Silence and Solitude

Matthew 3:13–4:1 NIV (Anglicised, 2011)

13 Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptised by John. 14 But John tried to deter him, saying, ‘I need to be baptised by you, and do you come to me?’ 15 Jesus replied, ‘Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfil all righteousness.’ Then John consented. 16 As soon as Jesus was baptised, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. 17 And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.’ 1 Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

Mark 6:30–32 NIV (Anglicised, 2011)

30 The apostles gathered round Jesus and reported to him all they had done and taught. 31 Then, because so many people were coming and going that they did not even have a chance to eat, he said to them, ‘Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.’ 32 So they went away by themselves in a boat to a solitary place.

Mark 6:41–45 NIV (Anglicised, 2011)

41 Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to his disciples to distribute to the people. He also divided the two fish among them all. 42 They all ate and were satisfied, 43 and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces of bread and fish. 44 The number of the men who had eaten was five thousand. 45 Immediately Jesus made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd.

Mark 6:46 NIV (Anglicised, 2011)

46 After leaving them, he went up on a mountainside to pray.

Friends grab a bible as you’ll want to refer to it as we journey together today.

Lord take my lips...

I have a confession to make. It’s a usual one for me during Christmas and Easter.

While I met with God in loads of different ways last week and felt him fully at my side, inspiring me, creating with me and giving me much joy and peace, I didn’t manage to spend pick up my usual prayer routine.

And to add to my confession, I’ve been struggling to find a rhythm of personal prayer, that ‘quiet time’ with God in amongst the business of life. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been praying, but it hasn’t looked like me spending time in the chair in my study for at least 30 minutes of quiet, stillness and some bible reading.

And I’ve been asking the question for a while now, is that a problem. I’m still speaking to God. Snatching 10 minutes here, praying with some one there, and a ton of arrow prayers. I know that God is part of my every day life and I feel his prescence and I feel him speak.

But…is it a problem that I’ve struggled to make time for stillness and quiet with God as a daily pattern? If I’m stuill speaking to him throughout the day, do I need to find that place of stillness which seems so hard to find?

Let’s explore that question as we journey with Jesus this morning.

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I wonder how you’re finding the isolation. If you’re a front line NHS worker or a key worker then you might say ‘what isolation, I’d love a bit of space because life is full on, hard and crazy at the moment’.

For others we might be feeling the length of this season of isolation, the lack of physical touch, the eomitional distance we feel when we can only see loved ones through a window or speak over the phone. Or maybe no-ones phoning us - if that’s the case please do ring our office this week and we’d love to hook you up with a phone buddy.

Just after hearing the announcement of the lock down and understanding what it’s ramifications were to church life, one of my first thoughts was, well at least I’ll have time for that quiet space with God each morning, or find a regular time in the day.

But I sort of thought that would just happen. Surely there’d be less pressure, surely there’d be more time. My ‘prayer chair’ is ready, I just need to sit in it, turn off the phone and then ask the Lord to do the harder work of turning off the noise in my mind.

And friends, I share with you that it hasn’t happened. My study chair is right next to my prayer chair, and I think Josh has spent more time in that chair, reading while I’ve been working.

So I’ve been praying in different ways, that’s ok right.

Let’s look at Jesus.

In our first passage, we see the familiar scene of Jesus’ baptsim. It’s one of those mile stone moments in his ministry. It’s where heaven literally touches earth, where we see God the Father speaking from on high, saying he is well pleased with his son, Jesus, God the Son here on earth and then God the Holy SPirit descends on Jesus like a dove.

Our one God shown virtically revealing the persons of the Godhead.

What a moment. The heaven’s are parted, Jesus is bathed in the love that he has known eternally, this is shining around all who are there and then he’s ready right, to go off and bring the world to God. To show them that he is the God who loves them, and the God who has come to save them.

It’s like that experience many of us have had where we go to a Christian conference, and toward the end of a talk, we feel fired up by God, we feel the prescence of the Holy SPirit, and it feels like he equips us in that moment to face the world, and to show his love to all, probably timesed 1,billion. This is his launch pad!

So Jesus steps out in to the world, right? No?

No?

The after this mountain top experience revealing who he is and euqipping him with everything he needs for his task, the Spirit led him into the wilderness.

Huh? What? Wait? Surely he was ready to save the world right there with his awesome godly teaching?

But he was led, and Mark’s gospel says driven, into the wilderness.

And I want us to pause

This word used by all the gospel writers for wilderness here is eremos

but the word means more than just a desert. That’s certainly how we take it in this part of scripture. But as with so many Greek and Hebrew words, they convey more than just a flat english word, there is a ton of extra meaning behind it.

Because this same word is used in our Mark passage

But we’ll get there in a mo.

Firstly, why did God the Holy Spirit lead or drive Jesus into the wilderness. We see it’s to get tempted. To experience temptation just like we do, and to overcome it, giving us hope that we can overcome it, but Jesus needed something more. Not just the approval and authority of the Father, but in that time he was seeking solitude.

The word eremos also means, desert, deserted place, desolate place, solitary place, lonely place and the quiet place

A place of solitude is a place where there are no other ditractions

[When I was called to be a minister, I was nearly 16, sat in a field in fracne, in a massive warehouse structure which was really a church, where 50 brothers, basically monks, led thousands of young people throughout the summer every year in a daily pattern of prayer and serving each other.

And the structure? 3 times a day we would head to the church when the bell rang

We’d walk in in silence, humbly and respectfully

We’d take a seat on the floor

We’d then sing through reppetative songs, a bit like chants, but more musical, and let the truths from the Bible sink from our heads to our hearts

We’d hear the Bible read in 3 or 4 different languages,

before 15 minutes of silence

And then we’d sing some more

Now I love a good band, get the guitars out, get the drums going, bit of bass, and let’s get our hands in the air to worship

But this was something else

That first couple of days I hated the silence

It made me feel uneasy, it made me feel fidgity

when was the last time I’d ever sat so still and so quietly?

But by the middle of the week, it was a place of calm, and I felt God call me to be a minister for him

By the end of the week, I wanted nothing more than to sit in silence, and to seek solitude. And they had a beautiful lake which you had to walk down a very steep hill to reach.

That was my first taste of silence and solitude, at least the first one I properly entered into.

When we seek solitude, we are seeinkg that place with a lack of distractions so that we can meet with God.

‘But I don’t have time to find that at the moment. You don’t understand, life is so busy’ - I hear you, I’ve been thinking the same recently. I hoped I would fall into prayer in this time. But the miracle of modern technology, is also the down fall for me. I’m as busy as ever, but my face to face chats are now over zoom, my pastoral conversations are over the phone, and I’m actually finding that without travel time, I’m getting more done of the never ending work flow.

And then I stopped to read a book by John Mark Comer. ‘The ruthless elimination of Hurry’ and I got challenged by God. And it was confirmed for me in hearing Pete Greig on Spring Harvest at home this week as well

Would you turn with me to Mark 6

Let’s see what sort of week Jesus is having.

He’s now got quite the following, and he brings a dead girl back to life at the end of Mark 5.

He then heads home to see his family and the people he grew up with, but they can’t believe that the boy they’d seen grown up, their Jesus, could do all the things he was rumoured to do. And in verse 5

Mark 6:5 NIV (Anglicised, 2011)

5 He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few people who were ill and heal them.

So Jesus was frustrated. And processing all that he’d seen that week, he then continues in doing what he’s there for. He sends out the twelve to do like he does.

So he sends his friends, his support network and his apprentices out to do miracles, healing the sick, raising the dead

And then he gets news that his cousin, his friend, the unborn baby that jumped in Elizabeth’s womb at the un born prescence of the son of God, the man who we’ve just seen baptize him, Jesus hears how Herrod has killed and beheaded him.

And the grief that Jesus met have felt.

And then the disciples come back bubbling over with excitement at what God had done through them as they’d followed Jesus’ example.

Mark 6:31 NIV (Anglicised, 2011)

31 Then, because so many people were coming and going that they did not even have a chance to eat, he said to them, ‘Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.’

Jesus is busy, he’s grieving, he’s tired, he’s processing the rejection and hasn’t had time to eat. People are coming and going and he invites his apprentices to come to a quiet place to rest. That quiet place in greek is the same word eremos. And that’s not just sleep? That is intentionally seeking after the prescence of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

And of course, they don’t make it to the eremos, the quiet place. On their way to the eremos which in the next verse is used for solitary place, He’s so tired, and yet there’s a crowd of people that gather. They manage to get on the boat, and cross to the next shore, but the people start running to catch them up. They run to where the boat lands and Jesus takes compassion on them, and he gathers them and he teaches them, and that is the feeding of the five thousand men and even more with the women.

And that’s where our final part of the passage picks up

Mark 6:44–45 NIV (Anglicised, 2011)

44 The number of the men who had eaten was five thousand. 45 Immediately Jesus made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd.

Mark 6:46 NIV (Anglicised, 2011)

46 After leaving them, he went up on a mountainside to pray.

Finally he got there. He made it to the solitary place. And reading through Mark 6, which I encourage you to do later, we see just how much Jesus needs the stillness and the solitude of God.

But it’s not that he was so super spiritual that he even prayed late at night. He’d been after this all day and life and ministry had taken over. He went to pray late at night because he knew that his time with the Father and the Spirit was more important even than sleep.

I wonder if you’ve ever struggled to sleep, and then when you intentionally decide to turn that time into prayer, a conversation with God, he blesses you with sleep which you struggled to get before?

But here’s the challenge

If God the Son, fully God and fully man, needs rest, and thats rest from resting in the arms of God, spending time in his prescence, away from distraction, then I know I do too. But I stuggle, and I would love you to journey with me over the next few weeks as we explore how we get there. In a moment we’ll use a centring prayer which Pete Greig uses to help us, but the final thing I really felt God lay on my heart is that I think we can change our situation by our attitude.

Andrew Sullivan in his manifesto for silence in an age of noise wrote this:

There are books to read; landscapes to be walked; friends to be with; life to be fully lived....[he doesn’t even touch social media, TV, netflix, disney plus, games consoles or the internet] This new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness. And it’s threat is not so much to our minds, even as they shape-shift under the pressure. This threat is to our souls. At this rate, if the noise does not relent, we might even forget we have any.

How is your soul at the moment

My temptation is to fill non-work time with distractions. I do love a good disney plus show, but how much am I mindlessly consuming when I could have been spending time with God. When I could have had 30 minutes even an hour of quiet time with him. Taking a passage from scripture, slowly reading it and re-reading it and asking God to speak to me. Or maybe reading a Christian blog or book and letting God feed me through it

Our times of online morning prayer have become a life line for many, and some have said it’s the highlight of their day. About 50 of us meet every morning. And this week as I was preparing this talk I felt God ask us to have 5 minutes of silence. We took Matthew 11:28-30 and just sat with it, asking God to speak to us through it.

Matthew 11:28–30 NIV (Anglicised, 2011)

28 ‘Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.’

I read it and we had silence, God moved and the feedback was immense. (we’re on zoom every morning at 9.15am)

Here’s just some snippets of the many reponses I was given

- Since Sunday I have felt that my prayers about a certain family situation were hitting a glass ceiling and bouncing back. Woke up really early this morning, praying again about it, and there was the tiniest whisper to look at my Daily Notes. Monday's and Tuesday's both concentrated on the enemy's way of using those closest to us to attack, and that we must stand on the living word to refute him, that we should pray for our family and not be demoralised and low in spirit. I know this, why do I have to keep learning it over and over again? Anyway this morning's silence gave me another chance to thank the Lord for His grace and mercy, and to ask that same grace and mercy for those I love.

- Thanks for this morning. I started the 5mins bringing all my concerns and going on a bit! But then felt God saying I know all this....just rest ....snuggle up to me and rest on me.

- In the silence I was reflecting what a blessing its been to actually finish tasks that I've started rather than end up juggling so many unfinished things! And I felt the Lords nudge that in future I need to choose more carefully what I pick up!

- this morning I felt that I was challenged that my own anxieties (about having to face the risk of the Coronavirus on the buses and in the supermarket) made my burden heavy. Jesus did NOT make my yoke difficult or my burden heavy, I did! I am pleased to say that I found our weekly supermarket shop a lot easier to cope with than last time 😊. I used to struggle with the Scripture, but nowadays it brings comfort and I wanted you to hear that 😊.

This silence thing works, and so does intentionally taking ourselves away from distraction.

Simon Guillebaud at the New Wine leadership conference called the distractions of our age the Satanic lullaby putting God’s children to sleep, and stopping us from acting as the powerful warriors he created us to be.

The majority of us have been forced into isolation by the spread of the virus. We would not have chosen this, and yet here we are.

We have a word spoken over us everyday at the moment and it’s the word isolation

John Mark Comer distinguishes isolation with solitude

Where isolation is escape; solitude is engagement

where isolation is danger; solitude is safety

where isolation can be like painting a target on your back for the tempter; solitude is openning yourself up to God

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 we crave when we lack solitude

So let’s commit to turning our isolation into solitude.

Becoming intentional about how we will use this time.

For me I need to make a change.

I need to get to bed for 9.30 (not staying up for one more episode of Agent Carter - I’m always the one who says ‘we’ve got time for another’). Not anymore

By going to bed early, I can then get up earlier and commit to at least 30 minutes of solitude before the kids get up (so that’s 6.30am)

If I have a day like Jesus had with the feeding of the 5,000 after a horrendous week, then I stay up until I’ve had that time with God

I’m realising that the personal quiet time with God that my mother installed in me from a child, isn’t just a good thing to do, or something that I aught to do. It’s an essential

How you fit it in, I don’t know. That’s between you and God. What I do know is that I’ve met many people over the years who have said, “I’ll be able to get my prayer life sorted once I’ve got that promotion, once my kids a a bit older, once our kids are at uni, once I’ve reached retirement, at the end of this project, once my assignments are handed in, once my life is a bit more balanced. Just look at the biblical charachters. How many well balanced people are in there? Don’t wait, use this time to get a new pattern in. Are you an early bird, then deffinately move things so you can do it in the morning. Are you a night owl, think about what time will suit you. But at least daily, when will you have that time with God.

I did feel him speak to me this morning about guilt as a tool in the hand of the enemy. Not to feel guilty for not having done it, but to look forward to embarking on the adventure of a lifetime by taking ourselves away from distraction and waiting on God.

So I’m going to pray this prayer, and then we’re going to have some gentle quiet time with God. As we’re on the internet and for those on the phone, I will play some gentle music, if we were in church we’d go for 5 minutes of complete silence, but it you want complete silence, can I encourage you to turn your volume off and join us back in 5 minutes as we join together in our final act of sung worship

And I leave you with this

God honours the time we give him, he meets us when we come to him however much or little. But how much more peace, joy, patience and love would we experience if we went seeking him in the space of silence and solitude on a daily basis.

When did you last intentionally seek the prescence of God?