How to Hear God with Pastor Ryan Braley

We are in the middle of our I think, our third week of our UPiX series, in which we had people kind of write in or call in or text in or email in an idea or a question they had and we wanted to preach a sermon around that and we had more than we had.

We had more topics than we had, weeks.

So we're going to try to cram as many in as possible, but there'll be others that don't get mentioned, sorry about that.

We can do our best, maybe in the fall to kind of address some of those or just answer them.

I've done a couple of you email but and this morning's question was this, from a young woman who said this how can you hear from God?

I've lived my whole life as a Christian.

I just want to know how do you hear from God, which is actually quite an intense question to ask for many reasons, but one of which is like, look, listen, to talk of the divine is hard enough anyway.

I mean, how do you describe or define God?

I mean, as Christians, we believe, oh, in the person of Jesus Christ.

He sort of embodies God.

Fair enough, but how do you talk about the divine?

It's with trepidation really, at best.

And then, how do you describe hearing from God?

How do you know if you've heard from God?

How do you know what God sounds like?

These are wonderfully legitimate questions, even for people of faith who've been going to church their whole lives and read the Bible and pray.

It's a good question to ask.

So this morning I'm going to try to answer it and tie it up with a nice little ribbon.

In 20 minutes or less, maybe I'll take 30.

Actually, you know me and no, I want to say a few things.

So what I wanted to do, I'm going to give you the good news and then I'm going to put a whole bunch of stuff in the middle that I would call advice, which I hope you follow and can at least think about in your own life.

And then I'm going to end with the same good news I began with, because I think to start off with how I would begin to talk about hearing from God is by saying there are things we have to remove from our lives in order to hear from God first and foremost.

Then we can add things later, like practices or rhythms.

But for this morning I'll talk about things we need to eliminate.

But, speaking of hearing from God.

We have a long and rich history of people who have heard from God in the Bible, and it's wonderfully diverse.

For example, there was once a man who was out wandering around and he heard God speak to him through a burning bush.

Of course, his name was Moses.

Yes, moses was his name.

These are thrilled to be here this morning.

I love it, moses or maybe you hate Moses, but it's fine and God speaks to him through a burning bush.

Anybody else have God speak to them through a burning bush?

I didn't think so.

How about this one?

God speaks in the Bible to people through a thunderstorm.

How cool is that?

I would love to have God speak to me through a thunderstorm when I was a little boy.

I was so terrified of them though I would just run the other way.

But God speaks the people of Israel and to Moses through a thunderstorm, which is awesome.

God also speaks through a donkey.

Remember the story about Balaam?

God uses a donkey.

Growing up, my pastor used to always say look, if God can use a donkey, he can certainly use a person like you.

He didn't say person, though, and I remind my daughter look, it's in the Bible, it's not a swear word.

You can say that word.

It's in the Bible.

If God can use a donkey, he can use a like you.

So but God's in this crazy story?

God talks through a donkey.

How wild is that Anybody ever have an animal speak to them?

Fair enough, how about this one In the book of Daniel?

No, actually the one we just read in first Kings?

God speaks to Elijah.

God takes Elijah, puts him in a cave or Elijah goes there on his own and in the sheer silence, the Hebrew says in the sheer quietness, god speaks.

How can God speak in sheer silence what he does?

So God speaks in the sheer silence.

And then in Daniel 5, god speaks to people through this mysterious hand falling down and riding on a wall.

It's a strange story.

Read it later in Daniel 5,.

But this hand comes down and there's the writing on the wall.

This is a proverb or proverbial idiom that still lasts today.

Can we acknowledge how cool it is that this weird story in Daniel 5 is still used by people today as a colloquialism?

It's the writing is on the wall.

That's where this comes from.

This hand sort of I don't know what it's like a floating hand, and writes on this wall announcing this stuff from God.

And, of course, how can we forget in the Bible when God speaks to us as a whole culture through, of course, the brilliant work of Morgan Freeman?

Right, wonderful, when God spoke to us all through Morgan Freeman in the book of I don't remember which book it was in the Bible, but I'm kidding, it's on the Bible.

But God speaks, so there's also God comes to people through angels.

He speaks to people.

He speaks to people through dreams and visions, and God's speaking all these kinds of ways.

But how does God speak to us today?

How can we, normal people who have normal jobs, who live normal lives, how can we hear from God?

Well, here's the good news.

I told you I'd start with good news.

We're going to do some advice and then I'm going to end with more of the same good news from back here.

Here's the good news.

The Gospel, according to Psalm 24, says this the earth is the Lord and all that is in it, the world and those who live in it.

Raise your hand if you live in the world.

Okay, for those of you paying attention, wonderful, you are the Lord's, just so.

You know that and you didn't do anything to be that.

That's just what you are.

The whole earth is the Lord's and all that is in it, the whole world and all those who live in it, belong to God.

You might also say it like this this whole world is full of God.

No matter which direction you turn or look, or which door you open or curtain you peek behind, you will find God there.

The whole world, according to the Psalmist this is the good news is full of God.

Now, in our modern Christian sensibilities, we like to divide the world, often in spiritual and material dimensions.

The spiritual world is sort of those things which are immaterial and often connotes something like religion and so like ghosts or angels or demons or God.

And the material world is, of course, the material world that we can see, you can hold it, you can touch it, you can taste it, put it under a microscope and we divide the world in these two realms.

But then oftentimes the hope of the Christian or the religious person is to leave the material, gross, dirty, tainted world to go into the spiritual world around, because it's more real, it's more spiritual, it's more holy, in fact.

But this is a very modern sort of rendering of the Scripture and this idea.

In ancient Hebrew, in classical Hebrew, they didn't have a word for spirituality Because they didn't see a distinction between the two.

The whole earth was full of God.

The whole thing material, spiritual was all one.

There was one world, one earth, one cosmos, and God dwelled there within it.

Which means this and here's the really good news To hear God, you are already where you need to be and you are already who you need to be.

You don't need to go somewhere else, whether it's on this side of death or post-death.

You don't have to go somewhere else or someplace else.

You can hear from God right here and right now.

As one rabbi says, a person is able to awaken the presence of God and the holiness of God anytime, any place.

So we would do better to think of spirituality not as some immaterial sort of ethereal place, but really a dimension or a manner of life of being awake and aware of the presence of God.

So like maybe there's a volume knob how awake to God are you?

So spirituality is living a life in which the volume knob just turned all the way up and you're constantly, or as constantly as possible, probably just aware.

You're moving in this dimension of being aware and awake to the presence of God, but it's right here and right now.

But here's the problem and, by the way, when I say that, that you can hear God and notice God right here and right now.

You don't have to go anywhere else.

That means not just in this place, in the sanctuary, but later on tonight.

When you're doing the dishes, you can experience God.

When you're doing a high school entrance exam or college entrance exam, you can notice and hear God.

When you're playing with your children, you can hear and experience and notice God.

When you're applying for your first job or your 10th job, you can hear God.

When you're in your cubicle at work.

That's four square feet big.

Then you're doing your TPS reports, which you do right away.

You can hear and notice God.

You don't need to go somewhere else.

But here's the problem that we often encounter, if you're a normal person, is that we don't often hear from God and we go through our days and our lives.

We're like why won't God speak?

Or why can't I hear God?

I don't notice God.

Everything seems sort of secular and just boring or flat or blasé.

Why can't I hear God?

Well, there's a story in Exodus.

I love it With Moses again.

Moses, god calls Moses.

That's what he says he will forever be known as Moses from now on.

I love Moses, by the way.

God calls this.

Is God speaking?

He says God calls Moses up to the mountain.

And then he says hey, and then, while you're there, be there, which is kind of funny.

It's like he's being a bit redundant, isn't God?

He says, hey, come up to the mountain and be here.

In fact, I highlighted it in yellow just so you would notice it even more.

There you go.

Why would he say that, hey, come here and be here.

Come up to the mountain and be there.

Well, where else would he be?

If he's going up to the mountain, where else would he be?

Why would God tell him come here and then be here?

Well, I wonder if it's not because many times we spend lots of time and energy and effort to climb to the top of the mountain and when we get there, we're not there, we're anywhere else, but there, for all kinds of reasons, like in this picture, everybody else but that old lady.

They're there, but they're not there.

Maybe you've been there or not been there.

A couple of years ago, me and my wife Katie were with our son, logan.

I hope you don't mind me telling the story.

Logan and we were in Arizona and we were at a dinner with this baseball team and there's like all the adults at one table, big, long table and then a whole table full of the baseball guys like 12 of them or whatever and it was a beautiful outdoor.

We were in Arizona, beautiful night outdoor restaurant on the rooftop, gorgeous lights are hanging up, the stars are out or whatever.

And I look over and we had one rule.

Wow, we have a couple of rules in our house.

One of them, which I like, was like I mean, I was litigious about it.

I was like, hey, no cell phones out when we have meals.

I want the cell phones put away.

But I learned that night, as well as other nights, that not everybody has that rule.

And so we're out having dinner together and all the adults are talking.

I look over at the kids table and they were like probably 15, 16,.

Every kid at that table, every single one except for Logan, had their cell phones out.

And they're just, and there's Logan just looking at me, mad because I wouldn't let him have his house.

And I felt bad because I'm like not only could he not be on his phone, but he couldn't even talk to anybody else, because every other kid had their cell phone out.

Because sometimes you go to the top of the mountain and you're there, but you're not really there.

And so perhaps the problem, if there was one with Moses, it wouldn't have been on God's side.

God was there, he was already there, the whole world is full of God.

The problem would have been on Moses' side.

Hey, moses, come on up here and be here.

So sometimes maybe the problem is not that God isn't there or God's not speaking, but that we aren't there, that we're not awake, we're not aware of the presence of God, that our volume knob is turned all the way down because of all kinds of other reasons.

Now I have three reasons that I found in my own life were three traps that I fall into all the time that prohibit me or like disable me, from hearing God.

I want to go over all three of them with you.

I'm going to offer three antidotes to those three things and I'm going to give you the good news again.

Is that sound all right?

Okay, number one I think one of the biggest reasons we don't hear from God, and I have props for every one of the three.

Oh, look at that.

How smart is that?

Number one is we're too busy, but I brought a calendar up here and this is somebody's actual calendar that I had copied and pasted onto this big calendar.

The person will remain nameless, but their name?

It starts with an R and ends with iron, and their last name begins with a B and ends with Rayleigh.

So anyway, but I'm not going to say who it is.

I have four kids and I'm married.

I'm a pastor.

I don't know if your calendar looks like that, but that's what my calendar looks like and I had Katie write it on that.

We're too busy.

In fact, one great writer says that atheism is the religion of the busy.

Atheism is the religion of the busy.

We're so busy with school and homework and our jobs and our sports and our kids, and if you have more than one kid, it's like or maybe you have one kid, it's just the sheer number of things you have to do in the week.

There's so much going on that our calendars are full plump.

Cal Newport wrote a book called Digital Minimalism and he writes this.

I love it.

This is the volume of obligations on our proverbial plates, be it vague projects or offhand promises, or quick calls or small tasks.

They continue to increase at an alarming rate.

We're not slowing down, we're getting busier.

There was once a time, not too long ago, when the standard response to the query hey, how you doing?

Was often an innocuous I'll find today, though, it's rare to encounter someone who doesn't instead respond with a weary I'm busy.

We've all been there.

That's busy, busy or too busy, which raises the question why do we feel the need to incessantly fill our calendars?

Why does every day, every morning, every afternoon, every evening have me full?

Well, there's lots of reasons.

One is a cultural pressure.

There's a cultural pressure to be about that grind, to be hustling, always moving, always doing something.

It's what we do.

If you want to be successful, get out there and hustle.

There's a cultural pressure.

Our egos are also involved.

We feel better about ourselves, like we're somehow a better person because we've worked harder and filled our calendar.

So there's this ego, for sure.

There's also this fear of being considered lazy.

We don't want anyone to think that we're lazy.

In fact, it's funny because sometimes folks will say to me I've had a long day, I'm going to go home and I just want to be lazy.

And I remind them you going home after a long day and sitting down is actually called rest.

It's not being lazy.

It's okay to stop and do nothing for five minutes in the day, but we have this incessant fear of being lazy and also to get theological on you.

I think we all have this drive within ourselves to earn something to grasp, to climb the ladder, to earn each other's approval our own approval of ourselves, or God's approval deep down.

And so we do more and more and more, but end up less and less satisfied every day, and we over schedule ourselves and over tax ourselves and we end up, just like Henry now, unworned, with our schedules full but our lives unfulfilled.

And how in the world, if our calendars are full, how can we make time to climb the mountain and hear from God?

How can we expect to hear from God if our calendars are too full to even go climb the mountain?

See, here's the thing too God is already present and already with us, but we're the ones who aren't present because we're too busy.

So, number one, we're too busy.

Number two, we're going way too fast.

I don't know if you know this, but this is scientifically proven If I put these shoes on, they make me run 10 miles an hour faster.

I don't know why you're laughing.

It's deadly, I'm deadly serious, but we're going 100 miles an hour every day.

One of my favorite books is a book called Fahrenheit 451, ray Bradbury, back in 1953, writes about a future dystopian universe which, quite honestly, sounds a lot like our lives today, and it's written 70 years ago.

But they have these billboards that were 20 feet long.

But the billboard makers I don't know if that's even a job.

It's not a real job of billboard maker.

Hey, what do you do for a living?

I'm a billboard maker, but anyway, billboard makers began to make their billboards not 20 feet long but 200 feet long.

These are long billboards that dotted the highways and Clarice, the young woman in the story, tells Montag who's the firefighter.

They do it because way back when people were driving on the highway so fast, they had to get from point A to point B so quickly and they wanted to be fast that they just would whiz by these billboards and nobody noticed them.

So the billboard makers make them 200 feet long, just so people will see them.

Man, I wonder about us.

We're so encouraged to go 100 miles an hour at breakneck speed.

We're whizzing by billboards all the time, which doesn't bode well for Chris Lindahl and his guaranteed offers.

You can tell him I said that too.

Whoops.

But we're going so fast.

We whizz right by billboards and right by burning bushes.

And if we're not careful, right by life and we've gone too fast and we've missed it all.

And I wonder if one day we'll wonder where did our day go?

Went so fast, where did the day go?

Or where did our summer go?

Man, I went by so fast.

And again, if we're not careful, where did our life go?

Where did it go?

Where did it go?

Now, if you haven't noticed, we're repairing Highway 169, which is wonderful, I love it.

But let's be honest, the reason we're doing it is so we can get from point A to point B just a little bit faster, and I'm in favor of it.

I think it's going to be great Once we're done with it next summer.

I'm all in.

But we have this underlying message that faster them is better.

Let's make everything faster because it'll be better.

So there's this low grade pressure in our lives and on ourselves to just go a little bit faster.

Everything we do has got to be a little bit faster.

Which makes me wonder, though, again, what are we missing then?

What are we whipping by so fast?

We don't even notice it.

The great Wendell Berry I love Wendell Berry.

He writes this there is indeed a music in streams, out in nature, where nature takes the time it takes, but it's not for the hurry.

In fact, if you're hurried you can't hear the music.

It has to be loitered by.

You ever loiter somewhere and imagined.

There's music in the streams, but it's not for the hurry, it has to be loitered by and imagined.

Friends, what if we just slowed down a little bit?

The great Dallas Willard once said that hurry is the great enemy of our spiritual lives today.

So spirituality is this degree to which we're awake or asleep, the presence of God, and hurry is the enemy of that volume button going up or down.

It's a great enemy of our spiritual lives.

He says more than any of the egregious evils in culture that we all know about, that you can Google and find out what are the things that are plaguing us today.

More than all those egregious and shocking infringements on our Christian faith in our life, more than those, is the subtle trap of hurry and does more damage.

Friends, I've got many emails from parishioners and people around the area like.

Pastor Ryan, what do you think about this cultural ill?

Or what about this sort of secular idea?

And what about this terrible evil that's in the culture?

And what about that politician who said that one thing?

And it's like those are all bad things.

But I've never once had an email from someone saying hey, pastor Ryan, what do you think about all of us going so fast through our days and we never slowed down?

And what about our overconsumption of just buying more and more and more?

Seems like a problem, doesn't it, pastor Ryan?

I don't get those emails.

No one ever says hey, are we involved in too many clubs or after school activities, or are our kids in too many things, or we have too many appointments, or our schedule is too full, or we're going 100 miles an hour?

I don't get those emails.

But, willers, that hurry is the great enemy in our spiritual lives today.

And there's music in the streams, but it has to be loitered by.

It's slowed down.

By the way, increased speed does not mean increased meaning.

We might think it does, but increasing our speed does not at all In a deeper, richer, more beautiful life.

In fact, it's quite the opposite.

Many times, increasing your speed doesn't mean you're going to increase your joy or your love or your life.

In fact, it often robs us of those things.

Here's what increased speed will get you, and I'm not going to lie to you.

Increased speed does mean more money.

Oftentimes, if you work harder and faster and stay longer at the office, you might increase your salary.

And if you're after one more dollar and you're honest about it, that's fine, then go for it.

Increase your speed and good luck.

But don't say I didn't warn you.

When you're to the end of your life and you ask where did it all go?

What was it all for?

Nobody I've ever met in their death that ever tells me hey, ryan, you know what.

I wish you would have done more.

I wish you would have spent one more hour at the office.

I wish you would have crammed in one more appointment or raced to one more job.

Nobody says that Hurry is the great enemy of our spiritual lives today.

If you want meaning and joy and life and profundity and beauty, to hear the music in the streams, you've got to slow down.

It has to be lauded by.

So we're too busy.

We're going too fast, too fast.

Also, we're too distracted.

We've got a million and one things going on and we're way too distracted.

By the way, look at this picture.

I love this picture.

This is a picture clearly from the sweater and jacket combo is from 1985, ish, you can tell.

Look at that man, that guy has lived in this best life.

And all of those things in that picture, all of them are now on a phone in your pocket and we wonder why we feel so distracted or we don't feel quite right when we wake up.

By the way, also there's these new studies have been going on where they're showing that our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and shorter.

And look, I'm not here to bag on cell phones or social media, but I'm gonna just for a minute.

So I really believe that's the biggest culprit and I know cause.

I've been there and I'm still there on many occasions.

But we ingest these short form media and what they do is they train us.

We like them cause we already have short attention spans, and then they teach us to even like it even more and they deliver short snippets like 30 seconds or less, and you get this dopamine rush and the hit of emotion in 30 seconds or less.

If not, guess what?

Pew, pew, pew, pew.

Just scroll to the next one.

There's an infinity number more right behind that one.

Just keep going.

They call this, by the way, and the research is pretty new.

They call it TikTok brain.

Maybe you've been there.

Here's a sentiment from a young journalist.

What she writes about her own experience with this kind of thing.

She does this Personally.

She writes I don't think I could sit through a whole film anymore.

I know tons of people who can't watch a full length movie any longer, and for those of you who are older, you're like that's crazy.

But if you're young, you're like oh, totally.

Here's why.

Why would I want to?

She says an Instagram reel could give the same hit of emotion in a much shorter timeframe.

It's literally designed to be the perfect quick fix.

By the way, these media websites were designed initially for altruistic reasons, to connect you for life and for exploring.

They're not like that any longer, though.

Now they're designed to hold your attention and to keep you on there as long as possible, which is why it's not surprising when you hear someone say oh, I doom scroll for like two hours and I don't even know what I consumed Happens all the time, cause they designed to do that way.

Okay, she goes on to write.

Then the people around me are the same Lectures on double speed.

Youtube videos watched with one finger tensed over the button that skips five seconds ahead, just in case you get bored.

Impatience with any media longer than a few minutes at most.

In fact, nearly half of all users surveyed on TikTok said that videos longer than a minute were stressful.

Half of them, you guys.

No one's emailed me like Brian.

What are we going too fast?

Are we too distracted?

Too distracted?

Moses, of course, is that wandering Moses?

Moses is wandering around in the desert and he comes across this bush that's on fire and he looks at it.

It's crazy and wild, but he watches it long enough to notice that the bush doesn't burn up, which like okay, maybe think, like how long when he had been standing there watching that bush burn to know it wasn't being consumed.

Like, even dry kindling takes a good seven, eight minutes to burn up, completely right.

So he had been watching this for a long time.

How long does it take for a plant to be consumed once on fire?

I'll just kill.

I'm not gonna do that.

You guys thought I was gonna do it, but how long, like?

How long would it take this plant to burn up before you noticed.

It wasn't gonna burn up all the way, I don't know.

10 minutes, 12 minutes, which means Moses was staring at a bush in the middle of the desert apparently not a lot going on in the middle of the Moab Desert that time of year and he notices.

Only then does he notice that it's not being consumed.

Only then does God finally speak to him.

So a great rabbi, lawrence Kushner, says this the burning bush wasn't a miracle, it was a test.

God wanted to find out whether or not Moses could pay attention to something for more than a few minutes.

When Moses did, then God spoke.

How many of us walk by burning bushes all the time and don't notice it?

The trick is to pay attention to what is going on around you long enough to behold the miracle without falling asleep.

There's another world right here, within this one.

Whenever we pay attention, I'm like I can imagine myself out there and I'd see a bush on fire, like that's incredible.

There's a bush on fire.

That reminds me I'm having a fire tonight with our friends.

We're gonna have a party.

I should have some firewood, which, by the way, reminds me what is fire anyway.

How do you describe what I mean.

Can you hold fire?

Can you throw fire?

Which reminds me Katie wanted me to buy a throw pillow from Target tonight.

Oh, and Target is right near Chipotle.

I'm going to Chipotle and I'm gone Maybe 30 seconds tops, but there's a world right here in the midst of this one, if we notice it.

See, god is probably constantly looking for my attention, wanting to speak to me, but instead I'm sacrificing my attention on the altar of false gods.

Left and right, email, text messages, phone being on all the time.

One more book I'm trying to read, social media.

One more product I've got to consume, notifications turned on and every app me being accessible 24 hours a day.

So the problem is we're too busy, we're going too fast and we're too distracted.

So here's the antidote, and I'll go quickly.

And I made them all S's S words.

There's three S words, so you'd remember my new Monic device, number one I forgot what it is.

Ah, I remember.

Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.

Do as I say, not as I do.

Come on, you try doing this.

Sometimes it's really hard.

We've got to create space.

Now, look, I can't eliminate all of this.

My kids would throw me outside and never let me back in the house.

But maybe I just Maybe, just a couple of times a week.

I take out some things and create space and then, to get very practical in that space, then take time to listen to God.

Well, that's one minute or two minutes or an hour, whatever you can.

The best workout or the best exercise you can do for your body is the one that you'll do.

It's the same with praying or listening to God.

The best one that you can do is the one that you'll actually do.

So if you can go for one minute, great.

If you're brand new to listening to God or being, you know, sort of setting this time aside and creating space, go one minute, but go one minute a day and see what happens, and then go to five minutes and then go a little bit longer if you can.

But take time and create space and then honor that space.

Treat it like it's a date with, like your, you know, your partner or your good friend or a teacher or your boss.

Make it an appointment on your calendar, not to somehow lure God to show up, but for you to show up and for you to be there.

So create space and honor it and then, when you're in that space, listen for God and just see what happens.

Number two slow down.

And I mean literally in every way.

The great John Orpert once asked Dallas Willard he goes Dallas, dallas, hey, give me some advice on how to have a deeper, more meaningful spiritual life.

Dallas, who I've already quoted, said to him after a long pause ruthlessly eliminate, hurry from your life.

And John goes okay, cool, cool, I wrote it down.

What else?

What else?

Give me some more things, what else?

And John says I was ready for the next thing.

I wanted to have a whole list of things.

I could go home and accomplish and do them, and I'm going to be like the greatest spiritual leader of all time and the greatest pastor.

What's next, dallas?

Dallas, again after a long pause, says ruthlessly eliminate, hurry from your life.

So slow down.

Here's what I love to do, if you can I know it isn't always feasible, but instead of driving, go for a walk, walk to the store, walk to your neighbor's house, just go for a walk with your family, even for a 10 minute walk, and slow down.

And when you do, look around and be present with people and stop and say hi, have conversation.

One of the hardest things for me is Sunday mornings when I get pulled in 800 different directions because I love people.

But sometimes, if I'm not careful, I'll say, oh hey, how's it going?

I'm good to meet you, how are you doing?

How's your mom?

How's your dog?

How's your no-transcript?

So it's a good run.

Hey, slow down.

You can even eat slower.

If you have to drive, drive slower.

And all the cops in the room said amen, take your time to breathe.

I mean, watch how fast you eat.

Just notice next time you're having a meal with friends.

We eat at a rapid pace and it's not good for digestion, to be honest.

But slow down, maybe with people.

Now all you performers in the room are looking at me with the side eye and acting like I told you to shove a toothpick in your eye.

But I'm just telling you, try it.

You've got to slow down and listen for God and just see what happens.

Lastly, so space, slow down and then silence.

Embrace the silence, remove your distractions.

One rule I kind of live by and I get kind of lived by it, but it's a good one for me, because when I go home after work, I'll put my phone on loud and I'll put it on top of the fridge so I can still hear it if someone calls me or texts me.

But I don't have to have it on me or I'm just constantly tempted to.

So maybe you want to turn your phone off all the way, when you could home from work or turn the email notifications off or the text ding off, turn the distractions off.

I have a family or friends of mine who their whole family.

They take a whole day, one whole day a week, and turn their phones off.

I know your chest just tightened there from anxiety.

Go analog If you can get off your computer screen.

Get off and write with pen and paper.

Remember pen and paper, it's back in the day we had those.

Turn off your music.

I love having music in the car, but on occasion I'll turn the music off, turn the podcast off and roll the windows down.

It's kind of nice Practice a quiet room, a quiet mind, a quiet body and rest and listen for God.

Elijah goes up to this mountain and he hears God in the sheer silence.

Okay, we're close with this.

We're going to practice it this morning.

I know I'm almost done, but practice the presence of God.

So the good news that I started with the world is full of God.

It's full of God.

The problem isn't that God isn't speaking.

The problem is that we're not there.

We're a thousand other places.

So there's a bunch of advice I gave you Create space, slow down and embrace the silence and then practice the presence of God.

Brother Lawrence wrote a good book called Practicing the Presence of God.

We like candles in churches because flame symbolizes the presence of God, which is all around us all the time.

So, at home or wherever you are, light a candle if you want to and remember that God is there and practice the presence of God.

You could talk out loud to God if he was there in the room with you.

You could listen quietly and just see what God might have to say to you who knows?

But while you're doing your dishes, playing with your children, doing the homework, driving in the car, buying groceries, practice the presence of God.

And this morning we're going to take one minute 60 seconds.

It might feel longer for some of you.

That's good.

We're going to practice the presence of God.

So we're going to get quiet.

No music, no sound, no nothing, and we're going to just wait.

There was a Christian man who invited his Buddhist neighbor to church one Sunday morning and the Buddhist like sure I'll go.

And they go to church and when they're done, the Christian man's dying and no one goes.

Hey, what did you think?

And the Buddhist man was like it was great.

But how do any of you hear from God with all that talking that you do this morning?

We're going to listen, so I'm going to close your eyes and you can picture something, if you want to.

You can picture a cross, you can picture a Bible verse, you can picture the face of Jesus, if you have one, or just anything that you want to.

But hold the empty space and listen for God.

God might yell something out loud to you, maybe not.

The point is that you're there, that you've been called up to the mountain and that you're there.

And if your mind wanders off that's okay, happens all the time Bring it back, just bring it back gently.

Guide yourself back to that image or that thought, and we're going to sit in silence to hear from God this morning for 60 seconds.

Thank you, god.

We thank you for your presence here.

The whole world is full of you.

God, you give us eyes to see and ears to hear.

The mountain, and may we be there, god.

We repent of all the ways which we filled our lives so plumpful and have gone too fast and succumbed to all the distractions.

God, we are coming today, in the ordinary and in the most mundane moments.

You hear, god?