Refine

INTRODUCTION

We are continuing our series this morning called Retreat to Advance, all about the spiritual habit (or discipline) of solitude. All throughout the Bible, we find people of God, the ancestors of the church today, periodically drawn out into desolate spaces, away from the everyday hustle, away from the constant chatter of society-at-large, away from the desires and loves that satisfy the appetite of the mind and the body, but not the true hunger. God leads men, women, families, kings, poets, prophets, nations, and yes, even his own son, out into the wilderness, into the desert, into caves, gardens, and onto mountaintops, so that he might have a word with them.

Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk from the early 20th century, once wrote this about Solitude:

Solitude is to be preserved, not as a luxury but as a necessity: not for perfection so much as for simple survival in the life God has given you. (Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander)

Solitude, the retreat from what is known and comfortable in order to more clearly encounter the presence of God, is absolutely fundamental to spiritual life. And yet the intentional disconnection from people, and jobs, and phones, and information and influence and wealth and comfort, is growing increasingly more and more difficult these days. And so I want to challenge you, as we look into how God uses the sacred space of wilderness, to begin thinking about how you can begin planning out your day, your week, your month, your year, to retreat into God’s presence, so that you might advance the gospel of Jesus with his peace and joy in your heart.

PRAY

Last week, we talked about how Retreat leads to Refocus. When you take the time to align your heart with God’s, your dreams and goals and purposes become more like his. Your time with him will bring about greater clarity concerning his plans and dreams for you, to bring about more of what he says is good and right and beautiful.

Today, I want to talk about how Retreat leads to Refining. And I’m just going to say this right now, you may not like one. Refining is all about a burning away of impurities, a cleansing process that exposes your sin, your selfishness, your desires and pursuits that run counter to God and what he’s all about. These impurities hurt your testimony, they hurt your relationships, they hurt your ability to persevere and pursue what matters when hard times come. Refining is vital to healthy life with Jesus, to a healthy church community, to a healthy mission.

Long story short, it’s going to hurt, but you need it.

A STORY OF EXILE

Turn in your Bibles to Lamentations chapter 3. Lamentations is a book of poems that express a wide range of emotions, from confusion to anger to heartbreak. They are essentially funeral poems that explore loss, pain, loneliness. And whose funeral is it?

Jerusalem. It’s the kingdom of Israel. The nation as they knew it had died. Lamentations is written following Babylon’s destruction of the capitol city. The people of Israel are exiled, driven out from their homes, their place of safety and security and comfort, disconnected from family and religion and commerce, and pulled into a wilderness of a different kind, a disordered kingdom where good and evil are judged by men, not by God.

And the thing is, exile is not new to Israel. It happens all the time. Slavery in Egypt. Wanderings in the desert. Capture and rescue and capture and rescue in the book of Judges. The Babylonian captivity here. And even after all of this, when they finally return home, it is a short-lived victory before they are assimilated into the empire of Rome. But if these are the people of the almighty God—YHWH Shabaot, the Lord of Armies—how is it that they continue to be conquered?

And the answer is unfaithfulness. Way back, when God called Abraham out of the city and into the wilderness, God made a promise to him. He would watch over him, protect him, care for him, help him to flourish and grow and multiply. And all God asked in exchange is that Abraham and his family trust God, do what he says, be faithful to follow him however he leads. God makes a covenant, a commitment to Israel: I will be your God, and you will be my people. When you keep this, when you live and act as my people, you will see the fruit of a God who watches over you and seeks your good. But when you break my covenant and choose right and wrong for yourself, I will hand you over to your desires and you will get what you deserve.

Despite having the Almighty God on their side, they still rebelled. They disconnected from God and assimilated into the cultures around them. They set up human kings for themselves, they chose other gods, they moved to look and live like every other human kingdom around them, and they depended on unjust human systems for their security and prosperity. And every time they did this—the Bible says that they “did what was right in their own eyes”—they were exiled, displaced and disconnected from the comforts and safeties they depended on.

This brings us to our passage. Israel grieves their loss. But let’s read carefully how, while they are in exile, they process this grief:

Lamentations 3:19–33 CSB

Remember my affliction and my homelessness, the wormwood and the poison. I continually remember them and have become depressed. Yet I call this to mind, and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s faithful love we do not perish, for his mercies never end. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness! I say, “The Lord is my portion, therefore I will put my hope in him.” The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the person who seeks him. It is good to wait quietly for salvation from the Lord. It is good for a man to bear the yoke while he is still young. Let him sit alone and be silent, for God has disciplined him. Let him put his mouth in the dust— perhaps there is still hope. Let him offer his cheek to the one who would strike him; let him be filled with disgrace. For the Lord will not reject us forever. Even if he causes suffering, he will show compassion according to the abundance of his faithful love. For he does not enjoy bringing affliction or suffering on mankind.

You’ll notice if you have your Bibles out that Lamentations 3 is broken up into little poems of three verses each, and there is a poem for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It’s a beautifully organized hymn of lament, and we could honestly spend an entire sermon series walking through each one (maybe we will someday!). For how, though, I want you to draw your attention to a couple places.

Remember my affliction and my homelessness. The author here is hurting and homeless, and he knows it’s because God is judging him. Back in verse 1, he talks about the “rod of God’s wrath” that has driven him away from his people and from his path. The language is striking here. He says his path has been made crooked. He walks in darkness instead of light. His body is ravaged and his hunger is satisfied with poison. He has been deprived of peace and he can’t remember what prosperity looks like anymore.

Judgment. God judges. We don’t like to think of God judging, especially like this. First of all, because it doesn’t preach well. And second, because we prefer a God that is created in our own image, fashioned to meet our every desire, and so in the Western Church specifically we have worked hard to form a God that is loving, generous, easygoing, and distant.

And yet, God judges. Right here. God is a God of justice and fairness, AND he is a God of grace and mercy and lovingkindness. It’s all right here. The author goes back and forth between the God of wrath and the God of faithful love, and he is the same God.

I’m going to say something, and I hope you take this the right way: there will times in your life where you could use a bit of exile. The world we live in is filled with patterns of feelings, thoughts, and actions that are set against the good ways of God. And the usual rhythms of your day—work, friends, phones, facebook, whatever your day-to-day habits might look like—tend to key us into these patterns. It’s fairly easy to fall into a state of what Mark Sayers calls a “blissful contentment.” We do not bother to examine the world around us. I’m not talking about what’s on the news, I’m talking about you, right now, your habits and interactions. How you fill your mind and your body, how you relate to other people, how you work and rest and play. Perhaps the word is not as it is because there are a few bad apples. Perhaps things are as they are because the we know our parts, and we play them to perfection.

Sometimes Solitude is exile. It’s dislocation from the blissful contentment. When God draws you out from your day-to-day patterns and rituals, he makes distance between you and what is known and comfortable. And that distance helps you to understand that the things around you are not what they should be. The straight path you were on was heading straight for your destruction. The light you were heading to was a false hope. The food you consumed so ravenously was poisoned. Louis Bouyer, a 20th century french theologian, wrote this:

Solitude is a terrible trial, for it serves to crack open and burst apart the shell of our superficial securities. It opens out to us the unknown abyss that we all carry within us and discloses the fact that these abysses are haunted. (Louis Bouyer)

In my own experience with the practice of Solitude, sometimes it has led to refocusing. I get a creative idea, I get inspired to see ministry and mission and the gospel in a new and fresh way. But often it is refining. I have discovered that I need the solitary moments to get right with God what I have so tragically gotten wrong. And I will say here, solitude doesn’t need to be radical. Paul spent years living in a cave, John performed his whole ministry in the desert eating honey and flies, but you don’t have to join a monastery to get one-on-one time with God. For me, sometimes it is as simple as leaving my phone at home and going for a walk out in my neighborhood. Or even my backyard. It doesn’t take much. But I have learned that I need a space, broken off from human interaction, from day-to-day routine, to grieve my sin. To acknowledge that my patterns of thought and behavior are not aligned with the ways of Jesus. That I have justified and validated and contorted and twisted things in my mind so that the story I tell in my head is not only right, but good. That I have been listening to and telling myself lies, and that I have blind spots where I conveniently hide my darkness. That the flaws I have dismissed as mere human hungers are actually fatal.

And I will say this here: if you do not not begin to make a habit of withdrawal from the hustle, of taking a break to get right with God what you have gotten wrong, God will do it for you. That was exile. Israel had so bought into the cultural myths of self-worship, self-sufficiency, and self-gratification that they were locked into to the disordered ways. And so God has to set them free, through judgment, through captivity, through exile, from the mess of their own making. God’s judgment at first seems like God is not loving, not kind, that he is mean and vindictive and enjoys punishing humans. And yet, God’s justice shows that he is the most loving, kind being there is, because his judgment is always restorative. And seasonal. God himself says in Exodus 34:7 that his judgment may last for a few generations, but it does so in order that his faithful love may extend for thousands of generations.

There may be times when God forces you into solitude. Maybe you lose your job or your home. Maybe you are separated from your spouse or your family or your friends. You may at first run to your own defense, to blame everyone around you for your misfortune, even God, because the default pattern embedded in us by the world says that I do what is right in my own eyes. But I love what Dallas Willard says about this. He writes that God uses solitude to confront our own soul with its obscure forces and conflicts that escape our usual attention. And in doing so, the wilderness, which to us on the outside seem like a place of weakness, becomes a place of strengthening. It bursts apart the shell of superficial securities, and when it finally does, God cuts straight to the heart, and then, prayerfully, we see what the Lamenter sees.

Go back to Lamentations 3. Check out verse 21:

Yet this I call to mind, and therefore have hope.

God’s judgment, our exile, brings about hope in our lives. Solitude is a stripping away of the comforts and safety measures we have placed around us to keep us happy

I’m a Christian, AND I have a good job

I’m a Christian, AND I’m a good conservative/liberal whatever

I’m a Christian, AND I like my little addictions (work, food, entertainment, sex, etc.)

I’m a Christian, AND I’m a social media influencer/influencee

There will be times when God gets pushed out into the margins of your life in lieu of something more tangible, more immediate, more self-gratifying. If you are honest with yourself, there is likely something that you struggle to function without every single day. You could probably do without prayer and reading your bible for weeks or months at a time without batting an eye, but you need ______________ to feed your cravings. Solitude strips away the stuff that keeps God at a distance and pulls you back into him. That’s how God judges. He doesn’t exile you to punish you, he exiles to heal you. To burn away the chaff. To remind you, ultimately, of his faithfulness, his love, his goodness.

Look what he says in verse 26: It is good to wait quietly for salvation from YHWH. What’s The Lamenter doing? He’s practicing solitude! And it’s an important reminder that solitude and silence go together. You don’t need to have lots to say when it’s just you and God. It’s a good idea to try something you may not have done much of recently.

Listen.

Even in our conversations, we don’t listen to hear what’s actually being said. We listen in order to respond. We wait for a keyword, something that triggers an opinion or life experience we have, so we can swing the conversation back to us. Most of our interactions have boiled down to the this. And it comes down to the idea that, when all is said and done, I think I have the answer. I may have made a mess, but I will also be the one to fix it.

That’s not solitude. Solitude is going into the quiet of God’s presence and having your flaws and frailties exposed before God, and you have no answer. No earthly knowledge that will solve your problems. Instead, you wait. You listen. And in the quiet, you don’t find hatred, but love. You don’t find abandonment, but kindness. You don’t find rage, but mercy. You find that you are not the author of your own salvation. You cannot save yourself, not by working harder, keeping pace, or ignoring the signs. Only YHWH saves. Only God turns graves into gardens.

And that leads to the last point. Refining in solitude leads to greater dependency on Jesus.

I say “YHWH is my portion, therefore I will put my hope in him.” (Lam. 3:24)

The sons of the priesthood would often say this, because as priests, they had no claim to land. They had no region of Israel that belonged to them. They only had the temple, the presence of God to rely on. This is crazy now. The author says that in solitude, we have nothing but the presence of God.

Willard: We can only survive solitude if we cling to Christ there. And yet what we find of him in that solitude enables us to return to society as free persons.

If you want to grow deeper in your faith, if you want to advance the mission, if you want the gospel to flourish and take root. It may not be done by working harder, doing more, being better. It may be done by retreating and being refined by God. To acknowledge that you are not enough, but that Jesus is everything.

COMMUNION

Spend sometime in quiet. Wait for the music to start. Then when the worship begins, come up when you are ready and take the bread and the cup. Ask God these questions:

Where have I put my hope?

Where have I sought me instead of God?

Who is my salvation?