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February 20 - February 22, 2020
A boy’s backpack and five thousand lunches later, we read this: Jesus made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd. After leaving them, he went up on a mountainside to pray. Later that night,…he was alone on land.14
why he was up all night praying. Because it was the only time he could find to be alone in the quiet! He was so busy that he literally didn’t have a moment alone all day long, so all he could think to do was send his apprentices away and stay up all night on a mountain (the word eremos isn’t used here, but a mountaintop at midnight fits the bill). Because he knew that time alone with his Father was even more important than sleep itself.
I love this. Jesus “often withdrew.” He frequently got away. He made a point to sneak off to pray on a regular basis. It was a common habit in his repertoire.
In Luke’s gospel in particular, you can chart Jesus’ life along two axis points: the busier and more in demand and famous Jesus became, and the more he withdrew to his quiet place to pray.
When we get overbusy and life is hectic and people are vying for our time, the quiet place is the first thing to go rather than our first go to. The first thing we lose is unhurried time to just sit with God in the quiet. To pray. Read a psalm. ...
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And if you’re running through your Rolodex of excuses right now—I’m a full-time mom, I have a demanding job that starts early, I’m an extrovert, I have ADHD, etc.—stop for a minute. Think about this: Jesus needed time in the quiet place.
silence. There are two dimensions of silence—external and internal.
Quiet is a spiritual discipline in and of itself. A millennium and a half ago, the African theologian Saint Augustine said entering silence is “entering into joy.”16
Quiet is a kind of balm for emotional healing.
Saint John Climacus, the sixth-century Syrian monk who spent most of his life praying on Mount Sinai, so beautifully said, “The friend of silence draws near to God.”17
C. S. Lewis, in his masterwork of satire, The Screwtape Letters, has the demons railing against silence as a danger to their cause (the ruin of a Christian’s soul). Senior demon Screwtape calls the devil’s realm a “Kingdom of Noise” and claims, “We will make the whole universe a noise in the end.”18
The clutter in our minds is like a mental hoarder, landlocked in his or her bedroom in a self-constructed prison. Some of us feel trapped in the toxic, unhealthy patterns of our own minds.
solitude I don’t mean isolation. The two are worlds apart. Solitude is engagement; isolation is escape. Solitude is safety; isolation is danger. Solitude is how you open yourself up to God; isolation is painting a target on your back for the tempter. Solitude is when you set aside time to feed and water and nourish your soul. To let it grow into health and maturity. Isolation is what you crave when you neglect the former.
Richard Foster wrote, “Loneliness is inner emptiness. Solitude is inner fulfillment.”19 In solitude we’re anything but alone. In fact, that’s where many of us feel most in connection to God.
If our theory is right and the problem is more our absence than his, more about our distraction than his disconnection,20 then the solution is fairly simple: create an environment for attention and connection to God; and I know of no better place than the eremos.
Henri Nouwen said it bluntly, yet eloquently: 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.
There’s a saying in parenting literature: “To a child, love is spelled T-I-M-E.”
If you love God the Father and want a living, thriving relationship with him where you experience his presence all through the day, then you need to carve out time to be alone with him. Full stop. And relational time is wildly inefficient. It comes in fits and bursts. You spend a day together, but it’s one short conversation you remember, a passing comment that changes everything.
Well, when you spend one hour a day adoring your Lord and never do anything which you know is wrong…you will be fine!22
When we don’t practice this Jesus soul habit, we reap the consequences: We feel distant from God and end up living off somebody else’s spirituality, via a podcast feed or book or one-page devotional we read before we rush out the door to work. We feel distant from ourselves. We lose sight of our identities and callings. We get sucked into the tyranny of the urgent, not the important. We feel an undercurrent of anxiety that rarely, if ever, goes away. This sense that we’re always behind, always playing catch up, never done. Then we get exhausted. We wake up, and our first thoughts are, Already?
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On the flip side, here’s the alternative: We find our quiet places—a park down the street, a reading nook at home, a morning routine that begins before the little ones are awake—and we “come away.”23 We take our time. Maybe it’s not a full hour, but we’re there long enough to decompress from all the noise and traffic and stress and nonstop stimulation of modern society. Sometimes all we need is a few minutes. Other times, an hour isn’t enough. Other times, we gratefully take what time we can get. We slow down. Breathe. Come back to the present. We start to feel. At first we feel the whole
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The place of rest. We come back to our places of soul rest. To what Thomas Kelly called “the unhurried [center of] peace and power.”
Andrew Sullivan wrote this: Modernity slowly weakened spirituality, by design and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action. The reason we live in a culture increasingly without faith is not because science has somehow disproved the unprovable, but because the white noise of secularism has removed the very stillness in which it might endure or be reborn…. If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital
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I grew up in a church tradition where we started our days with a quiet time. At the very beginning of our days, we would set aside a chunk of time to do Jesusy stuff. Usually there was coffee involved. Normally we read the Bible. Asked God to do some things in our lives. Confessed our screwups, our needs, our aches. Sometimes we just sat there. Alone. In the quiet. With God. And our souls.
Here’s to tomorrow morning, six o’clock. Coffee. The chair by the window, the window by the tree. Time to breathe. A psalm and story from the Gospels. Hearing the Father’s voice. Pouring out my own. Or just sitting, resting. Maybe I’ll hear a word from God that will alter my destiny; maybe I’ll just process my anger over something that’s bothering me. Maybe I’ll feel my mind settle like untouched water; maybe my mind will ricochet from thought to thought, and never come to rest. If so, that’s fine. I’ll be back, same time tomorrow. Starting my day in the quiet place.
Thomas Aquinas, once asked the question, What would satisfy our desire? What would it take to feel satisfied? The answer he came up with was this: everything. We would have to experience everything and everybody and be experienced by everything and everybody to feel satisfied. Eat at every restaurant; travel to every country, every city, every exotic locale; experience every natural wonder; make love to every partner we could possibly desire; win every award; climb to the top of every field; own every item in the world; etc. We would have to experience it all to ever feel…okay, that’s enough.
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Karl Rahner, who was one of the most important Catholic theologians of the twentieth century, had this haunting line: In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we learn that ultimately in this world there is no finished symphony.3
infinite desire – finite soul = restlessness.
The Jesus tradition would offer this: human desire is infinite because we were made to live with God forever in his world and nothing less will ever satisfy us, so our only hope is to put desire back in its proper place on God. And to put all our other desires in their proper place below God. Not to detach from all desire (as in Stoicism or Buddhism), but to come to the place where we no longer need _______ to live a happy, restful life.
bishop of Hippo said this: You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.4
Dallas Willard put it this way: Desire is infinite partly because we were made by God, made for God, made to need God, and made to run on God. We can be satisfied only by the one who is infinite, eternal, and able to supply all our needs; we are only at home in God. When we fall away from God, the desire for the infinite remains, but it is displaced upon things that will certainly lead to destruction.5
The word Sabbath comes to us from the Hebrew Shabbat. The word literally means “to stop.” The Sabbath is simply a day to stop: stop working, stop wanting, stop worrying, just stop.
The irony is, to get this feeling, you don’t need to pay $99.99 for a terry cloth bathrobe or $69.99 for a handmade throw blanket. You just need to Sabbath, to stop. You just need to take a day of your week to slow down, breathe.
But Sabbath is more than just a day; it’s a way of being in the world. It’s a spirit of restfulness that comes from abiding, from living in the Father’s loving presence all week long.
Restfulness Relentlessness Margin Busyness Slowness Hurry Quiet Noise Deep relationships Isolation Time alone Crowds Delight Distraction Enjoyment Envy Clarity Confusion Gratitude Greed Contentment Discontentment Trust Worry Love Anger, angst Joy Melancholy, sadness Peace Anxiety Working from love Working for love Work as contribution Work as accumulation and accomplishment
No wonder the writer of Hebrews, speaking of Sabbath and its spirit of restfulness, called us to “make every effort to enter that rest.”7 Notice the irony of that command; we are to work hard to rest well.
There is a discipline to the Sabbath that is really hard for a lot of us. It takes a lot of intentionality: it won’t just happen to you. It takes planning and preparation. It takes self-control, the capacity to say no to a list of good things so you can say yes to the best. But Sabbath is the primary discipline, or practice, by which we cultivate the spirit of restfulness in our lives as a whole. The Sabbath is to a spirit of restfulness what a soccer practice is to a match or band practice is to a show. It’s how we practice, how we prepare our minds and bodies for the moments that matter
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The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.9
A. J. Swoboda wrote this: [The Sabbath] has largely been forgotten by the church, which has uncritically mimicked the rhythms of the industrial and success-obsessed West. The result? Our road-weary, exhausted churches have largely failed to integrate Sabbath into their lives as vital elements of Christian discipleship. It is not as though we do not love God—we love God deeply. We just do not know how to sit with God anymore. He continued: We have become perhaps the most emotionally exhausted, psychologically overworked, spiritually malnourished people in history.
What could I do for twenty-four hours that would fill my soul with a deep, throbbing joy? That would make me spontaneously combust with wonder, awe, gratitude, and praise? Dan Allender, in his book Sabbath, had this to say: 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,
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So there is a day that is blessed and holy. A rhythm in creation. Six and one. And when we tap into this rhythm, we experience health and life. But when we fight this rhythm—ignore it, suppress it, push past it, bully it, make excuses, look for a way to get out of it—we reap the consequences. Consider the mind: we grow mentally lethargic, numb, uncreative, distracted, restless. Emotional unhealth becomes our new normal. Irritability, anger, cynicism, and its twin, sarcasm, overwhelm our defenses and take control of our dispositions. Or consider the body: we get tired and worn out; our immune
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Sabbath wasn’t even in my vocabulary, much less my vernacular. But we all come to Sabbath, voluntarily or involuntarily. Eventually the grain of the universe caught up with me, and I crashed, hard. My sabbatical was like playing catch-up on a decade of missed Sabbaths, come to collect with interest.
Sabbath is coming for you, whether as delight or discipline.
Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.22 I love the opening word, “Remember.” It’s easy to forget there is a day that’s blessed and holy. Easy to get sucked into the life of speed, to let the pace of your life ramp up to a notch shy of insanity. To forget: Creator (not me), creation (me).
Remember to be present to the moment and its joy. Humans are prone to amnesia, so God commands us to remember. Then God said this: Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God.23
So the Sabbath isn’t just a day for rest; it’s also a day for worship. By worship I don’t necessarily mean singing at church (though that’s a great example); I mean whole-life orientation toward God.
On the Sabbath all we do is rest and worship.
Often people hear “worship” and assume that means singing Bethel songs all day while reading the Bible and practicing intercessory prayer. That’s all great stuff. But I mean worship in the wide, holistic sense of the word. Expand your list of the spiritual disciplines to include eating a burrito on the patio or drinking a bottle of wine with your friends over a long, lazy dinner or walking on the beach with your lover or best friend—anything to index your heart toward grateful recognition of God’s reality and goodness.
For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.25
In fact, I find it fascinating that the Sabbath is the only “spiritual discipline” that makes it into the Ten Commandments.
