June 4

The Surprising Reward of Silence

On a recent bike ride I saw at least 75% of the people walking had a phone connected to their ear. I was staggered by the thought that 30 years ago you had to have a cord attached to the phone. We live in a day of constant noise.

Bernie Krausse who records nature sounds for film and television says in 1968 to get one hour of undisturbed sound, no airplanes or cars, it would take him 15 hours. Today, to get the same undisturbed nature sound, it takes him 2000 hours of recording time. We live in a noisy world.

Elijah has just championed one of the greatest revivals in history, yet in chapter 18 he finds himself alone in a cave, drowning in the sea of self-pity. God knows the only solution to this problem is for Elijah to hear HIS voice so he sets up a little experiment. He tells Elijah to go out and stand on the mountain, and then a powerful tornado wind tears the mountain apart. But the Lord was not in the wind. Next is an 8.0 earthquake that shakes the mountain to the core. But God is not in the shaking of the mountain. Next up is a fire. And the fire burns everything in sight, it is spectacular, but in the end no voice of the Lord. Finally there is a gentle whisper from God. And there in the whisper Elijah hears the voice of God.

Our days are filled with cell phones, ipods, baseball. Fox News, radio, telephones, Facebook, emails, The Fan, Lady Gaga, honking horns and nagging bosses… talking people. Every day our ears are assaulted with a 1000 cacophonous sounds.

Yet Elijah said the voice of God is a gentle whisper. If this is true then we can’t have a relationship with God until there are long periods of quiet in our lives. This is a problem for me, since I have a terrible case of spiritual ADD. A lot of this is caused by the culture I live in. The culture tells me silent people aren’t very productive. Silence is a waste of time. We are performance based and silent people are perceived as being lazy. Being busy makes me feel important. The tendency is equate activity with significance. If we are on cell phone, always talking, we must be very important. We also fill our lives with noise because we are afraid God just might break through and then we would have to change our lives. We want to remain in control. God would just mess things up. So we stay busy so he can't break through.

If it has been a long time since you have heard the voice of God, go sit quietly in a cave (or a room if you don’t live on a mountain) for a time and begin to train your self to be silent before God.

Today is accountability day.

Set aside Monday, June 21st for our Summer Bible Reading Encouragement Dinner 7:00 at our house.
RSVP if you can attend.