Into the Quiet

Hello and welcome to the John Mark Thomas Teachings podcast. My name is Yinka Doss and I'm your host. Each week we feature teachings by John Mark or other voices in the formation space and it's great to have you with us. This week we're bringing you a message from the 24-7 Prayer USA National Gathering in 2025. In this episode John Mark explores the practice of solitude, silence and stillness, asking what it would look like for us to follow Jesus into the quiet in a world that's noisy than ever before. Here's John Mark. Good evening. Peace be with you. May the Father and the Holy Spirit and the Son but in the right order bless you. It is a delight to be with you. Please turn your Bibles to Luke chapter 5 and we stand to honor God and to honor what we are about to read as more than just a story or a wisdom tradition, but as the wisdom of the living God. Luke chapter 5, short text, verse 15 and 16. Let me just give you a moment again in the quiet to just take a few deep breaths and open your heart to receive whatever God would deposit into your inner woman or man tonight. Luke chapter 5, verse 15. With the news about him, Jesus, spread all the more so that crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their illnesses. But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed. Let me read verse 16 one more time. But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed. Take seat. I have shown you the power of silence, how thoroughly it heals and how fully pleasing it is to God. Know that it is by silence that the saints grew, that it was because of silence that the power of God dwelt in them, because of silence that the mysteries of God were known to them. We need to find God and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. Mother Teresa of the missionaries of charity. At once the spirit sent him out into the wilderness and he was in the wilderness 40 days being tempted by the Satan. He was with the wild animals and angels attended him. The Gospel writer Mark. Speech is the organ of this present world. Silence is the mystery of the world to come. Saint Isaac the Syrian. Silence is God's first language. Saint John of the Cross. Very early in the morning while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house, went off to a solitary place where he prayed. Mark one. Without solitude, it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life. We do not take the spiritual life seriously if we do not set aside some time to be with God and listen to him and renown. All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone. The philosopher Pascal. Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest. Mark six. And to end the world of men is made of jangling noises. But with God it is a great silence. Without silence is a melody. Sweet is the contentment of love thrilling as a touch of flame. When I enter into God, all of life has a meaning. My fever is gone in the great quiet of God. That is just a very small sampling of what the saints and teachers of the Christian way over hundreds of years have to say about the importance of quiet in the spiritual life. I'm working on a project right now on quiet and all I really want to do with you for the next bit of our time is just share a little bit of what I'm learning. I did quite a bit of research on the new emerging science around noise pollution. You may be familiar with this. The World Health Organization recently named noise pollution as the second worst environmental toxin after air pollution worse than oil and gas. A recent study in the European Union found it was responsible for a million dallas a year that's an acronym for disability adjusted life years. Hence, let's say you live by a freeway and you live to 70 when you would have lived to 75 if you called Nashville home. It turns out that noise is devastating to both our body and to our mind or our mental health. This study found that prescriptions for anxiety medication rise 28% for every 10 decibel increase in neighborhood noise. This is of course tied to issues of systemic injustice and even of race as noisy, the kind of noisy apparatus that is required by a city or a metropolitan area, freeports, freeways, airports, shipping centers, Amazon delivering kind of cohorts are often built in underserved communities that don't have the agency to mount a nimby resistance. Here's a basic diagnosis from a scientific journal I read. The article was entitled, This is your brain on silence. The body reacts immediately and powerfully to noise. Even in the middle of deep sleep, neuro physiological research suggests that noises first activate the amygdala clusters of neurons located in the temporal lobes of the brain associated with memory formation and emotion. This activation prompts an immediate release of stress hormones like cortisol. People who live in consistently loud environments often experience chronically elevated levels of stress hormones. So if you think about it, you know, we evolved or created or both or whatever for quieter soundscapes. I recently started backpacking again and I am just in love. There's something about getting out into the wilderness somewhere that even a four wheel drive vehicle cannot go. Only your feet can take you there. It is so quiet. It's not actually silent. There's birds and coyotes and wind in the trees, but it is quiet. And if you think about it, when you're out in nature, pretty much anything that is loud is dangerous. If there's a loud noise and you're out like backpacking four days into this year, you know, whatever, then if it's really loud, it's probably coming to eat you. It's a tiger or predator or bear or an avalanche or a hurricane or a tornado or an earthquake or a tsunami or a sleeper wave. So when you're driving around Nashville, your mind may know this is just the freeway or the garbage truck outside my Airbnb, but your body interprets all noise above a certain decibel level as a threat. Now scientists distinguish between noise and sound. Noise is unwanted sound. That's why we experience a rock concert as joy and a leaf blower as that neighbor we hate, right? And even if you're listening to a live band later tonight at some, you know, Dye Bar in Nashville, even if the sound level is freely chosen by you, you want to be there and it's good stress. Noise is stress. Period. Full stop. It's still stress on your central nervous system. And the reality is we live in a world of noise. You could call it an age of noise. Our cities are noisy. Freeways and airplanes and garbage trucks and cars that are so fast and so furious. Bleeding alerts. But our culture is noisy too. Even if you live on a farm in the middle of Tennessee, up a dirt road, our culture is so loud. There's the noise of LAX or whatever where I live and the noise of the front page of your newspaper and the incessant political hostile war that we are living through. There's the noise of the internet, so much information. We are swimming in information. We are drowning. We are suffocating and choking on information. And of course, there's the noise of social media. So many opinions. Everybody has an opinion about everything. It's emotionally loaded and so much outrage and fear peddling and public shaming and moralizing. And here's the thing. And I say this with joy, but our churches are noisy too. We worship the God of peace to the sound of electric guitar solos. We love God. The God whose first language is silence with words and thoughts and ideas and inspiring messages from guest speakers. Not bad things at all. We often go through our entire Sunday gatherings without so much as a deep breath, much less a moment of silence. I was at a church recently that I would consider to be one of the best churches in the country, if not the world. It was an honor to be there. And like most churches, there was basically zero silence from the moment I walked into the building to the moment I left. But there was one moment where the pastor kind of overseeing the gathering said, I just want to give you 15 seconds to just listen to God. And as somebody that has a bit of qualms about how noisy the modern church is, I was so happy. Finally, a moment to breathe. Sat through three gatherings. Not one time. I count it because I'm that guy. Not one time. You're like, you're supposed to be listening to God. I know. Not one time did we make it to 15 seconds. I think eight was the highest we made it. And this is what I would consider to be one of the best churches in the world. What is it about our churches? We cannot be quiet for 15 seconds. Often rather than being a refuge from the noise, we become just a Christianized purveyor of it. My conviction is that the enemy is here mixed in with the weed and the tears at work underneath it all. I remember years ago, an essay from Andrew Sullivan in New York City entitled, I Used to Be a Human Being, which was kind of on the effect of the smartphone on modern culture. And he had a few kind of throwaway paragraphs on religion. He's kind of a liberal Catholic. He had this passing line, quote, if the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism, but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation. He was tapping into a thread that actually predates the digital age and the kind of spread of urbanization. This is a dominant theme in the writings of C.S. Lewis, if you're familiar with his work, writing in the 1940s about the effect of noise and hurry on the spiritual life. In his masterpiece, Screwtape Letters, he has the fictional demons say, on behalf of hell, listen to this, quote, music and silence. How I detest them both. No square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, music or silence. But all has been occupied by noise with the capital N. Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless and viral. We will make the whole universe a noise in the end. I live just outside Los Angeles. I think they're doing pretty good on that threat. Is this strategy of the enemy on your radar that one of his goals in your life is to drown out your ears, literal and archetypal with noise? Thankfully, in a noisy world that most of us call home, we have a rich tradition to draw from. What the professor of church history and a friend of mine, Dr. Gerald Sitzer, calls water from a deep well. Jesus himself called treasures new and old from the storehouse that offer you and I wisdom for walking with God in a world of noise. Jesus himself begins his ministry by going into the quiet. Just if you have your Bible open, turn one page to the left back to chapter four. This is essentially the beginning of the Jesus story, right? Look at chapter four, verse one. Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit. There's one of the most fascinating lines in the New Testament. Left the Jordan and was led by the spirit into the wilderness where for 40 days he was tempted by the devil. The word translated wilderness there and the NIV at least, my version of the Bible is Aramos in Greek. Can you say that word? Well done. It can be translated the solitary place or the quiet place or the lonely place or the desert or the deserted place or the wilderness or the wild place or just this afternoon as I was prepping, I discovered two more, the secluded place or the remote place. And Jesus visit to the Aramos and the story that Luke tells was a key inflection point. The apostle John later tells us the reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil's work to make war on Satan and to defeat him. And we often think of that as happening at the cross, an atonement theory called Christ's Victor that goes all the way back to the earliest theological journeys of the church, the victory of Christ. But that victory is not isolated to the cross and the resurrection. It actually begins years before right here where Jesus goes toe to toe with the same tempter that came to Adam and Eve in the garden. But where Adam and Eve failed, where you failed, where the prophets and the judges and the kings of Israel and generation after generation after generation failed, Christ succeeded and defeated the evil one. And what happened here is a turning point in the story of Jesus. If you look down at verse 14, Jesus returned to Galilee. This is the end in the power of the spirit. First time we read this line and news about him spread through the whole countryside. He was teaching in their synagogues and everyone praised him. It's in pedestrian insight, but Jesus did not begin his, quote, ministry until after time in the quiet. If only all of us pastors and leaders were to follow Jesus's example. And this visit to the Aramaus was not a one and done visit. It was woven into the fabric of Jesus' life. Hence if you turn back to our anchor text and look at this just one more time, after Jesus begins, we just read it in the power of the spirit to preach and to teach and to heal the sick and to deliver the demon eyes and to raise the dead and to work miracles. We read understandably verse 15, the news about him spread all the more so that crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their illnesses. Crowds are noisy. You guys are rockists tonight. And that's a compliment, not an insult. It's beautiful. That's 16. Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed. That phrase lonely places is just a different English translation of the same Greek word. Aramaus, it's the desert, the deserted place. It's the quiet. Here's a few alternative translations of verse 15. Jesus himself frequently withdrew to the wilderness and prayed. Jesus often slipped away to be alone so he could pray. As often as possible, Jesus withdrew to out of the way places for prayer. So this wasn't just a place that Jesus went to once or even went to regularly. It was a practice, a discipline, a rhythm of life for Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of the Living God. As you know, it has since come to be called the practice of solitude, silence, and stillness. And there's little that I could say to this room about the practice of silence and solitude and stillness that you don't already know. You are literally the prayer people. But at the risk of boring you, let me just offer you a few words by way of reminder before we move on. First off, solitude. It is very important to understand what solitude is not. It's not aloneness. So when social scientists studied the effect of solitude on the human person, I read a lot of that research recently. It was really interesting. They have to distinguish between solitude and aloneness. So aloneness is what introverts like myself love. It's when we're not with other people, but we may be texting people or watching TV about people or reading a book by a person or folding laundry or working on a sermon or calendar planning. We're alone, but we're not in solitude. This is a crucial distinction because many people mistakenly assume that solitude is a preference-based spiritual discipline for introverts and those that are, quote, into that sort of thing. This is a tragedy for extroverts because they never experience the depth of intimacy with God that I believe is only possible in the quiet place. And it is a tragedy for introverts, too, because solitude is warped into a spiritualized version of a little me time for dad who's stressed out and just needs to decompress, which does nothing but deepen my narcissism, not set me free from it. In reality, this was fascinating research. Studies show that once you distinguish between solitude and aloneness, introverts have no higher desire for or enjoyment of solitude than extroverts. Level playing field once you take the books away. So what is it if it's not aloneness, if it's not just time to chill out and decompress and read a good book? What is it? Ruth A. Le Barton defines it this way and her excellent work on this subject. It's most basic and profound level is simply an opportunity to be ourselves with God. That's why it's not the same thing as aloneness. You're not alone. You're with God. The Saint Jerome, the translator of the Vulgate in the fourth century said, we are never less alone than when we are alone. But honestly, my favorite definition of solitude, I think he may be a believer, but doesn't come from a Christian. He comes from Cal Newport and his book, Digital Minimalism. His paradigm for solitude is very simple. It's a place that is free from other inputs where there are no other inputs into your mind, into your brain, into your five senses or the body itself, other than God, the voice of God and your own heart. Here it is that's coming up in your own heart, laid bare before God. I did this 21-day solitude retreat a few years ago that was overseen by an elderly clinical psychologist and spiritual director. It's this punk rock underground program. It's been around for decades, but it has no name, no website. You can't sign up for it anywhere because it's absolutely horrible. It's terrifying. I wanted to do it for years and I just could never get away from my life for 21 days until somebody stole my life and my job and my salary. I was unemployed and then I was like, you know what, I have time to do it right now. I should do it. So I did. You get there and it's really strict. There are lots of rules around it. You have to turn in your phone, all of your devices. There's absolutely no contact with the outside world at all. You pack in all your own food. You're not allowed to talk to a single person. It's on this kind of remote cabin up in Kewchit Sound on a remote stretch of coastline. You're all by yourself. You're not allowed any alcohol. You're not allowed more than one cup of coffee a day. You can't do any exercise, nothing to quote discharge anxiety from your body. Your one human contact is like every morning, five days a week at 5.50 a.m. There was an hour and a half long depth therapy session, which is kind of like therapy, but without the part where you feel good at the end, you know. And like 21 days of this, right? And one of the things that was really hard for me was you're not allowed any books. You can't bring practicing the presence of God by Brother Lawrence or Letters of a Modern Day Mystic or How to Hear God by Pete Grig, which is a great book by the way. You can't bring any of that. The Bible is quote allowed, and yes, that's the word he used, but with a strong warning, not to use it as a distraction from God and your pain. And I asked him, like, why I get no phones. I get no alcohol. I even kind of sort of get the no going for a run thing because you want me to feel all the anxiety of my whatever. Okay. But why no books? Like books are a vital part of my life with God. You discover the right book and it's just a form of prayer and it's just opening me to God. Like why, there's such a big part of my life with God. Why no books? And he said, well, this program was designed to recreate the desert. Jesus in the desert, Moses in the desert, Elijah in the desert, Paul in the desert. And then he just said one line that I will never forget. He said, in the desert teaches by taking away. And I realized I only know how to learn through addition, through adding new truth, wisdom, insight into my brain, through a podcast, through a book, through a sermon, through a song, through a therapy session, through a mentor, through scribbling down notes. I know how to learn through addition. It has a really good and important place. But the desert, the Aramos, the quiet teaches through subtraction, they're stripping you down to where there are no other inputs, just the voice of God and all the other stuff coming up in you. All the noise begins to go away and we can actually hear. And secondly, silence. This is pretty self-explanatory, but as you know, of course, there are two dimensions to silence. The most obvious one is external silence or exterior silence where you silence all of the noise outside you. No people in a crowded coffee shop, no TV playing in the background, no music, even if it's worship music in your AirPods, no chimes or push notifications from your phone, it's quiet. And that in and of itself is healing. There's actually all sorts of science about just the neurological healing effect on the body of just silence. People try to kind of spiritualize silence, which means allegorize silence. Like I'm alone with God in my heart at the coffee shop with your AirPods Max in, rocking it out to Bethel, just going, right? That's great, but that's not silence. You're human. You have a body. You have a central nervous system. Being different is happening in you as a person, as a soul. In silence then, in noise. But the second dimension is interior silence. This is 10,000 times harder. This is where you attempt, and it is easier said than done, so be really gentle with yourself. To quiet all of the thoughts and the worries and the emotions and the incessant river of conscious distraction and the rumblings of the heart inside you, the noise of your own brain, your own fear and worry and greed and lust and envy and insecurity and shame and pride. It is hard to hear the voice of God over the roar of our own brain. And as Saint John of the latter said 15 centuries ago, the first one to really attempt to translate the desert fathers and mothers to the wider church, essentially said how you are outside of prayer will determine how you are inside of prayer. Meaning if your life is noisy and busy and chaotic and multitasking and full of information overload and texts and alerts and outrage and gossip and opinion and fear mongering and obsessive news checking, and then you go into silence. How you are outside is how you are inside. All of that is going to follow you in. It is going to be really hard to hear the tender loving voice of the Father. Your secret place is going to be crowded with a lot of other voices. It is like that scene in the Empire Strikes Back. All things really are. Where Luke is training on Dagobah and he sees that mysterious black cave and he asks Yoda what is in there and Yoda says only what you take with you. What is in the Array Mas, only what you take with you. Hence the final layer of this practice is stillness. One of my favorite gifts of 24-7 prayer and this beautiful movement, somebody used the word raktag. Gerald, did you say that? That was not kind. Kidding, you are kind of raktag. But one of my favorite gifts of this movement to the global church is your intro refrain on Lectio 365, which my family listens to every morning on the drive to school. As we enter prayer now, we pause to be still, say it with me, to recenter our scattered senses upon the presence of God. Well done. You are listening. That is a prayer for stillness. The Eastern Orthodox Metropolitan Callisto Swear who studied under C.S. Lewis defines stillness this way. Stillness is a state of inner tranquility or mental quietude and concentration. Not simply silence, but an attitude of listening to God and of an openness to God. It's coming to a place where the troubled waters of your heart and your janky mind, what now one used to call monkey brain, settle down to like a glassy lake early in the morning. And you're just there before God, quietly, lovingly waiting. Silence is about so much more than peace or tranquility, not less. That is an essential precondition for so much of our spiritual formation. But ultimately, it is an attitude, as we're said, is about an opening to God, a surrender. It's about a yielding and a freedom from what psychologists would call our attachments, all of our emotionally dysregulated clinging to the things we think we need in order to be at peace and okay. But in reality, our prison, it's a detachment from outcomes. Arrested peace, whatever comes, not what I will, but your will be done into your hands. I commit my spirit and all will be well, all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well. Resting in God, stillness, solitude, silence and stillness. Now as I was praying about our time together this evening, this is just like what I felt I should bring. It's embarrassingly simple. This is what I'm working on right now, so that does make a little bit sense. But honestly, I doubt much I just said that you don't already know. So I was a bit curious about what God may have for you tonight, and I likely will never know the answer to that question. But on one level, I think this is just an invitation to the practice of solitude, silence and stillness. Especially if you are new to following Jesus or not even yet a follower of Jesus or just new to this practice, or you found ways to excuse your way out of it because of your personality profile, your extroversion, or your stage of life, or certainly Jesus would not know what it's like to have a two-year-old or whatever it may be. And I just, I want to say to you, it would be, I think, impossible for me to understate how important it is for you, like Jesus, to slip away. If Jesus needed this practice, how much more? Yeah, but you don't understand. Like I'm a young parent, I got three kids under. If Jesus needed this practice, yeah, but you don't understand. Like I'm an executive, you wouldn't know what that's like, you just read the Bible and pray. But if Jesus needed this practice, yeah, but I'm a college student. Oh, yes, you play video games for 30 hours a week. If Jesus needed this practice, how much more so do you and I? Now and once said, without solitude, it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life. I know you're not supposed to rate the practices or the ways of being with Jesus, but let me break that rule. It's solitude and it's community. Trying to follow Jesus without community is just as ludicrous and nonsensical as trying to follow Jesus without quiet. Yet many of us are trying to find a pathway to God that doesn't ever require us to be alone or away from our phone or face our anxiety or come to stillness. And God is gracious and He will love you and meet you wherever you are in the world, but you are still cutting yourself off from life. We do not take the spiritual life seriously if we do not set aside some time to become a monk, but some time to be with God and to listen to Him. You can say it that bluntly if you're Henry Nowan, I can't so I can quote him. That's my passive aggressive approach to you. No, that's the invitation to you. This is true for all followers of Jesus, but it's especially true for pastors and leaders, which I know is a large chunk of the room. Elton Shrewblood, who was a Quaker pastor in the Chaplain at Stanford University about a century ago, once said, the more public your life is, the more you have to learn to hide. Whether you're an international celebrity, you have to wear a hat and dark glasses to go to the grocery store. I doubt that's you. Or just the local pastor of a small church. Your life is public at some level. And you and I need to learn to hide like Jesus did, to slip away. Literally, the disciples would have to go out searching for Jesus. Where is he? We woke up and he was just like, God, could the same be said of you? And we have to give the Arraymos enough time for it to do its work, or really better said for God to do His work through it. That's the problem. Process is not quick. Huge problem for most of us in the room. It takes time. The world we live in has sped up to an insane pace. Our phones have deformed us. They have expected us. They have conditioned us to expect life to be fast, controllable, and easy. And life, certainly the spiritual life, it is slow. It is all about surrender and how uncontrollable life is. And I don't care what anybody tells you. It is not easy. It's beautiful. It's worth every sweat. But man, it is not easy. We've been malformed by just, I'm hungry. I don't want to cook. Few twists of the thumb. Chipotle, nine minutes later at the door. Isn't life glorious? But that's not how life with God is. That's not how prayer is. Prayer moves at the same speed it always has. Your body moves at the same speeds. Your nervous system, your mind, your soul moves at the speed that God created it to move long ago. And if you're new to this practice, a lot of people fear it. They fear the quiet. They're scared to death to be alone. Why is it that we always have ear pods in and always have a podcast going or music going or the TV playing in the background? Why can't we ever just sit there and just be quiet? There are lots of reasons, but one is just straight up fear. I got the chance when I was working on this project, I'm on right now, to go up to Seattle area and visit what is purportedly the quietest place on earth, the anechoic chamber, the Microsoft chamber, maybe Microsoft offices. And it's this insane like science room, you know, the quietest place on earth is 20 decibels. This place is negative 20 decibels. So you go in and you can hear your, I could hear my eyelids opening close. I could hear my blood pumping. I could hear like the, when I would move my net, like my vertebrae grinding. I was like, shoot, I need a chiropractor. It was really fun. But I got actually really scared beforehand because I get there and they like give me this dressing down about like how terrifying it is. If people are in there for long, the world record is 68 minutes in this chamber. After 45 minutes, most people begin to hallucinate and often people go mad and they said a large number of people can't make it past the two minute mark. And they said afterwards you need to carve out an hour. You can't just leave. We have a room for you to decompress. And I'm like, what? All of a sudden I got really scared. Like I thought I was getting like a cool paragraph for my next book and like a good story to tell in a sermon. And now I'm like going to need like a medical visit or whatever. And it was wonderful, by the way. I want one in my house so bad. They had to come in and check like after two minutes. It was like their rule. They won't let you say it. I was like, yes, I'm great. Can you please like turn off the light? It was, I just sat there, centering prayer, just being loved by the Trinity for 30 minutes until our session ran out. And they're like, you have to get out now. We have somebody else coming in. I was like, come on. I have that world record in the bag. In the bag. And so I'm clearly just so monkishly godly that it was fantastic. But I was not anxious at all for me. But then I realized most people are literally never alone. Never in the quiet. They sleep next to their phone. They wake up to it and call for it. I mean, never alone. Because what's in there only what you take with you. You're in there. Your dad's in there. Your mom's in there. Your divorce is in there. Your secret sin is in there. And the love of God is in there with all of it too. You have nothing to fear. What is waiting for you on the other side is a voice just saying over and over and over again. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. What's waiting for you on the other side is the God of peace, the still point at the center of all reality. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. What's waiting for you on the other side is freedom, truth and honesty and pure joy and peace. And I love you. I love you. I love you. You do not need to be afraid. But secondly, at another level, I think tonight there's an invitation. I say this, my wife always tells me, whenever you say humbly, that means arrogantly, honey, so never say humbly. So, okay, I mean this gently. I don't know. I think there's an invitation here to your tribe or your beautiful movement to the quiet. I did not grow up in the charismatic stream of the church. So my first introduction to the work of the Holy Spirit in the church was through the UK church. In fact, one of the first pastors I was introduced to was Pete Greig. I will never forget sitting for coffee with him near Holy Trinity Brompton. And leaders like Pete's and others that still have imprinted so deeply onto who I am as a person. It changed my life. It changed our church in Portland. It was before. It was after. It has enriched my life with God and life in community in ways that I could not articulate or put into even clumsy words. But every moment, even the really good ones, every, I'm sorry, every movement, even the really good ones has its blind spots. And as a fellow lover of the Holy Spirit, I offer for your consideration that the charismatic movement in general is highly vulnerable to our world of noise. In part because it came into the Protestant arm of the church, different in the Catholic story, but in the Protestant arm through the contemporary worship movement, which in turn came into the church from rock and roll. And so the renewal of the Holy Spirit was tied to great drums and electric guitar solos. And there is a place for that, certainly, but the world has radically changed since the 1970s when all of this kicked off. At that time, the need was to stir people up to a greater love for God, to awaken people out of a nominal Christianity, to a passion for the living God. And there is still a need for that, especially in certain parts of the country and the world. And especially for joy and a time of great sorrow. But there is, I think, far more of a need or at least equally strong a need now, in my view, to calm people down, to recenter our scattered senses on the presence of God. For passion and for stillness. After remember, passion in the Christian tradition does not mean emotional energy. It means what you are willing to suffer and die for, what you are willing to bleed for, the passion of Christ. Passion can be noisy and exuberant and joyful, and it can be quiet and mournful and devoted at the same time. If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism, but distraction. Perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation. We've just started a little microchip in the mountains where I live. It's tiny. It's really small. It's meeting at my house right now. I'm having the best time of my life. One of the things we're exploring is just what would the charismatic move of the spirit of Jesus in our time? What would it look like in the quiet? Healing, praying for healing, prophesying, asking for miracles, deliverance from the demonic, all of it, but without this. Nothing against this. But we have a candle in my house, but we don't have this. What would it look like just with a community sitting before God and what St. John of the Cross called silent love? What if the passion of the next 10, 20, 30 years was to sit alone or together and to burn quietly for God? Now, this may just be something that God is leading me to and two or three others in the room. We can start our own ragtag offshoot. I'm a firm believer in letting the spirit of God form the inner architecture of our hearts. In the words of Hebrews, letting him work in us what is pleasing to his will or the words of Paul and Philippians to work out your salvation with fear and trembling for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose. This may not be what God is working in you and your community and your circles and your leadership. Bless you. You may be called more to stir up a passion for God and this isn't either or it's one of the things I love about Christians worship leading. It's not joyful exuberance or quiet. It's both and it's paradox. That's the Christian faith. Everything is paradox. Anytime you've gotten on one side, you've lost the heart of God. It's both and done beautifully this evening. But as for me, I have come to believe that God is leading me to a quieter life to commune in the quiet with the God is first language is silence. And I think this is part of what the spirit of God is stirring in our time. I don't know. I know this. Most of what you've been talking about for the last 24 hours happens best in the quiet fear of God. I was just in New York City and my friend John Tyson said, you know, when you're in Manhattan, everything you see was made by and forgive the language. It's his not mine, but it was made by man. And so you measure your life against the accomplishments of other men and women. But when you go out into nature, everything you see was made by God. And you measure your life against the creation and the handiwork and the fingerprints of the creator. When we get away from the noise of our life into the quiet, we come face to face with the fear of God. How could we not be humble? How could we not repent? And then as we hear this soft voice say, I love you, I love you, I love you become my friend. How could we not say yes to friendship with God? So to end, you know, we come to a conference like this and it's so inspiring to be here. It's also, and I think this is a bit my overachiever perfectionist, it's also a bit intimidating, right? Like, holy cow, how do I take all of this back with me and the enemy is there to like speak shame into our life. You're not doing enough or you're doing it wrong or you're not good enough for now. You're too noisy. But before I wasn't noisy and that look, whatever. How do I take this back to my life, to my church, to my community, to my city? Just a reminder, psychologists tell us that growth commons when we push about 10% beyond our current capacity. So if you're very easy analogy, if you're working out like Tyler does nine times a day and I do nine times a year and you're there. And let's say right now you can currently bench press 100 pounds. If you want to grow, you don't like go from 100 pounds to 200 pounds. What happens if you try? You crush your sternum and die. If you want to grow, you go from 100 to 110. And then when you kind of have that, you go to 120 and 125, 34 and you level up slowly and incrementally and you get stronger. That's kind of how just life is. So as you return home, and this is I'm landing the plane here, I promise. Here's just a question for you to sit with now in the moment. And as you return, what could you do to make your life 10% slower, quieter and more prayerful? Just take a moment right now. Just reflect on that radical overhaul. There's a place for that. But what about just 10%? What could you do? What could you stop doing? Just take a minute. Think about it. Really what you're asking is God, what are your invitations to me? What are you forming in my heart? What are you leading me to? And if that question is not where you would identify, it's not where you would put the finger on the pulse of the Spirit's invitation to you, then try this one on. What is it that the Spirit of God is currently working in your heart? You are you. You're not Tyler. Thank God you're not me. Any of the speakers or leaders up here, you are fearfully and wonderfully made. Your life was ordained by the living God. Yes, you're broken. We're all a walking disaster. I love you. I love you. I love you. What is God forming in your heart? I don't mean that in the sense of radical individualism. I mean that in we are the body of Christ. You play your crucial part in the body. What is God working in you? Not for yourself, but for others for the body of Christ. Take a moment. Now, as we go into the evening or week from now on a solitude day or just tomorrow morning when you wake up, God, what are you stirring in my heart? May the God of quiet bless you. May you speak to you in a language you can understand. May you have ears to hear what the Spirit is saying to you. May he fulfill all that he has called you to do and to be and to say and to have. And may your soul throb with joy in the great quiet of God. Let's stand together and pray. Let's pray. John Mark made a great point that growth happens when we push about 10% beyond our current capacity. So to end, let's take some time to talk with the Holy Spirit about what that 10% could look like for you. Start by taking a few deep breaths with me. Become aware of God's presence. And when you're ready, wait on the Holy Spirit for insight into that same question. John Mark offered, What is one specific thing that I could stop doing would do differently to make my life 10% more prayerful, quiet and slow? I'll give you 30 seconds here and then close with Amen. Amen. Amen. We develop resources to help churches and small groups apprentice in the way of Jesus. Thanks a little bit for our show music. We're a crowd-funded non-profit, so everything we make is completely free because it's already been paid for by the circle, our community of monthly givers. Special thanks today goes to Josh from Centennial Colorado. Mark from Irmo, South Carolina. Kayla from Barron Springs, Michigan. Jeremy from Greenwood, Indiana. And Wendy from Rome, Georgia. Thank you all very much. To join these friends on the circle or learn more about our resources, visit practiceintheway.org. Until next time, may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.