Tag: stillness

A place of rest

Someone once said that the purpose of the news media is the manufacture and maintenance of anxiety.  I Think he was right, but I also think that some churches do something similar.

That famous quotation, “If Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for him” (C.T. Studd), is true. But sensitive souls are vulnerable to a dangerous distortion, “If Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice I make can ever be enough for him”. I wonder if this explains an unhealthy drivenness in the churches?

Activity is good, the lord himself was noted for it, he ‘Went about doing good’ (Acts 10:38) and so should we. But why do I meet a lot of neurotic Christians living with a constant sense of failure, “I’m not doing enough, I’m not keen enough, I don’t have enough faith”.

Preachers and youth leaders can make this worse. Most sermons conclude with an appeal for more activity or more intensity. More activity means that we must ‘do more’, ‘witness more’, ‘pray more’, ‘worship more’. More intensity means ‘pray harder’, ‘worship harder’, ‘have more faith!’

The Bible rejects this driven culture. All but one of Paul’s epistles begin with a simple greeting, “Grace and peace to you…”. We start with God’s grace. Grace means that you are good enough for him already – you cannot work yourself up to a new ‘level’ to enjoy this, you can only receive is as you would a generous gift.

Then there is peace. A little English word that sits on the shoulders of a giant Hebrew one, ‘shalom,’ which means ‘wellbeing’ or ‘wholeness’. Gospel peace is the eventual restoration of my broken humanity – body, mind and spirit. It also means that we can know inner calm in dire circumstances right now.

That is why the most resilient Christians are those with a very high view of the sovereignty of God – they trust him. Our drivenness derives from a poor understanding of God’s nature. ‘Grace? Surely, he couldn’t be that generous?’ ‘Peace? Surely, we need a bit of a kicking to get us going?’

Yes, he is that generous and, no, we don’t need a good kicking. Know this, if you stopped praying today, never go to church again, never share your faith or read your Bible again, God will still love you as much as he would if you fill your life with those things.

So many Christians, in their life and witness, convey a simple message, “Follow Jesus and you could be as frazzled as me”. They are working out of drivenness. My friend Chris once said to me, “If I wanted more peace in my life, I wouldn’t do church, I’d check out Buddhism!”

In his lovely book, ‘Working from a place of rest’ Tony Horsefall advocates the opposite. On old hymn captures Tony’s message like this:

Drop thy still dews of quietness,
till all our strivings cease;
take from our souls the strain and stress,
and let our ordered lives confess
the beauty of thy peace.

An ’ordered life’, one that expresses God’s grace and peace, is an incredible advert for the gospel. If Chris could see it lived, he wouldn’t bother with Buddhism.

I have not stopped challenging people to ‘go about doing good’. But I find myself more often encouraging people to learn to say ‘no’ and take time to appreciate grace, peace, love, hope, and joy. I believe it would transform our church life for the better if our pastors and youth leaders did the same.

The skill of being still

Listen to this on audio here

We sing about it: ‘Be still for the presence of the Lord…’ We read about it: ‘Be still and know that I am God…’ But we are never still! The bible often speaks of ‘stillness’, and the things related to it, such as meditating and waiting on God. But Christians, especially evangelical Christians, cannot abide stillness, we like noise and activity, with a side-order of mild chaos. We don’t do stillness.

Here’s why the skill of being still is important. First, stillness is a helpful start to a time of prayer, it puts us in the right frame of mind. Second, the practice of stillness and Christian meditation develops a ‘still’ heart, so that we cope better when things get frantic. Third, at times of crisis we can retreat into that still place and re-connect with God. We all need to learn to be still, it is a vital component of a healthy spiritual life.

Achieving stillness

I use Psalm 131 to help me with this. When I start to pray, or study, or meditate, my head feels like a busy train station at rush hour, full of noise and clatter. Here is King David’s solution:

My heart is not proud, O LORD,

My eyes are not haughty.

I do not concern myself with great matters.

But I have stilled and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with it’s mother. Like a weaned child is my soul within me.

O Israel, hope in the Lord, both now and evermore.

David begins Psalm 131 by dealing with some of the distracting noises in his head. He names three.

Pride – that feeling that we are better than others, that God should be chuffed that we want to talk with him. ‘My heart is not proud’ he says, laying pride aside.

Second is haughtiness – that tendency to look down on others. ‘My eyes are not haughty’, he says and lays that judgemental spirit aside.

Remember that David was a head of state, and the work never stopped. It was his job to think about ‘great matters’. But in this special place he lays this third distraction aside, All that work-related head-clutter must wait, it has no place here.

This is how to achieve stillness; you cannot eliminate random thoughts and feelings. Just recognise them and let them go. It takes a little while to learn how to do this but after a while it becomes easier.

Mindfulness and meditation

So far, this is rather like mindfulness, a method of being quiet, letting go of distracting thoughts, and being in the moment. I have found mindfulness to be a helpful way to learn the skill of being still. But Christian meditation is more than that. When my mindfulness teacher asked me how it was going, I used to say, ‘Wonderful, when I take time to be still, I get a lovely sense of the presence of God’. He would say, ‘That is not supposed to happen!’

This illustrates the big difference, mindfulness teaches you to ‘be still’, biblical stillness says, ‘Be still… and know that I am God’. That’s a world of difference, isn’t it? This is why I always focus on a verse or two of scripture when I meditate. I often use this little Psalm.

The picture we are left with is of a small child with a full belly dozing happy and safe in its mother’s arms. Stillness, for the Christian, is clearing the decks to be with the Lord. This is where you belong, this is where you are safe, here you are accepted.

Roy Searle, a Baptist pastor in northern England describes a moment when his young son came into his study while he was working. ‘What do you want?’ Roy asked, ‘Nothing’, the little boy said, ‘I just wanted to be with you’.

That, my friends, is stillness.