Retreating to be with God (2)

Intro

Good morning, TJ, etc.

Do you have a favorite show? What about music? I feel like I always need some kind of input. I hate silence. I get really uncomfortable. I think that makes it hard for me to spend time with God.

As Christians, we spend a lot of our time living the mission, being out in the world, doing the stuff of Jesus, but it’s really important to take a step back, to spend some time with the Architect, to let him direct us as we go back to work. We need to seek the presence of God.

SEEK THE PRESENCE OF GOD

So, here’s what I want to do this morning, I want to look at a series of verses about Jesus. None of these is a whole story from the gospels. All of these are short, quick snippets in the midst of other stories, but I think they show us something important. In the midst of life, in the midst of all the ministry and the mission and the things that Jesus was doing, he always lived out of a pattern of seeking the presence of God to fuel that ministry. So, let’s look at these scriptures.

Verses:

Matthew 14:13 NLT

As soon as Jesus heard the news, he left in a boat to a remote area to be alone. But the crowds heard where he was headed and followed on foot from many towns.

Matthew 14:23 NLT

After sending them home, he went up into the hills by himself to pray. Night fell while he was there alone.

Matthew 17:1 NLT

Six days later Jesus took Peter and the two brothers, James and John, and led them up a high mountain to be alone.

Mark 1:35 NLT

Before daybreak the next morning, Jesus got up and went out to an isolated place to pray.

Mark 6:32 NLT

So they left by boat for a quiet place, where they could be alone.

Luke 4:42 NLT

Early the next morning Jesus went out to an isolated place. The crowds searched everywhere for him, and when they finally found him, they begged him not to leave them.

Luke 5:16 NLT

But Jesus often withdrew to the wilderness for prayer.

Luke 9:18 NLT

One day Jesus left the crowds to pray alone. Only his disciples were with him, and he asked them, “Who do people say I am?”

Do you get it?!

This is the point: It was the consistent pattern of Jesus’ life and ministry to get away to be in the presence of God.

And the question I kept asking myself this week as I was preparing was this: If it this was the consistent pattern for Jesus—you know, the person who is LITERALLY GOD—then why do I think I can survive without it?

You know how we do. Ah man, I’m busy, I’m tired. I’ll be okay today. I can spend time with God later. The baby woke up early and interrupted my normal time, so I guess I’ll just try again tomorrow. We come up with all these reasons why we can’t afford to spend time with God right now, but Jesus shows us that we can’t afford not to spend time with God.

So, there are three things I think we can learn from Jesus about what it means to seek the presence of God: Retreat, Enjoy, and Stay.

RETREAT to the presence of God

In nearly all of these verses, Jesus isn’t just spending time in the presence of God, but he is retreating to the presence of God. He’s not just seeking the presence of God on the go; drive-thru. This, I think, is the hardest part of seeking the presence of God. We need to find time to retreat from world around us. Life is going faster and faster. You guys have school and sports and theater and jobs and all kinds of things you’re doing. And let me tell you, it doesn’t slow down.

We are a culture that is overcome by FOMO. You know what I’m saying? FOMO is fear of missing out. And we live like this: I can’t turn off my phone because what if somebody wants to talk or I miss out on something fun. I’ve gotta do more extracurriculars because it will look good for college. I need to serve at church and I need to do this, and we have all these things we’re doing. And for everything we do, we want to get some kind of reward. So, it’s hard for us to invest time in God when we don’t see something tangible on the other end of it. The reward is the time itself.

So, I think what most of us do is we try to multitask. We think, I can just do it while I do other stuff. We do this all the time anyway. We drive and we listen to podcasts or audiobooks. We talk on the phone while we fold the laundry. Have you ever had 3 screens open at once? You’re watching a show with your laptop open to pay your bills, but then you open Facebook on your phone. So. Many. Distractions. And we try to do that with God. We kinda half-pay attention to him while we’re doing everything else.

But that’s not the pattern of Jesus. The pattern of Jesus is to RETREAT. Luke 5:16 says that he often withdrew to pray. Jesus knew that it was important to retreat. Now, here’s what I want us to see. In order to retreat, Jesus had to say “no.” The verse right before this says that news of his power was spreading and “vast crowds” were coming to hear him preach and be healed of their diseases. Don’t rush past this. Imagine the scene. All these people—these sick, spiritually hungry people—have shown up to see Jesus, for Jesus to give them something. They are asking him, “Teacher, heal me!” “Teacher, teach us!” And Jesus walks away and leaves them there. Imagine! If I was in the crowd, I would be so mad. In Fred Craddock’s commentary on Luke, he writes of this passage:

Luke Healing a Leper (5:12–16; Matthew 8:1–4; Mark 1:40–45)

But Jesus will not permit himself to be defined by the people or be so occupied as to be cut off from the source of his power. He is in the desert again, praying and perhaps, as in the desert before, struggling. It was no simple or easy matter to turn away, even for prayer, so long as even one diseased or possessed person asked for help. Some of us regard turning from evil to good a victory; only persons of extraordinary spiritual discernment can at times turn from good to the power necessary to resource the good.

I really like that last sentence. It’s so hard, but sometimes we have to turn away from things that are good to the things that “resource the good.” Sometimes we have to say no to good things in order to get away, to spend some time in the presence of God, to gain more power, insight, wisdom, etc. so that we can go back out and do more good.

This is the Rhythm of the world—plants have growing seasons and dormant seasons. The sun is out for some of the day and then it retreats. We do stuff all day and then we go to sleep. In sports, you play a little bit and then you huddle up or you’re subbed out, or you take a timeout. At your job, you get a lunch break. But in our spiritual lives, we often don’t have these kinds of rhythms. We just go go go and we assume God is going with us. But if we’re going to get in line with God, if we’re going to keep everything on track, we need to retreat into God’s presence.

There are two aspects to this that I think are important: Jesus made a physical change of space and Jesus limited his contacts.

In these passages, Jesus is making a physical change of space. He’s often going up on the mountain or into the wilderness or a garden. Retreating means you need to get out of where you are, where all your distractions are, where life is, and go somewhere else. This, I think, is what the monks got right. They retreated to somewhere remote, somewhere far away from the noise of life where they could hear God.

So, where can you go to be in the presence of God, free from distraction. Maybe it’s going on a walk in the early morning or at night. Maybe you have a special chair in your house. Maybe you have a special place you like to travel to. Maybe, honestly, if you have a lot of kids, it’s just your bathroom. Make a change of space.

The second thing Jesus did was retreated from people. There were different stages of this, but he couldn’t spend ALWAYS spend time in the presence of God with everyone. Just like PV talked about last week, sometimes he retreated with a small group of disciples, sometimes with an inner circle, and sometimes just him and God. We need to learn when we need to step back from people for a time to seek the presence of God. Listen. Try as I might, it’s really hard for me to spend time with God when all my kids are awake. It may be hard for you to spend time in the presence of God on your lunch break at work, so maybe you need to be alone. Maybe, you’re spending too much time alone and you need some support from your close inner circle. A retreat can include others!

So, first, we retreat to the presence of God, like Jesus did.

ENJOY the presence of God

Secondly, we want to enjoy the presence of God. In John 14 and 15, Jesus is talking a lot about his relationship with the Father. He says the Father is in him and he is in the Father. He says that he loves the father and the father loves him. They have a close bond, and you never get the impression that Jesus is spending time with God just because he feels like he has to. He actually enjoys the presence of God.

Here’s why this is important: You make time for what you love. Nobody has to twist my arm to eat three meals a day. I do it because I enjoy it. And also would die without it. Nobody had to force me to go see The Batman. It was three hours so it took me a while to find time to go, but I did find time. I am sure you make time to go fishing, or to hang out with your friends, or to cook your favorite meal. You do those things because you love them!

When I was in college, I had the opportunity to choose between two interships: one was in Los Angeles. The other was in Crawfordsville, IN. I picked Crawfordsville. Why? because a girl I liked lived near there. LA is objectively cooler, but my heart pulled me.

So, if we’re really going to consistently seek the presence of God, we have to love it. We have to enjoy it.

What if I don’t enjoy the presence of God?

This is a good question, because we don’t always. Sometimes it’s hard because there are so many distractions. Sometimes it’s hard because we’ve got things in our hearts and our minds that we haven’t dealt with—sin, trauma, etc. Sometimes it’s just hard. We’re tired and it doesn’t seem like it’s going to help.

Part of the problem is that we have come to understand what it means to “enjoy” or “love” something wrongly. We think if we love our career, it’ll be easy. We think if we enjoy our hobby, we’ll never want to not show up. But that’s not always true. Anything we do that is good requires hard work and discipline. I have always loved golf. But were there days I didn’t want to go practice? 100%. I remember trying to come up with any excuse not to practice some days. I often tell people that I love to write. I enjoy it. But actually sitting down with a blank page and starting is so hard. Every single time. I have to commit to it, schedule it, to get anything done.

Even when we love God, we sometimes will have days that we don’t “feel” like spending time in his presence. So, when I say that we should enjoy the presence of God, I don’t mean that it’s always going to be easy or fun, but simply that it is life-giving to us. It is a deep desire that we have to spend time in the presence of God.

And in order to cultivate that desire, we have to out ourselves in places to remind ourselves of our first love. That’s what that book—You Are What You Love—is ultimately about. The practices and habits we do that help to form our love for God. When we come to church and we sing in worship together, we are reminding ourselves of the goodness of God. When we immerse ourselves in scripture—it can be hard at first—but the truth speaks to us and we find life there. Even what we’re doing with fasting is a reminder that these things in our lives ought not become what we truly love and enjoy but that God is.

STAY in the presence of God

Now, once we retreat to the presence of God, we can find that we enjoy the presence of God, and what I believe is that is what leads us to Stay in the Presence of God. Because, when we look at the life of Jesus, it’s not as if Jesus was in God’s presence when he was alone and then he left God’s presence to go back to the crowds. The Spirit went with him, he was constantly in communication with God. Look at this passage from John 12.

John 12:28–30 NLT

Father, bring glory to your name.” Then a voice spoke from heaven, saying, “I have already brought glory to my name, and I will do so again.” When the crowd heard the voice, some thought it was thunder, while others declared an angel had spoken to him. Then Jesus told them, “The voice was for your benefit, not mine.

Jesus is having a conversation with God in the midst of a sermon! Jesus used his practice of retreating to God’s presence to stay in the presence of God all the time.

Think about it. The more we return to a particular thing, the more that thing becomes a part of us, the more we see it, connect to it, think about it as we go throughout life. We had this conversation at our Men’s ministry this week about the kingdom of God, and our citizenship in the kingdom of God. And I think it’s helpful to think about it like an actual country with a distinct language and culture. My wife is fluent in Spanish. She learned Spanish in school, but it really became part of her when she went to Spain and immersed herself in the language. While she was there, she began to think in Spanish, dream in Spanish, and when she came back she brought that fluency with her. She had an extended retreat where she could learn the language and when she comes back, she’s able to take the language with her.

When we retreat to the presence of God, we’re able to learn the language of spirituality, of the kingdom of God, and then we’re able to take that with us everywhere we go. We’re able to stay in God’s presence, even when we’re in the midst of the world. The Bible says IN the world but not OF the world. Now, we gotta go back for refills and refuels or we’ll lose it, just like Karly will lose her Spanish if she doesn’t use it, and that’s what the retreats are for. But the point is: I don’t believe for Jesus there was this hard line, as if the presence of God was only in the wilderness or on the mountain and as soon as he left it, he was cut off, holding his breath until he could get back. I think for Jesus, the times in the wilderness or on the mountain were ways of immersing himself in the presence of God so that he could still see it when he went out into the world and there were a hundred other things pulling for his attention. We have to learn God’s voice in the quiet so that we can recognize it when things get loud.

One thing that I really believe God has been teaching me throughout this season is that he is always there and he’s always working and most of the time I don’t see him because I’m not paying attention. But I believe when we retreat into God’s presence and we enjoy God’s presence, it helps us to stay connected to God’s presence all the time.

So, we STAY in the presence of God.

Conclusion.

As we close this morning, I want to encourage you to seek the presence of God. It’s gonna be quiet. It’s gonna be awkward. That’s fine.