Sermon Tone Analysis

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:

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:

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.