The Way of Life: Solitude and Silence | Psalm 62
Brian Hedges | November 24, 2024
Today we’re finishing up our series on “The Way of Life: Vital Practices for Your Spiritual Journey.” We’re going to be in a number of places this morning, beginning in Psalm 62, if you want to turn there in Scripture.
While you’re turning there, let me ask you this morning, what is your vision of the good life? If you were to think about life as you want to live it, the ideal life, the life that you believe would really bring deep joy and satisfaction to your heart, how would you describe that life? For many of us, probably, we would think about financial independence. We may think about vocational success, we would think about our relationships, we want good friends, a wonderful social network. We want a harmonious family life. We want our grown kids to be successful in life, and so on. We think in terms of success and health and prosperity. Maybe we have some vision of the American dream, where we own a home—maybe we own two homes—we’re able to retire when we’re 65 years old and live the rest of our lives spending time with our family and loved ones, traveling around the world, or what have you.
Some of you may have as a vision of a good life being the perfect mom, being the Pinterest mom, where you spend your days helping your kids make cute crafts, a perfectly decorated cake for every celebration, a picture-perfect life with picture-perfect kids. You want things to look good and you want them to be good, and that’s always the ideal you’re striving for.
Your vision of the good life may be something different than that, but it’s probably some version of a life that is basically successful. Whatever that vision is, it is your present definition of happiness. Your ideal for the good life is whatever you believe in your heart of hearts will make you the most happy, your personal ideal of human flourishing.
While all of us probably want some of those things in some measure, the Scriptures hold out kind of a somewhat different vision of what the good life looks like. The Scriptures hold out a kind of life which is full of joy, but it’s joy that is not rooted in our circumstances. It’s joy that you can experience even in the midst of trials. It’s that picture of the tree whose fruit never withers, its leaf never withers, that bears its fruit in season, even in the times of drought. It is what Jesus described as a rich and satisfying life, the abundant life that he came to give us. But it is a life that is characterized by deep relationship with God, where that relationship with God then defines every other reality in our lives.
That’s really what this series has been about, but we’ve been looking at it in terms of the practices that lead to that kind of life. We’ve said that the way of Jesus is a way of life, but it’s a way marked out by spiritual practices. Essentially, we’ve been looking at some of the spiritual disciplines.
In this series, we’ve covered so far five core disciplines. We’ve talked about meditation. We talked about different kinds of prayer—recollection and contemplation and confession. Then last week we talked about sanctified self-talk, what the older writers called soliloquy, but essentially it was a way of speaking truth to ourselves so that we are encouraging ourselves to set our hearts on the Lord.
Today is the end of this series, and I want us to look today at a spiritual practice that really is foundational to all the rest when we’re thinking about these private and personal spiritual practices in our lives. That is what we might call the practices of retreat, which really includes several practices within them, and especially I want us to focus on solitude and silence: being away with God, alone with God, and silent before him.
I want to begin by reading from Psalm 62. The message this morning will be more topical in nature, so I’m not going to focus only on this psalm, but read this as we begin, then we’ll look at some other passages as well. Psalm 62 is all about finding rest in the Lord. I’m going to read a portion of the psalm, verses 1-2 and then verses 5-8. The passage says,
“Truly my soul finds rest in God;
my salvation comes from him.
Truly he is my rock and my salvation;
he is my fortress, I will never be shaken.”
There it is again, this picture of a life, a person who cannot be shaken by the storms of life. Verse 5:
“Yes, my soul, find rest in God;
my hope comes from him.
Truly he is my rock and my salvation;
he is my fortress, I will not be shaken.
My salvation and my honor depend on God;
he is my mighty rock, my refuge.
Trust in him at all times, you people;
pour out your hearts to him,
for God is our refuge.”
This is God’s word.
This morning, what I want us to think about are these disciplines of retreat. We’ll look at three things:
1. The Disciplines of Retreat
2. Why We Need Them
3. How to Practice Them
Once again, it’s a simple outline, and I’m going to give you a lot of content this morning. Don’t feel like you have to get everything written down. All of this will be available online within just a matter of days, and you can review them that way.
1. The Disciplines of Retreat
I want to start, as I have each week, with some definitions. What are we talking about when we talk about disciplines of retreat? There are three in particular I have in mind, two of which I’m going to focus on this morning, but really there are three that belong within this category. They are solitude, silence, and sabbath. Let me give you a definition of each. All of these definitions, by the way, come from Adele Calhoun’s helpful book The Spiritual Disciplines Handbook.
(1) Solitude means to leave people behind and enter into time alone with God. It’s pretty simple. It’s time alone with God. It is a separation from people for a period of time. We’re not meant to always be alone; we are meant to live in community, we are meant to live in relationships and be in families, to have friendships. All of that’s important, and there are disciplines that are attached to those relationships as well. But nevertheless, there is this aspect of our lives where we need a personal relationship with God and time alone with him in solitude.
(2) Secondly, silence. Silence is to free oneself from the addiction to and distraction of noise so as to be totally present to the Lord. So, if solitude is an abstinence from time with people, silence is an abstinence from noise. That would include both quietness, as we cease talking to other people, and also we silence the noise around us.
Think about technology—cell phones, music, Internet—all the distractions that are coming at us. We unplug for a period of time.
(3) Thirdly is sabbath. Sabbath means to set apart one day a week for rest and worship of God. I’m not going to say a lot about sabbath this morning. I’ve talked about that before; you can find those messages online. The texts I’m going to focus on this morning especially have to do with solitude and silence. But sabbath is a piece of this, as we learn to devote a portion of our time each week to worship of God.
Now, let me just show you in the Psalms where we see solitude and silence, and then I want to show you that this is also something that was characteristic of the life of Jesus. I’m just going to give you a number of verses right now, passages of Scripture with only minimal commentary, and then we’ll dig into why we need these things and how to put them into practice.
First of all, silence and solitude in the Psalms. Notice again Psalm 62. Let me read this time from the English Standard Version, and notice here the emphasis on silence. It says,
“For God alone my soul waits in silence;
from him comes my salvation.
He alone is my rock and my salvation,
my fortress; I shall not be greatly shaken.”
Then verse 5 basically repeats that idea from verse 1. So it is the idea of someone who is depending on God alone, who is waiting for the Lord, who is finding rest in the Lord.
Take Psalm 4:3-4. The psalm says,
“Know that the Lord has set apart his faithful servant for himself;
the Lord hears when I call to him.
Tremble and do not sin;
when you are on your beds,
search your hearts and be silent.”
There it is in the form of a command, a command to be silent before the Lord.
Here’s another passage, Psalm 131. This is a passage that gives us a word picture for what this kind of quietness of heart, this rest of soul, looks like. It’s the picture of a child. Psalm 131:1-2:
“My heart is not proud, Lord,
my eyes are not haughty;
I do not concern myself with great matters
or things too wonderful for me.”
But listen to this.
“But I have calmed and quieted myself,
I am like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child I am content.”
This is the child that because it’s weaned, it’s not craving for something. It’s not looking for milk or nourishment. This is the child that is resting peacefully on its mother’s shoulder. The psalmist says, “This is what my soul is like.” He has found this kind of rest and contentment of soul in the presence of God.
One more. Psalm 46:10 says, “Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations; I will be exalted in the earth.”
There you have four examples that are calling us in a variety of ways, either by example or by direct command, to silence in the presence of the Lord, to be set apart for God, to depend on God alone; a kind of practice in our lives that’s characteristic, or should be characteristic, if we are to pursue this life of spiritual flourishing in God.
Now, what I want you to see is that this practice was characteristic of the life of Jesus. I want to show you a few passages that show you the pattern of retreat in the life of Jesus, and I want you to notice not only that he did this, but that he habitually did this. Let me give you four passages.
Mark 1:35—Mark chapter 1, after the introduction to the Gospel, gives us something like a day in the life of Jesus. It’s giving us a portrait of a characteristic day in Jesus’ life where there’s all the pressing demands of ministry. He’s teaching, he’s healing people, people are coming to him even into the evening, he’s casting out demons—he’s doing all of these things. He had to be weary after that, but Mark 1:35 says (this is the very next day), “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house, and went off to a solitary place where he prayed.”
That phrase “solitary place” is actually just one word in the Greek, and it really carries the idea of the desert or the wilderness. It’s the place of solitude. It’s the place in Scripture of encounter with God. That’s what the wilderness is in Scripture. It’s this place where people encounter God, and Jesus sought it out. He went out into a solitary place to pray.
There’s something very similar in Mark 6:31-32. You have the same word used again. This is also a busy day in the life of Jesus. This is after Jesus had fed the thousands with loaves and fishes. It’s the day when he found out that John the Baptist, his cousin, the forerunner, the prophet who went before him, he found out that John the Baptist had been beheaded. It’s a time of weariness, it’s a time of even grief.
Jesus’ disciples, having experienced all of this, need a respite. And Jesus speaks to his disciples. Look at Mark 6:31. It says, “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.’ So they went away by themselves in a boat to a solitary place.”
Do you get the picture here? There are people who still have needs. There are people who are still pressing in on Jesus. There’s probably a line of people who still want food or they still want healing or they still want teaching. Yet Jesus understands the need, both for himself and for his disciples, to pull away from that necessary work, to withdraw, to retreat, and to spend some time alone for rest and restoration.
Now, two passages from Luke, Luke 5:15-16. It says, “Yet the news about him spread all the more, so that crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses. But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.”
Notice it says he often did this. So the picture you’re beginning to get is that this is habitual in the life of Jesus. This is a practice. This is something he does again and again and again. He often withdraws from the crowd in order to spend time with his Father in prayer.
One more. Luke 22:39-40 says, “Jesus went out as usual—” once again, you’re getting a picture of a characteristic practice in the life of Jesus. “Jesus went out as usual to the Mount of Olives, and his disciples followed him. On reaching the place, he said to them, ‘Pray that you will not fall into temptation.’”
This is Jesus going to a garden on the Mount of Olives. It’s an olive grove, the garden of Gethsemane. The passage is telling us that this was Jesus’ usual practice. He often went to that garden to pray. That’s how Judas Iscariot knew where to find him, we learn from another one of the gospels.
So, commenting on these passages, an author who I’ve not quoted yet in this series but I commend to you, John Mark Comer, in his book Practicing the Way, makes this observation. He said, “For Jesus, the secret place wasn’t just a place, it was a practice, a habit, a part of his life rhythm. He seemed to have little hiding places all over Israel where he would slip away to pray.”
Now, this is teaching us something. It’s teaching us that to follow Jesus, to live in the way of Jesus, we have to learn from him these practices and put them into practice in our own lives. That’s what we’re talking about this morning: disciplines of retreat which especially include solitude, time away with God, and silence before him.
2. Why We Need Them
Why do we need these practices, these disciplines? Let me give you some reasons. Here we’re answering the why question; we’ve just answered the what question, what they are; so here’s the why question. Actually, there are two why questions. I want to ask, why do we need them and why are they so difficult for us to observe?
(1) First of all, why do we need these practices? I think we can sum it all up with these basic two reasons that have also been a theme in this series. We need these practices, first of all to better know ourselves. You may remember that earlier in the series I quoted the opening statement from John Calvin’s Institutes, where he says, “All the wisdom we possess consists in [these two things] the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self.”
The only way we will really come to a deep knowledge of ourselves, a deep understanding of our own hearts and lives, is if we spend time away with God and we’re silent before him.
One of the passages I already read essentially teaches this. Psalm 4:4: “Tremble, and do not sin; when you are on your bed, search your heart and be silent.” Search your heart. Another version says, “Ponder your heart,” or, “Meditate within your heart.” I like the old King James; it says, “Commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still.”
That’s the call. It is a call to be still before the Lord, and it’s only as we do that that we come to have a real understanding of ourselves.
I think most of us know that self-awareness is a good thing. It’s not that we want to be self-absorbed, but actually, have you noticed that sometimes the most self-absorbed people are actually not very self-aware? Sometimes people who are really self-absorbed lack the self-awareness to realize how they’re coming across to others. Maybe you’ve noticed that in conversation. You begin to recognize that this person’s talking, but they don’t realize how they’re communicating, they don’t realize what they’re emoting. They don’t realize how they’re coming across to me. You realize there’s kind of a barrier there, because here’s a person who’s not really emotionally mature, not mature enough to really understand themselves.
Listen, we can’t really grow in spiritual maturity if we’re not growing in this emotional maturity. Self-awareness is a part of that, but you never will have a deep and profound self-awareness, a knowledge of yourself, until you have an understanding of yourself before the face of God. You will know yourself best when you know yourself before the face of God, therefore we need this time in solitude and silence for that purpose.
Let me give you a quotation from Spurgeon. Spurgeon preached a sermon called “Solitude, Silence, and Submission.” This isn’t new, and one of my aims in this series has just been to persuade you that these practices are not spiritual novelties. They are, instead, historically grounded disciplines. These are not new, they are ancient. They are not optional, they are essential. So here’s Spurgeon, long before Dallas Willard or Richard Foster or John Mark Comer or any of the popular writers on this today were were around. Spurgeon said,
“I commend solitude to any of you who are seeking salvation, first that you may study well your case as in the sight of God. Few men truly know themselves as they really are. Most people have seen themselves in a looking-glass [or mirror], but there is another looking-glass which gives true reflections into which few men look. To study one’s own self in the light of God’s word and carefully to go over one’s condition, examining both the inward and the outward sins, and using all the tests which are given us in the Scriptures, would be a very healthy exercise, but how very few care to do it.”
That’s what we’re called to do. If you want a deeper understanding of your own heart and life, you can find it in silence and solitude and stillness before the Lord.
So, we need this to better know ourselves and to better know our God. Psalm 46:10: “Be still and know that I am God.”
Jonathan Edwards in Religious Affections said, “A true Christian delights at times to retire from all mankind, to converse with God in solitude. This also has peculiar advantages for fixing his heart and engaging his affections. True religion [by that he means true Christianity] disposes persons to be much alone in solitary places for holy meditation and prayer.”
This is why you need this. You need these practices of retreat—solitude, silence—to know yourself and to know God. Really, that’s when transformation begins to happen. It’s when you begin to see yourself in the light of God, you begin to understand God more and more as he is revealed to us in Christ through the Scriptures by his Spirit, and in that gaze on the character of God and that communion with God, our lives begin to change.
(2) We know we need this, but we also find it quite difficult, don’t we? Why is that? Why is it so hard to practice these disciplines? I want to give you three reasons here, then we’ll get into some solutions.
Reason number one: overcrowded schedules. How many of you have already had this conversation today? You encounter someone in the lobby: “Hey, how are you doing?” “Doing good. Fine. Just busy.”
I mean, that’s what we all say, and we’re all saying it all the time. In fact, I don’t know if you feel this way, I feel almost embarrassed if someone asks me, “Did you have a busy week?” and if the honest answer is no, I almost feel embarrassed, because in the back of my mind I’m wondering if they’re wondering what I do with all my time. Where’s the productivity?
I mean, we live in a culture that prizes better, faster, more productive, stay-busy, don’t-waste-any-time, so we have conditioned ourselves to live very busy lives.
Wayne Cordeiro, in a wonderful little book called Leading on Empty, tells a story of a man who wanted to go on a safari. He had scheduled this safari in some exotic country, it’s going to be several days long; but he was late arriving, so the safari had already left without him. So he hired some of the local tribesmen to take him to where the safari was. He was pressing them day after day after day; he was pressing them to go as fast as they could. I mean, they are either running or they’re walking at a very fast pace. They get to the end of the day and they’re completely exhausted. They get up do it the next morning.
On the fourth morning, the guy gets up and says, “Okay! It’s time to go! Let’s get up and go!” And the leader of these local men who were carrying his stuff said, “No, we’re not moving. We’re not going anywhere.”
He said, “But I paid you to help me catch up!”
This is what the leader said. He said, “Sir, we’re not going to move all day. You’ve pushed us so hard these first three days, now we have to wait a whole day so that our souls can catch up with our bodies.”
Now, that describes where many of us are. Your body is moving so fast that your soul needs to catch up because of an overcrowded schedule, an overbusy life. One of the things you’re going to have to learn to do is make space for God. If you want to have this, if you want the kind of life that Jesus holds out, you have to follow the practices that Jesus followed and you have to make space in your schedule for time with the Lord. Our overcrowded schedules make that difficult. That’s one reason.
Here’s a second reason: pervasive technology. I think the two most significant changes in Western civilization happened in 1454 when you had the invention of the printing press and it began to be used for commercial purposes. That changed the world. That brought about the Renaissance and then the Reformation and the Enlightenment and many other things. That was a significant change in Western civilization.
You know what I think the second thing was? 2007. You know what happened in 2007? It was the invention of the iPhone. I’m not joking either. When the iPhone hit the market, none of us knew what was hitting us. All of a sudden, we had the power of a personal computer in our pockets, at our fingertips, carrying it with us all the time, with almost limitless potential for distraction and interruption and temptation—things that would keep us occupied and preoccupied all of the time if we so choose.
Listen to now what another older writer said, long before the iPhone was ever invented. Think about what he would say. This is A.W. Tozer. He wrote this in 1960.
“‘Commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still’ [quoting Psalm 4], is a wise and healing counsel. But how can it be followed in this day of the newspaper, the telephone, the radio, the television? These modern playthings, like pet tiger cubs, have grown so large and dangerous that they threaten to devour us all. What was intended to be a blessing has become a positive curse. No spot is now safe from the world’s intrusion.”
My goodness, what would Tozer think today? You have a TV in your pocket! You can stream Netflix anytime you want! You can scroll social media endlessly. You can always be connected to the news. Our world has changed, and we’re still catching up with how to do discipleship and be followers of Jesus in this changed world. The pervasive technology is a huge obstacle—I think it is one of the most significant issues in our discipleship today. I include myself in it. I didn’t realize what I had in my pocket for the first five years, and I’m realizing now, seventeen years later, the kinds of changes, the kinds of limits, the kinds of disciplines that need to be placed to manage this thing so that it’s not an out-of-control tiger that can just devour intention in my heart and life. Pervasive technology is a huge obstacle.
But here’s what it all boils down to, number three. It all really boils down to simply this: unintentional use of time. That’s the bottom line. We actually do not have less time than previous generations. Some of us go around saying, “I just don’t have time.” You’re talking about all these spiritual disciplines: “I don’t have time for these spiritual disciplines.”
That’s actually not true. You do have time. You have as much time as God has given you. You have exactly the amount of time that God has provided for you for the things he wants you to do. You’re not lacking in time. None of us are lacking in time. We have all the time that God wants us to have. Our problem is that we squander time or we misuse time or we devote our time to priorities that are not God’s priorities for our lives. What we need is a more intentional use of time. We need to change the way we think about time. We need to reorder the priorities in our lives so that we put first things first.
3. How to Practice Them
That really leads us to point number three, how we do this. How do you put these disciplines in practice? I want to be as practical as I can, and I want to address it on two levels. I want to think big picture for a minute and suggest three things that are necessary for lifestyle changes. Then I want to zoom into how you would actually spend time alone with God, say an extended period of time—half a day or a day or something like that.
(1) First of all, the wide-angle lens: lifestyle changes. What actually has to happen for us to make this a priority?
Number one: elimination. I’ve already quoted Dallas Willard in this series. He said, “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.” Hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life. You have to eliminate things. So if you hear this series as mainly being, “Brian’s giving me a list of yet more things to do,” that’s really not the purpose. It’s not giving you a list of more things to do, it’s really just calling us back to be attentive to God, and the first step is not adding things, it’s subtracting things. Listen to John Mark Comer again. He says,
“The call to apprentice under Jesus is a call not to do more but to do less. It’s not addition, but subtraction. It’s not about increasing complexity but about pursuing simplicity. It’s less about habit-stacking than it is about learning to say no. Jesus is calling you to slow down and simplify your life around the three goals of an apprentice: to be with Jesus, become like him, and do as he did, to make apprenticeship to him the animating center of gravity for your entire life.” [Now listen to this.] The elephant in the room is that the vast majority of us have far too much going on to add Jesus into our overly busy schedules. I’m so sorry, but I don’t know how to soften the blow. There is simply no way to follow Jesus without unhurrying your life.”
You’re going to have to make some hard choices if you’re going to do this. Otherwise, you’re going to have a notebook full of notes, you’re going to have heard a series and thought, “Yeah, that was useful information,” and nothing’s going to change. You’re just going to keep doing what you’ve always been doing. So you have to make some choices about elimination. What needs to go in order to make space for this?
Number two, training. Spiritual disciplines are not about trying harder, they’re about training smarter. Again, this is a metaphor, an image I’ve used here before; I got it from someone else. If you were to, say, sign up for a marathon—you want to run a marathon six months from now—and you haven’t run a mile since high school, you’re not going to get out and start by running ten miles in the first day. You have to build up to it. You have to install some disciplines in your life, where you’re building up the stamina and the capacity over time to be the kind of person in the kind of fitness, the kind of physical health, that you’re able to run a marathon. Otherwise you’re just going to collapse at about the fourth or fifth mile.
In the same way, spiritual practices are not just trying harder to be a better person; they are slowly practicing and observing the kinds of practices that develop and increase our capacity to know God and walk with God and become more like Jesus.
So, you start small, and you build up to more. If you’re not accustomed to spending time alone with God, don’t start with a three-day personal retreat. Start with something like fifteen minutes of silence a day. Start with small measures of time where you are focusing on the Lord.
Let me tell you my early experience. The first time I ever tried to do a spiritual retreat, I was twenty years old. I was serving in a parachurch ministry. I had what seemed like huge decisions looming before me—all the decisions you make when you’re twenty years old. I had very lofty spiritual ideals and ambitions, and I was reading guys like Tozer. “I want to be like a Tozer.” I wanted to go away, spend three days fasting and praying, there was someone in our church who had a lakehouse: “Yes, you can use our lakehouse.” And I went out there, and you know what? I lasted thirty hours, and I was about to go crazy. I was so anxious, I was so depressed, I felt so insecure, I was hungry and lonely…I couldn’t stand it. I could not do it, and I came back early. I just didn’t have spiritual maturity, I didn’t have the capacity. I didn’t know how to spend that kind of time in solitude along with the Lord. That had to be developed very slowly over a lot of time.
Dallas Willard gives this warning. He says, “Silence is frightening because it strips us as nothing else does, throwing us upon the stark realities of our life. It reminds us of death, which will cut us off from this world and leave only us and God. And in that quiet, what if there turns out to be very little to just ask God.”
In other words, you have to build this relationship before you spend extended time alone. So start small. Start with something like a period of time every day, and then develop some intentionality in your life.
This is the third thing in this big picture of life changes: intentionality. What I would suggest is develop a time for daily, weekly, and seasonal retreat. Here’s what I mean. A daily quiet time, where you’re seeking to prioritize every day at least some time that you spend alone with the Lord, some time spent in Scripture and prayer; a daily time with God, a daily quiet time.
Secondly, a weekly sabbath. Now, this sermon is not about the sabbath, and to be honest, I haven’t figured it out. I haven’t figured out how to do sabbath in the life in which we live. I’m trying to learn, but I don’t have this down. Sundays are not sabbaths for me. Sunday is a work day. For many of us, we’re so busy with everything that we have to do that we’re not taking anything like a regular twenty-four-hour period of time for physical and spiritual restoration. There’s work to be done in my heart, work to be done in yours as well, probably, for most of us. But this is something to aim for and something to start moving towards, seeking to have a period of time where we physically rest and spiritually rest ourselves in God on a weekly basis.
Then season retreats. Here I have in mind something like a half day or a full day, or maybe a couple of days, alone with God on a seasonal basis. Not everyone needs to do this often, but it can be quite helpful. I have found this helpful, trying to do this several times a year, to take thirty-six hours alone, in a cabin or in a room somewhere, where without distraction I can just spend time with the Lord and rest.
(2) Now, if you were to start doing something like this, how would you do it? That’s the second question and the last main point. What I want to give you is a series of pretty simple steps. I’m not going to spend time on all of these, I’m just going to read them off with brief commentary, a couple of quotes, and we’re done. But here is an approach.
If you were, say, to devote an entire morning—maybe your next day off you devote the entire morning to just spend time with God, and you have maybe a four to six hour period of time, what would you do? How would you even do that? Here are six steps to get you headed in the right direction.
Number one, choose a time and place. You have to have space to do this. Now, for some of you it can be at home, but if you have young children or you have a busy household, it’s probably not going to be at home, unless you get up really, really early in the morning before anybody else gets up. Or you have a place where you can really be secluded—a quiet room or a study or something like that. So you may need something else. When the weather’s nice, you could do this at a park. But it’s quite easy to rent a place for a day or so. You’re going to have to have a place and you’re going to have to have time, and you’re going to have to schedule it. If you wait until the time is available without putting it on your schedule like you would any other appointment—a doctor’s appointment or a dentist appointment or anything else—you’ll never have it. You have to look ahead and you have to say, “Okay, on this day or these days I’m going to set this aside. I’m going to block this out for time with God.”
Now, if you’re married you can help one another with this. I was so encouraged this week; someone texted me a few days ago and asked for my notes from this whole series because her husband was giving her an entire day to just be by herself to spend time with the Lord, kind of away from the press of home and family and all the rest, and she wanted to read my notes to spend some needed time with God.
That’s exactly the kind of thing that needs to be happening. You should seek that out from your spouse, ask for it, and support one another in it. Choose a time and place.
Number two: once you’re there, begin with devotional reading and prayer for help. Your goal is to spend time with God, and you have to get your heart in the right frame of mind. Most of the time, when I arrive at a retreat, I’ve been hitting it so hard and I’m so disoriented that when I get there it takes a while to even get warmed up to the idea of spending time with God. So I need to read something that will work like a spiritual choke in my life, that will get things moving in the right direction. That could be Scripture, or sometimes it could be other kinds of devotional reading that is pointing you towards the Lord and is warming your heart.
The goal is not to get through a book; the goal is to spend time with God. So you use the book, whatever it is, as a means to help move your heart in the right direction, but stopping frequently to actually pray and to speak to the Lord.
Number three: rest your body and your soul, and if needed, take a nap. I remember a mentor said to me years ago, “Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is take a nap.” In reality, you’re not going to experience a deep kind of soul rest and spiritual rest if your body is exhausted. So if you’ve been going ninety to nothing for weeks on end, you probably are going to need some physical rest. But retreat can provide that for you, or a full half day, or whatever it is, that you’re spending to seek the Lord. So take the nap and get your mind to a point where you’re able to focus on the Lord without needing the physical rest.
Number four: be still and quiet and listen. Here’s the goal: the goal is a heart that is quiet before the Lord.
You remember the story—there’s a wonderful illustration of this in the life of the prophet Elijah. You remember the story in 1 Kings 19? Elijah has just had this showdown with the prophets of Baal. He’s called down fire from heaven, right? It was this huge contest. It had to be the climax of Elijah’s ministry. This is the highest point in his ministry, and that’s over. He’s coming off of that experience and finds out that Jezebel, the evil queen of Israel at that time, is ready to hunt him down and kill him. Elijah is afraid, and he runs for his life. He runs off into the wilderness, into the desert.
You know the very first thing he does? He sleeps. Then an angel brings him food and he eats. Then he goes back to sleep, and then an angel brings him food and he eats. Finally, after several cycles of this, he goes to Mount Horeb or Sinai, the mountain of God, and there he is on the mountain, and the Lord finally speaks and says, “Go and stand on the mount before the Lord,” and it says that the Lord passed by and there was this great strong wind that tore through the mountains, breaking in pieces these rocks. But the text says the Lord was not in the wind. Then there’s a great earthquake, and the Lord’s not in the earthquake. There’s a fire, and the Lord isn’t in the fire.
Then finally there’s a still, small voice. Brothers and sisters, I think it’s a picture for us—even though that was a theophany of the Old Testament—it presents a picture for us of pressing through the storm we may encounter until we get to that place of quiet where we unburden our hearts before the Lord in prayer, where we encounter God in the stillness and in silence.
Number five: unburden your heart in prayer. Psalm 62 begins, “Pour out your heart to him.”
What do I mean by that? You may get to this place of retreat or this time alone with God and there’s something in you that’s like, “I don’t feel spiritual enough to be here. I have so many other things on my mind.” You’re feeling bad about things, you’re feeling guilty about things, you’re feeling stressed about things, you feel fearful. You’re concerned about relationships, you’re concerned about your work, you’re concerned about family. Listen, all of that is matter for prayer. You just start with whatever’s there, and you just bring those burdens one by one by one, lay them down at his feet, and pray until you’ve laid it there before the Lord. You unburden your heart before the Lord until you come to that place where your heart is quiet.
Ruth Hayley Barton, in her wonderful book Invitation to Solitude and Silence, says,
“To stay on a journey into solitude and silence is to stay with the experience of seeing ourselves as we are in God’s presence. In solitude we stop defending against the reality of our condition, we give up our attempts to control the outcomes of our journey, we let go of our attachment to the pieces of ourselves that we’ve allowed to define us, we endure the storm created by the old self as it frantically tries to maintain control. Accompanying this self-awareness is a desperate desire for healing and communion that is painful in its intensity. The silence that comes after the chaos is pregnant with presence.”
Don’t you want that? Don’t you want to find yourself in silence that’s pregnant with the presence of God, to know that you are united to him, that you are in fellowship with him, that he is there and you are with him, communing with him? If you want that, you have to pursue it. Those who seek will find.
Finally, number six: plan for a slow re-entry back into life. Don’t rush through this, and don’t rush back into the busyness and the hurry of life. Plan that so that you can re-enter slowly and you can come back having prepared yourself to re-engage in relationships and with work and family and all the rest, and to re-engage in a posture of love and compassion and service to others. I think that’s a crucial piece of this as well.
So, to summarize—I’m almost done—the discipline is of retreat, silence, and solitude. The reasons we need them: to know God and know ourselves. How do we put them in practice? You have to make some changes in lifestyle, in schedule. Eliminate hurry from your life. Then actually set apart time for God, and follow a process something like this, where with a combination of solitude and silence, prayer and the word, and rest and restoration of soul you can get your heart quiet with God.
Let me end in this way. I’m going to read one more thing from A.W. Tozer. I thought about cutting part of this; it’s the final paragraph of his essay on cultivating solitude and silence. But this is so good, I’m going to read it all, and I think this is a fitting capstone to this series. Listen to Tozer.
“Retire from the world each day to some private spot, even if it be only the bedroom. For a while I retreated to the furnace room for want of a better place. Stay in the secret place till the surrounding noises begin to fade out of your heart and a sense of God’s presence envelops you. Deliberately tune out the unpleasant sounds and come out of your closet determined not to hear them. Listen for the inward voice till you learn to recognize it. Stop trying to compete with others. Give yourself to God, and then be what and who you are without regard to what others think. Reduce your interests to a few. Don’t try to know what will be of no service to you. Avoid the ‘digest’ type of mind, short bits of unrelated facts, cute stories, and bright sayings. Learn to pray inwardly every moment. After a while, you can do this even while you work. Practice candor, childlike honesty, humility. Pray for a single eye. Read less, but read more of what is important to your inner life. Never let your mind remain scattered for very long. Call home your roving thoughts. Gaze on Christ with the eyes of your soul. Practice spiritual concentration.
“All the above is contingent upon a right relation to God through Christ and daily meditation on Scriptures. Lacking these, nothing will help us. Granting these, the discipline recommended will go far to neutralize the evil effects of externalism and to make us acquainted with God and with our own souls.”
That’s what we need, brothers and sisters. Let’s seek him. Let’s pray together.
Gracious, merciful God, the call to know you is a high calling, but it’s a calling that touches us at the deepest core of our being. This is what we were made for, to glorify God and enjoy him forever. Lord, our hearts are restless. What we need and long for is rest in you. I pray that you would give us the will to seek it, give us the discipline to choose the practices that will help us to revitalize our fellowship with you, our walk with you. Give us each wisdom for what that looks like in our particular lives. Each of us are different. Our burdens, our responsibilities, our personalities—we’re different, and no one needs to do exactly what another person does. But Lord, give us wisdom to know how to seek your face, and then, Lord, as we set aside time and space to do that, would you meet with us and fill us and change us, transform us, so that we know you better and grow more like your Son, Jesus.
As we come to the table this morning, we ask you, Lord, to allow the table to be for us a means of grace. This too is a spiritual practice, and may we come this morning seeing in the emblems of bread and juice the story of the gospel, the story of the incarnate God who gave his life for the life of the world, who died for our sins and rose from the dead to give us access into your presence and to restore us to a right relationship with God. Lord, we come this morning not depending on ourselves, not depending on our practices, our disciplines, or anything else, but depending on what Christ has done. So meet with us now in these moments, speak to us in the quietness of our hearts, and draw near to us, we pray in Jesus’ name for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
