Best Spiritual Practices (Part 5) - Withdrawal

Well, good morning.

Welcome to Orchard Hill.

Yes, this is an axe.

Actually, when I came in last night for the service, one of the guys on the worship arts team said, Are you going to like start off with the line today we're reading from the book of Acts?

And I thought, no, no, we're not doing that.

I'm holding this axe because this is part of an old story.

Maybe you've heard this.

It's been told many times, many ways.

It's about two different lumberjacks.

And they both had a quota of how many trees they needed to cut down, chop down in a day.

And so they would begin their day and set out and work vigorously to try to meet their quota.

And as the days would go on, they would each find that their acts would start to become more dull, making it harder and harder to meet the quota.

So one of the lumberjacks decided that his solution was to work harder, faster, to chop harder, to swing harder with each swing.

Well, the other lumberjack decided that he would spend the first part of his day sharpening the blade of his axe so that he would be able to produce more as the day went.

And the first lumberjack would look at the second one, and as he would take his time to sharpen his saw, he would basically, or his blade, he would basically look at him and say, You are wasting your time.

I am getting so far ahead of you.

But what you probably know just from the way this was set up, that the other lumberjack who would take the time to sharpen the blade would by the end of the day pass him up because he was more efficient with every swing of the blade.

Well, that isn't just a nice story that has kind of a moral idea.

It's actually got some biblical roots.

In Ecclesiastes chapter 10, verse 10, we read this if the axe is dull and its edge unsharpened, more strength is needed.

Ecclesiastes 10:10

But skill will bring success.

And what the writer of Ecclesiastes is pointing to here is this idea that if we take time to sharpen the blade, to make sure that we're not just pressing ahead all the time to all of the increasing demands in our lives, we'll actually become more efficient at the things that are important to us.

In other words, the me that sometimes I want to be versus the me that I sometimes am, I'll be closer to the me that I want to be if I spend time, so to speak, sharpening the blade.

Well, we've been in this series that we've called the best spiritual practices.

And they're really about us spiritual disciplines, ways that we put ourselves in a place to connect deeply with God.

And we've talked about Bible intake or daily time with God.

We've talked about corporate worship, we've talked about serving, we've talked about spiritual friendship and the importance of being connected to others.

And today we're going to talk about this idea of withdrawal, about the idea of how do we take time to sharpen the blade, so to speak.

And we heard a passage read from Mark chapter 6, where Jesus and his disciples were together and they were being inundated with so many things that were going on, so many people around them that they were in a place where they needed some time away.

Mark 6 · chapter mention

And Jesus comes and he says, very simply, listen, here's what I want you to do.

I want you to get away to a quiet place by yourself and get some rest.

And so Jesus gives, in a way, a prescription of the need and also a prescription for the problem.

So first I just want to talk about the need.

Why sometimes we need to sharpen the blade, why sometimes we need a change of pace or to withdraw from some of the things in our lives.

So the first thing we see in this passage is that there was a need because there were too many people.

Verse 31 puts it this way: it says, Then because so many people were coming and going.

Now, some of this may depend for you or for me, whether you see yourself as an extrovert or an introvert.

If you're more extroverted, your your space where there's too many people is much broader than if you're introverted.

Sometimes if you're introverted, like you drive out of your driveway and you have to wave to the neighbor and you're like, oh, all these people, kind of a thing.

But but if you're more extroverted, it takes a little longer, it's a little bigger run up to the point where you say, I'm just I've just had it.

But do you ever get to the point where you say, I can't take any more people?

Well, that was happening to the disciples.

And Jesus comes along and says, This is one of the issues.

But but that wasn't the only thing that was happening.

I also think that they were experiencing too much opposition.

And you don't see this immediately in verses 30 through 32, but if you look at the context, what was immediately before this in the story, what you see is that John the Baptist had just been beheaded.

Verse 26 and following says this.

It says the king was greatly distressed because of his oaths and his dinner's guests.

He did not want to refuse her.

What had happened was John the Baptist, who had been a renowned proponent of Jesus, had been put in prison.

And in fact, earlier, some of Jesus' disciples had come to him and said, What's going on?

How is this person who follows you experiencing something so negative?

In fact, in Matthew 11, there's what we could call a forgotten beatitude.

A beatitude goes back to the Sermon on the Mount.

It's things like, Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the meek, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

It's called a beatitude because you're blessed if you do it.

In Matthew 11, 6, Jesus says, Blessed are those who are not offended in me.

And it's just a little phrase in the middle of this when people come to him and said, Well, why is John in prison?

And Jesus is saying, You'll be blessed if you allow me to do my business my way.

And then John the Baptist here, because of a request of one of the king's minions, says this happens.

It says, So immediately he sent an executioner, verse 27, with orders to bring John's head.

The man went and beheaded John in prison and brought back his head on a platter.

He presented it to the girl and she gave it to her mother.

On hearing of this, John's disciples came and took his body and laid it in a tomb.

Now, why do I say this is opposition?

Well, clearly there was the persecution of people of faith.

And one of the things that can happen in our life, your life, is you will have people who will be opposed to you.

But notice that the opposition here was a couple of directions.

There was the opposition of the people who were basically against John the Baptist and the followers of Jesus, and then the followers of Jesus were opposed to Jesus in a sense because they were saying, How can you let this happen?

And one of the things that happens sometimes in our lives and our experiences, whatever we do, we can feel like we get criticized for it.

Do any of you know what I'm talking about?

You go to work and it seems like it doesn't matter what you do or how you do it, you go to school, and some of your friends uh tell you that you should do things a certain way, and then some of your friends tell you that isn't the way, and you better do it a different way, or you're not fitting in.

And we always feel like we have some kind of opposition.

Somebody asked me recently if I'd seen the reviews of Orchard Hill Church on Yelp.

And uh I said, Well, I guess I'll go look at them.

I didn't realize there were reviews of Orchard Hill Church on Yelp.

And so I went and I looked, and and I actually looked not just at Yelp but some other sources then because I became interested.

Like, what do people say?

And there were a few negative reviews, which isn't shocking that there would be some negative reviews.

By the way, if you ever want to leave a positive review, feel free.

And of course, the negative reviews kind of stick in your head, and and the the first negative review I saw was from some people who said that church doesn't care at all about the community.

All they ever do is create a traffic jam on Brandt School Road.

I thought, okay.

And then the next one was that I saw was saying that the worship team, the people who sing, don't care.

I'm paraphrasing a little bit here, uh, about Jesus.

All they care about is showing off their physiques.

I thought, huh.

Who are they talking about?

And then it said, the big guy, so so I assume they mean David, uh, who's here, who is big and does have a physique.

And and they basically said, this guy doesn't care about Jesus, he just wants to show off his muscles.

And I just thought, have you ever talked to him?

What look like do you know?

And and now that seems small.

I mean, it's kind of funny actually, like, like, hey, the, you know, he's just up here like, hey, Jesus, kind of a thing.

But but it can't feel good to have somebody say, you don't care.

Do you ever get to a point where you say there's just people telling me things that are just negative about my life, about me?

Well, that's a reason that sometimes we're in a place of need.

Here's another thing that we see, and that is sometimes there's just too much to do.

So there's too many people, there's too much opposition, and there's too much to do.

He says, then because so many people were coming and going, they did not even have a chance to eat.

They were so busy that they couldn't find time for a meal.

And busyness, I've heard it said, is like the curse of our age.

Because sometimes there are so many things going on that we feel as if if we don't just keep being productive, keep running, keep going, that we'll never get to everything that we have to get to.

Tim Kreider wrote a piece in the New York Times about five years ago now.

It's called The Busy Trap.

If you Google it, you can find it's a really good article.

He doesn't write from a Christian perspective at all.

But he writes basically saying that in our country today, we've made busyness almost a medal of glory or honor.

Here's what he says: he says, if you live in America in the 21st century, you've probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are.

It's become a default response when you ask somebody how they're doing.

Busy, so busy, crazy busy.

It's obviously a boast disguised as a complaint.

And then he goes on, he talks about it some more, and a little later he says this busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness.

Obviously, your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you're busy, completely booked and in demand every hour of the day.

And what he is referring to here is something in our culture that basically says, what I need to do is I need to be so busy because by being busy I demonstrate my importance.

And so the disciples here were surrounded by so many people, they had opposition and they had so much to do, and Jesus comes along and speaks into that.

But let me just ask you do you ever find yourself in any of those categories where you're saying, right now I have so many people around me, so much just negativity coming at me, so many things to do that I can't seem to get perspective.

Maybe you're in middle school, you're in high school, and it doesn't seem to matter kind of what you do when you go to school, but you have you have kids who who say things and it just is always negative.

Maybe you're a parent of young children, and you feel like you have no time whatsoever to yourself.

Maybe you're not in any of those scenarios, but you're in a place where today you feel fairly lonely.

And you say, I wish I had so many people around.

But but even in that, you hear, maybe not from people verbatim, but you hear kind of the statements of people saying, Why don't you have people around you?

And Jesus comes and he gives an answer.

And his answer is really straightforward.

He says, Come away by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.

And I'd like to suggest that in this answer, he addresses each of these three problems.

In the first, come away by yourself.

He suggests the idea and the practice of solitude.

And here, what he's basically practic suggesting is that when we come away by ourselves, we would separate ourselves from all of the activity in order to gain a little bit of perspective.

Dallas Willard put it this way: he said, solitude, well practiced, will break the power of busyness, haste, isolation, and loneliness.

Now that's counterintuitive because what he's saying, and Dallas Willard has written extensively on the spiritual disciplines, what he's saying is that having a practice of solitude will actually be a hedge against loneliness.

That seems counterintuitive because it seems to us to say that if I'm isolated or if I'm in solitude, that I'll feel more alone.

But what he's saying is it's actually the exact opposite because having some of those moments where we have solitude allows us to engage more fully with people.

I like what else Dallas Willard has said.

He said, God does not ordinarily compete for our attention.

You see, one of the reasons that we need solitude is because without solitude, we have so many things competing for our attention that it's hard to ever discern the voice of God.

And this really leads to the second thing that we see here, the second practice.

If there's solitude, come away by yourself.

There's also silence to a quiet place.

It's one thing to get alone, it's another thing to experience silence.

And the reason I say this is so often, what happens is that is that we don't practice silence when we're alone.

What we do instead is we try to hedge the aloneness with noise.

And you know how you see this?

It's when you wake up in the morning and the first thing you do is you turn something on so that you get some some volume, whether it's news, whether it's going online to look at something, whether it's it's social media, but but you want some kind of input because that input gives you a chance to say, now I'm I'm hedging myself against this quietness in my life.

And then you get in your car, and what's the first thing you do?

You turn something on, whether you pull it up from your phone or whether you turn it on the radio, but we're always turning something on so that we always have something kind of talking to us.

And what happens in that is we cannot hear our own internal thoughts or the thoughts of God, but we only hear the words of so many people in the culture in which we live.

Again, Dallas Willard says it this way silence allows the reality of God to stand in the midst of your life.

Silence allows the reality of God to stand in the midst of your life.

There used to be a show on uh called Candid Camera.

Uh I never think I saw like like originals, but I've seen some reruns.

Um there's a show today, kind of like it, Impractical Jokers, I think it is, uh, where the people do these kind of ridiculous things and they catch the reactions of people on camera to kind of like catch how they react.

Well, there was an old candid camera episode where what they did is they put a camera on an elevator.

And you know, kind of when you get on an elevator, the standard thing is you get on the elevator, you walk on, and then you turn around and face the door.

Well, they they put a camera here and they would have somebody get on the elevator, and then they would have three people get on the elevator, and when they got on, they would just stand and face the other direction, and then they would would would focus on this person to get their reaction.

And so there's three people facing the wrong way, or I guess you wouldn't call it wrong, but the opposite way of social norm.

And then one person who's standing there, and what they saw when they did this is that almost time after time the person would stand there, look really uncomfortable, and then sooner or later they would turn around to the other way.

And I wonder sometimes if we don't have so many voices speaking into us so much information that that becomes the predominant way in which we view the world.

There was a man, an engineer a few years ago who developed something called the backward brain bicycle.

And this is a uh contraption where basically when you ride it, if you turn to the right, the the handlebar, the wheel goes to the left.

And he would take this around and have people who would who had learned to ride bicycles try to ride it, and what they found almost invariably is anybody who's ridden a bicycle for any amount of time could not turn because it was so counterintuitive to everything in their way of thinking that when they tried to turn, they would lose their balance.

In fact, the man who developed it, he said it took him eight months to be able to execute a nice, correct turn on this bicycle to retrain his mind.

But then he had his son, who was six, try to ride it, and his son within two weeks could master riding the backward brain bicycle.

You see, what had happened was that was the adult, or those of us who are adults who've been conditioned to one way of thinking, cannot reprogram our mind quickly.

And what silence does is it gives you an opportunity to step aside from all the voices in culture and let your mind be repositioned for the word of the Lord.

See, sometimes the voices that we hear may not be like audible voices, but but but some of us have spent lifetimes trying to live down something that was spoken about us when we were kids.

Maybe it was a parent, a sibling, a boyfriend, girlfriend, some kids at school, a teacher who said something that was particularly cutting, and we have gone through our lives saying, I do not want that to be true about me, so I am trying to prove somebody from way back when wrong about who I am.

And without silence, the voices that that are spoken from our culture and and people into our lives are always, you're not enough, you must do more, you must perform more.

And silence takes us out of that for at least a short amount of time.

There's one more practice that we see here in Jesus' statement.

And that is, I think it's the practice of Sabbath.

He says to this, says to them, and get some rest.

Now, Sabbath is a concept in the Bible that we find in the Ten Commandments where it says that there should be one day that's holy unto the Lord, that you should have a day of rest.

And what it's referring to is the practice of gathering for public worship and then desisting of kind of our common work, what we spend the rest of our time with.

And certainly a lot could be said about this idea of corporate worship, but just for a moment, let me just think about this concept, not just in the technical sense of a day that's set aside, but just in terms of what it means for you or for me to not always be trying to accomplish something.

Mark Golly, who's an editor at the magazine Christianity Today, wrote an article called The Theology of Play.

And he's an avid hunter and fisher and golfer, and he said that basically he has to always try to quiet his inner critics who are telling him anytime he goes to do any of those activities that they're not worthwhile.

And he said in this that he feels that there are moral reasons and practical reasons and theological reasons that he has to lay out to defend himself whenever he tries to do something that's just playful or good for his soul.

And then he writes this the prosecutors rest their case on a common but questionable assumption that life's highest purpose is to work, to get things done, to be useful, to make the world a better place.

Leisure, if it's to be justified, must fit into the purpose of making it possible for us to work longer, harder, or better.

And even then, leisure must be efficient.

In other words, we have to get our rest so that we can return to our important stuff that we all have to do.

And he says this: he says, biblical rest does not mean doing nothing.

For the eternal Sabbath rest includes joyful worship of the Lord, Revelation 4.

But the activity of rest is not about doing something to justify our use of time, it's not about shoring up our energy for more work.

It's activity designed to do one thing, to bring joy.

And then he says this if it's not useless in the way that we normally understand that word, then it's not rest.

Let me read that again.

If it's not useless in the way that we normally understand the word, then it's not rest.

And one of the best ways to rest, besides worship, is to play.

Whenever we take a Sabbath or whenever we find time to play, we remind ourselves from where we've come and where we're going.

We're living into our purpose and our destiny.

You know what happens for most of us as we get older?

Is we start to think.

That we rest so that we can return to work.

And I like how Mark Gally puts that to say sometimes we need to do something that's useless just for the pure joy of it, because that is replenishing to the soul.

Now, clearly, the idea of Sabbath in the Bible, and Jesus here just says rest.

He doesn't talk about the Sabbath technically, includes the idea of corporate worship.

There's an old movie, Chariots of Fire, that tells Eric Lydell's story about the 1924 Olympics, where as a world-class runner, he was set to run and favored to win the 100-meter dash.

But when the time trials came out for it, or the race schedule, he was scheduled to run on a Sunday, and so he famously refused to run.

And then he instead entered the 400-meter and ended up winning it.

And the movie, although it's slow, it's still kind of worth watching, is about somebody who said, you know what, I'm not going to give up my day of worship and my day of rest, even for a high pursuit.

Now don't misunderstand me.

If you qualify for the Olympics and the heats on a Sunday, if it were me, I'd probably decide to run.

In fact, I was only about five seconds away from qualifying for the 100-meter dash when I was that age.

But um if you know times, that's like really slow.

Um and my but but my point is this, and that is so many times we don't even ask the question today.

We just schedule and go and do, instead of saying, what does it mean for me to take a day where I spend part of the day worshiping God and then the rest of the day at play?

Doing something that's that's just fun, that brings some life into my soul.

See, what we tend to do is we tend to say, Well, I better get to church.

Uh check that off the list.

Now I'm gonna go mow the lawn, now I'm going to run a few errands, I'm gonna get get a jump on Monday.

And it's almost like Jesus is saying, if you feel that sense of too many people, too much to do, too much opposition, why don't you come away by yourself and get some rest?

Now, in a sense, when we talk about these different things, they're all pointing to another spiritual discipline, which has been called fasting.

And the Bible talks about this in several places, Matthew 6 and other places.

And fasting was the abstinence from food, basically, for a spiritual end.

And when we think about that, it's hard for us to fully wrap our heads around what that meant in that culture.

And the reason is, is because we're removed from that culture.

For me, if I want to eat, what I can generally do is I can walk to my freezer, I can open up my freezer, I can pull something out, I can take it out of the carton, I can take a step and a half to my right, place it in a microwave, punch up some numbers, and in about two and a half minutes have a warm meal ready for me.

Now that's not normally how I eat, but but but I can eat that way.

And so we don't tend to think of meals the way that people in the Bible times thought of meals.

You see, for them, it was a big process.

They would spend time gathering, they would spend time working to create a fire and to do things to cook.

Usually it was a communal effort where more people were involved, and then they would sit and they would talk and they would enjoy it.

So if somebody were to fast from a meal, what they would do is they would step away from all of the work, all of the social connection for several hours generally in order to say, I'm going to just detach from that for a spiritual purpose.

And what fasting in many ways is, is it's anything that you or I do where we forgo something that's legitimate for a greater purpose.

And maybe for us today, fasting or silence, solitude, Sabbath could involve saying I'm going to give up my three-minute meal preparation and eating consumption.

But for some of us, maybe it's it's bigger than a meal.

I mean, a meal might be a good place.

But maybe it's saying I'm going to be silent in the morning instead of turning on the TV news and hearing what the commentators have to say about the latest story in North Korea or the latest story with Harvey.

Or maybe we'll abstain from getting on social media and the first thing in the morning to see what everybody's saying and what all is going on.

Or maybe we'll make it a point to, on our drive, just simply say, as I get in my car, I'm just going to let silence be part of my experience.

So I have a few moments just to just to decompress from all the noise around me.

Maybe for some of us it means taking the concept of a day of rest more seriously.

A day to say I worship corporately and then I play.

I do things that are useless as we normally define the word.

Because without that, what will happen is we'll plow through our life and we'll keep saying, I'm just gonna swing harder and harder and harder and harder until this becomes so dull that all the hard work in the world won't get us where we want to go.

You see, God, I believe, has designed us to be creatures who rest.

As Jesus rested himself and as God rested in creation, six days He He worked and created, the seventh day he rested, we're designed to be creatures who need time to take a step back.

Now I do have a caution.

And my caution is this, and that is, you can hear this today, and you can say, okay, okay, I'm going to start to practice some kind of withdrawal.

I'm going to set aside social media, I'm not going to take as many selfies, you know, whatever it is.

And that's going to be my way of kind of decompressing.

Check.

But the point of this is not to be able to say, I was silent, I had solitude, I practiced a little bit of Sabbath.

The point of this is to actually connect with the deeper spiritual realities of who God is and what he's done in Jesus Christ.

And this is true with all of the spiritual disciplines.

You can practice a discipline as if to say, I did it, but the point of the discipline is to actually connect with the heart of God.

And so what we hope happens as you kind of come to a point, I come to a point where I say, I'm stepping back and I'm doing something useless, is it's a it's a very tangible reminder to say, I don't earn my way with God.

That ultimately it's God's work through Jesus Christ that does for me the person who doesn't do anything to deserve it, that lets me come into a right relationship with God.

And it's almost like the rhythm is built into our lives to say, every week I want you to take a day and say, I'm not earning anything.

I want you to take some time and space to remind yourself of how these spiritual realities really work.

Sometimes what we do instead is we just say, if I do that, I won't get everything taken care of.

I won't get there.

In my yard, I have some bushes at the end of my driveway.

I think I have a picture of it here.

And what you see, uh, this is the end of my driveway, is on the left side, the bushes are substantially bigger than as you go to the right, you see how small they are.

You see that?

Now it's not that when we bought these bushes and planted them that there was a runt of the litter on the right and then you know better bushes on the left.

Well, what happened here is over time uh you can see that the trees behind on the right side have blocked the sunlight from coming to the bushes on the right.

And so they don't get as much sunlight as the bushes on the left.

Now, here's what I can't do.

I can't go and just simply say, well, I'm gonna work really hard at making this bush on the right to grow.

The only thing that I can do is I can say, well, I'm going to cut down or prune the trees that are behind this so that you can let the light in, the light will get in and bring life and vitality to this.

And here's what spiritual disciplines are.

Here's what the best spiritual practices do.

And that is, you don't directly change your soul, but what you do instead is you put yourself in a place where more light can come in.

And what solitude and silence and Sabbath or fasting does is it allows some more light to come in so that you can hear the real voice of God and let your soul thrive.

Instead of hearing all of the criticisms, all of the complaints, the people who say that you are not enough or that you haven't done enough, you'll be able to start hearing the voice of God that says, You're my love child.

So loved that I sent my son on your behalf.

I created you in my image to be a person with gifts, talents, things to offer the world.

And although sin marred it, my son has restored it, and my spirit will renew it within you.

And when that becomes something that you feel and sense, then your spiritual practices have helped you to thrive.

You know, there's nothing that can be perfectly prescribed for everybody because we're all different.

So how we encounter God at the depth of our soul may be a little different.

But here's what I know, and that is if you and I don't find ways to let that be our reality, it's like we're running through our life with a dull blade.

And we won't thrive.

And the lie that we'll be tempted to believe is that I don't have time to stop and sharpen the saw, my spiritual saw, my spiritual blade, to become attuned to the God of the universe.

But instead, I just need to plow through.

Jesus' invitation, I think, could be spoken to you and me today.

Why don't you come away by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest?

Did you notice what verse 32 says?

And they did.

They went to a quiet place.

You and I need a will to say, God, I'm going to come away from all that's in my culture, all that's in my world, just for a season so I can hear and I can see things as they really are.

Father, I ask today that you would help each one of us as we're here to resist the temptation to think that we just are so indispensable to everything that we have to always plow ahead.

But instead, we'd understand the concept of silence and Sabbath and solitude and how they can help us encounter you at a deeper level.

And God, that those practices would remind us that it isn't what we do that that makes us somehow acceptable to you, but it's what has been done on our behalf.

And even the practice of just saying, I don't have to produce today, would almost be an act of worship of saying, God, it's a reminder that I don't produce in order to earn my way with you.

But Jesus does what I can't do.

And we pray this in the name of Jesus Christ.

Amen.

May God bless you as you go.

Have a great weekend.