ideal to develop your Sabbath around and to include Worship in church attendance.

The Jews don't talk about practicing the Sabbath. They talk about keeping the sabbath which gives more of the idea of a treasure you keep because it is so valuable rather than a behavior you practice in an effort to simply prioritize.

Simply put Sabbath must be a day that is set aside and holy to God I'm like other days. It is truly a holiday or a holiday. When you think about the holiday, it is uniquely different from other days because it is set aside for some intended purpose.

It is far too easy to spend most of our time on the things that don't really matter the most in life. This is the greatest desire versus the deepest desire idea. This is the day we sent a Park for something different to take place around us, and within us from the other six days. Ultimately, this is about consecration.

There is no way to Sabbath without actively trusting God, as this will involve boundaries where you are available to God rather than being available to work limiting interactions with people to devote yourself wholeheartedly to interacting with God. FOMO is real.

Six days we work to change the world and on the seventh day we trust in God celebrating what is. This is how we grow to learn to trust God more. Sabbath is a wonderful way to grow our worship for God into a deeper expression of surrender and submission.

Solitude & Sabbath

Phil 2:13 For God is working in you giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him. NLT

Hurry is an enemy to love.

Sabbath and Solitude are two things we are beginning to explore.

Can’t go deep if we don’t slow down - but you don’t go deep just because you slow down. You have to choose to go deep. Don’t just slow down – go deep. This is not about getting all serious but rather exploring what it is to delight in the Lord. Relax! Rest! Delight in Him! He delights in you in a place of joyful rest and restful joy.

Slowing down just to chill and rest is good but God desires something more. Will you rehearse what I’ve chosen to reveal?

Be careful not to ask the wrong question as you start into this. The question should be what is sabbath supposed to be not? When are we supposed to do it?

Treating Sabbath as a preference you have been convinced you really need to fit in somewhere leaves you at the mercy of your busy schedule trying to fit this in somewhere. The point of Sabbath is not to get it in, so you can get it done. The point of sabbath is to slow you down so you can go deep. It is entirely possible to slow down without going deep. Moses was overwhelmed, exhausted and depressed, and God was right there, saying I will give you rest in my presence will be with you. Sabbath is not slowing down to simply chill out and relax trying to take it easy. Sabbath is slowing down for the purpose of going deep so you need to open your Bible, practice, sacred activities to set the tone for something that is more than just fitting it in. What is Sabbath supposed to be and once you figure that out, give yourself to it Arranging and rearranging your life and your schedule accordingly. Numbers chapter 2 we are called by God to arrange our lives around God‘s presence.

Stop trying to live life in a prayerful disposition, and start training to live life in a prayerful disposition. Raise your hand, if you have ever run a marathon or a half marathon. Nobody wakes up one day and says hey, there’s a marathon this morning I’m going to go try to run a marathon. You don’t try to run a marathon you train to run a marathon. You don’t try to benchpress 200 pounds train to benchpress 200 pounds. Training is the scriptural concept and if you are trying, but not training, you keep failing and before long, you dismiss the idea as something that simply doesn’t work for you. It’s a lie of discouragement because your focus is all wrong. This becomes the F5 focus. Don’t try to be in outrageously, loving, person train to be in outrageously loving person. Don’t try to passionately pursue the Lord, but train to passionately, pursue the Lord. Trying deals with principles, while training deals with practices.

Solitude, stillness and silence

Communion to introduce and perhaps communion frequently

Get a jar of dirty water, shake it up to demonstrate what it’s like to live in the constant state of stimuli in the world. Set the jar on the table and by the time you’re finished speaking, the sediment has settled. This is a great demonstration of the value of solitude That produces a clarity of mind from the body made from dirt

The world is noisier than it has ever been and it keeps getting louder and louder and faster and faster would you agree? Progression idea, serpent in genesis dragon in Revelation Should we just submit to what the world becomes and become like it (Rom 12) or should we be a force, a counter, cultural force that awakens a dying world in a state of confusion to the richness of flourishing that comes from the kingdom of God? Our responsibility to bring the full impact of a good God and a prosperous kingdom to a fallen world in desperate need of God’s love.

The worlds counsel is counsel of enmity against God and against Gods ways.

“Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; (worlds system of thought)but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away.”

https://bible.com/bible/59/psa.1.1-4.ESV

In our modern day era, it is completely possible to banish solitude altogether because even when we are alone, we don’t have to be alone robbing us of this beautiful practice of solitude

87% of our population sleeps next to a smart phone and checks their phone as the first thing they do when they wake up. We need to parent our phones and put them in timeout. If we just cooperate with what’s common we just become like impulsive children who do not know how to cultivate maturity and have no idea how to delay gratification for the purpose of becoming something more than what you become when you don’t.

The last thing corporate America wants you to do is to think deeply on your own about the things that really matter to you!

Henry Nowin said without solitude, it is virtually impossible to develop a spiritual life. Simply, put we do not take our spiritual life seriously if we do not set aside, time to listen to him, Jesus often withdrew to lonely places to pray.

You cannot have a healthy marriage if you are never alone together and this demonstrates solitude. You also cannot have a healthy marriage if you are always alone and this demonstrates community.

The more we have grown acclimated to a society full of strangers, the more we become propelled to present ourselves, rather than being organically, known and comfortable with who we are.

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is a friend of silence. Mother Theresa

Researchers who have studied solitude have made a clear distinction between solitude, and simply being alone. There is a difference, because being alone does not mean you are free from distraction. Solitude is a place where you are free from all inputs. That includes worship, music, podcasts, and even scripture reading. This is the deeper awakening of a treasured well that exists within you for a flourishing state of communion with God. Lessen our reaction, Lord, deepen our response.

Researchers discovered when you separate solitude from aloneness there is no more desire for or against true solitude for extrovert or introvert‘s. This is not merely aloneness that introverts love and extroverts loathe . Something deeper is taking place.

Solitude is intentional time in the quiet to be with yourself and God. This is where God most effectively reveals what truly exists within your heart, those things that should exist there and those things he wants to deal with. Solitude is the re-creation of the wilderness and the wilderness teaches by taking away. It is the stripping away that begins to allow you to see further than you could before. In the desert you can see for Miles, because nothing clutters your view.

Solitude is the true disengagement of your senses from the world that exists around you. You have a body with a nervous system and brain. Solitude helps recalibrate your design to Rediscover Gods intention in the garden. Wow.

Someone speaking of Dallas Willard said as brilliant as his mind was, his heart was even deeper, and the truth of God’s word, somehow existed within him on a cellular level. This doesn’t happen by knowledge alone, but there must be practice and engagement of all faculties and resources to grow in the revelation of living in Christ, in such a way that we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28).

James 4:1 What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? NIV

James 1:14 but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. NIV

Proverbs 4:23 Keep your heart with all diligence, For out of it spring the issues of life. NKJV

Proverbs 4:23 Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life. ESV = Streams.

The unaided mind tends toward chaos. The ultimate challenge in life is the art of managing consciousness. Your life is this stream of consciousness. If your life is miserable, it’s because your stream is miserable. Managing that stream effectively so it can be characterized by that which is joyful and truthful and beautiful is the ultimate challenge.

The difficulty in our day is how cheap it is to outsource this stream to various screens so quickly and easily this will never produce greater capacity and depth from within us. I can avoid anger, anxiety, and so on just by outsourcing it so easily. Our ability to manage consciousness is weaker than ever in human history. Solitude in its uniqueness is our starting point of today. Don’t start with engagement when you already feel so overwhelmed and overloaded and over committed. You don’t need one more thing to do.

Throughout the gospels, we see Jesus ministering, powerfully, but there is a strong parallel between his devotion to solitude and his connection to power. 40 days he was in solitude in the wilderness, fasting and praying, and then we read in Mark 1 about this marathon of ministry that resulted where he was healing people and expressing the power of God that was flowing through him. After this, we read this curious verse about how Jesus got up early the next morning to find his way back to solitude. The Bible describes they had to send out a search party to find him because he was spending so long in his place of solitude. If I have a marathon ministry day, my natural thought is to take the next day off and sleep in, but Jesus knew the value of replenishing to avoid spiritual depletion and ministry exhaustion.

In the modern day world, we are never truly alone, and we are rarely truly in community. We seem to be always connected and interacting, but do not be confused, community is something deeper that involves communion of the soul.

Solitude is a place of the wilderness, where you will not only encounter God, but you will begin to encounter your unforgiveness toward your father, or your anger toward a coworker, etc. The heart is deceitful above all else, and it uses distraction to medicate its pain, compelling you to justify its behavior every step of the way.

Ephesians 3 speaks of a deeper knowing of God’s love that passes all knowledge. Some realities are learned from experiencing them not merely learning them academically. You will find yourself frustrated, but you must break through that barrier to discover solitude is more experimental and experiential than you possibly can realize without giving it a try. Spirituality is like a basic expression of little experiments through which you grow in a deeper awareness of God.

If a sermon on practicing peace could remove your anxiety then that would have happened a long time ago. Be anxious for nothing! There! Don’t you feel better since you learned the concept of peace? You must learn to practice peace as you learn to practice his presence. Peace doesn’t come from the absence of problems. Peace comes from the presence of God. In the same way peace doesn’t come from learning that you’re not supposed to be stressed out. That only stresses you out even more!

THIS IS NOT ABOUT TRYING TO DO SOMETHING. THIS IS ABOUT TRAINING TO DO SOMETHING. We overestimate what we can do by trying and we underestimate what we can do by training. Don’t try to run a marathon, train to run a marathon. You can’t control your inability when you try but you can control your pursuit as you train.

You can practice becoming a non-anxious presence to your world but it takes practice and not just principles. Your body must be involved in this process and that is why solitude, sabbath and prayer are all important. Do not underestimate the value of regular exercise increasing your overall health and your sense of well-being. Regular exercise helps you discharge anxiety from your body by activating the production of your brain's feel-good neurotransmitters, called endorphins. Develop some kind of routine that works for you and don’t stress out about it. Take the stairs rather than the elevator. Start your day with pushups. Purpose to take a conversational walk with God. More intentional ideas of working out at a gym, etc are great if you can purpose to fit that into your schedule but physical training isn’t as valuable as spiritual training so don’t get lost in the pursuit of that which is lesser. 1 Timothy 4:7-8 “…train yourself for godliness; 8 for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.” NIV

You need a practice to implement that helps train the behavior of the spirit. I heard a great sermon on being satisfied. I am now going to be satisfied. It just does not work that way. Learning to create a space for God to do what you cannot do is what this is all about. I can will to turn off my phone. I can will to devote myself to growing in the understanding of a Sabbath, but I cannot will to no longer feel dissatisfied as a matter of or act of my will. It takes a pattern to implement this principle in a way that it shapes, conditions, and recalibrates my heart and my soul. God, and his spirit through this practice can create in you what you cannot; a heart that is at rest and a soul that truly is content and well.

Sports analogy: Theology are rules to play the game. Spirituality is playing the game. If you never put the coaching into practice you are over stimulated and underdeveloped never growing in any capacity to become more. We must practice principles to engage in becoming who God designed us to become. We become more loving by experiencing love not by learning about it. When loved well we love well and learn more by living in this river of love. Love is learned in community (which is where we get wounded as well) and in solitude.

Ego and self-promotion is going on within you and that stream will produce a result that is given to things you were never designed by God to experience. Thinking you can stop sinning by being more determined about what you’ve decided is true is a deception. This is not about being more resolved and more determined. This is about being more formed into God’s image through the process of spiritual practices that take you deeper into spiritual formation. If I don’t discover solitude I will miss this gift of deeper spiritual formation that I cannot do on my own.

Spiritual disciplines are the posture of your pursuit. They are not your pursuit. Deep concept here but these activities can become idols if you’re not careful in the way you treat them. God’s not interested in your spiritual life he’s interested in your life! Practices are avenues to position yourself to more effectively experience Christ formation that God desires for you to experience.

Solitude enlarges the gap between stimulus and reaction, awakening the ability to respond. This is the training ground to help you to find a deeper response rather than a quick reaction. The reactionary disposition is rooted in the system of this world. Lord deepen our response and lessen our reaction. The less you spend time with God the more you talk about yourself, the more you are concerned about your reputation and the more you live with a hair trigger reactionary disposition. After developing the practice of solitude you will notice you actually begin being much more present in the moment when you come back into community.

Solitude and hurry are absolutely incompatible with each other. Solitude reveals how lives are more surface than soul. Don’t conclude any time of solitude with some kind of evaluation of if you felt it was successful or not. Just smile and celebrate that you are growing in this ancient practice of Jesus that truly matters in our modern day lives! Evaluating or trying to force this experience is contrary to the very nature of the practice itself.

Give understanding to where your body is and why. Don’t just reject it actually befriend it and begin to walk your body into a deeper communion with God. This restlessness is the inner dissatisfaction that exists within a soul. If you could hear a sermon on being satisfied, and simply choose to be satisfied as a result, you would’ve done that a long time ago.

NOTES IN WORD ABOVE THIS

When we are posturing ourselves correctly, we will find it to be very natural and automatic to begin doing what God designed us to do in the first place. The atmosphere of our lives releases, the potential God seeded deep within us. Angels and demons, kings, priests profits versus slaves.

The chief act of the will is not effort, but consent. Your will was designed to surrender to God and this will never deplete you, but always complete you in a place of communion and awakening with God

So often people fear solitude, because they fear encountering themselves so deeply. Often people believe they are going into solitude and have this glorious encounter with God we are nobody is there to make them mad or ask them to do something they don’t want to do. Then when you get into this place of solitude with God you learn quickly. You begin to experience yourself in a way you had not known was possible. Your issues and your desires exist within you!

All the things you push down and self medicate with the cultural narcotic of your choice suddenly begin to emerge, and you start to feel things you haven’t felt in a very long time or perhaps you don’t remember feeling those things at all. Somewhere you had the feeling and within you came a reaction to address that feeling in a way that you are now not able to address it in a state of solitude. It’s like coming out of surgery and the anesthetic begins to lessen so you feel some of the things you haven’t felt during the procedure.

During my message at some point, I need to explain that I am serving notice on your body, your nervous system, your neurological stimulator’s, the chemical exchanges exist within you declaring recalibration is coming !!!

JOHN MARK STUFF:

HOW ARE YOU STRATEGICALLY INTRODUCING THIS ON A MORE INTIMATE LEVEL TO STAFF, ELDERS, COMMUNITY GROUP LEADERS AND OTHER KEY LEADERS?

Weekly light a candle at the table with Bibles in hand as part of Sabbath to establish a more memorable routine.

* Do you desire to encounter God? Then say yes to Jesus’ invitation to solitude, silence, and stillness, and follow Him into the quiet.

CHECK OUT NOTES IN THE NOTES

Most of us have spent thousands of hours under great teaching but how has this impacted behavior?

Zzzzzz

Draw Out Potential

True Disciples are PRACTICING CHRISTIANS

Sabbath – concise ideas

Quiet In A Noisy World

Formation of Practices

Joy Is A Moral Obligation

Hurry Is An Enemy

Follow Jesus For Real

Team Q & A

Celebrity Culture

Pursuits - Results

Invited To Solemn Quiet Practices

Spiritual Formation - zoom

Sabbath – Elaborate Prayer

Behave Not Just Believe

Solitude = very long

Anna Lembke On The Neuroscience of Addiction: Our Dopamine Nation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jziP0CEgvO

Let’s take a moment to bring ourselves into a more fully devoted awareness to God’s presence in silence together as a church family.

Habakkuk 2:20 But the Lord is in His holy temple. Let all the earth be silent before Him. NAS

DRAW OUT POTENTIAL:

We are designed to be fruitful and multiply in the image of a fruitful, multiplying God. We are designed to be fruitful and multiply in the image of a fruitful, multiplying God as He fills us with the fulness of God which requires overflowing as nothing can contain His fulness. We are called to carry him not to contain him and this is why the Bible describes outpouring rather than downpouring.

We are called to rule Genesis. We will co-rule with Christ one day. In Revelation we see that the Garden became a garden like city. We’re designed in the image of God to be fruitful and multiply with the ability to take raw materials and turn them into something more than it could be without us. Harley Davidson motorcycles existed in the earth in the form of raw materials before they were designed and built by man.

Genesis 1:26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” NIV

The word “rule” or “have dominion” in other translations is a Hebrew word, “radah”. It’s a royal word referencing the dominating rule of a king.

One Hebrew scholar gave definition to this as “actively partnering with God in taking the world forward”. You thought you were just getting out of bed in the morning, reading your Bible, sipping your coffee, getting the kids to school, going to work, etc. You are actively partnering with God in moving the world forward. This is the language of royalty. This is what kings do and what queens do. In ancient days the king was thought of as divine in the image of God for others to behold their royal status and divine abilities. That meant that everybody else was not the image of God, which in turn meant everybody else would be slaves born to serve the king.

The Genesis story clarifies that we are all created in the image of God. This was revolutionary as it says not just one people group or ethnic group – all people are made in the image of God and were made to rule. Genesis 2 we read about the raw materials in the Garden of Eden and then we see how ruling looks a lot like work.

(Rivers flowing out of Eden)

Genesis 2:11-12 “…there is gold. 12 And the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there.” ESV

In Eden, Adam and Eve had a river (Genesis 2:10). On the new earth, we’ll have the river of the water of life from God’s throne (Revelation 22:1).
In Eden, Adam and Eve had gold and onyx nearby (Genesis 2:11-12). In the new Jerusalem, we’ll walk on golden streets, and walls will have every precious stone (Revelation 21:19-21).
In Eden, Adam and Eve will called to rule and to serve (Genesis 1:26; 2:15). In the new earth, we will serve as kings and priests (Genesis 22:3,5).
In Eden, the unclean serpent was present to tempt and to bring shame (Genesis 3:1). In the new earth, there will be nothing impure, shameful, or deceitful (Revelation 21:3,23).
After Adam and Eve sinned, they were banished from God’s presence (Genesis 3:23-24). On the new earth, God’s presence will endure forever (Revelation 21:3,23).

Genesis 2:15 The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. ESV

We are to work it and keep it. This Hebrew word means to cultivate, develop or draw out its potential.

Tim Keller’s definition of work based on Biblical theology,

“Rearranging raw materials to draw out its potential for the flourishing of everyone.” Rearranging raw materials in order to create an Eden like space where human beings can flourish in relationship with God, others and to the earth itself.”

When a farmer takes soil and seed and rearranges it into a crop for people to eat, enjoy and live. Or when someone in a restaurant takes crops, or groceries, and rearranges it into a meal for us to share in community enjoying the enriching benefits of the table. An entrepreneur takes an idea or a crafts person takes a lump of clay or a piece of metal, or when a parent takes a child… All of this is the work of cultivation. Culture comes from this idea of cultivation. Healthy culture is the result of healthy people who take the raw stuff on planet earth help release an Eden like place of delight.

The Garden was more of a project than a product, meaning it was designed to expand and go somewhere. Scholars argue that God’s original intention was for Adam and Eve to multiply and spread the garden out all over the entire world. Notice the last two chapters of the Bible in Revelation is all about the future and they are filled with references from Genesis 1, 2 and 3. In Revelation it’s not a Garden any longer but it is a Garden like City with gates, streets, dwelling, infrastructure, society, culture, food, drink, art and poetry.

Moving from careerism to contribution to this process of cultivation. Vocation is a practice of cultivation where we are fruitful and multiply. The word vocation comes from the Latin word which simply means calling. Work is an act of discipleship. Jesus was a carpenter – we must view our work as a key facet of our apprenticeship to Jesus and as the place where we spend the bulk of our time as the primary context of our spiritual formation. The place where we work out with God and community, in prayer, our spiritual life to grow, mature and to come face-to-face with our struggles, weaknesses and our sin. This is a wonderful place of finding Jesus at work within our lives. Culture says I am what I do. Scripture says I do what I am.

Ephesians 1:22-23 And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all. ESV

Ephesians 3:16-21 I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, 18 may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, 19 and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. 20 Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, 21 to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen. NIV

The Bible references the outpouring not down pouring when it talks about heaven invading the earth. We cannot contain the fullness of God but we are called to carry it overflowing in an outpouring everywhere we go.

We are designed to be fruitful and multiply in the image of a fruitful, multiplying God as He fills us with the fulness of God which requires overflowing as nothing can contain His fulness.

We see rivers flowing out of Eden in Genesis. River flowing from the Temple in Ezekiel. We are planted by streams fo living water in Psalms and finally in Revelation 22 the river flows from God’s throne, from God’s very presence.

TRUE DISCIPLES ARE PRACTICING CHRISTIANS:

Are you a “practicing Christian?”

In the West, we don’t follow Jesus we tend to invite Jesus to follow us inviting his input when we need his blessing.

Jesus was very straightforward when he invited people into a relationship. Come and follow me. Not accept me and go to heaven after living your life the way you think you should live your life. Come and follow me meant come and be my disciple. Learn my ways, and let my ways become your ways. Not follow me like following each other on Instagram, looking in to like all your pages and pictures, but follow me like lay down your life and sacrificially surrender to the purposes of God as I demonstrated for you to know.

Plato was a disciple of Socrates. Discipleship wasn’t invented by Jesus. In the first century discipleship was the apex of the Jewish education system.

All Jewish children would memorize the first five books of the Bible. By the time they were age 12, and then they would be an advanced level of education by invitation only that went beyond the age of 12, and after that only those who are magna, cum laud, elite highest in the class would have the opportunity to interview with rabbis to go to the third level of training in education, and this is the most elite level of following a rabbi. If you were one of the ones lucky enough or as would be explained in the Hebrew language, if you were blessed to this degree, then you would become an apprentice to a rabbi. Number one your focus was to be with the rabbi 24/7 following the rabbi, and being with them a common declaration, among those fortunate enough to have a rabbi to follow Would be a declaration of blessing. May the dust of your rabbi cover you. In other words, following your rabbi from town to town may the dust he kicks up rest upon you.

The #1 goal was to be with your rabbi #2 was to become like your rabbi. Your goal was to become a carbon copy of the person you believe God had purposed to mentor you in the ways of God. You would follow him around, copy his form of dress, capture his tone of his voice, and carry his yoke as the expression of your life, having been trained, equipped and marked by that person’s life.

#3 you do what your Rabbi did. By the way, but this earlier in your notes, but when you are being interviewed by a rabbi and the rabbi deems you a qualified apprentice, the rabbi would commonly say something like this, come and follow me. Now back to this portion of the notes, the goal was for you to not only become like your rabbi, but for you to become a training expression yourself, that was the true reflection of the rabbi, which meant that rabbis yoke was impacting generation, after generation after generation

So translating this from ancient Israel into modern day times we want to first and foremost learn to be with Jesus, he did not say go make fishers of men he said come to me, and I will make you fishers of men.

#1 we must learn to be with him!

#2 we must learn to be like him!

#3 we must learn to do what Jesus did and because this isn’t merely rehearsing the teaching behaviors of who was our rabbi but learning to die to ourselves so our living rabbi can love, serve and give through our surrender!

We are all being formed into the image of that which is influencing our lives. We are the compilation of a variety of influences in our lives. You are in the process of becoming a more exaggerated version of who you in alignment with who or what is influencing your life.

Our goal isn’t to learn all about what Jesus was and is about. Our goal is to be about the Kingdom work that Jesus introduced on earth as it is in heaven. We should be about the Kingdom work in OKC as it is in heaven!

Polls show 76% of Americans claim to be Christian. Other studies show those truly demonstrating Biblical Christianity as a lifestyle is 8%. Many Americans claim to follow Jesus but actually the vast majority of them live their lives their way asking Jesus to follow them. This is perhaps a morning pick-me-up to keep me smiling and I’m trying to be morally upright in whatever way I’ve decided is right for me and Jesus is in tow for whenever I may need him to help me get a date, make the lights, get a parking spot, etc.

It takes practice to keep God in the forefront of our minds. This is why we must purpose spiritual disciplines or practices of Jesus silence, solitude, fasting, prayer, reading scripture = these are the practices that awaken a deeper abiding in Christ in our lives.

Dallas Willard, “The first and most basic thing we can and must do is to keep God before our minds. This is the fundamental secret of caring for our soul. Our part in practicing the presence of God is to direct and redirect our minds constantly to him. In the early time of our practicing, we may well be challenged by our burdensome habit of dwelling on things much less than God. These are habits. Not the law of gravity and can be broken. A new grace filled habit will replace the former ones as we take intentional steps for keeping God before us. Soon our minds constantly turn to God as the needle of a compass constantly returns to the North. If God is the great longing of our souls he will become the pulsar of our inward being.

SABBATH:

Weekly light a candle at the table with Bibles in hand as part of Sabbath to establish a more memorable routine. Sabbath simply means to stop. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. “Are you tired?” has become a rhetorical question in our exhausted society. Come to me all who are weary. I will give you rest if you are willing to stop by spending time with me. Most of my worst moments as a husband, father, friend, etc are moments when I was exhausted. Tired people are not loving people. Hurry and exhaustion are enemies to love. You cannot become the best version of God’s design for your life as an apprentice to Jesus if you continually suffer from chronic exhaustion. God sabbathed. He built this rhythm into the fabric of all creation. French revolution in 1793 tried to restructure the 7 day work week into a 10 day work week and productivity plummeted, suicide rates soared, etc. You are not a machine. You are a soul! You are designed by God to embrace a rhythm of rest.

Sabbath isn’t a legalistic requirement but it is part of the 10 Commandments just like we shouldn’t lie we shouldn’t keep an unhealthy pace of life. It’s simply a law that has been built into all creation. You can resist the Law of Gravity but it won’t serve you well.

Sabbath is a way to live more deeply in God. You don’t have to buy it or order it online. All you have to do is stop and enjoy a rhythm of rest.

1. Lighting candles

2. Blessing children

3. Eating a Sabbath meal

4. Gratitude

5. Singing

6. Worshipping with your community

7. Walking

8. Napping

9. Making love to your spouse

10. Reading

11. Spending time alone with God

12. Spending time with family and friends.

This is not a to do list but a description of patterns that are commonly included in sabbath.

May the God of rest fill you with his peace as you pursue his heart.

In many ways we are reliving the French Revolution all over again not due to the government trying to extend the week but as a result of more of a modern day conspiracy to accelerate every area of life in submission to the idolatry of accomplishment and accumulation.

God created the human body and the planet with a rhythm and violating that rhythm doesn’t end well. There is a rhythm to day/night, waking/sleeping. There is a rhythm to the activity of spring and summer and the dormancy of fall and winter. You are a soul not a machine. God’s pace is peace! When we live without sabbath we violate the rhythm of God. You were not

When we violate the sabbath we go against the rhythm our Creator built into our body and into the fabric of creation itself. You were not designed to go 24/7 and if you do you’re living in and perpetuating disobedience. You may awaken the pursuit of success in your children but what does it profit to gain the world.

Exodus 20:8-11 = Sabbath is not just a good idea. It’s one of the 10 Commandments and it is the longest Commandment. It’s just as important as not lying, stealing or committing adultery. If you neglect it you will pay a consequence yet it is the only commandment we brag about disobeying – bragging about how busy we are working so many hours, completing projects over the weekend, etc because busyness is a sign of accomplishment in a world that worships success and this is not the way of Jesus.

Even if the Sabbath isn’t a New Testament Command but it is wisdom and truth just as not having another God before Him or ?other? Sabbath is a gift from a generous loving wise God to us. A God that Jesus called “Lord of the Sabbath”. Many fear Sabbath because it violates productivity and the more your identity is wrapped up in the pursuit of success the more you’ll struggle with Sabbath. This is a practice of identity where you remember and rehearse routinely how you are a child of God. I am a child of God! I am God’s son! This is who I am and Sabbath is is the rhythm of this reality as we learn to practice resting in Him, trusting in Him, being with Him together in Him. Remember joy is a moral obligation.

This is practicing a day of rest as we cultivate a spirit of restfulness by serving notice on restlessness as our way of life. This awakens a restfulness in all areas of our lives and begins to shift your overall disposition. You begin to shift from hurry to margin, from burnout to living at a sustainable pace, from noise to quiet, from distraction and chaos to clarity, from grasping to gratitude, from anxiety to peace, from attempting to control our life to trust.

This is centering our entire lives around God. England message tents formed around the presence of God.

You can experience sabbath right now and you don’t have to buy it online or pay for it with money. You must be willing to stop.

1. What stood out to you?

2. Is Sabbath a part of your life rhythm now or not?

3. What are the obstacles that try to disrupt sabbath.

1. Pick a time to Sabbath and start with even if its not 24 hours.

2. Pick a beginning and ending ritual. Traditional Sabbath begins with lighting a candle and concludes by prayers of blessing.

3. Implement practices that are common in Sabbath. Resist the urge to judge your Sabbath good or bad. Just let it be what it is as you embrace the ways of Christ.

4. Share your practices and your reflections on your practices in community so we can all grow together in this important reality of God.

Pathological busyness and chronic exhaustion create the opposing force against sabbath and rest. But Jesus says come to me all who are weary and I will give you rest. Follow me and practice my ways and you too can become a non-anxious presence in our stressed out society. You are most like yourself when you achieve the state of rest. Sabbath is all about that! Your strongest desires are not your deepest desires. Your strongest desires are born from awakened ambition in the pursuit of success, revenge, etc. Your deepest desires are seeded in your life from God and must be discovered & cultivated to produce a greater harvest of who God designed you to become..

· Sabbath at its core is a communal event. Joining together to celebrate resting in God’s presence, having a meal and purposing the calming of our overactive imagination.

· Nothing addresses how you spend your time and money like Sabbath. How do I do this? Can I do this?

· Some people are working 2-3 jobs. Generosity in the church can empower each other to enter into this rest that they couldn’t otherwise. Are we serious about this or not? How do we create Sabbath for others who are unable to do so? Pay for something to help them feel the release to get to the table.

· There is addiction to hurry that resembles addiction to heroin. Commitment, connection and bonding together in a relationally accountable pursuit of rest hurry gets flushed out of your system and it changes what’s taking place and not taking place within you.

· Physiologically as well as sociologically many people are addicted to work as our identity tends to be wrapped up in what we do and how much we accomplish. Dopamine hit after dopamine hit for successful achievements and you’re getting pats on the back = socially accepted addiction. (Company explained to guy once anyone gets to that level of success in our company they cannot remain married – as if it were a badge of honor and success).

· Chronic addiction to entertainment and digital life brings a superficial connection that can be part of your strongest desire without being a genuine part of your deepest desires.

· Sabbath was built in the ancient architecture as an ancient, timeless practice born from eternity to energize temporal. We are formed by our culture. 1969 7-11 opened and you could buy a soda on a Sunday. What?!?!?! Don’t let the world’s ever-changing culture define you more than God’s ancient practices in alignment with your God-given design.

· Too hard because of my stage of life, young kids, single, etc. How much pressure are you allowing your family to be under because you are being defined by the culture around you rather than the Kingdom of God?

· You can be inspired by this and you can even appreciate it but you have to decide do you want to make God’s rhythm your own and if you’re going to lead your family in growing in an understanding of what this should look like in the context of your lives as a priority so your children will discover that for themselves in the legacy they will leave in your wake.

QUIET IN A NOISY WORLD:

Prayer is relaxing into God's goodness as you practice abiding in Him.

https://www.soulshepherding.org/breath-prayers/

BREATH PRAYERS Calm Your Anxiety, Focus Your Mind, and Renew Your Soul as you practice praying continually. Breath prayers combine deep breathing with prayers of meditation on God’s Word to help calm your body while focusing your mind on truth.

About 3 centuries after Christ men and women known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers went out into the Egyptian desert to pray and meditate on God’s Word. This was after the years of intense persecution when many Christians were martyred. These monks and nuns were separating themselves from the worldliness in the church, which was increasingly adapting to and being accepted by Roman culture.

The Desert Fathers and Mothers lived in cells or huts made of reeds and practiced austere and rigorous spiritual disciplines like silence, solitude, simplicity, fasting, penance, and obedience to an elder. Their asceticism was their “internal martyrdom” that purged their souls of sin and worldliness and led them into lives of intimacy with the Lord and ministry to others. Their testimony to the transforming life of Christ was so powerful that thousands of people traveled to visit them in the desert to receive spiritual direction or healing.

One of the beautiful things that emerged from the disciplined life of the Desert Fathers and Mothers was their soul-full practice of Breath Prayers. They contemplated Christ’s presence in quiet solitude, meditating on short, one breath prayers. Often they did this while sitting outside their cells and weaving baskets from reeds.

They breathed in God’s Word slowly and deeply. Gently, they repeated their prayer, over and over, letting it descend with their minds into their hearts, to form their will in the image of Christ.

They would breathe their prayer before going to sleep at night until it prayed itself within their souls while they slept. Then when they awoke in the morning the prayer was still on their lips!

Deep breathing can help calm the physical symptoms of anxiety, while prayer helps to center our thoughts on Christ and His presence with us & His love for us.

https://littlehousestudio.net/blog/2022/6/17/what-are-breath-prayers

Prayer tends to be worry in God’s direction. Jesus didn’t say pray whatever is on your mind. It’s not a problem to share what’s on your mind but Jesus specifically said to pray by reciting a pre-made prayer. The Lord’s prayer was prayed 3x’s a day by the first Christians. Psalms are called the prayer book of the Bible. The activity of prayer is an awakening of something deeper within you. This is how God wired the brain to grow – by watching and learning what others have done. Pre-made prayer is like scaffolding to help build and establish the structure of the temple of the Holy Spirit – you! The point of prayer is not to master it but rather to be mastered.

Silence & Solitude are the most important spiritual disciplines for people today. - Dallas Willard

So what are we talking about?

Solitude is the practice of being absent from people and things to attend to God.

Silence is the practice of quieting every inner and outer voice to attend to God. - Pete Scazzaro

Mother Theresa said God is a friend to quiet.

St Ignatius (uhg·nay·shuhs) said, “Always try to keep your soul in peace and quiet, ready for whatever our Lord may wish to work in you.

Without silence & solitude it’s virtually impossible to grow in the spiritual life. We do not take the spiritual life seriously if we do not set aside some time to be with God and listen to him- Henri Nouwen

Solitude is not a solitary place.

Solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self.

We enter into solitude first of all to meet our Lord and to be with Him and Him alone. Only in the context of grace can we face our sin; only in the place of healing do we dare to show our wounds; only with a single-minded attention to Christ can we give up our clinging fears and face our own true nature. Solitude is a place where Christ remodels us in his own image and frees us from the victimizing compulsions of the world.

Solitude is not a therapeutic place. It is a place of conversion.

Solitude is going to war not only with the world around you, but also with the world that exists within you as you are crucify in the flesh Strengthening the spirit to be awakened. In the midst of all the distracting reactions we all find so tempting and many have simply given into in such away. We would never deny Christ but we dethrone him when we give our focus to distractions rather than focusing on him. They will resist everything. I am preaching right now as unrealistic.

Socio politically research shows people who are given to the blazing speed of secularized society, never taking any time for reflection in the quiet, but always listening to every news report or headline or social media post, they are easily manipulated because they are not taking the time to develop their own thoughts. They’re just constantly busy being drawn into whoever has their attention to re-post their social media to vote for their candidate to maligned the opposing candidate. They’re more reactive than active, more busy than wise, when there is a lack of introspection and reflection. Easier to get them to buy your product support your candidate retweet your #ConsumeYourSocialMedia, etc..

We live in a day, where it is easier than ever to medicate or shame, anxiety, disappointment, or whatever it is, we find ourselves, wanting to escape from. Noise pollution can cause hypertension, heart disease, arrhythmia, stroke, learning difficulties, emotional difficulties, cognitive impairment, anxiety, depression, and more.

* One study found that prescriptions for anxiety medication rise 28% for every 10-decibel increase in neighborhood noise.

It is interesting, how digital capitalism, politics, The entertainment industry, our own human vulnerability, and the devil’s kingdom of chaos, confusion, and darkness All seem to work to keep us away from the quiet place.

If finding a place of silence feels like going to war, you are not alone. Jesus often withdrew to the lonely places to pray. This wasn’t a little downtime a little me time a little book reading time. This was resisting the system of the world around him That placed greater and greater demands upon him as he journeyed through discovering the purposes of the father in his life. It does appear that the more known he became in the busier he got the more frequently he would break away to places of solitude with the Father.

Formation of Practices

InFORMATION = Introduce belief, activate behavior and rehearse FORMATION - In community talking bout how it’s going. 82% of information is formation.

Brother Lawrence, French Monk, The practice of the presence of God.

A.W. Tozer, “Constant conscious communion

Jesus, Deep Abiding

Focusing on principles, motivates us to try really hard. Focusing on practices motivates us to train really hard. Trying without training, produces a greater awareness of your inability to do something than anything else. This is where so many modern-day Christians dwell. We want to train with practices that have been proven to substantiate principles overtime throughout the ages as generations of believers have devoted themselves to formation as the result of information in the pursuit of discipleship or apprenticeship, following the ways or the practices of Christ

Discipline speaks of working at being able to do something you cannot currently do. With no disciplines we are simply left with a set of beliefs that speak of what to do but with no plan to grow into the ability to do something you cannot currently do - becoming more who God desires and has designed you to be

Loving God with your mind and your body as you actively implement the truths of God’s Word that have largely become disconnected concepts we say we align with but have little influence on our behaviors.

Saint Augustine? “Without him we cannot. Without us he will not.”

Eve, bride of First Adam, deceived by slight deviation of what God had spoken. Church, bride of Christ, deceived by slight deviation of what God has spoken.

Practices without legalism. Acts of wisdom not righteousness. Grace is not opposed to effort. Grace is opposed to earning.

Rhythm/Encounter: entertainment, encounter, rhythm

Practice hospitality. What are your problems and what are your practices? Changing your practices addresses your problems. Solitude ex.

SIMPLICITY: Week one go through your closet and get rid of stuff. Week 2 go through rest of house and give stuff away. Week 3 evaluate priorities that are revealed through patterns. Week 4 create new habits to replace old ones very purposefully and intentionally.

We must stop making assumptions that people know how to read their Bible, pray, fast, sabbath, simplicity, hospitality, abiding = becoming people of love, joy and peace learning to be a non-anxious presence.

Very clear practices and exercises begin to work these principles into our lives.

The ultimate goal of all the practices is to become a person who is awakened to the deeper purposes of God that are explained by principles but enacted by practices.

We can take a day to rest, start our morning in quietness and prayer, we can read scripture, live in community, open our lives to the poor and become family together around the table. Through the practices we can set our entire life before God and let God do the transforming work only he can do as we give him something to work with.

Practices do require effort. Dallas Willard, “Grace is not opposed to effort. Grace is opposed to earning.”

Subtraction practices first by auditing your life cutting out a few habits from your daily routine. Netflix is not a good investment of your time.

Addition practices

Comer’s practices:

1. Sabbath,

2. prayer,

3. solitude,

4. scripture,

5. community,

6. service,

7. generosity,

8. witness.

What is your weekly rhythm going to be? Write out a schedule you think would be good asking God to help you formulate what is right for you.

Legalism = what I want you to do. What’s God asking from you?

Practices are simply places to meet Jesus as your primary focus.

We have made faulty assumptions that people have healthy practices that are born from Biblical principles. I’ve had to learn that I’m very intuitive and with that comes expectations without explanations. We must provide explanations much like a parent.

· 5 minutes of silence when you wake before you touch your phone.

· 10 minutes of reading Psalms after you get up.

· Day away to listen, pray and think about what God desires for your future.

Israel knew God’s deeds but Moses knew God’s ways. Psalm 103:7

JOY IS A MORAL OBLIGATION:

Rejoice, and again, I say rejoice. This is a commandment in Scripture. Therefore, joy becomes a moral obligation. Interestingly, this word rejoice is the verb tense of the noun joy, but it is not a word that can be accomplished in isolation. It speaks of a joyful celebration in the form of community, or in the context of community. We are told in scripture to be like Jesus anyone who claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did. Jesus reached at the joy of the Lord, is the strength. He was the most joyful person who ever walked on the planet.

HURRY IS AN ENEMY:

If you want to experience the life of Jesus you must experience the lifestyle of Jesus.

Jesus invites us into his pace of life. He’s not asking to be involved in your pace of life.

What is a great enemy to spiritual life of our day? You’d come up with a lot of things but probably not hurry and hurry is one of the greatest enemies to your spiritual life. Most people are simply too busy to live spiritually enriched lives. We must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from our lives!

Dopamine of your phone

pathological business and distractions are huge blockades to spiritual life in our society today.

10 signs of hurry sickness

1. Irritability

2. Hypersensitive

3. Restlessness

4. Workaholism or just nonstop activity

5. Emotional numbness

6. Out of order priorities

7. Lack of care for your body

8. Escapist behaviors

9. Slippage of spiritual disciplines

10. Isolation

How many of you have 7 out of 10 of these going on right now?

Write out a schedule that would be your dream schedule aligning with your values. Time devoted to prayer, exercise, family, etc. How far from this schedule is your actual schedule? We achieve inner peace when our schedule aligns with our values.

Learning to live with simplicity around the things that truly matter.

Therapeutic practices to help you slow down:

Do you drive the speed limit?

Do you come to a full stop at a stop sign?

Get into the slow lane on purpose.

Walk when you can walk and enjoy the

Choose the longest check-out line and do not get on your phone.

The most important thing in your life is not what you are doing but rather it’s who you are becoming.

FOLLOW JESUS FOR REAL:

Jesus was very straightforward when he invited people into a relationship. Come and follow me. Not accept me and go to heaven after living your life the way you think you should live your life. Come and follow me mint come and be my disciple. Learn my ways, and let my ways become your ways. Not follow me like I follow you on Instagram, and like all your pages and pictures, but follow me - like lay down your life and sacrificially surrender to the purposes of God as Jesus demonstrated them for us to know.

You are apprenticing under the master who is the master rabbi who did not his life did not end in glory but in shame. If you don't understand this that will set you up for great disillusionment disillusionment and frustration something bigger than this world to live for

Plato was a disciple of Socrates. Discipleship wasn’t invented by Jesus. In the first century discipleship was the apex of the Jewish education system.

All Jewish children would memorize the first five books of the Bible. By the time they were age 12, and then they would be an advanced level of education by invitation only that went beyond the age of 12, and after that only those who are magna, cum laud, elite highest in the class would have the opportunity to interview with rabbis to go to the third level of training in education, and this is the most elite level of following a rabbi. If you were one of the ones lucky enough or as would be explained in the Hebrew language, if you were blessed to this degree, then you would become an apprentice to a rabbi. Number one your focus was to be with the rabbi 24 seven following the rabbi, and being with them a common declaration, among those fortunate enough to have a rabbi to follow Would be a declaration of blessing. May the dust of your rabbi cover you. In other words, following your rabbi from town to town may the dust he kicks up rest upon you.

#2 the goal is to become like your rabbi. Number one was to be with your rabbi number to wish to become like your rabbi. Your goal was to become a carbon copy of your rabbi. You would follow him around, copy his form of dress, capture his tone of his voice, and carry his yoke as the expression of your life, having been trained and equipped.

TEAM Q & A:

https://youtu.be/9DsBbg0HbuU

The nature of church in the nature of Christ the atmosphere of church in the atmosphere of gods kingdom

Communion. Without community can look like walking to pick up the cracker and the juice with a quick apology to the Lord for the sin in your life, because you want to take communion with a red heart. An Alcoholics Anonymous meeting or someone opens by telling us their name, and admitting their struggle in Beach , and being celebrated for their courage is a greater resemblance of the table of the Lord, then a shallow Individualistic apology to God on your way to get the cracker and juice.

The transition required us to move from trying to sell people on an idea which gives the essence of a product or commodity. Instead, we simply had to invite people into gods kingdom, where we will come and die together, so Christ can begin to live through our surrendered available lives.

Every church has a social contract that is unspoken. This shift is changing the social contract. Everything was shifting, and we found ourselves leading more vulnerably than we had ever lived from before. The absence of human confidence is a part of the new one skin church. Be in ability to teach enough to understand is a part of the new wineskin church. Some things are only learned by putting them into practice and this is part of the new wineskin church, where we all are learning from our own context of life that is defined specifically and uniquely for each and every individual. It is a beautiful thing for all of us to be exploring, and experiencing the faithfulness of God in each of our lives, as we sort this all out.

The easier it is to explain what you do the less you resemble a biblical blueprint of church. Church is that which can be dropped into any society and any community bringing loving transformation in every direction from the origin of your own identity. That’s truly discovered in Christ and will affectively reach those people. God has entrusted to your care mine

It begins with an inspiring idea, but on the other side of it is the underwhelming nature. We must be honest about the underwhelming nature on the other side of the inspiring idea where we are walking out in the nasty now, and now not just celebrating the sweet by and by.

Find hoppers, wish dream is what?. Community in our imagination is not actually the community that transforms you. The actual community you experience when getting involved is the community that can form me. You will go through a sense of disillusionment if you step deeper into this church, but that is part of the process, so ride it out, and Roe threw it to become more of who God desires for you to become.

You must be very intentional and continually cautious not to allow yourself to ever feel or rehearse the thought that finally we are the church that gets it. That in and of itself violates the very nature of humility that is required for you to grow forward in what God is doing in this hour of the church

What are the core practices that are vital to a resilient, spiritual life? Thinking about this from the standpoint of young adults and going backwards should help us define what is taking place in kids and youth

We are moving from the rehearsal of principles to the integration of practices to mobilize us from audience to army

Gods love will lead you to unlovable places where you then get to be the expression of his love that met you in your unlovable place. This is the essence of reaching into the space of social injustice.

John Marks youth moved from once a month movie night to once a month participating in the beauty of transforming the city, by going out and caring for those in desperate places, trimming their toenails?

You can have mission without making disciples but you cannot make disciples without having mission.

Most pastors are not honest about how hard life with Jesus truly is. When your disposition has been hijacked, by that which sells more effectively, you lose touch with the reality of life from the perspective of eternity. By default then we tend to produce sermons that overpromise and under deliver. When you create a pride position, it produces a shame position. I think he said unity line?

When are messages focus on the idea that the best is yet to come. The temporal reality is holding your theology hostage. If best means the image of self sacrificial, love, and to come means. Through eternity, mostly when you die, then, yes, the best is yet to come, but stop preaching sermons that try to lead disillusioned sheep into a shallow place of chasing after the best life this world has to offer, as if that was the ultimate goal of the cross of Jesus Christ.

If the best is yet to come me, and you’re like oh fine, follow the upward trajectory of a marvel movie with a few setbacks that ultimately takes you into a place of Greek celebratory tranquility having accomplished the goal that had been challenged as the focus of your life and you have a different Reality than I do. A few setbacks with some really climactic moments as the main emphasis of my life.

If we are not careful, we talk about this aspiration to a flourishing life in the kingdom of God, without honestly and authentically talking about how life comes from death in God’s kingdom is a Christian. You will find yourself many times doing the right thing in the way of Jesus and being punished for it by the culture that is a counter narrative to the kingdom.

When we don’t speak honestly about these things, we create partial realities that are in complete pictures which become a breeding ground for deconstruction for cynicism, for shame, for hiding, or covering things up, for cynicism there are these two extremes were the overly optimistic. Pastor is trying to keep hope alive. without being honest, and on the other side, is like a cynical blogger, who has abandoned the pursuit of or hope for a community of love and authenticity. Somewhere in between these two positions we find Jesus.

Sometimes we face painful circumstances where God feels more like absence than presence, and in those places of suffering, we can discover, deeper maturity, and greater authority but pain is part of the process, and we must not try to escape it, but rather embrace it, and grow through it to become more of the person, only the cross of Jesus Christ to make you become.

There are those times where you courageously take a step of faith with confidence everything is going to be great and suddenly it feels like everything has fallen apart and you wonder in the midst of it where God even worse or is

Spiritual consumerism is fed by surface sermon shots in the arm to keep you in a perpetual state of hype rather than authentic hope. Setting healthy expectations is a very important part of healthy community.

People are growing disillusioned. If all we’re doing is attracting people to attend church without truly making disciples we are actually contributing to the greater problem of disillusionment in society (AND IN THE CHURCH!!!).

Community and discipleship is about collective formation of Christ within each of us and all of us.

Most people speak with the intention of making you feel something or think something. Most people hearing speakers are asking, “How do I do this? What do I do?”

Awesome vision now until the next awesome vision to come with all kinds of varying focal points. Instead of rolling something out to invite people to believe in. We should introduce what we sense and invite people on the journey.

Failure and humility actually is used by God to get you into a prophetic state of awareness of more of what God desires for you beyond the moment of disappointment. Sit with it. Don’t just try to escape it.

Attachment style research shows healthy attachment is developed more profoundly by doing something wrong, apologizing and being restored than it is through doing something right. To lead with the open understanding you won’t bat 1k as a leader. Admitting when I miss it as a leader and acknowledge what it cost those you’re leading.

Be very careful not to take information and become a practitioner before becoming an apprentice. Don’t try to implement it! Just become it and let God do what He desires to do through your surrendered available life!

Some are coming to the realization that they have been given to decades of ministry that have been coming from the origin of error. The reaction of implementation can easily be correction that is born from guilt or even shame that only takes us further in embracing insecurity and perpetuating immaturity.`

CELEBRITY CULTURE:

The celebrity culture has infected the church like a disease, and it’s not just pastors who are behind it Celebrities don’t form on their own. Behind every celebrity pastor is in the Dorn congregation and adoring congregation. that supports a celebrity atmosphere. This doesn’t happen overnight. When a pastor embraces the ambition for fame, cannot take route, unless a congregation supports that kind of shallow man centered atmosphere. Many people want their pastor to be a spiritual hero or a celebrity on some level. When we feel a celebrity pastor is devoted to us. It makes us feel better about who we are because he is so no and he’s devoted to us. Look at us we have a celebrity pastor therefore, we have some form of celebrity status.

The desire for fame, or whatever version of your preference Whatever version of status for your preference to self promote is normally driven by a deep Father wound deep needs at all

Aristotle said it well so many centuries ago, “When people don’t feel love, they seek to be admired.” Jesus addressed this with the Pharisees, talking about the seat of Moses declaring do not call anyone on earth father, because it was common language among the Pharisees to embrace someone as a mentor and to reference them in unhealthy way as Abbot Father or the one you would look for The one you would look to for the teachings of a flourishing life. You don’t need a man to teach you the anointing will teach you look to your heavenly father.

No fishing for likes on social media to pump up his fragile ego. Jesus was able to be compassionate without compromising, because of the confidence he had before God his father.

Our society has failed miserably at holding power in a way that promotes order. Raise yourself up God will take you down. Humble yourself low and God will raise you up. When people are given power in the world system, it automatically produces self promotion resulting in oppression in other directions.

PURSUITS – RESULTS:

ENCOUNTER – RHYTHM

There are spiritual pursuits which we can schedule and control, giving us the feeling of spiritual accomplishment, and there are spiritual results which comes from pursuits as we position ourselves before the Lord with devotions prayer gathering, reading, studying classes, etc. spiritual results happen, as God does his work within us that we cannot do , forming Christ within us, healing our bodies, our emotions, our relationships, etc. this is counter and rhythm rhythm is about the spiritual pursuit encounter is about the spiritual result. God initiates we respond in our pursuit of God and spiritual results begin to be the experiential conclusion, where encounter becomes our way of life

Most of your deepest spiritual formation where Christ is being formed within you will actually not result from the practices you keep but rather from the pain you endure if you learn to process that correctly. And you learn to process that correctly through consistent practices causing you to become a non-anxious presence more fully aware of the presence of the Lord.

In a fallen world, however, spiritual pursuits, don’t automatically produce enjoyable, spiritual results. Many times it will, but there is a beautiful tension of syncopation when we read Proverbs, and then we read Job. Pain and suffering, bankruptcy, divorce, loss of friendship, disappointment, humiliation , betrayal, etc. these also are spiritual results from living in a fallen broken spiritual in my environment because of the sin of mankind. These complicated difficulties that we suffer sometimes come from the devil, sometimes come from our own bad decisions, and sometimes just come without understanding where they came from at all. Set aside your theology for a moment, in regard to how bad things happen or why bad things happen, and just embrace the fact That these are often the places where God does his best work in all of our lives, if we continue to look to him

Discipleship is the Spiritual discipline to do things you do not want to do in order to become who God designed to be. Flesh never prays and always resists until it is trained in the pleasures of spiritual discipline. Discipline, desire, delight.

Not a formula of one hour will achieve a 20% improvement in Chronic anxiety and 15% alignment to a miscalibrated nervous system and a 5% increase in trust in God for the day. Many times it feels the opposite as death is actually the avenue to life.

Follow me is something you do that unlocks what God does in you. The practices are not the goal. They are the train tracks that help you find your way into a deeper place with God. But God won’t do these things for you. He won’t turn off your phone or make you practice sabbath.

The power of encounter is more about getting unstuck than it is moving forward. Miraculous healing liberates my body but getting in shape is going to the gym.

It feels great to get unstuck and get moving directionally but we will grow into a deeper place where we need a deeper encounter to address the deeper roots of the basis of why we are stuck in deeper layers of bondage.

Invited To Solemn Quiet Practices:

* Jesus doesn’t command you to read Scripture or live in community or even go to church; he just does all of these things, and then says, “Follow me.”

* You’re not commanded. You’re invited.

Henri Nouwen once said:

• “Without solitude it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life. ... We do not take the spiritual life seriously if we do not set aside some time to be with God and listen to him.

* Think about it: The more intimate a relationship, the more it requires time alone together.

* Imagine if I was never alone with my wife - if we were always with other people, always on the go, always in a loud, noisy environment? We would never be intimate.

* Your relationship to God, and to your own soul, is the same.
What I find when I go into solitude is ...

* I decompress from the overstimulation of the modern world, my body and central nervous system begin to calm...

* I slow down ... from all the hurry and traffic and pathological busyness...

* And I begin to feel.

* I’m forced to confront the good, the bad, and the ugly in my own heart. All my anxieties and ambitions and addictions, it all comes up. All of it is exposed in the safe place of God’s loving presence.

* And in solitude, I hear the voice of God over the din of all the other voices, within and without.

* I get God’s perspective on my life.

* Noise pollution:

* Noise pollution can cause hypertension, heart disease, arrhythmia, stroke, learning difficulties, emotional difficulties, cognitive impairment, anxiety, depression, and more.

* One study found that prescriptions for anxiety medication rise 28% for every 10-decibel increase in neighborhood noise.

* In another study in Europe, scientists found that one million years of life are lost each year due to noise, in what they call DALY or “Disability-Adjusted Life Years,” people’s lives cut short by chronic noise.

* Ruth Haley Barton writes this:

• “The invitation to solitude and silence is just that. It is an invitation to enter more deeply into the intimacy of relationship with the One who waits just outside the noise and busyness of our lives. It is an invitation to communication and communion with the One who is always present even when our awareness has been dulled

by distraction. It is an invitation to the adventure of spiritual transformation in the deepest places of our being, an adventure that will result in greater freedom and authenticity and surrender to God than we have yet experienced.”

Ending:
• I love her imagery of God waiting for us outside the noise and busyness of our lives... waiting

to speak to you, comfort you, breath in courage to your heart, to love you...

* Ultimately, the invitation to solitude is an invitation to intimacy with God

* As St. John of the Ladder said in the sixth century, “The friend of silence comes close to God.”

* Do you want to come close to God? Then follow Jesus into the quiet place.

* Inside all of us is a deep well of pain. No matter how sunny your disposition, or robust your faith — we all have pain in our heart.

* And when we go into solitude, what is down, comes up.

* Now, I know what you’re thinking: Why in the world would I ever go into solitude?! This is like the opposite of a sales pitch!

* Why? Because all of this stuff is in you ... it’s leaking out like toxic pollution, to the people closest around you, the people you love.

* To get free of it, we have to face it.
Distraction:

* The problem is, our culture has become incredibly sophisticated at not feeling our pain. Not just physical pain, but emotional pain as well.

* Primarily through the medium of distraction.

* A thousand different cultural narcotics offer us a quick way to anesthetize emotional pain with our distraction of choice — food, alcohol, work, shopping, travel, entertainment, social media, the internet, porn, and more.

• The smartphone is most people’s portable coping mechanism of choice.

The pattern:

* Go into solitude. Get away from the noise and distraction of ordinary life.

* Let yourself feel.

* Let whatever is in you come up.

* It may be joy or gratitude or exuberance! Or it may be exhaustion or fear or grief ...

* Whatever it is, let yourself feel it.

* Don’t run away to your distraction of choice. Stay with the pain; follow it all the way down to God.

* Just this simple act of noticing and naming your emotions before God can do wonders for your soul.

* Psychologists talk a lot about how important it is not only to “feel your feelings,” for your body to process and discharge emotion, but also to name your feelings. Because when you name your feelings:

1. You realize you are not your feelings. Your feelings are a part of you, but not the

whole. You get a little distance from them and, with it, freedom. Secondly ...

2. You realize you have a lot of feelings — you often feel anxiety, but also excitement; melancholy, but also joy ...

• But for us as followers of Jesus, once we notice and name our inner life — which is a
key task in the spiritual life and a key function of the Practices, to create space for this to happen — but once we notice and name, then we can offer our feelings up to God for our transformation.

I’m convinced that one of the reasons so many people find prayer boring is they don’t really pray, they perform! They hold back from God all the ugly stuff.

But prayer isn’t a place to be good, it’s a place to be real ...
Read the Psalms! Two-thirds of the Psalms are what scholars call lament!

Lament is different than complaining. Complaining is just griping about your life, and it tends to make a bad problem worse.

Lament is complaining to God. It has a U-shape to it; you go down into your pain, but then you offer it up to God.

We give God our feelings. Then we ...

God our desires

Our desires drive our feelings.

We feel happy when we get what we want. We feel sad when we don’t get what we want. We feel anxious when we’re scared what we want might be torn away. And we feel angry when someone or something is standing in the way of what we want.

* In one study at the University of Virginia, participants were isolated in a room with no distractions and given a choice to be alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes or to push a button and receive an electric shock and get out early.

* Two-thirds of men and a quarter of women chose to be electronically shocked rather than be alone.

* One research scientist concluded: “Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative.”

in a culture devoted to the worship of the twin gods of accomplishment and accumulation, where pathological busyness is the norm, where people, even when they are alone, are never really alone, but tethered to their devices ... to spend a day just sitting in the quiet listening for God is considered a poor use of time.

* At once the Spirit sent him out into the wilderness, and he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.” (Mark 1v12-13)

Luke And Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit”

* Notice when Jesus went into the wilderness, he had to face down the wild beasts.

* So too, we have to face down all our demons.

* But as long as we stay tethered to our world of “diversion” — all the noise and crowds and entertainment and doom scrolling that keep us from ever facing the dark underbelly in our own soul — we remain in bondage and never get free.
Seam: This is why the three enemies — all three, the world itself, the flesh, and especially the devil — do everything they can do to keep us away from the eremos.
The resistance:
• I call it “the resistance.”
• Ruth Haley Barton writes:

• “The practices of solitude and silence are radical because they challenge us on every level of our existence. ... All the forces of evil band together to prevent our knowing God in this way, because it brings to an end the dominion of those powers in our lives.”

* You will often find that when you make a plan to go into solitude, all hell breaks loose. Literally. All sorts of things go wrong: the dishwasher will leak or your car will get a flat tire or you’ll get a call from an angry client — it’s like there’s some hidden axis of evil conspiring together to keep you tethered to the world ...

* What’s demonic, what’s just coincidence, what’s our own inner resistance, we never know for sure.

* But I know this: the resistance is real.

* There’s resistance from the world — powerful forces have a vested interest in you staying as distracted as possible. In the so-called “attention economy,” some of the brightest minds on the planet are working night and day to keep you glued to your device and away from the freedom of solitude ... because there is money to be made on diversion.

* There’s resistance from the flesh — from forces in our own heart that make excuses or bow out last minute or avoid the pain of true solitude ...

* And there’s resistance from the devil himself, or at least from demonic powers ...

* C.S. Lewis, in his masterpiece of satire, The Screwtape Letters, created a fictional series of letters between a senior demon named Screwtape and his apprentice demon named Wormwood on how to best tempt a young man they call “the patient.”

* In it, Screwtape says there are two things the devil cannot stand — music and silence. Because they open the human heart to God.

* Instead, the devil’s counter-strategy is noise.

* And then Screwtape has this haunting line, “We will make the whole universe a noise in the end.”

* This is the agenda of the evil one — to fill your life with noise, distraction, triviality, diversion.

* My point is, all sorts of mysterious forces — human and non-human — conspire together to do all that is in their power to keep you and me away from solitude, silence, and stillness ...

Solitude Teaching 01: The Quiet Place

https://practicingtheway.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Practice+Resources/PTW-Solitude-Teaching-Notes.pdf?utm_source=Practicing+the+Way&utm_campaign=8bf05cbb97-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_08_07_10_41_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-54f84b24a9-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D

Intro hook:

January 27, 1956.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is sitting at his kitchen table in the middle of the night, about to walk away from his destiny.
This was still early in the civil rights movement, and Dr. King was not yet widely known.
He had been brought in to Montgomery, Alalabama, to lead the bus boycott, following Rosa Park’s courageous act of refusing to sit in the colored section of the bus.
But as the boycott dragged on, the ire of the mob was increasingly turned onto its leader.
With the rising tide of death threats, Dr. King was fearing not only for his life, but for his wife and daughter.
The day before, Dr. King had been arrested and jailed for driving 30 miles per hour in a 25-miles-per-hour zone.
That morning, he was released, but came home to another round of threatening phone calls.
The evening of the 27th, he could not fall asleep, so he got out of bed, made a pot of coffee, sat down in his kitchen, and began to pray to God in the quiet.
In a later sermon, he told the story this way:

• “And I bowed down over that cup of coffee — I never will forget it. ... I prayed a prayer, and I prayed out loud that night. I said, ‘Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. ... But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now. I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage.’ ... And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, ‘Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world.’”

• In his biography of Dr. King, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian David Lewis makes the

point that this was a defining moment in Dr. King’s life and, as a result, in the nation of America and far beyond.

Seam: But. Imagine a hypothetical situation ... What if?

What if Dr. King had a smartphone? What if he sat down with his cup of coffee and disappeared into Twitter, or started working on his next TikTok video?
Or got an emergency text?
Or started reading the news and fuming over the latest op-ed?
Or what if he had a TV and just started binging a new series?
Would there have been a Dr. King? Would he have been able to hear God’s voice in the quiet and, from it, draw on God’s strength to continue the fight? Or would he have been sucked into the black hole of the digital age?
Hypothetical situation.

Seam: But it has me thinking about our very real situation as the first generation to apprentice under Jesus in the digital age.

What if the greatest threat to the Christian faith today isn’t secularism but distraction?
We live in an era where it’s possible to go through your entire life and never be alone; even when we’re “alone,” we’re on our phone or the internet or in our entertainment queue.
The cultural critic Cal Newport, in his book Digital Minimalism, writes, “It’s now possible to completely banish solitude from your life.”
The moment that most of us are ever alone, in a room or even in our car, we reach for the appendage of our device — check our texts, open social media, read the news, play music, put on a podcast, Google whatever.
Our devices keep us tethered to the world of noise.
And the threat of all this noise and distraction isn’t just to our minds or even to our bodies; it’s to our souls.
How many moments have I missed? Where God wanted to speak to me, or shape me, but I was distracted by my devices?

Set up: Is there a practice from the Way of Jesus that could position you and me to hear Jesus’ voice in all the noise of the modern world?

Yes, it is the practice of solitude.
That night in his kitchen in Montgomery, Dr. King was tapping into a practice that is all over the life of Jesus.

Turn: Turn in your Bibles to Luke 5. Let’s read from verse 15... Luke 5v15-16

The news about [Jesus] spread all the more, so that crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses. But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.

The phrase “lonely places” is the English translation of the Greek word eremos.
But eremos can also be translated:

The desert
The deserted place
The desolate place
The solitary place
Or, my personal favorite, the quiet place

Jesus’ world was very different from my own in Los Angeles, where there are people as far as the eye can see. Most people in his day lived in small, rural villages; most were farmers on small plots of land; all lived within walking distance of the synagogue.
And outside the populated areas, there were vast tracts of empty, uninhabited land. Called “the eremos.”
Jesus would regularly disappear out into that wide open space, all by himself, to pray.
Luke tells us “he often withdrew” to the eremos.
Listen to a few alternate translations of Luke 5.

Jesus himself frequently withdrew to the wilderness and prayed. (NET Bible)
Jesus often slipped away to be alone so he could pray. (NCV)
As often as possible Jesus withdrew to out-of-the-way places for prayer. (The Message)

When you read the gospels, you find story after story of Jesus, all alone, out in nature; just him, and God.

Seam: In fact, when you read the Gospels, you notice in Jesus’ life a rhythm of retreat and return...

Retreat and return:

Jesus would retreat into solitude; he would get away from people, from noise, from stimulation ... to pray, rest, and listen for his Father’s voice ...
But he was no hermit. He would then return to be with people in community, and to love and serve ...
You see Jesus toggle back and forth between solitude and community.
There are all sorts of ways to group the practices of Jesus, or the spiritual disciplines, but arguably, solitude and community are the two basic containers for all the practices.
Solitude and community are the twin pillars of the spiritual life, the two legs by which we travel the Way of Jesus.
The problem is: Many of us in the digital age never really go all the way into solitude or community ...
Instead, we’re often “alone together”, in the words of Sherry Turkle, the MIT professor and expert on the digital age’s impact on Millenials and Gen Z.

• You can be with people, but not actually in community. ... Never have relationships go beneath the surface where you know and are known.

• And you can be alone in a room, but on your device.
• We’re drawn to solitude, like we’re drawn to community, but we’re also scared of it.

Seam: Which is why your mind is likely starting to raise objections:

Objections:

Yeah, but I’m an extrovert.
Or I’m a young parent.
Or I live a busy life.
Or What about social justice and mission?
But again, “Jesus often withdrew into the eremos ...” and, I mean, he was Jesus! You think you’re busy? People were literally clinging to him or digging through ceilings or begging from the roadside for his touch ...
And yet, in spite of the demand (or could it be because of it?), he would regularly slip away ...
In fact, you can chart Jesus’ life on an axis of demand and withdrawal. It seems that, the more in demand Jesus became, the more he would disappear into the quiet.
We read stories of people literally going out searching for him in the eremos ...
And in doing so, he laid down for all his apprentices a pattern to follow.

Seam: Now, this pattern has come to be called the practice of Solitude ...

Practice:

• To start, let me clarify what Solitude is not.

• First, it’s not loneliness:

• Richard Foster, in Celebration of Discipline, writes:

• “Loneliness is inner emptiness. Solitude is inner fulfillment.”

Loneliness is a felt absence; but solitude is a felt presence.
Loneliness is a gnawing ache in the human heart for unrequited love; the gaping wound of the modern soul. Sociologists tell us Gen Z is the loneliest generation of all time.
But solitude is not loneliness.

• Secondly, it’s not isolation:

• The Hawaiian pastor Wayne Cordeiro writes:

“There is a difference between isolation and solitude. They contain similar characteristics, but in reality they are worlds apart. Solitude is a chosen separation for refining your soul. Isolation is what you crave when you neglect the first.”
Isolation is a movement away from relationship; solitude is a movement toward relationship.

• Finally, it’s not aloneness ...

When social scientists study the effect of solitude on the human person, they distinguish between solitude and aloneness.
Aloneness is what we introverts love: It’s when we’re not with other people, but we may be texting people or watching TV or reading a book or folding laundry. We’re alone, but we’re not in solitude.
This is a crucial distinction because many people mistakenly assume that solitude is a preference-based spiritual discipline for introverts.
This is a tragedy for extroverts because they never experience the depth of intimacy with God that is possible only in the quiet place.
And it’s a tragedy for introverts too, because solitude is warped into a spiritualized version of a little me-time.
In reality, studies show that once you distinguish between solitude and aloneness, introverts have no higher desire for or enjoyment of solitude than extroverts.

• So, what is it?

Solitude defined:

• Very simply: The practice of solitude is intentional time in the quiet with ourselves and God.

• Ruth Haley Barton, the author of our recommended reading for this Practice, writes:

• “Solitude, at its most basic and profound level, is simply an opportunity to be ourselves with God.”

• That’s why it’s not the same thing as aloneness. You’re not alone; you’re alone with God.

• In the 4th century, St. Jerome said:
• “[We are] never less alone than when alone.”

• One way to think about solitude is as a place that is free of inputs. • The only inputs are 1. God and 2. your heart laid open before God.

Seam: Which is why solitude has two companions: silence and stillness ...

Silence:

Silence is pretty self-explanatory, but there are two dimensions to silence:
Exterior silence, where you silence noise outside you. No people in a crowded coffee shop, no TV in the background, no music in your AirPods, no chimes from push notifications on your phone. It’s quiet.
But the second dimension is interior silence. Where you attempt — and this is easier said than done — to quiet all the thoughts and worries and emotions and rumblings of the heart inside you.

Seam: This, in turn, is designed to lead to stillness ... Stillness:

• The Eastern Orthodox Bishop Kallistos Ware defined stillness this way:

• “Stillness is a state of inner tranquility or mental quietude and concentration. Not simply silence, but an attitude, of listening to God and of an openness to God.”

• It’s coming to a place where the troubled waters of your heart settle down like a glassy lake early in the morning. And you’re just there, waiting.

Often, when I teach on this in our church, I get a glass jar, fill it with water, and put soil from a creek near my house in it. I shake up the jar until the water is all muddy and churned up, and then I set it down and wait. And over a long period of time, all the turmoil starts to settle down, and in the end, all the silt goes to the bottom of the jar and the rest of the water is calm and clear.
That’s a picture of what’s happening in you as you go into solitude. We go in all churned up and, over time, if we stay with solitude and silence long enough, we come to stillness.

Hinge: And most of the great ones of the Way of Jesus down through history would all say that solitude is one of the most important of all the practices of Jesus.

• Henri Nouwen once said:

• “Without solitude it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life. ... We do not take the spiritual life seriously if we do not set aside some time to be with God and listen to him.”

Think about it: The more intimate a relationship, the more it requires time alone together.
Imagine if I was never alone with my wife - if we were always with other people, always on the go, always in a loud, noisy environment? We would never be intimate.
Your relationship to God, and to your own soul, is the same.

What I find when I go into solitude is ...

I decompress from the overstimulation of the modern world, my body and central nervous system begin to calm...
I slow down ... from all the hurry and traffic and pathological busyness...
And I begin to feel.
I’m forced to confront the good, the bad, and the ugly in my own heart. All my anxieties and ambitions and addictions, it all comes up. All of it is exposed in the safe place of God’s loving presence.
And in solitude, I hear the voice of God over the din of all the other voices, within and without.
I get God’s perspective on my life.
And often, I come to a place of freedom — success and failure both lose their power over my heart, as does the approval or disapproval of other people.
In solitude, it’s like I come home.

But when I neglect solitude...

I feel distant from God — I often resort to living off someone else’s spirituality, via a podcast or a sermon.
I feel distant from myself — I lose sight of my sense of identity and calling, who I am and what I’m meant to do.
I get more and more reactive — I get sucked into the tyranny of the urgent, not the important.
I lose God’s perspective on my life ... on what matters and what doesn’t.
And above all, I get so tired — I run out of energy to do what’s truly life-giving. As a result, I shift from engagement to escapism — entertainment, social media, doom scrolling, shopping, sugar, alcohol, etc.
I become emotionally unhealthy, on edge; the smallest thing can make me yell at my kids, or plunge into despair.
And I become vulnerable to temptation.
These are the signs and symptoms of a life without solitude.

And to clarify, the eremos isn’t just a place, it’s a practice.

You don’t have to go out into the desert of Judea or New Mexico or the Australian outback ... though that may be a fantastic idea.
But you can practice this in your daily life — walking to a park down the street from your house, or sitting in your backyard at night, or getting up early before your family or roommates are awake... or like Dr. King, and like Jesus, by staying up late.
We must learn to find the eremos.
One early Christian father gave this advice:

• “Find in the busy city the desert of the monks.”

Meaning, find solitude, silence, and stillness right in the middle of your ordinary life.
Most of us can’t go live in the desert; we have to drop our kindergartener off for school by 8 a.m. and be at work by 8:30.
How do we make space for God? The same way as Jesus; we retreat, we slip away, find a quiet place. And there we pray.

Seam: We need this practice now more than ever...

Noise pollution:

We said a few words about noise pollution earlier.
Noise pollution can cause hypertension, heart disease, arrhythmia, stroke, learning difficulties, emotional difficulties, cognitive impairment, anxiety, depression, and more.
One study found that prescriptions for anxiety medication rise 28% for every 10-decibel increase in neighborhood noise.
In another study in Europe, scientists found that one million years of life are lost each year due to noise, in what they call DALY or “Disability-Adjusted Life Years,” people’s lives cut short by chronic noise.
This is of life or death importance!
We need what Robert Cardinal Sarah of Guinea called “the power of silence.”

Seam: But let’s be honest, many of us avoid solitude and silence at all costs! Radical:

• Dallas Willard, the Christian philosopher and teacher of spiritual formation, once said this:

• “Solitude and silence are the most radical of the disciplines for the spiritual life because they most directly attack the sources of human misery and wrongdoing. ... Silence is required to complete solitude, for until we enter quietness, the world still lays hold of us.”

• Think about the gravity of his claim: that solitude is the most radical of all the spiritual disciplines.

All the practices of Jesus are “radical” in our day and age: sabbath, community, generosity, etc.
But could it be that solitude is the most radical?
And, as a result, the most neglected?

Seam: But Jesus went into solitude. All the time. Do we really think we can live without what Jesus considered essential?

Invitation:

And Jesus’ invitation was, “Come and follow me.” Another way to translate that is, “Come and follow my way of life.”
If you’re thinking, is Solitude for me? Yes, it’s for all people, in all places, for all time.
How you practice has to be customized for your personality and stage of life and living situation, but if Jesus needed this core discipline, how much more so do we?
But, that said, Jesus does not command you to go into the quiet.
In fact, very few of the spiritual disciplines are ever commanded.
Jesus doesn’t command you to read Scripture or live in community or even go to church; he just does all of these things, and then says, “Follow me.”
You’re not commanded. You’re invited.
Ruth Haley Barton writes this:

Ending:
• I love her imagery of God waiting for us outside the noise and busyness of our lives... waiting

to speak to you, comfort you, breath in courage to your heart, to love you...

Ultimately, the invitation to solitude is an invitation to intimacy with God
As St. John of the Ladder said in the sixth century, “The friend of silence comes close to God.”
Do you want to come close to God? Then follow Jesus into the quiet place.

Solitude Teaching 02:
Encounter With Our Self

Intro hook:

21 days.
In an isolated cabin in a Pacific Northwest forest.
All alone.
No phone. No computer. You literally turn over your devices when you check in.
No books.
The Bible is “allowed,” but with a gentle warning not to use it as a distraction.
No alcohol.
No more than one cup of coffee a day.
No exercise — nothing to “discharge anxiety from your body.”
And no contact with the outside world; you pack in your own food.
Your one point of human contact is the clinical psychologist and spiritual director who oversees the program.
This program is over 50 years old, but it has no name, no website, it’s all word of mouth.
But a few of my friends have been through the program and said it was one of the most transformative experiences of their life, so on my sabbatical, I went for it.
Now, in all honesty, I thought I would crush it. I mean, I’m an introvert, I love to be in the quiet. And I have a lot of solitude in my Rule of Life. It thought it would be easy.
It was one of the most harrowing, difficult, emotionally painful things I have ever done.
I realized I had developed a way of being in solitude with props — a stack of books to read, my laptop to do a little writing and calendar planning.
This was my first time going into solitude with nothing to distract me from the reality of my life.
I asked the director of the program, why no books? And he said, “This program was designed to re-create the experience of Jesus in the desert or Elijah in the desert or Moses in the desert.” And then he said, “And the desert teaches by taking away.”
I’m used to learning by addition — by hearing a teaching or listening to a podcast or reading a book — by adding new information. But the desert teaches by subtraction, by taking away all our props ... and leaving our soul naked, exposed, and raw.
Until you go into the desert, you don’t truly know what’s in you ...
Now, 21 days was a one-time event; I don’t plan on doing that ever again. But whether your time in solitude is 21 days in the wild ... or 21 minutes with a cup of tea on your couch, the point is the same ... you have to face yourself.

Encounter:

• Henri Nouwen, in his book The Way of the Heart, writes:

• “Solitude is not a private therapeutic place. Rather, it is the place of conversion,
the place where the old self dies and the new self is born, the place where the emergence of the new man and the new woman occurs. ... In solitude I get rid of my scaffolding. I have no friends to talk with, no telephone calls to make, no meetings to attend, no music to entertain, no books to distract, just me – naked, vulnerable, weak, sinful, deprived, broken – nothing. It is this nothingness that I have to face

in my solitude, a nothingness so dreadful that everything in me wants to run to my friends, my work, my distractions ... Solitude is the furnace of transformation ... the place of the great struggle and the great encounter — the struggle against the compulsions of the false self, and the encounter with the loving God who offers himself as the substance of the new self.”

Notice that for Nouwen, solitude is not a kind of day spa for the soul. Rather, it is what he called the place of encounter.
Over the next three sessions, the plan is to cover the three primary encounters we must face in solitude:

1. An encounter with our self
2. An encounter with our enemy 3. An encounter with our God

Seam: First up, an encounter with our self. The first thing:

When you go into solitude, rather than feeling happy or at peace, the first thing that often happens is what Father Thomas Keating called “the unloading of the unconscious.”
Which is a way of saying whatever is down in you comes up, from the substrata to the surface of your heart.
And you begin to feel...
Let me name a few of the most common feelings that come up in solitude:

1. Exhaustion

Often, the first thing we feel is just tired.
I call it “the crash.” It’s like our body has been running on adrenaline, and all of the sudden it just goes out. We feel a bone-deep weariness.
I think of the story of Elijah in 1 Kings 19: When he goes into the eremos, he’s so exhausted that all he can do for the first three days is sleep, eat, and drink.
That’s often all you can do at first — rest.
Rest is an essential component to discipleship to Jesus.
Imagine your tiredness on a spectrum:

On one side is good tired – the feeling at the end of a long week, where you made the world a better place, you gave your life away, and you’re ready to Sabbath and rest.
Then there’s unhealthy tired – where you’re not sleeping enough, low on margin, high on stress. It’s manageable, but you’re on edge.
Then there’s dangerous tired – where you’ve lost touch with your soul and your God, and you’re easy prey for temptation.

Where would you plot your soul on the spectrum of good tired to dangerous tired?
If you’re in good tired, rest can keep you healthy; if you’re in unhealthy tired; rest can get you back to healthy; and if you’re in dangerous tired; rest can expose your need for serious change.
Another feeling that comes up in solitude is... 2. Fear
Often, I go in expecting peace and tranquility. But instead, my mind can’t stop racing, and I find myself less praying and more worrying in God’s general direction.
I’m trying to focus on God, but my mind is a ping pong ball, just jumping from what if to what if.
In solitude, all our fears come up.
Third...
3. Sadness
Underneath everything in this life is a kind of sadness.
Even our happiest moments — a wedding or graduation or the birth of a child ... all come tinged with a faint note of sorrow.
Sorrow and joy intermix in this life, while we wait for Jesus’ return.
And when you go into solitude, often, you begin to feel sadness well up inside you. It’s like your soul tells you what you need to grieve, to sit in before God and let pass through you.
The upside is, it’s almost like your body has happiness antibodies. When you let yourself really feel your sadness, often, it gives way to joy. But it takes time.
Another emotion we often feel is... 4. Anger
All the contemplatives write about this; about how in quiet prayer, one of the major challenges we face is anger. All your hurts come up, all the people who you feel have wounded you or wronged you. And you feel mad or bitter.
I’ll occasionally find myself ruminating on how infuriated I am, or replaying the wrong done to me, or rehearsing a speech against my enemy...
Anger comes up. And finally... 5. Shame
When we are stripped down, naked, exposed ... who we really are comes through. With other people, we can perform, project an image, attempt to control other people’s

perception of us. We can even fool ourselves to an extent! We can hide.

But in solitude, there’s nowhere to hide. Who we are — the good, the bad, and the ugly — is all laid bare before God.
And we often feel a profound sense of just how broken and in need of salvation we are.

Seam: One word for all these feelings is - pain...

Pain:

In solitude, we encounter our pain.
The existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said there are two types of people in the world — those who are in despair and know it, and those who are in despair and don’t know it.
Inside all of us is a deep well of pain. No matter how sunny your disposition, or robust your faith — we all have pain in our heart.
And when we go into solitude, what is down, comes up.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: Why in the world would I ever go into solitude?! This is like the opposite of a sales pitch!
Why? Because all of this stuff is in you ... it’s leaking out like toxic pollution, to the people closest around you, the people you love.
To get free of it, we have to face it.

Distraction:

The problem is, our culture has become incredibly sophisticated at not feeling our pain. Not just physical pain, but emotional pain as well.
Primarily through the medium of distraction.
A thousand different cultural narcotics offer us a quick way to anesthetize emotional pain with our distraction of choice — food, alcohol, work, shopping, travel, entertainment, social media, the internet, porn, and more.

• The smartphone is most people’s portable coping mechanism of choice.

• I read one article in a medical journal entitled “The Smartphone as a Pacifier” that argued adults use smartphones the way toddlers use pacifiers, as an emotional crutch to distract them from painful feelings ... but as long as you use a pacifier, you never grow up.

And not only are we Christians prone to the same myriad of distractions as everyone else, but we can easily use God as just another distraction from our pain.
The psychologist John Welwood called this “spiritual bypassing,” which he defined as a “tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.”
An entire cottage industry outside and inside the church has grown up around staying positive.
Not all bad. But so few people are telling the truth.
Life is deeply beautiful, but it’s also full of pain.
We must learn to face our pain.

Seam: How do we do this?

As always, we apprentice under Jesus.
And follow him to Gethsemane.
Turn in your Bibles to Matthew 26.
The story we are about to read takes place just a few hours before Jesus’ betrayal, arrest, illegal trial, torture, and murder ...
Jesus knows what’s coming, and we read this ...

Matthew 26v36-39

Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane ...

• In Luke’s version of the story, he writes, “Jesus went out as usual” or that can be translated, “As was his custom.”

Meaning, it seems like Jesus had all sorts of hiding places around Israel where he would slip away to be alone; Gethsemane was one, a park just outside the city.
... and he said to them, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.”
... and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.”
Notice, “he began to be sorrowful and troubled.”
Not, he began to feel happy and at peace.
No, he began to touch his pain.
And he was overwhelmed by it. “To the point of death!”
Do you ever feel that way? Like your pain is just too much to face; you’d rather die?
He calls on his friends: stay here, I need community. But then ...
Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”

Seam: Jesus goes to the place of pain ...

The place of pain:

He doesn’t distract himself from his pain.
He meets God in his pain.
How? He follows three movements of the soul. First ...

1. He gives God his feelings

“My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death!”
He just tells the Father how he feels: no filter, no edit, just his raw, uncut self, laid bare before God in lament.
Then ...

2. He gives God his desires
• “Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me.”
• The cup here is a metaphor for his coming suffering on the cross.
• Let the gravity of that prayer sink in: Please, Father, I don’t want to go. • Again, no filter. He’s just offering his desires to God. And finally ...

3. He gives God his trust

• “Yet not as I will, but as you will.”
• He comes to the place of surrender.

Seam: This is the pattern laid down by Jesus for his apprentices to follow ...

The pattern:

Go into solitude. Get away from the noise and distraction of ordinary life.
Let yourself feel.
Let whatever is in you come up.
It may be joy or gratitude or exuberance! Or it may be exhaustion or fear or grief ...
Whatever it is, let yourself feel it.
Don’t run away to your distraction of choice. Stay with the pain; follow it all the way down to God.
Just this simple act of noticing and naming your emotions before God can do wonders for your soul.
Psychologists talk a lot about how important it is not only to “feel your feelings,” for your body to process and discharge emotion, but also to name your feelings. Because when you name your feelings:

1. You realize you are not your feelings. Your feelings are a part of you, but not the

whole. You get a little distance from them and, with it, freedom. Secondly ...

2. You realize you have a lot of feelings — you often feel anxiety, but also excitement; melancholy, but also joy ...

Seam: How? By following the same three movements as Jesus. First, we ...

1. Give • • • • •

• • •

• •

2. Give • •

God our feelings

We pray whatever is in us.

As the saying goes, “Pray what you got!”

If you’ve got bitterness, pray that! Hurt, pray that! Worry? Pray that!

With no filter.

I’m convinced that one of the reasons so many people find prayer boring is they don’t really pray, they perform! They hold back from God all the ugly stuff.

But prayer isn’t a place to be good, it’s a place to be real ...
Read the Psalms! Two-thirds of the Psalms are what scholars call lament!

Lament is different than complaining. Complaining is just griping about your life, and it tends to make a bad problem worse.

Lament is complaining to God. It has a U-shape to it; you go down into your pain, but then you offer it up to God.

We give God our feelings. Then we ...

God our desires

Our desires drive our feelings.

• •

• • •

3. Give •

• •

It all comes back to desire ...

The problem is, many of our desires are complex and confused — we want to follow God’s call on our life, but we don’t want to go to the cross!

We want to be holy, but we also want to sin!
What do we do with our desires?! We offer them to God.

Same pattern: no filter, just “God, here. I want _____.” Whether that desire is good, bad, or straight up ugly — we offer to God. And then we ...

God our trust

We surrender. We let go of the illusion of control. We give up trying to engineer our life to the perfect outcome.

God, your will be done.

And that moment of surrender, when you feel your heart yield, that is the fulcrum point. From there, your emotions start to get healthy. You start to move through all the inner chaos and come to peace.

Summary: This is the pattern: Go to the place of pain and meet God there.
• The great lie is that we heal by moving away from our pain, when in reality, we heal by

moving toward it and meeting God and our community in it.

Seam: But this means learning to face our pain.

Facing our pain:

There’s a saying in the therapy world: “Do the work.”
You’ll hear people in therapy say, “Oh, she’s done the work.” Or, “He’s not done the work.”
That language can sound off-putting to Christians, especially those from a church tradition where there’s a high emphasis on Christ’s finished work on the cross.
But when you listen carefully, you realize what people basically mean by “do the work” is just face your pain, sit in it, and wait there for Jesus to come and heal you.
My wife — who is about as extroverted as they come — has come to love solitude. But when we were younger, she would avoid solitude at all costs, because she used to say, “I don’t want to look under the surface because I’m scared of what I’ll find in my shadow.”
She’s not wrong. All sorts of teachers of spiritual formation from Ruth Haley Barton to Pete and Geri Scazerro and many others have used the metaphor of an iceberg for the soul.
Like an iceberg, most of our soul’s life is below the surface.
And there seems to be some dynamic to spiritual formation where, if we’re not willing to face what is below the surface, we never experience the depth of healing God has for us.

Seam: The Christian psychologist Dr. Larry Crabb has this paradigm based on the iceberg analogy...

The iceberg:

Above the surface is what Crabb calls “the managed life,” where our focus is on living by a set of principles to be successful. Our driving question is: How do I look and feel good?
But inevitably, we get hurt, betrayed, rejected, let down, and we slip down to what he calls “the wounded life,” where our driving question is: What can I do to get back to looking and feeling good?
But the invitation of Jesus is not to go up and out of our pain, but down and into it ... to meet God there, in what Crabb calls “the formed life,” where our question becomes: What is God doing through this and in me?
That, that is the question of transformation.
And if you are willing to go down and in ... rather than up and out ... you’ll discover a whole new level of peace.

Ending:

In closing, many people fear the quiet. They fear being alone. They are terrified of what’s under the surface and what may come up in solitude.
But to quote Jesus’ often repeated command: “Do not be afraid.”
What you find waiting for you, deep in the dark of your soul, is love.
The Jesus of the Trinity is there waiting to welcome you, love you, heal you, burn you clean, and set you free.
In solitude, we experience being totally exposed, totally seen, totally known, and completely forgiven and accepted and loved by God ... just as we are. This is an experience few people ever realize is possible ...
So do not be afraid. Jesus is waiting for you in the quiet.

Solitude Teaching 03:
Encounter With Our Enemy

Intro hook:

• Blaise Pascal - the 17th century French philosopher - once said:

• “All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”

Rather than go into solitude, we turn to what he called “diversion” to distract ourselves from ourselves.
And he said this in the 1600s, four centuries before the iPhone, Wi-Fi, or social media.
“Diversion” is easier than ever before.
But the fear of solitude is not a digital age thing, it’s a human thing. Some deep fissure in the human heart is scared to death of the quiet.
Nietzsche, another philosopher around the same time as Pascal, but definitely not a Christian, said:

“When we are alone and quiet, we fear that something will be whispered into our ear, [so] we hate the silence and drug ourselves with social life.”
People, in his view, are at times a drug, a narcotic for our fear.

In one study at the University of Virginia, participants were isolated in a room with no distractions and given a choice to be alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes or to push a button and receive an electric shock and get out early.
Two-thirds of men and a quarter of women chose to be electronically shocked rather than be alone.
One research scientist concluded: “Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative.”
Why is that?
Why is it we avoid solitude and silence? Why is it we always have background music on? Or

the TV going in the living room? Or a podcast in our earbuds? Why is it the moment we have a breath, we pull out our phone?

What is it we’re so afraid of?
As a kid, I used to get scared at night that there were monsters under my bed or in my closet.
For many adults, solitude is the monster under the bed.

Seam: But I hate to break it to you — not all of our fears are ungrounded ... Recap:

We started last week with Henri Nouwen’s idea that “solitude is not a private therapeutic place.” It’s not a day spa for the soul where introverted Christians go to chill. Rather, Nouwen called it “the place of encounter.”
We said there are three primary encounters we must face in solitude:

1. An encounter with our self (and our pain) 2. An encounter with our enemy
3. And an encounter with our God

• Up next on the docket is an encounter with our enemy

Turn: Please turn in your Bibles to Matthew 4.
• Let’s read the opening story of Jesus in the eremos ...

Matthew 4v1-11

Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”
Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written:
“‘He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’”
Jesus answered him, “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”
Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.”
Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’”
Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him.

The place of strength:

Notice verse 1:

“Then Jesus was led by the Spirit” — meaning, this whole story is at God’s initiative ...
“Into the wilderness” — and the word there in Greek is eremos, which, as we said, can be translated “the desert,” or “the deserted place,” or “the solitary place.”
“To be tempted by the devil” — that can be translated, “For the purpose of being tempted by the devil.”

Do you find this story confusing?
Why would the Spirit lead Jesus into solitude to be tempted by the devil?
For years, this story made no sense to me.
Because I read it this way: The devil comes to Jesus in his weakness — after forty days, all alone, with no food or water, in the dry, hot desert. Isn’t that like the enemy? To come after us when we are weak and tired and vulnerable?
But the story clicked for me when I realized I had the whole thing backwards: The eremos isn’t the place of weakness. It’s the place of strength.
After forty days in solitude, Jesus was at the height of his spiritual powers! Then and only then did he have the strength to defeat the devil.

Seam: Now, this is not how most of us think about solitude — as the place we go to draw on God’s power to defeat the devil — but it is how the early followers of Jesus thought about solitude.

The desert fathers and mothers:

Few people have ever taken the story of Jesus in the desert as seriously as the desert fathers and mothers, a group of very serious disciples of Jesus who lived over a thousand years ago.
Let me give you a little backstory. The fourth century A.D. was a key inflection point in church history. That’s when the Way of Jesus was legalized in the Roman Empire and, for the first time, Christians went from being a persecuted minority to a political majority. At first, everyone thought it was the best thing ever: no more dying in the arena, no more martyrdom. But then, cultural Christianity started to infect the church like a cancer. Compromise and corruption became widespread.
In response, thousands of men and women left civilization behind and went off into the deserts of North Africa, Judea, and Syria ...
But here’s what I find interesting: Their paradigm for going into solitude was not sabbath rest; it was spiritual war.
For them, the eremos wasn’t the place you go to slow down, breathe, decompress, and reset your sympathetic/parasympathetic nervous system, though there is a place for all of that, 100%.
But for them, it was the place you go to encounter your demons — literally.
The biblical text they anchored their life in was Matthew 4. They said: Jesus went into solitude to face down the devil. As followers of Jesus, we should do the same.
My point is, they did not go into the eremos to flee, but to fight.
Not to escape, but to engage.
Not to play defense, but to run offense.
Over time, the desert fathers and mothers started monasteries and monastic orders that spread all over the world.
A few years ago, my son and I were in Ireland, and we got a chance to visit Skellig Michael, which is a small island off the southwestern coast where they filmed the new Star Wars trilogy — it’s the location where Luke Skywalker is hiding at the lost Jedi temple.
In real life, it’s not a Jedi temple, but a UNESCO World Heritage Site of an ancient Augustinian monastery. The stone huts on-site are over a thousand years old.
The original monks named it “Skellig Michael” — Skellig is Gaelic for rock, and Michael after Michael the archangel in Revelation, because he does battle with Satan. They named it Skellig Michael because they went out there — to the westernmost point of the known European world — to fight back against the waters of chaos and face down the Satan himself.
Like ya do.

Seam: Is this how you think about solitude, silence, and stillness?

Catch:

I’m guessing not!
One of the reasons many people practice solitude once or twice and then abandon the discipline is because they go in expecting a kind of private spiritual wellness therapy, but when they arrive, it’s more like a war zone.
To navigate the eremos, we need to listen to the wisdom of the desert fathers and mothers.
They came up with a paradigm that I find very helpful. They said when you go into solitude, you encounter what they called “the three enemies of the soul.”
Which were kind of like an unholy trinity, at war with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The three enemies are:

• The world

The flesh
And the devil

The world is the system of ideas, values, practices, and social norms of a sinful society.

2. The flesh is our base, primal, animalistic drives for self-gratification, especially in regards to sexuality and survival. It’s our lust, our greed, and our fear.

3. And the devil is not just a personification of evil, but a real spiritual being who is the animating force of evil in our soul and society. At war with all that is good, beautiful, and true.

When we go into solitude, we encounter all three enemies.
We encounter the world — when we get a little distance from the noise of the world, we begin to realize just how many of the norms of our sinful society we have come to accept, how compromised our heart is, how we’ve lost our convictions ...
We encounter the flesh — the bent, warped desires in our own heart and body itself all come up ...
And we encounter the devil — as demonic thoughts assault our mind.

Seam: Now, you may be thinking, really? We do? I’ve been in solitude and, for me, it was just a lot of chatter in my head. Exactly.

The mind:

The desert fathers and mothers offer this insight, based on the story of Jesus in Matthew 4.
They point out that Jesus’ fight with the devil is not like a scene out of a Marvel movie, with Jesus flying around like Thor battling it out with Thanos.
Rather, it’s a quiet conversation in his mind between the truth of Scripture and the lies of the evil one.
They saw the fight with the three enemies of the soul as primarily a war in our mind with evil thoughts.
One of my favorite desert fathers was Evagrius of Pontus, also known as “Evagrius the Solitary.” He wrote a book called Talking Back: A Monastic Handbook for Combating Demons — best subtitle ever!
In it, he made the point that Jesus refused to get sucked into debate or dialogue with the devil. Instead, when the lies of the evil one came into his mind, he just changed the channel. He redirected his attention to the truth of Scripture ...
That was Jesus’ strategy.

Seam: But to get victory over the three enemies of the soul we - like Jesus - have to go into solitude.

When we go...

When we go into the eremos — whether we go away on a silent retreat at a monastery or, like one person I know, on an annual weeklong solo canoe trip in the backcountry ... or just get up early before our kids or roommates, put our phone away in a drawer, and sit on the floor and pray ...
Something happens in solitude. With distance from the world, we begin to see clearly all the ways our heart has been caught up in the world.
And we start to get free of the tangled web of lies and deception and temptation that play in our mind...
But this is not easy.
The biographer Mark’s version of the Jesus in the wilderness story is much shorter, he just writes:

“At once the Spirit sent him out into the wilderness, and he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.” (Mark 1v12-13)
Notice when Jesus went into the wilderness, he had to face down the wild beasts.
So too, we have to face down all our demons.

But as long as we stay tethered to our world of “diversion” — all the noise and crowds and entertainment and doom scrolling that keep us from ever facing the dark underbelly in our own soul — we remain in bondage and never get free.

Seam: This is why the three enemies — all three, the world itself, the flesh, and especially the devil — do everything they can do to keep us away from the eremos.

The resistance:

• I call it “the resistance.”

• Ruth Haley Barton writes:

You will often find that when you make a plan to go into solitude, all hell breaks loose. Literally. All sorts of things go wrong: the dishwasher will leak or your car will get a flat tire or you’ll get a call from an angry client — it’s like there’s some hidden axis of evil conspiring together to keep you tethered to the world ...
What’s demonic, what’s just coincidence, what’s our own inner resistance, we never know for sure.
But I know this: the resistance is real.
There’s resistance from the world — powerful forces have a vested interest in you staying as distracted as possible. In the so-called “attention economy,” some of the brightest minds on the planet are working night and day to keep you glued to your device and away from the freedom of solitude ... because there is money to be made on diversion.
There’s resistance from the flesh — from forces in our own heart that make excuses or bow out last minute or avoid the pain of true solitude ...
And there’s resistance from the devil himself, or at least from demonic powers ...
C.S. Lewis, in his masterpiece of satire, The Screwtape Letters, created a fictional series of letters between a senior demon named Screwtape and his apprentice demon named Wormwood on how to best tempt a young man they call “the patient.”
In it, Screwtape says there are two things the devil cannot stand — music and silence. Because they open the human heart to God.
Instead, the devil’s counter-strategy is noise.
And then Screwtape has this haunting line, “We will make the whole universe a noise in the end.”
This is the agenda of the evil one — to fill your life with noise, distraction, triviality, diversion.
My point is, all sorts of mysterious forces — human and non-human — conspire together to do all that is in their power to keep you and me away from solitude, silence, and stillness ...
If and when you attempt to go into the eremos, you will feel the resistance.

Seam: But ... if you follow the Spirit into the quiet place ...

On the other side:

... into an encounter with yourself, your enemies, and your God ...
If you face whatever comes...
If you draw on God’s power to fight evil, within and without ...
You will discover that on the other side of the struggle is freedom.
No, solitude is not a “private therapeutic place”; it’s a battlefield.

It’s not always a battlefield. Sometimes you go into solitude and it is a day of rest with God. Beautiful.
But this is not the solitude of Jesus in Matthew 4 or John the Baptist or Elijah; they went into the eremos to fight, not to flee.

But if you pay attention, you’ll start to notice that people who spend a lot of time in solitude are some of the most calm, tranquil, joyful people you know. They just radiate this inner peace.
But it’s a peace that was won by struggle ...

Seam: The key is just to stay with it ... Stay:

There’s a saying from Abba Moses, one of the desert fathers. A young monk came to him for advice on prayer, and he said this, “Stay in your cell and it will teach you everything you need to know.”
Stay in your cell; meaning, stay in solitude ...
Many people abandon solitude long before it does its work of liberation.
Henri Nouwen said this:

• “The task is to persevere in my solitude, to stay in my cell until all my seductive visitors get tired of pounding on my door and leave me alone.”

“The task is to persevere.” Until the voice of the enemy is defeated by the voice of God.
Few of us have any idea of the power available to us if all we do is go into the quiet with God ...

• What if the quiet that we so fear holds the secret of our freedom?

Seam: But, as powerful as it is, there is a death to self that is required to make solitude a regular part of your Rule of Life ...

Death:

In Celtic Ireland, early Christian monks called themselves “green martyrs”. Red martyrs were those who literally died rather than deny that Jesus was Lord before the Roman Empire, but green martyrs were those who symbolically died to a normal life to go off into the forest to be alone in prayer.
They recognized that solitude required a death to the status quo of a culture run by the world, the flesh, and the devil.
But on the other side of this death to a “normal life” was a kind of resurrection.
Which is why, down through history, people have often sought wisdom from monks and nuns, and holy hermits, often hiding in caves and on mountains ....
As G.K. Chesterton once said:

• “It is the paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.”

It is only when we are free of the world’s grip that we can truly change the world ...
Will you be one of the saints? One of the few who retreat to return, as Jesus did, in power?
Listen to Luke’s ending to the story:

• “And Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit”

We’ll talk more about in our final session, but ...
I believe this is the call of Jesus upon our generation: To go into solitude, and come back in the power of the Spirit: free to set others free.

Ending:

• Most of us are not called to quit our job and move into the desert.

• But all of us who follow Jesus are called to fashion our own desert in the rhythms and routine of our daily life ...

• To go into solitude... and there find freedom in God.

Solitude Teaching 04:
Encounter With Our God

Intro hook:

Last week, I got up early one morning and drove outside the city to a Norbertine monastery. It’s up a windy road, in a beautiful canyon, there’s no cell reception there, no urban noise at all — it is quiet.
I was sitting in the chapel, and it was so quiet that when I would click my pen to write in my journal, I could hear it echo off the walls ...
And I spent the day just sitting there, alone, with God ... listening...
No phone or device, no books to read, no to-do list, no goals for the day; just my Bible and journal and an open heart.
At first, my mind was jumpy and all over the place ... but as the hours passed, it began to calm ... and I began to sense the voice of God welling up in my heart.
When the day was over, there were no fireworks in the sky, I was not caught up in the third heaven.
But I drove back home at peace and with a sharper clarity around...

Who I am, who I’m not...
What I’m called to do and not do...
And mostly just a sense of how loved I am by God and how incredibly good my life in his world actually is.

Now, most people would say I don’t have the time to spend a day away.
I live a busy life in LA. I’m raising three teenagers, I lead a nonprofit, I am always behind on my to-do list — and on my solitude day, I did not check a single thing off it.
Most would consider my day a waste of time.
In fact, Henri Nouwen called solitude “wasting time on God”. He didn’t mean solitude is a waste of time.
He meant, in a culture devoted to the worship of the twin gods of accomplishment and accumulation, where pathological busyness is the norm, where people, even when they are alone, are never really alone, but tethered to their devices ... to spend a day just sitting in the quiet listening for God is considered a poor use of time.
But to those who have discovered the raw power of just setting your soul before its maker ... it’s the best use of time you could possibly imagine.
All the saints and sages of Christian history say in chorus: Solitude is a foundational practice for the spiritual life.
I love this from Father Ammonas, one of the desert fathers. When a young man came to him for spiritual direction, he said:

• “Behold, my beloved, I have shown you the power of silence, how thoroughly it heals and how fully pleasing it is to God ... it is by silence that the saints grew ... it was because of silence that the power of God dwelt in them, because of silence that the mysteries of God were known to them.”

• What Father Ammonas and so many others — ancient and modern — say is: No matter your personality or your stage of life, solitude, silence, and stillness hold a raw power for transformation that few other disciplines do.

Seam: Because... in solitude... we encounter God ... Set up:

Over the last two sessions, we made the point that solitude is not “a private therapeutic place” — it is the place of encounter.

1. First, an encounter with our self
2. Second, an encounter with our enemy

3. And now we’re ready for the final and most important encounter of all — an encounter with our God

Turn: Turn in your Bibles to Mark 1. Let’s read yet another story of Jesus in the eremos...

Mark 1v32-39

That evening after sunset the people brought to Jesus all the sick and demon-possessed. The whole town gathered at the door, and Jesus healed many who had various diseases. He also drove out many demons, but he would not let the demons speak because they knew who he was.

In context, Jesus is coming off a marathon day of teaching in the synagogue, healing the sick, casting out demons ... you would think he would sleep in the next morning, go out to brunch with Peter, James, and John, and recover over a nice pour over with avocado toast ...
But instead, verse 35 ...

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.

• That phrase “solitary place” is eremos in Greek. While everyone else is sleeping, Jesus goes into solitude to pray ... 36 ...

Simon and his companions went to look for him, and when they found him, they exclaimed: “Everyone is looking for you!”

Notice, they have to go searching for Jesus! It’s like he’s hiding.
I would argue, learning to hide is an essential discipline of an apprentice of Jesus.
Because, look at what comes out of the quiet; next line ...

Jesus replied, “Let us go somewhere else — to the nearby villages — so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.” So he traveled throughout Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and driving out demons.

Jesus is presented with an amazing opportunity to go back to Capernaum and ride the wave of popular opinion. There’s all sorts of social pressure on him, but notice, what does Jesus say?

“Let us go somewhere else ... so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.”
That’s Jesus for “no.”

In this story, you see Jesus’ pattern of retreat and return ... He goes into solitude to encounter God, and then he comes back ...
And you see that he comes back with this heightened sense of clarity around his identity — his sense of self, who he is, and his calling, what he is meant to do next ...

Example:

It comes as no surprise that Jesus used two verbs with his apprentices on a regular basis — “come” and “go.”
Come away on retreat and then go back — or return to love and serve.
It’s so important that we follow this pattern, because when we don’t come away, we lose our center, and our spiritual equilibrium ... But when we encounter God in solitude, like Jesus, we often emerge with a clearer vision of our identity and calling.

Seam: A short word on each ...

1. Identity

By “identity,” I just mean who we experience ourselves to be.
We all live from an identity, or a sense of self.
But identity formation is unique in Christian spirituality because — very different than how identity is made in our postmodern culture — our identity as Christians isn’t something we choose, like what style of clothing we wear, or what car we drive, or what political party we “identify” with. It’s something we discover, we receive as a gift from God.
It’s less architecture and more archeology; less something we make up and more something we unearth from the ground of our being in God.
Much is said about the “true self” in our culture, but through a Christian lens, we don’t discover our true self by seeking it, but by seeking God.
In seeking God, we encounter what Nouwen called “the inner voice of love” — the voice of God, speaking over our life exactly as we are, with all our flaws and failures.
We realize all those things are true of us, but they are not the truest thing about us. The truest thing about us is that we are “in Christ,” in the language of the New Testament. We are seen, utterly as we are, no filter, no Photoshop, and yet we are enveloped by love, in love, for love.
When we go into solitude, we encounter God’s love and hear his voice over our identity ...
As a result, we get a little distance from other people and their voice over our identity — their love or hate, their praise or criticism, and all their opinions ... We realize we’re

not what other people say or think about us; and we get a little buffer between us and all the other voices ...

And come away with a new clarity on who we are in God ...
Our identity. Secondly, our ...

2. Calling

When we encounter God’s love, we then feel safe enough to surrender to God and his direction over our life.
And then we are inevitably sent by God back out ...
Thomas Merton once said, “We do not go into the desert to escape people but to learn how to find them.”
The desert fathers and mothers used to say, “We retreat from the world, for the world.”
And we come back with a new clarity of purpose around our calling ...

This is what I’m meant to do, and not do.
This is what I’m meant to give my time to, and not to.
This is what I’m meant to give my best energies to, and not to ...

So that we can say yes to God’s call on our life, but also so we can say no to all the other calls on our life.
It’s been said that the opposite of contemplation isn’t action, it’s reaction. It’s a ping- pong life that is in slavery to the tyranny of the urgent, not the important. To other people and not to God.
The goal is to go into solitude and then come back out, like Jesus, who, when presented with an amazing opportunity and with pressure from the disciples, said, No. That’s not who I am or what I’m supposed to do next.
Identity, and calling.

Hinge 1: This is why we need solitude .... more now than ever.
• I grieve when I hear modern Christians write off solitude because they are extroverted or

have young kids or a busy job or just don’t like it, or even pastors who tell me they are too busy with ministry ...

If Jesus needed this practice, how much more do we!
Jesus spent so much time in solitude ...
And yet: Jesus was no hermit. He would always come back. But not until after an encounter with God.
Ultimately, we do not go into the eremos to encounter ourselves and our pain ... as important as it is to make space for our feelings to come up and come to an emotional homeostasis ...
Nor do we go into the desert to encounter the evil one and get free of his voice ...
Ultimately, we go into the eremos to encounter God — to his hear his voice, speak over us our identity and calling...

Hinge 2: But this, this is why we need to learn, not just to go away; we need to learn to wait on God and listen for his voice.

Listening:

The French intellectual Simone Weil once said, “Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.”
That was her summary of all of it. Waiting patiently in expectation.
This process of encounter often takes way longer than we prefer.

• We’ve been so formed by our culture of speed — 5G and WiFi and order on Amazon and it’s on your door a few hours later — but the spiritual life has its own pace, and it’s slow ...

Much of it is spent waiting and listening ...
Jesus regularly said, “If anyone has ears to hear, let them hear.” Let them listen.
Listening is at the heart of all true Christian spirituality.
Ruth Barton, in our recommended reading, writes this:

• “One of the basic assumptions of the Christian life is that God does communicate with us through the Holy Spirit. The rhythm of speaking and listening we call

communication is at the heart of any real relationship — including our relationship with God. ... The capacity to recognize the voice of God through the ministry of the Holy Spirit arises out of friendship with God that is sustained through prayer, silent listening and attentiveness to all that is going on outside us, inside us, and between us and God. Through practice and experience we become familiar with the tone

of God’s voice, the content of his communications with us and his unique way of addressing us. We learn to recognize God’s voice just as we recognize the voice of a loved one on the other end of the phone.”

• You may be new to following Jesus and learning to hear God’s voice for the first time, or you may have been a Christian for many years, but if listening prayer is new to you, it’s very simple ....

• Our friend Dr. Aila Tasse from Kenya says there are three keys to listening prayer:

• “There’s so much going in our minds [she says], and we are distracted so much, so you need a quiet place, quiet time, and a quiet heart.”

1. Quiet place — find a distraction-free zone.
2. Quiet time — one of the best catchphrases to ever come out of the evangelical tradition.

3. And a quiet heart — our heart is full of noise! An hour spent in silence may be the noisiest hour of your life! All sorts of distractions come up. You let them come, but then you let them go ... you still your mind before God ...

Then, you just open your mind to God ...
In biblical theology, your body, including your mind, is the temple of the Holy Spirit, the dwelling place of God. Meaning, the Holy Spirit is inside you; he has direct access to your consciousness — to the flow of thoughts and feelings and perceptions and images that pass through your mind’s eye all day long.
And just like a friend sitting next to you at a coffee shop or a co-worker in an open-plan office, he can interrupt you and inject his thoughts into your thoughts, his feelings into your feelings ...
This is why God doesn’t have to speak audibly. He doesn’t need to; speech is guided thought. When you speak to someone, you guide their mind into your thoughts; God can reach directly into our mind and guide our thoughts.
So when we go into solitude, we spend most of the time just listening ...
We listen to Scripture — whether we open our Bible and read chapters and chapters at a time, or just read one passage slowly and prayerfully, or just meditate on whatever Scriptures God brings to mind ...
We listen to the circumstances of our life — searching for God’s hand of providence in the unfolding of our story ... asking the question, Where is God in the events of my life? And what is God trying to draw out of me in this season?
We listen to the quiet whisperings of our heart — trusting that God’s Spirit is often at work, desiring through our desires. In fact, this is one of the reasons solitude is so important; we often don’t know what we desire, not truly. Therefore, we don’t know God’s intention for us. In solitude, we get in touch with that deep desire of the Spirit of God in the holy of holies that is our inner heart.
And we listen to the thoughts that come into our mind from God himself ...
We have to listen carefully because God’s voice is often so quiet and gentle ...
In the story of Elijah’s time in solitude in 1 Kings 19, there’s that famous line about how God’s voice was not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, but in “the still, small voice.” Another way to translate the Hebrew is “the sound of gentle silence.”
So many of us have found God’s voice to be like a whisper in the heart.
This is why the quiet is the best medium for hearing God’s voice, and it’s why learning
to discern God’s voice from all the other voices — within and without — is the task of a lifetime. It’s a skill you must develop as a follower of Jesus, and it can be done, not just by monks and nuns, but by people like you and me. It’s just like learning to hear any other voice.
Jesus called himself the Good Shepherd and said his “sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice.” (John 10v3-4)
If I were sitting at a coffee shop and my dad were to walk in behind me and start talking, my brain would immediately recognize his voice and turn around, “Dad!” Because I’ve grown up listening to my father. I’d know his voice anywhere.
In the same way, as we spend time with our heavenly Father, we come to recognize his voice from all the other voices in the world.

Seam: How? Just by waiting patiently in the quiet and listening ...

Basic:

• This is the crux of discipleship to Jesus ...
• And there are some things that can only happen in solitude, and nowhere else. • As Dallas Willard once said:

• “You rarely find any person who has made great progress in the spiritual life who did not at some point have much time in solitude and silence.”

But remember: solitude is a place and a practice...

1. It’s a place

It may be out in the desert or the wilderness as it was for Jesus.
Do not underestimate the power of being alone with God in the beauty of his creation.
Every single example of Jesus in solitude, he’s outdoors, mostly in wild places ...
A spiritual discipline is any activity you see regularly in the life of Jesus. I believe walking or being alone in creation is one of the most overlooked of all the spiritual disciplines, and one of the most powerful.
So, the place may be the outdoors or, like me, you may live in a city and not have time to
do that a lot, or you may not be able, that’s okay. In Jesus’ teaching on prayer he said, “Go into your inner room, close the door, and there pray to your Father who is unseen ...” He was referring to a room in the typical first century home that was essentially a storeroom for food and other dry goods — no windows, no light, just a small closet really. This is where we get the language of a “prayer closet.” You may not have time to go hiking in a national park, but you likely have a closet you can hide in and there be with God ...
The eremos is a place, but ...

2. It’s also a practice

• You can do this for days at a time, on retreat as many of you are doing this coming week, or, like Jesus in Mark 1, just get up early and sit in your backyard and pray ...

Seam: And our invitation to you is not just to experiment with solitude for a few weeks, but to incorporate this practice into your Rule of Life. By which I mean, to incorporate it into your life architecture of apprenticeship to Jesus.

Rule of Life:

To find a daily place for solitude, even if it’s just ten minutes when you wake up or before you go to bed ...
To find a weekly place for solitude ... maybe you spend a longer chunk of time in the quiet on your Sabbath or day off ...
To find a monthly or seasonal place for solitude to discover the practice of retreat ...
But also, to begin to “de-noise” all of your life ...
One of the first things you learn in solitude is that to really hear God’s voice in the quiet, many of us need to lower the volume in our overall life.
The Apostle Paul said to the Thessalonians, “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life.”
Most of us live a noisy life in a noisy world.
But many people find that as they follow Jesus over time, they begin to listen to less podcasts, less music, watch less TV, listen to less radio when they drive ... that stuff isn’t bad per se, though much of it is like the ambient noise of a godless world ... a world trying to distract itself from the emptiness within ...
But that stuff isn’t bad at all. But many of us find we just desire to spend more and more time listening ...
You will likely find this as you follow Jesus ... you crave quiet more and more because you crave God ...

Ending:

There are seasons to life, and sometimes we need more solitude in our Rule of Life, other times the call of love is to be more present to people in need.
But in all seasons, we come to see the truth of what St. John of the Cross once said:

• “Our greatest need is to be silent before this great God ... for the only language he

hears is the silent language of love.”

He said this in the 16th century! Hundreds of years before the digital, urban, world of noise we live in today.
To repeat what I said in session 1: We are the first generation to follow Jesus with a smartphone in our pocket, the first people to sort out how to pray in the digital age. How to hear God’s voice when every time we open our phone a thousand other voices scream at us — other identities and other callings, not our true identity and true calling.
Future generations will look back on us: What will they say?
Will we be a generation whose faith was sucked into the black hole of the digital age?
Or will we stand together against the gravitational pull and go into the quiet to encounter God?
Ultimately, our spiritual future hangs in the balance.
Remember that line from Ruth Barton: The invitation to solitude is “an invitation to enter more deeply into the intimacy of relationship with the One who waits just outside the noise and busyness of our lives.”
God is waiting for you outside the noise ... the crowds of people ... the hurry of city life ... and all the distractions of our time.
I did not say this earlier, but, when I sat down in the chapel at that monastery and it was so quiet I could hear a hum in my inner ear ... I felt enveloped by God. There was no emotional high, it was gentle, but I felt surrounded by God’s presence and permeated by his love.
There are few things, if any, more wonderful this side of resurrection.
Do you desire to encounter God? Then say yes to Jesus’ invitation to solitude, silence, and stillness, and follow him into the quiet.

SPIRITUAL FORMATION

What if the greatest threat to our lives isn’t secularism but rather distractionism.

Jesus often withdrew to lonely places to pray. “Lonely place” also translates “wilderness place”.

Very early while it was still dark Jesus went out to a solitary place to pray = “wilderness place”

Jesus would find his way away from

This rhythm or practice of Jesus is all over his life = practice of solitude, silence and stillness. This is not just being alone. This is being alone with God. Not just “me time” for introverts.

This is arguably the most important practice, but definitely one of the most important practices. There is a difference between solitude and “aloneness”. Solitude is being free from input. Free from noise, cars, crowds but also free from input of devices, input, opinions, books, magazines, blogs. Put your phone and your books away and simply be in a place of solitude where you are simply quiet before the Lord.

This is the time for you to recreate the experience of Jesus, Elijah and Moses in the desert alone with God. It is surprising what comes up from within you when you take all these things away.

You have a body with a sensory nervous system and shutting off any stimuli is the shutting down of external noise until your internal noise finally begins to calm. This is a place of stillness, serenity or inner peace. Not only is your mind quiet and not only is your heart not agitated and calm but it is the place of practicing a beautiful waiting for the Lord to lead, guide and direct you on the deepest level of attentiveness. This is not a quick spot to discover. It takes time and discipline to get there.

Henri Nouwen, “Solitude is not a private therapeutic place. Rather, it is the place of conversion, the place where the old self dies and the new self is born, the place where the emergence of the new man and the new woman occurs. … In solitude I get rid of my scaffolding. I have no friends to talk with, no telephone calls to make, no meetings to attend, no music to entertain, no books to distract, just me – naked, vulnerable, weak, sinful, deprived, broken – nothing. It is this nothingness that I have to face in my solitude, a nothingness so dreadful that everything in me wants to run to my friends, my work, my distractions … Solitude is the furnace of transformation … the place of the great struggle and the great encounter — the struggle against the compulsions of the false self, and the encounter with the loving God who offers himself as the substance of the new self.”

The primary reason for solitude is not to dive deep into foundational emotions that come from soul trauma or to fight the devil in a place of deeper spiritual warfare. The primary reason for solitude is to experience God deeply learning to be more in touch with the voice of the Father as our way of life!

My preaching calms to come from more of a place of rest the less nervous and less anxious I am about standing before a crowd. Enthusiasm is great but nervous enthusiasm is unhealthy. Emotional energy can be a nervous effort to overcompensate for a lack of power.

People are flocking to practices like yoga, meditation, etc and then coming to church receiving an early 2000 rock concert and an arousing message.

Let’s take a moment to bring ourselves into a more fully devoted awareness to God’s presence in silence together as a church family.

Habakkuk 2:20 But the Lord is in His holy temple. Let all the earth be silent before Him. NAS

The early church adopted this practice of “Breath Prayers” which makes a lot of sense as we are told in Scripture to “pray without ceasing”. We are designed by God to pray the same way we breathe. This is an ancient Christian practice that dates back to at least the sixth century and likely earlier than that.

What are your practices? Great question but very dangerous to reply if you don’t explain how everyone has a different context of life and stage of life.

For every 10 decibal sound increase in a neighborhood anxiety medications increase by over 20%. Loud noise is related to hypertension, dimension,

Anxiety is in constant grind with loud noises all the time nervous system is constantly being grinded on

Fight or flight mode makes it almost impossible

Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. In essence, Dopamine Nation shows that the secret to finding balance is combining the science of desire with the wisdom of recovery.

SABBATH:

Are your greatest desires aligned with your deepest desires?

#EmbracingGodsDesign

Take time once a week to worship, rest and meditate in community. The human being was designed to run six days. Then it would be out of gas--needing refueling. Don’t mess around with God’s carefully engineered design.

Saturday night quieten whiten your soul, shutting off all sources of potential distraction, allowing yourself to have 12 to 15 hours of focus in preparation to stand before God‘s people having preserved the place of your imagination solely for him. This is the essence of Sabbath for me as a pastor, but so much more.

Just because you can watch something and tell me it didn’t bother you, so do you think it is OK? Does not actually make it OK. My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. There is such a thing as a seared conscience, and to continually neglect, this important area of your existence is potentially problematic on every area of life

The average pastor has his attention fixed on that which is what is shaking what is burning and what is God doing around him but Elijah‘s breakthrough happened when he encountered God in a very unimpressed moment of his life at a very underwhelming time of his ministry. This is where the shift happened.

It has never been more difficult to be still in all the history of the world than it is right now in the digital age, where access to the entire world is always within your reach

Practice quieting yourself multiple times throughout every single day just to learn to practice God’s presence, so that it truly becomes your way of life and your way of living. This is Legacy.

Circumstances can rage around you, but they do not have the power to take control of your faculties. If you do not allow them to do so. Faith, when she was a child with a very concerning beehive, looking yellow rash, and she saw my face and then she saw my calm after she freaked out . No matter what the circumstances may be reaching toward you. Practice, calm and listen to him. Legacy. Listen and pray. The practice of quieting ourselves as a family.

In a fallen world, we all contend with the chronically, dissatisfied desire Thomas Aquinas was asked what would it take to satisfy human desire, and his answer was everything. All of us deal with chronically, dissatisfied desire, so removing all restraint to find satisfaction is a losing strategy. Learning to celebrate discipline and embrace healthy restraint is actually the key that unlocks a satisfying life.

The idea of craving and aversion is actually the root cause of suffering. Most of our strategy for living is to simply chase what we want and to run away from what we don’t want. Even if you can successfully achieve everything you set out to accomplish the heart will still never be satisfied and you will always want something more. You were Born for something more.

Sabbath is a line in the Sand you draw where you throw down the gauntlet and say I am going to learn how to practice being free from work and from want This is where you don’t work and you don’t think about work and it is much more difficult than you can possibly imagine. Deactivation of the imagination by disconnection The J curve applies. Anything you try at first gets worse before it gets better and then you come back to where you were and then you excel to a higher place. Don’t get all caught up in evaluating your Sabbath thinking about if you liked it or not thinking about if it was successful or not just put the practice into Place, because you’re obedient to the Lord And trust him to help you grow in the revelation of Sabbath, and the result of God’s blessing, he promises to bring

In Exodus, the Sabbath is explained in terms of creation, but then, in Deuteronomy, the sabbath explained in terms of pharaoh in Egypt. Sabbath is a revelation of creation in the image of God, and Sabbath is a revelation of liberation from the worlds system of Egypt, where we put this into practice to keep from getting sucked back in to the worldly empire system. To be liberated, and then to be devoted to these practices and purposes of God is the only way we continue being liberated and free from producing structures that bring others into bondage, because our way of thinking isn’t different from the system of the world, which we are conquering in the pursuit of successfully coming out from under the oppression of others building their empire. We must be careful not to emerge into a mindset of building, our own empire and system that is contrary to God’s kingdom, impressing others to make our dreams happen. There is a difference between your greatest desire, and your deepest desire, and the sabbath is where God addresses and awakens our deepest desire to control our greatest desires. In Sabbath rest is resistance. If you are not learning to rest, you are not resisting the system that’s trying to take control of your life and your legacy.

A culture of reactivity and passivity results from being overstimulated, and under developed in our ability to critically think for ourselves

Reactivity is the exact opposite of discernment. The attractional path of least resistance very quickly, and very easily takes you to a place you do not want to go.

Instead of working less hours, we actually now work more hours even though technically we have less work to do because our time has been leveraged in accomplishing more tasks in fewer hours.

Be prepared for a sabbath sadness that results when you stop self-medicating, and you’re nervous system starts to go into shock. When there is less anesthesia, there will be the ability to feel things more. We live in a society that helps teach us the ability to master the neglect of deeper desires by empowering the pursuit of greater desires. Just like working out resistance, will produce something in you that cannot be produced in you without it. You can’t do it yourself you must purpose resistance in working out to grow in greater strength.

Give yourself a chance! We believe sin is wrong but if we never dismantle the reactionary disposition we believe what we believe but we love what we love more than we believe what we believe. Deeper desire is always trumped by greater desire in a reactionary disposition! Outrageously loving people are only those who control a hurried disposition. Time in God’s presence will transform your life. Turn page is awesome to build rhythm of gaining information but making room and taking time to rehearse what God reveals is pivotal!!! Hearer doer! You can’t become on your own even if you learn the principles of what to be. Solitude. Community.

Sacrifice disposition unveils deeper desires taking precedence over greater desires. Deep well in my life is this digging, drawing out and digging more. Come from this place in empowering others.

Delighting in Sabbath: You don’t walk into deep relationship without work, surrender and pursuit.

This is not just about what you are choosing not to experience, but this is about what you are choosing to experience. Happiness is circumstantial, so it comes and goes according to the circumstances you experience. Joy is something deeper that comes from a place we discover only if we are willing to dig. Delight is not the absence of all tension. Delight is the willingness to face the tension, digging deeper, to discover those ancient wells that are available to those who hunger and thirst, for God‘s kingdom beyond this world, deepest desire, greatest desire. We are talking about the inner dispositions of the heart. There are joyful feelings, but the feelings themselves are actually not the joy. There is the discipline of joy. Joyful people are more loving and loving people are more joyful. In the Greek rejoice is both a noun and a verb so in essence when Paul says rejoice, he’s simply saying to Joy. In the Greek language, rejoice is both a noun and a verb so when we translated in English as a verb, we say rejoice, but it literally means with the choice of your Will Joy with the choice of your will to joy. Sabbath is a discipline of celebration, which makes it a mechanism of delivery for Joy. Sabbath is one of the most important disciplines by which we become people filled with joy like God, who is filled with joy. Sabbath is about purposing, a greater awareness of the nearness and presence of God, in which there is fullness of joy.

Dan Allender writes in his book, The Sabbath: “The Sabbath is an invitation to enter delight. The Sabbath, when experienced as God intended, is the best day of our lives. Without question or thought, it is the best day of the week. It is the day we anticipate on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday — and the day we remember on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. Sabbath is the holy time where we feast, play, dance, have sex, sing, pray, laugh, tell stories, read, paint, walk, and watch creation in its fullness. Few people are willing to enter Sabbath and sanctify it, to make it holy, because a full day of delight and joy is more than most people can bear in a lifetime, let alone a week.”

To understand Sabbath you need to understand:

1. God is joyful - the One we get to be with on Sabbath.

God is the most joyful being in the universe. Any deep relationship takes time and work.

Just as a picture is worth 1000 words a practice is worth 1000 principles. Sacred practice born from kingdom principles awaken eternity in your life and legacy.

Are you living in light of eternity? You'll never leave a legacy until you live a legacy.

One year from now you will view this differently if you are willing to grow in the revelation allowing God to make you awake and engaged!

The tabernacle has various utensils that the Bible described as holy. It does not mean it is not wicked, because a pot or a utensil cannot be wicked or good. The reason it can be holy it’s because it can be set aside for the purpose of devotion to God. The Sabbath is to the week what special China is to cookware. It’s simply serves a purpose that is not for common use, and it has a special meaning when you experience it with its intended purpose.

The Jews don’t talk about practicing the Sabbath. They talk about keeping the sabbath which gives more of the idea of a treasure you keep because it is so valuable rather than a behavior you practice in an effort to simply prioritize.

Simply put Sabbath must be a day that is set aside and holy to God I’m like other days. It is truly a holiday or a holiday. When you think about the holiday, it is uniquely different from other days because it is set aside for some intended purpose.

It is far too easy to spend most of our time on the things that don’t really matter the most in life. This is the greatest desire versus the deepest desire idea. This is the day we sent a Park for something different to take place around us, and within us from the other six days. Ultimately, this is about consecration.

BEHAVE NOT JUST BELIEVE:

NEW WINE, SKIN REVELATION

https://youtu.be/9DsBbg0HbuU

Matt 28:19-20 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” NIV

We teach people what Jesus has commanded but we are supposed to teach people how to obey what Jesus commanded. Two very different things. One involves principles while the other involves practices!

The strategic objective of the event should be something deeper than attraction. How are we developing events that are developing people as we embrace practices over programs.

Read the verses when speaking and make room for some kind of reflection as part of this process.

The structure of what we have created does some good things, our model of church is not designed to yield a high level of transformation. The architecture of the modern day church is simply not highly conducive to walking people into a way of life that embraces a deeper revelation of Christ, and a true expression of the Jesus desires expressed through his church. It was designed for great preaching producing large gathering that can effectively walk people through systems and procedures to help grow an organization that points to Jesus as its reason for existing. Does the church awaken individuals to the eternal reality of Christ as their reason for existence in their every day lives? Set up for preaching for missions, for making friends with others, who have commonly held beliefs.

it does not produce sermon on the mount perpetuating people whose hearts are penetrated by the character of Christ and the kingdom atmosphere or the atmosphere of gods kingdom permeating that everywhere they go bringing gods presents to real life

God is awakening the ancient stream of church, taking us back to foundational ideologies that have in many ways being lost, or at least massively neglected in our pursuit of seeker, sensitive church growth, idolatry

Shallow spirituality has not been a concern as much as Grove tracks, and Experience central training. Not sure what these are called, but first impressions, etc..

We are waking up to the reality, not being critical, the way churches done in our generation is not the way church has been done in the best seasons of church throughout the ages with spiritual reformation and social transformation, taking place effectively

Not the way Church was done in some of its best seasons for 2000 years we must remodel or re-architect church if we are going to make spiritual formation, the driving aim of our existence as Christians in the earth

Spiritual formation, or discipleship, as would be commonly called, is a major weakness in the western world church

We have grown up with a church culture that has embraced the misnomer that you can becoming a Christian, without becoming a disciple maker

Have we embraced a Christian eyes message of left, right, Materialism, or career ism or Americanism, or social justice, or whatever it may be.

There are books being written about these ideas, but in a day, where amazing content can generated in a variety of ways, the kinesthetic bride of Christ is actually anointed to work this out to become a living example of what it means to become a Authentic expression of Christ in our every day lives or everyone around us to see and observe the love of God.

Ancient stream of church is being awakened to possess a loving response to the bankruptcy of discipleship born from shallow, spirituality, shallow solutions, simple, Sermons, etc., shortcuts, or that produces in the eternal kingdom of God, going against the very nature of Christ, and the very culture of God‘s kingdom

Much of what truly matters to God has been included peripherally, rather than centrally to the existence and the purpose of the church we must remodel and reform the architecture of the church to make formation and transformation the central driving force of our existence in every community and this cannot be done organizationally, but must be done individually everywhere we go bringing God’s presence to real life

Almost every pastor is quick to admit discipleship is a weakness in the modern day church but very few leaders seem to have any answers about how to make it better. We would rather dress someone up like a reindeer as a part of a Christmas production that we spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours on a presentation to get people to come watch because we feel we cannot get people to go and make disciples in their own context in the world

In the modern day church, it is entirely possible to become a Christian without becoming a disciple. How is this possible and what does it mean and what are the eternal ramifications of such a reality. We baptize people into the name of the father, son, and Holy Spirit, but do we fulfill the rest of the commission teaching them to obey Everything that I have commanded you, or discipleship

To reduce discipleship to a secondary option that exists within the church for those who want to get a little more serious has left, that which should be central to become that which is peripheral producing consumerism at the heart and the question is where we find church do we find kingdom ?

We have a minority of believers who are actually following Christ, and apprenticing others to do the same, which is what discipleship is all about

I am not interested in giving the next 30 years of my life to managing well the decline of the western world church. That will bleed a person dry. We must step into a posture of learning what it means more than survive, but learn to thrive in God’s design for the church I want to be able to hand the baton to my children and my grandchildren, and my great grandchildren that which empowers them to truly walk with God, and live in light of eternity

We want to become a living lavatory, where Jesus is at work, lives are transformed in World, begins to change

Formation is not a church growth strategy so be forewarned

Long term, this is a healthy strategy for deeper groove but short term there is a cutting away and a pruning that takes place readily when people are no longer getting what they want and so many churches will give them what they want. However, we must no longer be willing to sell out for short term strategies , when we are desiring to serve the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the god of the ages, etc.

There is a difference between teaching of what Jesus commanded them, and teaching them to obey what Jesus commanded him. Look at the great commission.

We can learn to become a non-anxious presence living in the peace of God as an expression of God’s kingdom, awakening God’s peace in the world around us. Everywhere we go.

It speaks of our misunderstanding of salvation, in the gospel itself to realize people can get saved without becoming an apprentice to Jesus Christ himself

MORE ON THIS TOPIC OF SOLITUDE, STILLNESS AND SILENCE:

The world is noisier than it has ever been would you agree? Should we just submit do you want the world becomes and become like it or should we be a force, a counter, cultural force that awakens the declining world to the richness of the flourishing that comes from the kingdom of God?

The more we have grown acclimated to a society full of strangers, the more we become propelled to present ourselves, rather than being organically, known and comfortable with who we are

In our modern day era, it is completely possible to banish solitude altogether because even when we are alone, we don’t have to be alone robbing us of this beautiful practice of solitude

87% of our population sleeps next to a smart phone and checks their phone as the first thing they do when they wake up. We need to be parented and told to put our phone in timeout because we have become like impulsive children who do not know how to cultivate maturity. The last thing corporate America wants you to do is to think deeply on your own about the things you have decided really matter

Throughout the gospels, we see Jesus ministering, powerfully, but there is a strong parallel between his devotion to solitude and his connection to power. 40 days he was in solitude in the wilderness, fasting and praying, and then we read, and Mark one about this marathon of ministry that resulted where he was healing people and expressing the power of God that was flowing through him. After this, we read this curious verse about how Jesus got up early the next morning to find his way back to solitude. The Bible describes they had to send out a search party to find him because he was spending so long in his place of solitude. If I have a marathon ministry day, my natural thought is to take the next day off and sleep in, but Jesus knew the value of replenishing to avoid spiritual exhaustion.

Henry now, and said without solitude, it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life. Simply, but we do not take our spiritual life seriously if we do not set aside, time to listen to him, Jesus often withdrew to lonely places to pray.

You cannot have a healthy marriage if you are never alone in this demonstrates solitude. You also cannot have a healthy marriage if you are always alone and this demonstrates community.

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is a friend of silence. Mother Theresa

Researchers who have studied solitude have made a clear distinction between solitude, and simply being alone. There is a difference, because being alone does not mean you are free from distraction. Solitude is a place where you are free from all inputs. That includes worship, music, podcasts, and even scripture reading. This is the deeper awakening of a treasured well that exists within you for a flourishing state of communion with God. Lessen and reaction, Lord, deep in our response.

Solitude is intentional time in the quiet to be with yourself and God. This is where God most effectively reveals what truly exist within your heart, those things that should exist there in those things he wants to deal with. Solitude is the re-creation of the wilderness and the wilderness teaches by taking away. It is the stripping away that begins to allow you to see further than you could before. In the desert you can see for Miles, because nothing clutters your view.

Ephesians speaks of a deeper knowledge that passes all knowledge and some realities are learned from experiencing them not merely learning them academically.

Sports: Theology are rules to play the game. Spirituality is playing the game. Experiencing spirituality what is true theologically. We become more loving by experiencing love not by learning about it. When loved well we love well and learn more by living in this river of love. Love is learned in community (which is where we get wounded as well) and in solitude.

In the modern day world, we are never truly alone, and we are never truly in community. We seem to be always connected and interacting, but do not be confused, community is some thing deeper than that involving communion of the soul.

The unaided mind tends toward chaos. The ultimate challenge in life the art of managing consciousness. Your life is this stream of consciousness. If your life is miserable, it’s because your stream is miserable. Managing that stream effectively so it can be characterized by that which is joyful and truthful and beautiful is the ultimate challenge.

The difficulty in our day is how cheap it is to outsource this stream to various screens so quickly and easily this will never produce greater capacity and depth from us, because we are neglecting, and even ignoring the deeper reality that exists within us. I can avoid anger, anxiety, and so on just by outsourcing it so easily. Our ability to manage consciousness is weaker than ever in human history. Solitude in its uniqueness is our starting point of today. Don’t start with engagement when you already feel so overwhelmed and overloaded and over committed. You don’t need one more thing to do.

You will find yourself frustrated, but you must break through that barrier to discover solitude is more experimental and experiential than you possibly can realize without giving it a try. Spirituality is like a basic expression of little experiments through which you grow in a deeper awareness of God.

Ego and self-promotion is going on within you and that stream will produce a result that is given to things you were never designed by God to experience. Thinking you can stop sinning by being more determined about what you’ve decided is true is a deception. This is not about being more resolved and more determined. This is about being more formed into God’s image through the process of spiritual practices that take you deeper into spiritual formation. If I don’t discover solitude I will miss this gift of deeper spiritual formation that I cannot do on my own.

Spiritual disciplines are the posture of your pursuit. They are not your pursuit. Deep concept here but these activities can become idols if you’re not careful in the way you treat them. God’s not interested in your spiritual life he’s interested in your life! Practices are avenues to position yourself to more effectively experience Christ formation that God desires for you to experience.

Solitude enlarges the gap between stimulus and response and this helps train you to find a deeper response rather than a quicker reaction. Lord deepen our response and lessen our reaction. The less you spend time with God the more you talk about yourself, the more you are concerned about your reputation and the more you live with a hair trigger reaction disposition. After developing the practice of solitude you will notice you actually begin being much more present in the moment when you come back into community.

Solitude and hurry are absolutely incompatible with each other. Solitude reveals how lives are more surface than soul. Don’t conclude any time of solitude with some kind of evaluation of if you felt it was successful or not. Just smile and celebrate that you are growing in this ancient practice of Jesus that truly matters in our modern day lives! Evaluating or trying to force this experience is contrary to the very nature of the practice itself.

THIS IS NOT ABOUT TRYING TO DO SOMETHING. THIS IS ABOUT TRAINING TO DO SOMETHING. We overestimate what we can do by trying and we underestimate what we can do by training. Don’t try to run a marathon, train to run a marathon. You can’t control your inability when you try but you can control your pursuit as you train.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Transformation of the soul into a person of love all through deep in union with the father and the son and the Holy Spirit all I’m trying to say, is that for them formation wasn’t something that happened after salvation it was salvation. This is a view of salvation that I think we desperately need to get back to not just in our preaching in our teaching, but in our own life, with God, secondly, from information.

Yes, the fourth century defined sin as “a refusal to keep growing and argue that in heaven, perfection will not be a fixed state like in Greek thought, but it kind of endless growth like a fourth century Christianized version of evolution, enlightenment, spiraling, ever higher into new realms of human possibility in God, that is from reading a revelation, 21 and 22. My point is for them salvation was not just a transaction. It was also a transformation

There’s not just a change in legal status. It was the healing of the soul it was not just pardon it was adoption is Ignatius, not Ignatius of Loyola Ignatius of Antioch he was likely disciple of the apostle John before he was martyred in 108 A.D. I just wanna give us as an example of how one of the church fathers is defining salvation. We have also as a Physician, the Lord, our God, Jesus Christ, the only begotten son, and word before time began, but who afterwards became also man of Mary, the virgin he was in a mortal body, been life he became subject to corruption that he might free our souls from death and corruption, and heal them and might restore them to health when they were diseased with ungodliness.

esus, the doctor of the soul or son of argue, that another speak English obviously another translation of the divine therapist they understood And growth and formation of the soul into a person of love all through deep in union with the father and the son and the Holy Spirit all I’m trying to say, is that for them formation wasn’t something that happened after salvation it was salvation. This is a view of salvation. We desperately need to get back to not just in our preaching in our teaching, but in our own life, with God, secondly, from information to formation Achilles’ heel of most discipleship models in the west, at least is similar to kind of most post Enlightenment education models they fall prey to Cartesian thinking Cartesian as in Renee Descartes the philosopher, who said I think, therefore, I am.

All of western culture not just Christian in this model believe all you have to do is get the right information and data into the computer and out will come the right behavior. The theory of change that I grew up was something like this but this was never said this way.

Transformation: information plus inspiration plus willpower equals change, information, sermons, biblical theology, doctrine, thinking God starts after I’m thinking the right things about God plus inspiration, strong, pietist kind of stream in evangelicalism you have to get it in your heart on your brain and your heart beautiful I agree with that now now go don’t be anxious this week now. Go stop, now go forgive your father just go do it everybody information plus inspiration plus world power equals change. How’s that working for you?

Or in the charismatic tradition or the Pentecostal stream of the church is more like encounter plus emotion plus willpower equals change And the problem is that not that those two formulas are bad is that they are just so incomplete for anything beyond early level change. They work really well in the beginning of your spiritual journey. YOU ARE WHAT YOU LOVE, by Jamie K Smith =I love his claim you can’t think your way to Christ likeness because we’re not a brain on legs. We are a human a whole person, a soul. So our model discipleship has to be holistic it has to penetrate our minds Yes, I’m happy to let that stands the portal to our soul but emotions in our body and the automatic responses, good and evil in our body in the memory that we carry in our nervous system from earliest day is it in seeing the way our brain is wired for attachment on our social world in the culture on our life habit Architecture, and so much more.

This is why we avoid the language of the spiritual disciplines, and before the language of practices because most people misunderstand the word spiritual as you all know to mean non-material as opposed to how it’s used by Paul, where it seems to mean, animated by the Spirit of Jesus and Paul writes about in Corinthians spiritual bodies. He doesn’t mean nonmaterial body he means body is it in the future, animated by the Spirit of God. But the disciplines are the practices are actually how we get the non-material ideas of Jesus into the very material bodies of our souls after all, and in biblical theology or what has been called a theology of the body, we don’t have a body we are a body maybe that’s an over a statement but our body is a part of who we are our discipleship must form us at the deepest level of our body of our soul of our social world of all that we are.

The third shift is from formation as an optional aside to the driving motivation of every church formation, or again discipleship, I would argue it is not a thing in the offering of the church of Jesus, it is the thing it is the Through-line hears Paul and Galatians chapter 4 verse 19. You will know it, my dear children for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you. Paul sees his role is that of a mother labor until Christ is formed in the church of Jesus. That is his end goal same with Ephesians read it. This is where I would argue the mission of movement went wrong and continues to fall short where it would argue that mission is the driving name of the church. My take on that is not so much that it’s a bad idea, but that is cart before the horse that mission is the byproduct of formation or discipleship is Jesus first called the disciples to come and be with him, and follow him an apprentice under him, and live as a student or learner of him and then, after a period of time he sent them out first it was come then it was ago. On the flip side this is where the formation movement I think has gone wrong and continues to fall short. The point of formation isn’t to get lost in an introverted wellness spirituality.

SOLITUDE: top

Solitude Teaching Notes

Solitude Teaching 01: The Quiet Place

Intro hook:

* January 27, 1956. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is sitting at his kitchen table in the middle of the night, about to walk away from his destiny.

* This was still early in the civil rights movement, and Dr. King was not yet widely known.

* He had been brought in to Montgomery, Alalabama, to lead the bus boycott, following Rosa Park’s courageous act of refusing to sit in the colored section of the bus.

* But as the boycott dragged on, the ire of the mob was increasingly turned onto its leader.

* With the rising tide of death threats, Dr. King was fearing not only for his life, but for his wife and daughter.

* The day before, Dr. King had been arrested and jailed for driving 30 miles per hour in a 25-miles-per-hour zone.

* That morning, he was released, but came home to another round of threatening phone calls.

* The evening of the 27th, he could not fall asleep, so he got out of bed, made a pot of coffee, sat down in his kitchen, and began to pray to God in the quiet.

* In a later sermon, he told the story this way:

Imagine a hypothetical situation ... What if?

* What if Dr. King had a smartphone? What if he sat down with his cup of coffee and disappeared into Twitter, or started working on his next TikTok video?

* Or got an emergency text?

* Or started reading the news and fuming over the latest op-ed?

* Or what if he had a TV and just started binging a new series?

* Would there have been a Dr. King? Would he have been able to hear God’s voice in the quiet and, from it, draw on God’s strength to continue the fight? Or would he have been sucked into the black hole of the digital age?

* Hypothetical situation.
Seam: But it has me thinking about our very real situation as the first generation to apprentice under Jesus in the digital age.

* What if the greatest threat to the Christian faith today isn’t secularism but distraction?

* We live in an era where it’s possible to go through your entire life and never be alone; even when we’re “alone,” we’re on our phone or the internet or in our entertainment queue.

* The cultural critic Cal Newport, in his book Digital Minimalism, writes, “It’s now possible to completely banish solitude from your life.”

* The moment that most of us are ever alone, in a room or even in our car, we reach for the appendage of our device — check our texts, open social media, read the news, play music, put on a podcast, Google whatever.

* Our devices keep us tethered to the world of noise.

* And the threat of all this noise and distraction isn’t just to our minds or even to our bodies; it’s to our souls.

* How many moments have I missed? Where God wanted to speak to me, or shape me, but I was distracted by my devices?
Set up: Is there a practice from the Way of Jesus that could position you and me to hear Jesus’ voice in all the noise of the modern world?

* Yes, it is the practice of solitude.

* That night in his kitchen in Montgomery, Dr. King was tapping into a practice that is all over the life of Jesus.
Turn: Turn in your Bibles to Luke 5. Let’s read from verse 15... Luke 5v15-16
The news about [Jesus] spread all the more, so that crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses. But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.

* The phrase “lonely places” is the English translation of the Greek word eremos.

* But eremos can also be translated:

* The desert

* The deserted place

* The desolate place

* The solitary place

* Or, my personal favorite, the quiet place

* Jesus’ world was very different from my own in Los Angeles, where there are people as far as the eye can see. Most people in his day lived in small, rural villages; most were farmers on small plots of land; all lived within walking distance of the synagogue.

* And outside the populated areas, there were vast tracts of empty, uninhabited land. Called “the eremos.”

* Jesus would regularly disappear out into that wide open space, all by himself, to pray.

* Luke tells us “he often withdrew” to the eremos.

* Listen to a few alternate translations of Luke 5.

* Jesus himself frequently withdrew to the wilderness and prayed. (NET Bible)

* Jesus often slipped away to be alone so he could pray. (NCV)

* As often as possible Jesus withdrew to out-of-the-way places for prayer. (The Message)

* When you read the gospels, you find story after story of Jesus, all alone, out in nature; just him, and God.
Seam: In fact, when you read the Gospels, you notice in Jesus’ life a rhythm of retreat and return...
Retreat and return:

* Jesus would retreat into solitude; he would get away from people, from noise, from stimulation ... to pray, rest, and listen for his Father’s voice ...

* But he was no hermit. He would then return to be with people in community, and to love and serve ...

* You see Jesus toggle back and forth between solitude and community.

* There are all sorts of ways to group the practices of Jesus, or the spiritual disciplines, but arguably, solitude and community are the two basic containers for all the practices.

* Solitude and community are the twin pillars of the spiritual life, the two legs by which we travel the Way of Jesus.

* The problem is: Many of us in the digital age never really go all the way into solitude or community ...

* Instead, we’re often “alone together”, in the words of Sherry Turkle, the MIT professor and expert on the digital age’s impact on Millenials and Gen Z.

• You can be with people, but not actually in community. ... Never have relationships go beneath the surface where you know and are known.

• And you can be alone in a room, but on your device.
• We’re drawn to solitude, like we’re drawn to community, but we’re also scared of it.

Seam: Which is why your mind is likely starting to raise objections:

Objections:

* Yeah, but I’m an extrovert.

* Or I’m a young parent.

* Or I live a busy life.

* Or What about social justice and mission?

* But again, “Jesus often withdrew into the eremos ...” and, I mean, he was Jesus! You think you’re busy? People were literally clinging to him or digging through ceilings or begging from the roadside for his touch ...

* And yet, in spite of the demand (or could it be because of it?), he would regularly slip away ...

* In fact, you can chart Jesus’ life on an axis of demand and withdrawal. It seems that, the more in demand Jesus became, the more he would disappear into the quiet.

* We read stories of people literally going out searching for him in the eremos ...

* And in doing so, he laid down for all his apprentices a pattern to follow.
Seam: Now, this pattern has come to be called the practice of Solitude ...
Practice:
• To start, let me clarify what Solitude is not.
• First, it’s not loneliness:

• Richard Foster, in Celebration of Discipline, writes:

• “Loneliness is inner emptiness. Solitude is inner fulfillment.”

* Loneliness is a felt absence; but solitude is a felt presence.

* Loneliness is a gnawing ache in the human heart for unrequited love; the gaping wound of the modern soul. Sociologists tell us Gen Z is the loneliest generation of all time.

* But solitude is not loneliness.
• Secondly, it’s not isolation:

• The Hawaiian pastor Wayne Cordeiro writes:

* “There is a difference between isolation and solitude. They contain similar characteristics, but in reality they are worlds apart. Solitude is a chosen separation for refining your soul. Isolation is what you crave when you neglect the first.”

* Isolation is a movement away from relationship; solitude is a movement toward relationship.
• Finally, it’s not aloneness ...

* When social scientists study the effect of solitude on the human person, they distinguish between solitude and aloneness.

* Aloneness is what we introverts love: It’s when we’re not with other people, but we may be texting people or watching TV or reading a book or folding laundry. We’re alone, but we’re not in solitude.

* This is a crucial distinction because many people mistakenly assume that solitude is a preference-based spiritual discipline for introverts.

* This is a tragedy for extroverts because they never experience the depth of intimacy with God that is possible only in the quiet place.

* And it’s a tragedy for introverts too, because solitude is warped into a spiritualized version of a little me-time.

* In reality, studies show that once you distinguish between solitude and aloneness, introverts have no higher desire for or enjoyment of solitude than extroverts.
• So, what is it?
Solitude defined:
• Very simply: The practice of solitude is intentional time in the quiet with ourselves and God.

• Ruth Haley Barton, the author of our recommended reading for this Practice, writes:

• “Solitude, at its most basic and profound level, is simply an opportunity to be ourselves with God.”

• That’s why it’s not the same thing as aloneness. You’re not alone; you’re alone with God.

• In the 4th century, St. Jerome said:
• “[We are] never less alone than when alone.”

• One way to think about solitude is as a place that is free of inputs. • The only inputs are 1. God and 2. your heart laid open before God.

Seam: Which is why solitude has two companions: silence and stillness ...

Silence:

* Silence is pretty self-explanatory, but there are two dimensions to silence:

* Exterior silence, where you silence noise outside you. No people in a crowded coffee shop, no TV in the background, no music in your AirPods, no chimes from push notifications on your phone. It’s quiet.

* But the second dimension is interior silence. Where you attempt — and this is easier said than done — to quiet all the thoughts and worries and emotions and rumblings of the heart inside you.
Seam: This, in turn, is designed to lead to stillness ... Stillness:

• The Eastern Orthodox Bishop Kallistos Ware defined stillness this way:

• “Stillness is a state of inner tranquility or mental quietude and concentration. Not simply silence, but an attitude, of listening to God and of an openness to God.”

• It’s coming to a place where the troubled waters of your heart settle down like a glassy lake early in the morning. And you’re just there, waiting.

* Often, when I teach on this in our church, I get a glass jar, fill it with water, and put soil from a creek near my house in it. I shake up the jar until the water is all muddy and churned up, and then I set it down and wait. And over a long period of time, all the turmoil starts to settle down, and in the end, all the silt goes to the bottom of the jar and the rest of the water is calm and clear.

* That’s a picture of what’s happening in you as you go into solitude. We go in all churned up and, over time, if we stay with solitude and silence long enough, we come to stillness.
Hinge: And most of the great ones of the Way of Jesus down through history would all say that solitude is one of the most important of all the practices of Jesus.

• Henri Nouwen once said:

• “Without solitude it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life. ... We do not take the spiritual life seriously if we do not set aside some time to be with God and listen to him.

* Think about it: The more intimate a relationship, the more it requires time alone together.

* Imagine if I was never alone with my wife - if we were always with other people, always on the go, always in a loud, noisy environment? We would never be intimate.

* Your relationship to God, and to your own soul, is the same.
What I find when I go into solitude is ...

* I decompress from the overstimulation of the modern world, my body and central nervous system begin to calm...

* I slow down ... from all the hurry and traffic and pathological busyness...

* And I begin to feel.

* And in solitude, I hear the voice of God over the din of all the other voices, within and without.

* I get God’s perspective on my life.

* And often, I come to a place of freedom — success and failure both lose their power over my heart, as does the approval or disapproval of other people.

* In solitude, it’s like I come home.
But when I neglect solitude...

* I feel distant from God — I often resort to living off someone else’s spirituality, via a podcast or a sermon.

* I feel distant from myself — I lose sight of my sense of identity and calling, who I am and what I’m meant to do.

* I get more and more reactive — I get sucked into the tyranny of the urgent, not the important.

* I lose God’s perspective on my life ... on what matters and what doesn’t.

* And above all, I get so tired — I run out of energy to do what’s truly life-giving. As a result, I shift from engagement to escapism — entertainment, social media, doom scrolling, shopping, sugar, alcohol, etc.

* I become emotionally unhealthy, on edge; the smallest thing can make me yell at my kids, or plunge into despair.

* And I become vulnerable to temptation.

* These are the signs and symptoms of a life without solitude.
And to clarify, the eremos isn’t just a place, it’s a practice.

* You don’t have to go out into the desert of Judea or New Mexico or the Australian outback ... though that may be a fantastic idea.

* But you can practice this in your daily life — walking to a park down the street from your house, or sitting in your backyard at night, or getting up early before your family or roommates are awake... or like Dr. King, and like Jesus, by staying up late.

* We must learn to find the eremos.

* One early Christian father gave this advice:

• “Find in the busy city the desert of the monks.”

* Meaning, find solitude, silence, and stillness right in the middle of your ordinary life.

* Most of us can’t go live in the desert; we have to drop our kindergartener off for school by 8 a.m. and be at work by 8:30.

* How do we make space for God? The same way as Jesus; we retreat, we slip away, find a quiet place. And there we pray.
Seam: We need this practice now more than ever...
Noise pollution:

* We said a few words about noise pollution earlier.

* Noise pollution can cause hypertension, heart disease, arrhythmia, stroke, learning difficulties, emotional difficulties, cognitive impairment, anxiety, depression, and more.

* One study found that prescriptions for anxiety medication rise 28% for every 10-decibel increase in neighborhood noise.

* This is of life or death importance!

* We need what Robert Cardinal Sarah of Guinea called “the power of silence.”
Seam: But let’s be honest, many of us avoid solitude and silence at all costs! Radical:
• Dallas Willard, the Christian philosopher and teacher of spiritual formation, once said this:

• Think about the gravity of his claim: that solitude is the most radical of all the spiritual disciplines.

* All the practices of Jesus are “radical” in our day and age: sabbath, community, generosity, etc.

* But could it be that solitude is the most radical?

* And, as a result, the most neglected?
Seam: But Jesus went into solitude. All the time. Do we really think we can live without what Jesus considered essential?
Invitation:

* And Jesus’ invitation was, “Come and follow me.” Another way to translate that is, “Come and follow my way of life.”

* If you’re thinking, is Solitude for me? Yes, it’s for all people, in all places, for all time.

* How you practice has to be customized for your personality and stage of life and living situation, but if Jesus needed this core discipline, how much more so do we?

* But, that said, Jesus does not command you to go into the quiet.

* In fact, very few of the spiritual disciplines are ever commanded.

* Jesus doesn’t command you to read Scripture or live in community or even go to church; he just does all of these things, and then says, “Follow me.”

* You’re not commanded. You’re invited.

* Ruth Haley Barton writes this:

Ending:
• I love her imagery of God waiting for us outside the noise and busyness of our lives... waiting

to speak to you, comfort you, breath in courage to your heart, to love you...

* Ultimately, the invitation to solitude is an invitation to intimacy with God

* As St. John of the Ladder said in the sixth century, “The friend of silence comes close to God.”

* Do you want to come close to God? Then follow Jesus into the quiet place.

Solitude Teaching 02:
Encounter With Our Self

Intro hook:

* 21 days.

* In an isolated cabin in a Pacific Northwest forest.

* All alone.

* No phone. No computer. You literally turn over your devices when you check in.

* No books.

* The Bible is “allowed,” but with a gentle warning not to use it as a distraction.

* No alcohol.

* No more than one cup of coffee a day.

* No exercise — nothing to “discharge anxiety from your body.”

* And no contact with the outside world; you pack in your own food.

* Your one point of human contact is the clinical psychologist and spiritual director who oversees the program.

* This program is over 50 years old, but it has no name, no website, it’s all word of mouth.

* But a few of my friends have been through the program and said it was one of the most transformative experiences of their life, so on my sabbatical, I went for it.

* Now, in all honesty, I thought I would crush it. I mean, I’m an introvert, I love to be in the quiet. And I have a lot of solitude in my Rule of Life. It thought it would be easy.

* It was one of the most harrowing, difficult, emotionally painful things I have ever done.

* I realized I had developed a way of being in solitude with props — a stack of books to read, my laptop to do a little writing and calendar planning.

* This was my first time going into solitude with nothing to distract me from the reality of my life.

* I asked the director of the program, why no books? And he said, “This program was designed to re-create the experience of Jesus in the desert or Elijah in the desert or Moses in the desert.” And then he said, “And the desert teaches by taking away.”

* I’m used to learning by addition — by hearing a teaching or listening to a podcast or reading a book — by adding new information. But the desert teaches by subtraction, by taking away all our props ... and leaving our soul naked, exposed, and raw.

* Until you go into the desert, you don’t truly know what’s in you ...

* Now, 21 days was a one-time event; I don’t plan on doing that ever again. But whether your time in solitude is 21 days in the wild ... or 21 minutes with a cup of tea on your couch, the point is the same ... you have to face yourself.
Encounter:

• Henri Nouwen, in his book The Way of the Heart, writes:

* Notice that for Nouwen, solitude is not a kind of day spa for the soul. Rather, it is what he called the place of encounter.

* Over the next three sessions, the plan is to cover the three primary encounters we must face in solitude:

1. An encounter with our self
2. An encounter with our enemy 3. An encounter with our God

Seam: First up, an encounter with our self. The first thing:

* When you go into solitude, rather than feeling happy or at peace, the first thing that often happens is what Father Thomas Keating called “the unloading of the unconscious.”

* Which is a way of saying whatever is down in you comes up, from the substrata to the surface of your heart.

* And you begin to feel...

* Let me name a few of the most common feelings that come up in solitude:
1. Exhaustion

* Often, the first thing we feel is just tired.

* I call it “the crash.” It’s like our body has been running on adrenaline, and all of the sudden it just goes out. We feel a bone-deep weariness.

* I think of the story of Elijah in 1 Kings 19: When he goes into the eremos, he’s so exhausted that all he can do for the first three days is sleep, eat, and drink.

* That’s often all you can do at first — rest.

* Rest is an essential component to discipleship to Jesus.

* Imagine your tiredness on a spectrum:

* On one side is good tired – the feeling at the end of a long week, where you made the world a better place, you gave your life away, and you’re ready to Sabbath and rest.

* Then there’s unhealthy tired – where you’re not sleeping enough, low on margin, high on stress. It’s manageable, but you’re on edge.

* Then there’s dangerous tired – where you’ve lost touch with your soul and your God, and you’re easy prey for temptation.

* Where would you plot your soul on the spectrum of good tired to dangerous tired?

* If you’re in good tired, rest can keep you healthy; if you’re in unhealthy tired; rest can get you back to healthy; and if you’re in dangerous tired; rest can expose your need for serious change.

* Another feeling that comes up in solitude is... 2. Fear

* Often, I go in expecting peace and tranquility. But instead, my mind can’t stop racing, and I find myself less praying and more worrying in God’s general direction.

* I’m trying to focus on God, but my mind is a ping pong ball, just jumping from what if to what if.

* In solitude, all our fears come up.

* Third...3. Sadness

* Underneath everything in this life is a kind of sadness.

* Even our happiest moments — a wedding or graduation or the birth of a child ... all come tinged with a faint note of sorrow.

* Sorrow and joy intermix in this life, while we wait for Jesus’ return.

* And when you go into solitude, often, you begin to feel sadness well up inside you. It’s like your soul tells you what you need to grieve, to sit in before God and let pass through you.

* The upside is, it’s almost like your body has happiness antibodies. When you let yourself really feel your sadness, often, it gives way to joy. But it takes time.

* Another emotion we often feel is... 4. Anger

* All the contemplatives write about this; about how in quiet prayer, one of the major challenges we face is anger. All your hurts come up, all the people who you feel have wounded you or wronged you. And you feel mad or bitter.

* I’ll occasionally find myself ruminating on how infuriated I am, or replaying the wrong done to me, or rehearsing a speech against my enemy...

* Anger comes up. And finally... 5. Shame

* When we are stripped down, naked, exposed ... who we really are comes through. With other people, we can perform, project an image, attempt to control other people’s

perception of us. We can even fool ourselves to an extent! We can hide.

* But in solitude, there’s nowhere to hide. Who we are — the good, the bad, and the ugly — is all laid bare before God.

* And we often feel a profound sense of just how broken and in need of salvation we are.
Seam: One word for all these feelings is - pain...
Pain:

* In solitude, we encounter our pain.

* The existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said there are two types of people in the world — those who are in despair and know it, and those who are in despair and don’t know it.

* Inside all of us is a deep well of pain. No matter how sunny your disposition, or robust your faith — we all have pain in our heart.

* And when we go into solitude, what is down, comes up.

* Now, I know what you’re thinking: Why in the world would I ever go into solitude?! This is like the opposite of a sales pitch!

* Why? Because all of this stuff is in you ... it’s leaking out like toxic pollution, to the people closest around you, the people you love.

* To get free of it, we have to face it.
Distraction:

* The problem is, our culture has become incredibly sophisticated at not feeling our pain. Not just physical pain, but emotional pain as well.

* Primarily through the medium of distraction.

• The smartphone is most people’s portable coping mechanism of choice.

* And not only are we Christians prone to the same myriad of distractions as everyone else, but we can easily use God as just another distraction from our pain.

* The psychologist John Welwood called this “spiritual bypassing,” which he defined as a “tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.”

* An entire cottage industry outside and inside the church has grown up around staying positive.

* Not all bad. But so few people are telling the truth.

* Life is deeply beautiful, but it’s also full of pain.

* We must learn to face our pain.
Seam: How do we do this?

* As always, we apprentice under Jesus.

* And follow him to Gethsemane.

* Turn in your Bibles to Matthew 26.

* The story we are about to read takes place just a few hours before Jesus’ betrayal, arrest, illegal trial, torture, and murder ...

* Jesus knows what’s coming, and we read this ...
Matthew 26v36-39
Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane ...
• In Luke’s version of the story, he writes, “Jesus went out as usual” or that can be translated, “As was his custom.”

* Meaning, it seems like Jesus had all sorts of hiding places around Israel where he would slip away to be alone; Gethsemane was one, a park just outside the city.

* ... and he said to them, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.”

* ... and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.”

* Notice, “he began to be sorrowful and troubled.”

* Not, he began to feel happy and at peace.

* No, he began to touch his pain.

* And he was overwhelmed by it. “To the point of death!”

* Do you ever feel that way? Like your pain is just too much to face; you’d rather die?

* He calls on his friends: stay here, I need community. But then ...

* Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”
Seam: Jesus goes to the place of pain ...
The place of pain:

* He doesn’t distract himself from his pain.

* He meets God in his pain.

* How? He follows three movements of the soul. First ...

1. He gives God his feelings

* “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death!”

* He just tells the Father how he feels: no filter, no edit, just his raw, uncut self, laid bare before God in lament.

* Then ...

3. He gives God his trust

• “Yet not as I will, but as you will.”
• He comes to the place of surrender.

Seam: This is the pattern laid down by Jesus for his apprentices to follow ...

The pattern:

* Go into solitude. Get away from the noise and distraction of ordinary life.

* Let yourself feel.

* Let whatever is in you come up.

* It may be joy or gratitude or exuberance! Or it may be exhaustion or fear or grief ...

* Whatever it is, let yourself feel it.

* Don’t run away to your distraction of choice. Stay with the pain; follow it all the way down to God.

* Just this simple act of noticing and naming your emotions before God can do wonders for your soul.

1. You realize you are not your feelings. Your feelings are a part of you, but not the

whole. You get a little distance from them and, with it, freedom. Secondly ...

2. You realize you have a lot of feelings — you often feel anxiety, but also excitement; melancholy, but also joy ...

Seam: How? By following the same three movements as Jesus. First, we ...

1. Give • • • • •

• • •

• •

2. Give • •

God our feelings

We pray whatever is in us.

As the saying goes, “Pray what you got!”

If you’ve got bitterness, pray that! Hurt, pray that! Worry? Pray that!

With no filter.

I’m convinced that one of the reasons so many people find prayer boring is they don’t really pray, they perform! They hold back from God all the ugly stuff.

But prayer isn’t a place to be good, it’s a place to be real ...Read the Psalms! Two-thirds of the Psalms are what scholars call lament!

Lament is different than complaining. Complaining is just griping about your life, and it tends to make a bad problem worse.

Lament is complaining to God. It has a U-shape to it; you go down into your pain, but then you offer it up to God.

We give God our feelings. Then we ...

God our desires

Our desires drive our feelings.

• •

• • •

3. Give •

• •

It all comes back to desire ...

The problem is, many of our desires are complex and confused — we want to follow God’s call on our life, but we don’t want to go to the cross!

We want to be holy, but we also want to sin!
What do we do with our desires?! We offer them to God.

Same pattern: no filter, just “God, here. I want _____.” Whether that desire is good, bad, or straight up ugly — we offer to God. And then we ...

God our trust

We surrender. We let go of the illusion of control. We give up trying to engineer our life to the perfect outcome.

God, your will be done.

Summary: This is the pattern: Go to the place of pain and meet God there.
• The great lie is that we heal by moving away from our pain, when in reality, we heal by

moving toward it and meeting God and our community in it.

Seam: But this means learning to face our pain.

Facing our pain:

* There’s a saying in the therapy world: “Do the work.”

* You’ll hear people in therapy say, “Oh, she’s done the work.” Or, “He’s not done the work.”

* That language can sound off-putting to Christians, especially those from a church tradition where there’s a high emphasis on Christ’s finished work on the cross.

* But when you listen carefully, you realize what people basically mean by “do the work” is just face your pain, sit in it, and wait there for Jesus to come and heal you.

* My wife — who is about as extroverted as they come — has come to love solitude. But when we were younger, she would avoid solitude at all costs, because she used to say, “I don’t want to look under the surface because I’m scared of what I’ll find in my shadow.”

* She’s not wrong. All sorts of teachers of spiritual formation from Ruth Haley Barton to Pete and Geri Scazerro and many others have used the metaphor of an iceberg for the soul.

* Like an iceberg, most of our soul’s life is below the surface.

* And there seems to be some dynamic to spiritual formation where, if we’re not willing to face what is below the surface, we never experience the depth of healing God has for us.
Seam: The Christian psychologist Dr. Larry Crabb has this paradigm based on the iceberg analogy...
The iceberg:

* Above the surface is what Crabb calls “the managed life,” where our focus is on living by a set of principles to be successful. Our driving question is: How do I look and feel good?

* But inevitably, we get hurt, betrayed, rejected, let down, and we slip down to what he calls “the wounded life,” where our driving question is: What can I do to get back to looking and feeling good?

* But the invitation of Jesus is not to go up and out of our pain, but down and into it ... to meet God there, in what Crabb calls “the formed life,” where our question becomes: What is God doing through this and in me?

* That, that is the question of transformation.

* And if you are willing to go down and in ... rather than up and out ... you’ll discover a whole new level of peace.
Ending:

* In closing, many people fear the quiet. They fear being alone. They are terrified of what’s under the surface and what may come up in solitude.

* But to quote Jesus’ often repeated command: “Do not be afraid.”

* What you find waiting for you, deep in the dark of your soul, is love.

* The Jesus of the Trinity is there waiting to welcome you, love you, heal you, burn you clean, and set you free.

* In solitude, we experience being totally exposed, totally seen, totally known, and completely forgiven and accepted and loved by God ... just as we are. This is an experience few people ever realize is possible ...

* So do not be afraid. Jesus is waiting for you in the quiet.

Solitude Teaching 03:
Encounter With Our Enemy

Intro hook:

• Blaise Pascal - the 17th century French philosopher - once said:

• “All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”

* Rather than go into solitude, we turn to what he called “diversion” to distract ourselves from ourselves.

* And he said this in the 1600s, four centuries before the iPhone, Wi-Fi, or social media.

* “Diversion” is easier than ever before.

* But the fear of solitude is not a digital age thing, it’s a human thing. Some deep fissure in the human heart is scared to death of the quiet.

* Nietzsche, another philosopher around the same time as Pascal, but definitely not a Christian, said, “When we are alone and quiet, we fear that something will be whispered into our ear, [so] we hate the silence and drug ourselves with social life.”

* People, in his view, are at times a drug, a narcotic for our fear.

* Two-thirds of men and a quarter of women chose to be electronically shocked rather than be alone.

* One research scientist concluded: “Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative.”

* Why is that?

* Why is it we avoid solitude and silence? Why is it we always have background music on? Or

the TV going in the living room? Or a podcast in our earbuds? Why is it the moment we have a breath, we pull out our phone?

* What is it we’re so afraid of?

* As a kid, I used to get scared at night that there were monsters under my bed or in my closet.

* For many adults, solitude is the monster under the bed.
Seam: But I hate to break it to you — not all of our fears are ungrounded ... Recap:

* We started last week with Henri Nouwen’s idea that “solitude is not a private therapeutic place.” It’s not a day spa for the soul where introverted Christians go to chill. Rather, Nouwen called it “the place of encounter.”

* We said there are three primary encounters we must face in solitude:

1. An encounter with our self (and our pain) 2. An encounter with our enemy
3. And an encounter with our God

• Up next on the docket is an encounter with our enemy

Turn: Please turn in your Bibles to Matthew 4.
• Let’s read the opening story of Jesus in the eremos ...

Matthew 4v1-11

* Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”

* Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

* Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written:

* “‘He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’”

* Jesus answered him, “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

* Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.”

* Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’”

* Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him.
The place of strength:

* Notice verse 1:

* “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit” — meaning, this whole story is at God’s initiative ...

* “Into the wilderness” — and the word there in Greek is eremos, which, as we said, can be translated “the desert,” or “the deserted place,” or “the solitary place.”

* “To be tempted by the devil” — that can be translated, “For the purpose of being tempted by the devil.”

* Do you find this story confusing?

* Why would the Spirit lead Jesus into solitude to be tempted by the devil?

* For years, this story made no sense to me.

* Because I read it this way: The devil comes to Jesus in his weakness — after forty days, all alone, with no food or water, in the dry, hot desert. Isn’t that like the enemy? To come after us when we are weak and tired and vulnerable?

* But the story clicked for me when I realized I had the whole thing backwards: The eremos isn’t the place of weakness. It’s the place of strength.

* After forty days in solitude, Jesus was at the height of his spiritual powers! Then and only then did he have the strength to defeat the devil.

Seam: Now, this is not how most of us think about solitude — as the place we go to draw on God’s power to defeat the devil — but it is how the early followers of Jesus thought about solitude.

The desert fathers and mothers:

* Few people have ever taken the story of Jesus in the desert as seriously as the desert fathers and mothers, a group of very serious disciples of Jesus who lived over a thousand years ago.

* Let me give you a little backstory. The fourth century A.D. was a key inflection point in church history. That’s when the Way of Jesus was legalized in the Roman Empire and, for the first time, Christians went from being a persecuted minority to a political majority. At first, everyone thought it was the best thing ever: no more dying in the arena, no more martyrdom. But then, cultural Christianity started to infect the church like a cancer. Compromise and corruption became widespread.

* In response, thousands of men and women left civilization behind and went off into the deserts of North Africa, Judea, and Syria ...

* But here’s what I find interesting: Their paradigm for going into solitude was not sabbath rest; it was spiritual war.

* For them, the eremos wasn’t the place you go to slow down, breathe, decompress, and reset your sympathetic/parasympathetic nervous system, though there is a place for all of that, 100%.

* But for them, it was the place you go to encounter your demons — literally.

* The biblical text they anchored their life in was Matthew 4. They said: Jesus went into solitude to face down the devil. As followers of Jesus, we should do the same.

* My point is, they did not go into the eremos to flee, but to fight.

* Not to escape, but to engage.

* Not to play defense, but to run offense.

* Over time, the desert fathers and mothers started monasteries and monastic orders that spread all over the world.

* A few years ago, my son and I were in Ireland, and we got a chance to visit Skellig Michael, which is a small island off the southwestern coast where they filmed the new Star Wars trilogy — it’s the location where Luke Skywalker is hiding at the lost Jedi temple.

* In real life, it’s not a Jedi temple, but a UNESCO World Heritage Site of an ancient Augustinian monastery. The stone huts on-site are over a thousand years old.

* The original monks named it “Skellig Michael” — Skellig is Gaelic for rock, and Michael after Michael the archangel in Revelation, because he does battle with Satan. They named it Skellig Michael because they went out there — to the westernmost point of the known European world — to fight back against the waters of chaos and face down the Satan himself.

* Like ya do.
Seam: Is this how you think about solitude, silence, and stillness?
Catch:

* I’m guessing not!

* One of the reasons many people practice solitude once or twice and then abandon the discipline is because they go in expecting a kind of private spiritual wellness therapy, but when they arrive, it’s more like a war zone.

* To navigate the eremos, we need to listen to the wisdom of the desert fathers and mothers.

* They came up with a paradigm that I find very helpful. They said when you go into solitude, you encounter what they called “the three enemies of the soul.”

* Which were kind of like an unholy trinity, at war with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

* The three enemies are:

• The world

* The flesh

* And the devil
The world is the system of ideas, values, practices, and social norms of a sinful society.

2. The flesh is our base, primal, animalistic drives for self-gratification, especially in regards to sexuality and survival. It’s our lust, our greed, and our fear.

3. And the devil is not just a personification of evil, but a real spiritual being who is the animating force of evil in our soul and society. At war with all that is good, beautiful, and true.

* When we go into solitude, we encounter all three enemies.

* We encounter the world — when we get a little distance from the noise of the world, we begin to realize just how many of the norms of our sinful society we have come to accept, how compromised our heart is, how we’ve lost our convictions ...

* We encounter the flesh — the bent, warped desires in our own heart and body itself all come up ...

* And we encounter the devil — as demonic thoughts assault our mind.
Seam: Now, you may be thinking, really? We do? I’ve been in solitude and, for me, it was just a lot of chatter in my head. Exactly.
The mind:

* The desert fathers and mothers offer this insight, based on the story of Jesus in Matthew 4.

* They point out that Jesus’ fight with the devil is not like a scene out of a Marvel movie, with Jesus flying around like Thor battling it out with Thanos.

* Rather, it’s a quiet conversation in his mind between the truth of Scripture and the lies of the evil one.

* They saw the fight with the three enemies of the soul as primarily a war in our mind with evil thoughts.

* One of my favorite desert fathers was Evagrius of Pontus, also known as “Evagrius the Solitary.” He wrote a book called Talking Back: A Monastic Handbook for Combating Demons — best subtitle ever!

* In it, he made the point that Jesus refused to get sucked into debate or dialogue with the devil. Instead, when the lies of the evil one came into his mind, he just changed the channel. He redirected his attention to the truth of Scripture ...

* That was Jesus’ strategy.
Seam: But to get victory over the three enemies of the soul we - like Jesus - have to go into solitude.

When we go...

* When we go into the eremos — whether we go away on a silent retreat at a monastery or, like one person I know, on an annual weeklong solo canoe trip in the backcountry ... or just get up early before our kids or roommates, put our phone away in a drawer, and sit on the floor and pray ...

* Something happens in solitude. With distance from the world, we begin to see clearly all the ways our heart has been caught up in the world.

* And we start to get free of the tangled web of lies and deception and temptation that play in our mind...

* But this is not easy.

* The biographer Mark’s version of the Jesus in the wilderness story is much shorter, he just writes:

* “At once the Spirit sent him out into the wilderness, and he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.” (Mark 1v12-13)

* Notice when Jesus went into the wilderness, he had to face down the wild beasts.

* So too, we have to face down all our demons.

* What’s demonic, what’s just coincidence, what’s our own inner resistance, we never know for sure.

* But I know this: the resistance is real.

* There’s resistance from the flesh — from forces in our own heart that make excuses or bow out last minute or avoid the pain of true solitude ...

* And there’s resistance from the devil himself, or at least from demonic powers ...

* In it, Screwtape says there are two things the devil cannot stand — music and silence. Because they open the human heart to God.

* Instead, the devil’s counter-strategy is noise.

* And then Screwtape has this haunting line, “We will make the whole universe a noise in the end.”

* This is the agenda of the evil one — to fill your life with noise, distraction, triviality, diversion.

* My point is, all sorts of mysterious forces — human and non-human — conspire together to do all that is in their power to keep you and me away from solitude, silence, and stillness ...

* If and when you attempt to go into the eremos, you will feel the resistance.
Seam: But ... if you follow the Spirit into the quiet place ...

On the other side:

* ... into an encounter with yourself, your enemies, and your God ...

* If you face whatever comes...

* If you draw on God’s power to fight evil, within and without ...

* You will discover that on the other side of the struggle is freedom.

* No, solitude is not a “private therapeutic place”; it’s a battlefield.

* It’s not always a battlefield. Sometimes you go into solitude and it is a day of rest with God. Beautiful.

* But this is not the solitude of Jesus in Matthew 4 or John the Baptist or Elijah; they went into the eremos to fight, not to flee.

* But if you pay attention, you’ll start to notice that people who spend a lot of time in solitude are some of the most calm, tranquil, joyful people you know. They just radiate this inner peace.

* But it’s a peace that was won by struggle ...
Seam: The key is just to stay with it ... Stay:

* There’s a saying from Abba Moses, one of the desert fathers. A young monk came to him for advice on prayer, and he said this, “Stay in your cell and it will teach you everything you need to know.”

* Stay in your cell; meaning, stay in solitude ...

* Many people abandon solitude long before it does its work of liberation.

* Henri Nouwen said this:

• “The task is to persevere in my solitude, to stay in my cell until all my seductive visitors get tired of pounding on my door and leave me alone.”

* “The task is to persevere.” Until the voice of the enemy is defeated by the voice of God.

* Few of us have any idea of the power available to us if all we do is go into the quiet with God ...

• What if the quiet that we so fear holds the secret of our freedom?

Seam: But, as powerful as it is, there is a death to self that is required to make solitude a regular part of your Rule of Life ...

Death:

* In Celtic Ireland, early Christian monks called themselves “green martyrs”. Red martyrs were those who literally died rather than deny that Jesus was Lord before the Roman Empire, but green martyrs were those who symbolically died to a normal life to go off into the forest to be alone in prayer.

* They recognized that solitude required a death to the status quo of a culture run by the world, the flesh, and the devil.

* But on the other side of this death to a “normal life” was a kind of resurrection.

* Which is why, down through history, people have often sought wisdom from monks and nuns, and holy hermits, often hiding in caves and on mountains ....

* As G.K. Chesterton once said:

• “It is the paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.”

* It is only when we are free of the world’s grip that we can truly change the world ...

* Will you be one of the saints? One of the few who retreat to return, as Jesus did, in power?

* Listen to Luke’s ending to the story:

• “

* We’ll talk more about in our final session, but ...

* I believe this is the call of Jesus upon our generation: To go into solitude, and come back in the power of the Spirit: free to set others free.
Ending:
• Most of us are not called to quit our job and move into the desert.

• But all of us who follow Jesus are called to fashion our own desert in the rhythms and routine of our daily life ...

• To go into solitude... and there find freedom in God.

Solitude Teaching 04:
Encounter With Our God

Intro hook:

* Last week, I got up early one morning and drove outside the city to a Norbertine monastery. It’s up a windy road, in a beautiful canyon, there’s no cell reception there, no urban noise at all — it is quiet.

* I was sitting in the chapel, and it was so quiet that when I would click my pen to write in my journal, I could hear it echo off the walls ...

* And I spent the day just sitting there, alone, with God ... listening...

* No phone or device, no books to read, no to-do list, no goals for the day; just my Bible and journal and an open heart.

* At first, my mind was jumpy and all over the place ... but as the hours passed, it began to calm ... and I began to sense the voice of God welling up in my heart.

* When the day was over, there were no fireworks in the sky, I was not caught up in the third heaven.

* But I drove back home at peace and with a sharper clarity around...

* Who I am, who I’m not...

* What I’m called to do and not do...

* And mostly just a sense of how loved I am by God and how incredibly good my life in his world actually is.

* Now, most people would say I don’t have the time to spend a day away.

* I live a busy life in LA. I’m raising three teenagers, I lead a nonprofit, I am always behind on my to-do list — and on my solitude day, I did not check a single thing off it.

* Most would consider my day a waste of time.

* In fact, Henri Nouwen called solitude “wasting time on God”. He didn’t mean solitude is a waste of time.

* He meant, in a culture devoted to the worship of the twin gods of accomplishment and accumulation, where pathological busyness is the norm, where people, even when they are alone, are never really alone, but tethered to their devices ... to spend a day just sitting in the quiet listening for God is considered a poor use of time.

* But to those who have discovered the raw power of just setting your soul before its maker ... it’s the best use of time you could possibly imagine.

* All the saints and sages of Christian history say in chorus: Solitude is a foundational practice for the spiritual life.

* I love this from Father Ammonas, one of the desert fathers. When a young man came to him for spiritual direction, he said:

Seam: Because... in solitude... we encounter God ... Set up:

Over the last two sessions, we made the point that solitude is not “a private therapeutic place” — it is the place of encounter.

1. First, an encounter with our self
2. Second, an encounter with our enemy

3. And now we’re ready for the final and most important encounter of all — an encounter with our God

Turn: Turn in your Bibles to Mark 1. Let’s read yet another story of Jesus in the eremos...

Mark 1v32-39

* That evening after sunset the people brought to Jesus all the sick and demon-possessed. The whole town gathered at the door, and Jesus healed many who had various diseases. He also drove out many demons, but he would not let the demons speak because they knew who he was.

* In context, Jesus is coming off a marathon day of teaching in the synagogue, healing the sick, casting out demons ... you would think he would sleep in the next morning, go out to brunch with Peter, James, and John, and recover over a nice pour over with avocado toast ...

* But instead, verse 35 ...

* 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.

• That phrase “solitary place” is eremos in Greek. While everyone else is sleeping, Jesus goes into solitude to pray ... 36 ...

* Simon and his companions went to look for him, and when they found him, they exclaimed: “Everyone is looking for you!”

* Notice, they have to go searching for Jesus! It’s like he’s hiding.

* I would argue, learning to hide is an essential discipline of an apprentice of Jesus.

* Because, look at what comes out of the quiet; next line ...

* Jesus replied, “Let us go somewhere else — to the nearby villages — so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.” So he traveled throughout Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and driving out demons.

* Jesus is presented with an amazing opportunity to go back to Capernaum and ride the wave of popular opinion. There’s all sorts of social pressure on him, but notice, what does Jesus say?

* “Let us go somewhere else ... so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.”

* That’s Jesus for “no.”

* In this story, you see Jesus’ pattern of retreat and return ... He goes into solitude to encounter God, and then he comes back ...

* And you see that he comes back with this heightened sense of clarity around his identity — his sense of self, who he is, and his calling, what he is meant to do next ...

Example:

* It comes as no surprise that Jesus used two verbs with his apprentices on a regular basis — “come” and “go.”

* Come away on retreat and then go back — or return to love and serve.

* It’s so important that we follow this pattern, because when we don’t come away, we lose our center, and our spiritual equilibrium ... But when we encounter God in solitude, like Jesus, we often emerge with a clearer vision of our identity and calling.
Seam: A short word on each ...
1. Identity

* By “identity,” I just mean who we experience ourselves to be.

* We all live from an identity, or a sense of self.

* But identity formation is unique in Christian spirituality because — very different than how identity is made in our postmodern culture — our identity as Christians isn’t something we choose, like what style of clothing we wear, or what car we drive, or what political party we “identify” with. It’s something we discover, we receive as a gift from God.

* It’s less architecture and more archeology; less something we make up and more something we unearth from the ground of our being in God.

* Much is said about the “true self” in our culture, but through a Christian lens, we don’t discover our true self by seeking it, but by seeking God.

* In seeking God, we encounter what Nouwen called “the inner voice of love” — the voice of God, speaking over our life exactly as we are, with all our flaws and failures.

* We realize all those things are true of us, but they are not the truest thing about us. The truest thing about us is that we are “in Christ,” in the language of the New Testament. We are seen, utterly as we are, no filter, no Photoshop, and yet we are enveloped by love, in love, for love.

* When we go into solitude, we encounter God’s love and hear his voice over our identity ...

* As a result, we get a little distance from other people and their voice over our identity — their love or hate, their praise or criticism, and all their opinions ... We realize we’re

not what other people say or think about us; and we get a little buffer between us and all the other voices ...

* And come away with a new clarity on who we are in God ...

* Our identity. Secondly, our ...
2. Calling

* When we encounter God’s love, we then feel safe enough to surrender to God and his direction over our life.

* And then we are inevitably sent by God back out ...

* Thomas Merton once said, “We do not go into the desert to escape people but to learn how to find them.”

* The desert fathers and mothers used to say, “We retreat from the world, for the world.”

* And we come back with a new clarity of purpose around our calling ...

* This is what I’m meant to do, and not do.

* This is what I’m meant to give my time to, and not to.

* This is what I’m meant to give my best energies to, and not to ...

* So that we can say yes to God’s call on our life, but also so we can say no to all the other calls on our life.

* It’s been said that the opposite of contemplation isn’t action, it’s reaction. It’s a ping- pong life that is in slavery to the tyranny of the urgent, not the important. To other people and not to God.

* The goal is to go into solitude and then come back out, like Jesus, who, when presented with an amazing opportunity and with pressure from the disciples, said, No. That’s not who I am or what I’m supposed to do next.

* Identity, and calling.
Hinge 1: This is why we need solitude .... more now than ever.
• I grieve when I hear modern Christians write off solitude because they are extroverted or

have young kids or a busy job or just don’t like it, or even pastors who tell me they are too busy with ministry ...

* If Jesus needed this practice, how much more do we!

* Jesus spent so much time in solitude ...

* And yet: Jesus was no hermit. He would always come back. But not until after an encounter with God.

* Ultimately, we do not go into the eremos to encounter ourselves and our pain ... as important as it is to make space for our feelings to come up and come to an emotional homeostasis ...

* Nor do we go into the desert to encounter the evil one and get free of his voice ...

* Ultimately, we go into the eremos to encounter God — to his hear his voice, speak over us our identity and calling...
Hinge 2: But this, this is why we need to learn, not just to go away; we need to learn to wait on God and listen for his voice.
Listening:

* The French intellectual Simone Weil once said, “Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.”

* That was her summary of all of it. Waiting patiently in expectation.

* This process of encounter often takes way longer than we prefer.

• We’ve been so formed by our culture of speed — 5G and WiFi and order on Amazon and it’s on your door a few hours later — but the spiritual life has its own pace, and it’s slow ...

* Much of it is spent waiting and listening ...

* Jesus regularly said, “If anyone has ears to hear, let them hear.” Let them listen.

* Listening is at the heart of all true Christian spirituality.

* Ruth Barton, in our recommended reading, writes this:

• “One of the basic assumptions of the Christian life is that God does communicate with us through the Holy Spirit. The rhythm of speaking and listening we call

• Our friend Dr. Aila Tasse from Kenya says there are three keys to listening prayer:

• “There’s so much going in our minds [she says], and we are distracted so much, so you need a quiet place, quiet time, and a quiet heart.”

1. Quiet place — find a distraction-free zone.
2. Quiet time — one of the best catchphrases to ever come out of the evangelical tradition.

* Then, you just open your mind to God ...

* In biblical theology, your body, including your mind, is the temple of the Holy Spirit, the dwelling place of God. Meaning, the Holy Spirit is inside you; he has direct access to your consciousness — to the flow of thoughts and feelings and perceptions and images that pass through your mind’s eye all day long.

* And just like a friend sitting next to you at a coffee shop or a co-worker in an open-plan office, he can interrupt you and inject his thoughts into your thoughts, his feelings into your feelings ...

* This is why God doesn’t have to speak audibly. He doesn’t need to; speech is guided thought. When you speak to someone, you guide their mind into your thoughts; God can reach directly into our mind and guide our thoughts.

* So when we go into solitude, we spend most of the time just listening ...

* We listen to Scripture — whether we open our Bible and read chapters and chapters at a time, or just read one passage slowly and prayerfully, or just meditate on whatever Scriptures God brings to mind ...

* We listen to the circumstances of our life — searching for God’s hand of providence in the unfolding of our story ... asking the question, Where is God in the events of my life? And what is God trying to draw out of me in this season?

* We listen to the quiet whisperings of our heart — trusting that God’s Spirit is often at work, desiring through our desires. In fact, this is one of the reasons solitude is so important; we often don’t know what we desire, not truly. Therefore, we don’t know God’s intention for us. In solitude, we get in touch with that deep desire of the Spirit of God in the holy of holies that is our inner heart.

* And we listen to the thoughts that come into our mind from God himself ...

* We have to listen carefully because God’s voice is often so quiet and gentle ...

* In the story of Elijah’s time in solitude in 1 Kings 19, there’s that famous line about how God’s voice was not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, but in “the still, small voice.” Another way to translate the Hebrew is “the sound of gentle silence.”

* So many of us have found God’s voice to be like a whisper in the heart.

* This is why the quiet is the best medium for hearing God’s voice, and it’s why learning
to discern God’s voice from all the other voices — within and without — is the task of a lifetime. It’s a skill you must develop as a follower of Jesus, and it can be done, not just by monks and nuns, but by people like you and me. It’s just like learning to hear any other voice.

* Jesus called himself the Good Shepherd and said his “sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice.” (John 10v3-4)

* If I were sitting at a coffee shop and my dad were to walk in behind me and start talking, my brain would immediately recognize his voice and turn around, “Dad!” Because I’ve grown up listening to my father. I’d know his voice anywhere.

* In the same way, as we spend time with our heavenly Father, we come to recognize his voice from all the other voices in the world.
Seam: How? Just by waiting patiently in the quiet and listening ...

Basic:

• This is the crux of discipleship to Jesus ...
• And there are some things that can only happen in solitude, and nowhere else. • As Dallas Willard once said:

• “You rarely find any person who has made great progress in the spiritual life who did not at some point have much time in solitude and silence.”

But remember: solitude is a place and a practice...

1. It’s a place

* It may be out in the desert or the wilderness as it was for Jesus.

* Do not underestimate the power of being alone with God in the beauty of his creation.

* Every single example of Jesus in solitude, he’s outdoors, mostly in wild places ...

* A spiritual discipline is any activity you see regularly in the life of Jesus. I believe walking or being alone in creation is one of the most overlooked of all the spiritual disciplines, and one of the most powerful.

* So, the place may be the outdoors or, like me, you may live in a city and not have time to
do that a lot, or you may not be able, that’s okay. In Jesus’ teaching on prayer he said, “Go into your inner room, close the door, and there pray to your Father who is unseen ...” He was referring to a room in the typical first century home that was essentially a storeroom for food and other dry goods — no windows, no light, just a small closet really. This is where we get the language of a “prayer closet.” You may not have time to go hiking in a national park, but you likely have a closet you can hide in and there be with God ...

* The eremos is a place, but ...
2. It’s also a practice
• You can do this for days at a time, on retreat as many of you are doing this coming week, or, like Jesus in Mark 1, just get up early and sit in your backyard and pray ...

Seam: And our invitation to you is not just to experiment with solitude for a few weeks, but to incorporate this practice into your Rule of Life. By which I mean, to incorporate it into your life architecture of apprenticeship to Jesus.

Rule of Life:

* To find a daily place for solitude, even if it’s just ten minutes when you wake up or before you go to bed ...

* To find a weekly place for solitude ... maybe you spend a longer chunk of time in the quiet on your Sabbath or day off ...

* To find a monthly or seasonal place for solitude to discover the practice of retreat ...

* But also, to begin to “de-noise” all of your life ...

* One of the first things you learn in solitude is that to really hear God’s voice in the quiet, many of us need to lower the volume in our overall life.

* The Apostle Paul said to the Thessalonians, “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life.”

* Most of us live a noisy life in a noisy world.

* But many people find that as they follow Jesus over time, they begin to listen to less podcasts, less music, watch less TV, listen to less radio when they drive ... that stuff isn’t bad per se, though much of it is like the ambient noise of a godless world ... a world trying to distract itself from the emptiness within ...

* But that stuff isn’t bad at all. But many of us find we just desire to spend more and more time listening ...

* You will likely find this as you follow Jesus ... you crave quiet more and more because you crave God ...
Ending:

* There are seasons to life, and sometimes we need more solitude in our Rule of Life, other times the call of love is to be more present to people in need.

* But in all seasons, we come to see the truth of what St. John of the Cross once said:

• “Our greatest need is to be silent before this great God ... for the only language he

hears is the silent language of love.”

* He said this in the 16th century! Hundreds of years before the digital, urban, world of noise we live in today.

* To repeat what I said in session 1: We are the first generation to follow Jesus with a smartphone in our pocket, the first people to sort out how to pray in the digital age. How to hear God’s voice when every time we open our phone a thousand other voices scream at us — other identities and other callings, not our true identity and true calling.

* Future generations will look back on us: What will they say?

* Will we be a generation whose faith was sucked into the black hole of the digital age?

* Or will we stand together against the gravitational pull and go into the quiet to encounter God?

* Ultimately, our spiritual future hangs in the balance.

* Remember that line from Ruth Barton: The invitation to solitude is “an invitation to enter more deeply into the intimacy of relationship with the One who waits just outside the noise and busyness of our lives.”

* God is waiting for you outside the noise ... the crowds of people ... the hurry of city life ... and all the distractions of our time.

* I did not say this earlier, but, when I sat down in the chapel at that monastery and it was so quiet I could hear a hum in my inner ear ... I felt enveloped by God. There was no emotional high, it was gentle, but I felt surrounded by God’s presence and permeated by his love.

* There are few things, if any, more wonderful this side of resurrection.

* Do you desire to encounter God? Then say yes to Jesus’ invitation to solitude, silence, and stillness, and follow him into the quiet.

Sabbath & Solitude

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