[00:00:01] Welcome to the River Church podcast. We're all about bringing the life, hope and love of Jesus to everyone around us. For more information, check out our
[email protected] Good. So imagine, right, let's have this. Imagine you are in a shop, right, and you have found the thing that you really want.
[00:00:27] And you grab your item and you go, okay, right, this is the thing that I really want. So I head to the till and you see a long queue, but you think, I really want this. And so you join the queue anyway. Then what do you do when you're in the queue?
[00:00:44] If you're anything like me, you go like this.
[00:00:48] Yeah. Is it just me or does everyone do this? You.
[00:00:52] You pull out. It's just me. It's just me. Yeah, you pull out your phone and you're not particularly looking for anything special.
[00:01:01] You're just, I just want to occupy my time. So I'm going to look at email, look at the Internet, scroll through just to occupy yourself. Because being in a queue is just painful, isn't it?
[00:01:16] Second thing, imagine. Imagine you're going to go and meet someone, right? And that someone is maybe 10 or 15 minutes walk away. I know there are some people who walk, right, but you get out the house, you walk five minutes down the road, and then you realize you've forgotten your phone.
[00:01:33] Who's going to turn around and walk back?
[00:01:37] And who's going to keep going, go on? I think loads of people will just turn around and go back because what is it feeling like we haven't got our phone? It's like there's some part of us missing, isn't there? It's like it's more critical than keys or money or anything like that. We need our phone. We've lost connection with the Internet and surely something's going to happen on the Internet.
[00:02:01] That's going to be the thing and we're going to miss out on it.
[00:02:06] Sherry Turkle, who is a sociologist, did some big studies on mobile phones. She started back in 2011 on it.
[00:02:16] And she writes this. These days, we see that when people are alone at a stop sign. She's American. Stop sign? Yeah. Or the checkout line. They seem almost panicked and they reach for their phones. We're so accustomed to being always connected that being alone seems like a problem technology should solve.
[00:02:40] Do you agree?
[00:02:42] Probably.
[00:02:44] It says in her studies, she saw not only increase in anxiety, but also a decline in empathy, shallow communication and a diminished capacity for solitude.
[00:03:02] This is what the smartphone generation is cultivating, but it's not just smartphones that do it. A guy called Neil Postman.
[00:03:12] Great name back in 92. He's been writing. He's a sociologist. Been writing since the early 70s.
[00:03:20] So, 92 smartphone era. Yes, it did occur.
[00:03:25] We did get by without phones hanging off our wrists.
[00:03:32] And he predicted, he saw that we were entering this era of information overload.
[00:03:40] The consequences of what he saw was fragmented attention, the inability to concentrate on anything for a long period of time, and that shift from what he called from depth to distraction.
[00:03:56] And he said that distraction would come to dominate our lives.
[00:04:02] We are living in a time of constant noise, constant distractions, constant things going on that need our attention. And they are.
[00:04:13] They don't need our attention.
[00:04:15] They're just drawing our attention.
[00:04:17] But they are affecting us day by day.
[00:04:20] I wonder how you think that might be affecting our own relationships with God.
[00:04:28] Now, last week, Q started us off on a new series we're doing called Forgotten Pathways and looking at the spiritual disciplines, the practices that we put in to connect with God. And he showed an order and showed a list of spiritual disciplines. Here's the list, and today we're going to look at this one of solitude up there. It's called intentional time in quiet to be alone with God.
[00:04:58] Before we dig in, maybe get your reactions. So maybe just turn to the person next to you. I know you've talked to them already.
[00:05:06] Sorry about that. Maybe just turn to the person next to you. Do you think solitude is a real discipline?
[00:05:12] Like, aren't we just talking about prayer?
[00:05:16] Do you think there's any benefit in solitude?
[00:05:20] Does the thought of solitude scare you?
[00:05:24] Why don't you just turn to the person next to you, ask them the question for a couple of minutes.
[00:05:32] Great. Okay.
[00:05:35] Hopefully you've got your first reactions. You kind of heard the first reactions of someone else as well.
[00:05:42] And I want to dive into it. And I'm here to convince you otherwise. I mean, I should go home, really, shouldn't I? But, yeah, I'm here to convince you. So I want to look at some Bible passages.
[00:05:55] I want to look at Jesus because Jesus, right, was a man of prayer. Okay? If you read through the Gospels, you see that Jesus prayed and he prayed in lots of different places. He prayed in a synagogue and to the temple with other religious people around him, with the Jews around him. He prayed with the crowds.
[00:06:16] He prayed for them. He prayed for healing. He prayed for deliverance with individuals. He prayed with his disciples. So he seemed to pray a lot.
[00:06:26] But this particular mention of Jesus going somewhere alone and praying and I've got a few verses because I feel like you might need convincing of this. Okay, so Mark one, it says, very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up and left the house and went off to a solitary place. He went off alone, and where he prayed.
[00:06:54] That's one. In Mark 1, Mark 6, it says, immediately in Mark's Gospel, everything happens immediately. Immediately. Jesus made his disciples get into the boat and go ahead of him to Bethsaida. And he dismissed the crowds, Go away, everyone.
[00:07:13] And after leaving them, he went up to a mountainside to pray.
[00:07:18] Jesus went to a solitary place in Luke's Gospel, it says, yet the news about him spread all the more, so the crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses.
[00:07:30] But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.
[00:07:36] And then another one, just a couple, just a chapter later. One of those days, Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray and spent the night praying to God. And when morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose 12 of them, who he also designated apostles.
[00:07:54] So when you read through these gospels, the Gospels, especially of Matthew, Mark and Luke, you see this picture of Jesus who prays often. He's connecting to God, and he's not just praying, but this picture of Jesus going to a solitary place, going alone to somewhere for at least hours at a time period of hours, not just moments, not just minutes.
[00:08:19] And also, if we go back to the start of Jesus ministry, do you remember what happened after his baptism?
[00:08:27] It says he goes out into the wilderness by himself for 40 days. That was the beginning of his ministry.
[00:08:36] So Jesus is someone who goes out to solitary places, but Jesus didn't invent it.
[00:08:42] Let me just ping you back to the Psalms, because David and the other psalmists write about it.
[00:08:50] Psalm 62, For God alone my soul waits in silence, says, from him comes my salvation.
[00:08:59] Psalm 37, Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him. Psalm 46, Be still and know that I am God.
[00:09:11] Now you might read these and think, hey, he's talking more generally about anxiety and thinking, thinking about resting in God's promises and knowing God. And, you know, I agree with some of that as well. I think, yes, that's it. But I think from these psalms, these are actually individual psalms, not ones to say out in congregation, the individual psalms. And I think that connection with being alone and in solitary place and in silence, waiting for God is really coupled with knowing God's providence, his care for us as individuals. And I think they're really coupled here. When you read through these psalms that these two things are connected here.
[00:10:00] But what do I mean by solitudes? And I'm using also words solitude and silence.
[00:10:08] Maybe that's a scary word for you. Well, I don't mean just, I don't mean in silence, just the absence of sounds. Right.
[00:10:18] It's not just the absence of noise.
[00:10:21] You can be alone by yourself and still have plenty of noise going around. You know, we can be alone and have the tv, the Internet, the phones, music, even books is noise. They're sources of distraction. They're information coming to us that wants our attention, that needs our attention. For them, there's lots of distractions and things. So solitude and silence is this place of being free from distraction, free from other things, getting our attention.
[00:10:58] Now, I don't know about you, but I find that quite hard.
[00:11:04] I find it actually quite unnerving. I'm someone who likes background noise, who is like, I tend to, if I'm doing something around the house, for example, I will put the TV on even though I'm not watching it. Will anyone else do that?
[00:11:20] Yeah. Or just put music on as background music. I'm not really listening to it, but just I want some noise in the background.
[00:11:28] Maybe that's because I don't like feeling like I'm alone.
[00:11:31] And then you get that thing, really strange thing, the strange thing of solitary confinement. Have you ever, like in prison, it's a form of punishment. They put the worst people into solitary confinement.
[00:11:47] Ian, are you asking us to do that?
[00:11:50] Because it's a controversial form of punishment. Because it can actually lead for any length of time, lead to psychological harm, they say, of some problems and the rest of it.
[00:12:04] But I think that says something about our souls and our minds, that actually being alone by ourselves is somehow self destructive.
[00:12:15] What does that say about us as people?
[00:12:19] But the thing is that the spiritual discipline of solitude is not being alone.
[00:12:25] It's being alone with you and God.
[00:12:32] It's not being with no one to talk to. It's not being alone just in your own thoughts.
[00:12:37] It's being alone, you and God.
[00:12:41] And the whole thing about this solitude is cultivating that relationship with God that intentionally I just want to cast out all distractions and I want to focus on God and to hear his voice.
[00:12:59] Now I have a problem with distractions. I'm one of those people. I don't have a problem listening to someone when it's one on one in a quiet space. Right.
[00:13:11] And I can talk to people in a group in a quiet space. But when I Get into noisy places. I find it really hard to actually focus on the person speaking to me. Like, I hear conversations all going around and. And they're all like, I'm trying to listen to them.
[00:13:29] I find it really hard to block out. So noisy restaurant, noisy social environment. It's kind of overwhelming. Am I odd? I know I'm odd, but. Yeah. Is anyone with me on that? Do you find it difficult as well? Yeah, I reckon probably half of the people know what I'm talking about. And the other half, you probably know someone that thinks it or yes, you can think we're odd. That's all good.
[00:13:53] But I think that it's just an illustration to me that I just go that distractions for me is the heart is the thing that blocks me out from hearing God, that there's so many other voices, so many other things that are needing that are wanting our attention, that the bleeps, the notifications, the alerts, the messages, the emails, the Instagram, the whatever, everything and everything is trying to get our attention.
[00:14:26] And it's the biggest thing to, I think, getting hearing God's voice.
[00:14:33] I got a friend that I met who's a Somali. Dev and I go over to. We shared last week going over to East Africa to meet some Somalis who are refugees.
[00:14:46] So this guy had fled Somalia.
[00:14:50] He'd left behind his family, his business, his community, and he'd gone to be in a safe house in another country.
[00:15:00] And one of the things he said is he was really struggling emotionally, psychologically, mentally. He was struggling with waking up in the morning and not having any messages on his phone.
[00:15:15] I don't know about you. He was waking up and thinking, this is something that I'm really struggling with. And it's an indication, obviously, that he's been cast out of a community.
[00:15:27] But it's also that thing of we're tied to these things that tell us we're kind of addicted to messages and things on our smartphone, there's distractions. It makes us feel part of a community, isn't actually connecting with other people.
[00:15:46] And it's a thing of that. I think that our sense of self worth as our thing about who we are as people is really now being tied up with these messages and these distractions really from a phone.
[00:16:04] But instead we need to cultivate a listening ear to God.
[00:16:10] You know, we can't just switch off everything.
[00:16:13] I don't know about you, but I'm someone that's always thinking about something. I've got stuff constantly going off in my mind and these Distractions just constantly give me more and more things to think about.
[00:16:26] And we need this extended time to stop and be in silence and solitude, just with God.
[00:16:36] Now, how do you start?
[00:16:39] How do you start?
[00:16:41] Some practical advice, and I want to admit to you first, before I give you practical advice, that I haven't ever spent some long, extended times in solitude. I haven't done it.
[00:16:57] So I'm with you.
[00:16:59] That many of you here, I know there are some of you here that have done that and that's fantastic. I think I'm really. I admire you, but I haven't done that. So I'm in the same boat if you're just starting out as well. So I've listened to some advice from people who've done it for many years of their life. And here's some steps. One is to start small and build up gradually.
[00:17:24] So don't be a hero.
[00:17:26] You know, I know there's some people here that would love to go, right, I'm going to do it. So I'm going to do it properly. I'm going to do a whole day as a first thing. Don't do that.
[00:17:36] Just take first steps. Take 10 or 15 minutes. One advice I found that was really. That I found really helpful just taking first steps. Set an alarm. You can use your phone for this. That is okay. Put it on, do not disturb, but send along for 10 or 15 minutes. And then you're not like, have I been long enough? Have I been long enough? Do you know, you can stop and think, hey, I'm going to be told when I've done the time, if you see what I mean.
[00:18:03] I like to grab a hot drink.
[00:18:05] Do you know I'm a fidget? Grab a hot drink, sit down in a nice quiet space.
[00:18:12] Another option is to go for a walk. Some people like to go out into nature, innit?
[00:18:18] And be outside. Because that can be actually help you with keeping out distractions. However, it's not a nature walk. Don't take your phone out every five minutes. Take a picture of something beautiful. It's up here.
[00:18:33] Capture it up here. Okay, Mentally. But it's supposed to help you reflect. You know, nature is really good at reflecting God and who he is in the grandeur.
[00:18:43] The other thing, it's not competition, right? One of the key mindsets, I don't know about you, with these disciplines, they can just turn into competition. Hey, how much do you do? How much do I do? Kind of thing. We can get into comparison.
[00:18:59] I mean, imagine one of these things. Imagine that you've Built up. You've done some small things. You've done maybe an hour and you've built up. And you thought, right, I'm going to take a whole day.
[00:19:10] And so you book the day off work.
[00:19:13] You plan that you're going to drive somewhere to be out in nature or be by the beach or somewhere like that to have this time of quiet.
[00:19:23] The day is looking like it's going to be a great day.
[00:19:27] And you've built it up. And then you've built it up in your mind that, hey, this is going to be a great spiritual experience.
[00:19:36] I'm going to really meet with God. He's going to really talk to me and he's going to give me loads of direction and advice in my life.
[00:19:45] But also, you want to come back, change, don't you, from it.
[00:19:51] And critically, now, let's just admit it. We also want to tell other people who ask us, how did it go? We want to tell them it was amazing, don't we?
[00:20:04] Right? We want to say how it was. Great.
[00:20:07] I saw an Instagram post recently, a little while back, I think I talked about it in another preach where I saw this video of this girl who had been taught, who'd recorded the videos, little snapshots about her day with God. And it was a video of her in a coffee shop reading her Bible, a video of her out on, walking on the beach, a video of her under a tree writing journals and the rest of it. And I just thought at the end of it, what was the point of the day?
[00:20:40] Was it to make a video and get likes and compare it with other people, or was it to be with God? So it's not a competition. Don't take your distractions with you. But thirdly, be experimental.
[00:20:56] This is an experiment.
[00:20:59] It's not always going to work out like you want to. I don't know about you, but however hard I try, I can't make myself fall asleep, right?
[00:21:09] However hard you try, it may not be a spiritual experience, a connection with God. C.S. lewis, the great C.S. lewis, has this fantastic little book of letters he wrote to children, right? And he writes this in answer to a little girl, I don't know how old, but a girl who asked about this subject and he said, don't expect you will have all the feelings you would like to have. You may, of course, but also you may not. But don't worry, if you don't get them, they aren't what matter.
[00:21:43] The things that are happening to you are quite real.
[00:21:47] Whether you feel as you would wish or not. Just as a meal would do a hungry person good. If you. Even if he has a cold in the head, which would rather spoil the taste.
[00:21:58] Our Lord will give us the right feelings if he wishes. And then we must say thank you. If he doesn't, then we must say to ourselves and to him that he knows best.
[00:22:11] It's not about us getting some sort of experience.
[00:22:17] It's about us growing closer to him, even though we may not feel it.
[00:22:23] And lastly, practical advice. Find some rhythms. I know people that find rhythms of a daily rhythm, a weekly monthly and a yearly rhythm.
[00:22:33] A friend of mine who goes away for five days or something by himself. That prospect is very scary to me.
[00:22:41] But yes, to go and do it for an extended period of time. It may not be something that you can do in your present time of life, in your situation, but actually to find different rhythms in your life is a good practice.
[00:22:55] So, yeah, I've told you, Jesus did it. The psalmist did it. It's in the Bible. We should do it. Some practical advice, and it's about hearing God's voice in it. But I want to give you just some lessons. Two lessons from Jesus where he was changed in some way through it.
[00:23:18] Do you know we need to start small and actually sometimes I think we question the whole thing of how. I've been saying we need to hear God's voice. But it's like we've got the Bible, haven't we? That is God's voice. Why do we need to hear God's voice separate from that? Why do we need to hear God's like voice for ourselves?
[00:23:42] Just want to return to two of the verses.
[00:23:45] One is from Mark 1. Jesus got up when it was still dark and he left the house where he went to a solitary place. And then it said, Simon, his companions went to look for him. And when they found him, they claimed, everyone is looking for you.
[00:24:00] Jesus replied, let us go somewhere else, to the nearby villages so I can preach there also.
[00:24:07] That is why I have come.
[00:24:11] Mark wants us to see that Jesus, his mission, knowing his mission, knowing what he's got to do, knowing where he's going, is connected with spending solitude, spending time alone with God.
[00:24:29] You know, Jesus is a busy person.
[00:24:32] We're all busy.
[00:24:35] Jesus is not like this person in quiet retreat all the time.
[00:24:42] Everyone is looking for you, Jesus. He's busy. Everyone has an agenda for Jesus. Do you have lots of people telling you what you need to do?
[00:24:52] Everyone had to, Jesus, come here. I need you to heal someone. Jesus, come here. I need you to teach us.
[00:24:59] Jesus, come here. I need you to raise an army to the throat of the Romans. That's one of the things that we're wanting.
[00:25:06] But in the middle of the business of life, Jesus prioritizes solitude with God. Why?
[00:25:13] Because the most important agenda for Jesus was his Father's agenda and he spent time seeking that out.
[00:25:26] Secondly, we see that Jesus is not only strengthened in his mission, but he's also key. Solitude is key in making key decisions. So as he goes up and he spends the night in prayer, and when morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose 12 of them whom he designated apostles.
[00:25:50] I don't know about you, but when you read through the Gospels, these guys aren't great, right? These 12 apostles, they are disruptive, they're disobedient, they're arguing with one another, they're arguing with Jesus. And many of the times you go through and when Jesus. Why on earth would you have picked these people?
[00:26:13] Even lists them and says they had really conflicting views about one being a tax collector and one being a zealot. One was really passionate about the Jewish people and one was siding along with the Romans. They were people that didn't get along. And yet Jesus chose these people.
[00:26:33] Why?
[00:26:35] Where did he get this from? It wasn't any humanly wisdom.
[00:26:39] Where did he get it from?
[00:26:41] He got it because he spent time with his Father and he heard God's voice in making key decisions in his life.
[00:26:53] Have you got a key decision in your life?
[00:26:57] Have you got something? You're just wondering actually what to do.
[00:27:03] Maybe you haven't.
[00:27:05] I think when I look back at my life, when I look at like key decisions about jobs or about spending my money or long term financial decisions or where I should live or what I should do with my time, I think I was just running on autopilot.
[00:27:22] I don't think I asked God.
[00:27:25] I don't think I asked him how he felt about certain things. I just thought, hey, we're busy, we're doing all these things, I can just get on. It seems reasonable to me.
[00:27:37] But I didn't ask him.
[00:27:40] What about you?
[00:27:43] Maybe you think maybe you need strengthening in mission? Maybe you're finding just being a Christian heart, all of these things that we have to do that we should be doing.
[00:27:56] And you're thinking, where do I find time? Where do I find strength to do that?
[00:28:01] How do I carve out time in my life to follow God in these ways?
[00:28:10] I want to say spending time in solitude with God is one of the ways in which we find the strength.
[00:28:18] But solitude is not a practice we achieve in our own power.
[00:28:24] We don't go, hey, I've done this time. It's great. I've done it.
[00:28:30] It's not something we achieve in our own willpower. It's actually a gift of grace.
[00:28:36] It's something we receive. Maybe if the bands could come back up and maybe the most important thing, the most important lesson, the takeaway really, is that spending time alone with God is not something that we need to get what we want.
[00:28:58] It's a time to express our dependence upon God.
[00:29:03] Here's the time to say, actually, I could go to loads of places and get help.
[00:29:10] I can go to other people and they might give me courage and strength, and that may be good.
[00:29:16] But actually, spending time alone with God just says, hey, God, I want to put you first.
[00:29:24] I want to recognize that you are the ultimate giver of grace, though it comes through community as well. But really, we want to put our dependence upon God and think, hey, I want to give you my first things.
[00:29:41] And this is something. Just preparing this. You know, I said, I've never done extended times of solitude myself.
[00:29:48] I'm preparing this. I'm just like, I feel convicted in my own heart.
[00:29:53] I feel God saying, yeah, maybe. Maybe you should prioritize this. I mean, I've had the idea.
[00:30:01] I've heard people talk about it, heard a really good friend talk about it, and it's like, come on, Ian, a bit of intentionality about this.
[00:30:15] Maybe that's something that God's saying to you this morning.
[00:30:20] Do you know, we were in worship this morning, weren't we? Worship God saying, God, you are all I need.
[00:30:30] Is that something that we want to declare this morning? It's something you want to declare this morning, that God is all that you need.
[00:30:40] Why don't we stand, Let me pray, and then we worship God.
[00:30:45] It.
