The more I read Church history, the plainer it is that the heroes of the faith made a regular practice of the discipline of solitude. Augustine, Luther, Whitefield, Brainerd, and many others knew firsthand the power of time spent alone with God. That’s what solitude is: the paradox of alone with. If seeking it was good for them, it will be good for us.
While we take a closer look this week at Jonah’s whale fail episode—in which he himself experiences the benefits of solitude—there are a few things we need to remember.
First, Discipline
The Oxford English Dictionary says that as a noun, discipline can be defined as “the controlled behavior resulting from activity or experience that provides mental or physical training, or a system of rules of conduct.” As a verb, it means to “train oneself to do something in a controlled and habitual way.”
So it’s not a one-and-done. We come back to it again and again. It’s about learning self-control by application of effort; that is, trying. If habit is a cussword in your house, consider discipline its positive inverse.
When we apply the discipline of solitude to our lives as disciples of Christ, it means that we should see the same kind of fruit Jesus bore. Follower of Christ, you walk the same way He does. You do what He does. If you don’t see the same fruit today, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing going on under the soil. Faith is, after all, requisite in the life of the believer; we cannot please God without it. Only the eyes of faith can behold fruit in a dead seed, and it knows and embraces the fact that the seed must be put to work.
Discipline isn’t about vain works, however. It’s about the faithful engagement of the works God has prepared in advance for us to do. To find them, we must actively seek the presence of God in the quiet place. The only way I know how to do this is to answer the call of the Spirit to come away with Him daily into the place of quiet, intimacy, and peace. That is the discipline of solitude. If I engage it with the kind of life-and-death purpose a warrior would use, I find transformation in evidence even in my life. And that’s an undeniable miracle.
Solitude Isn’t Isolation
It is an unhealthy motive that drives us to isolate. The word finds its origin in Latin as insulatus, which means “made into an island,” and what we’re meant to picture is the act of being cut off, even of a limb being amputated. Isolation is being cut off from the source. This is what Jonah was actually seeking in the first part of the book of the Bible that bears his name.
Isolation isn’t healthy because we’re usually driven to it by hatred or fear. In Jonah’s case, he hated what God had called him to, and if there was fear in his motive it was that God would find him out. Remember that in Jonah chapter one he fled from the presence of the LORD. First, that’s not possible and second, whenever we’re driven to hide, alarms ought to be going off all around us. It means we’re running scared.
God has called us to Himself. That call is irrevocable not because God is prideful or fearful of losing face or some absurdity like that. The call is irrevocable because God doesn’t change, and if the call is to Himself, nothing about it can change. He wants us to be close. He does not want us to hide. Love this intense doesn’t fail, and it isn’t lightly refused. If it is, condemnation is fully justified.
Isolation Isn’t Solitude
Solitude is founded on the Latin word solus, which means “alone.” It includes synonyms like withdrawal, peace, and wilderness. If I have been able to communicate anything since we founded WhiteNoise Studio, I certainly hope one of the main features has been about how every walk with Jesus includes the wilderness at some point.
The prophet Hosea spoke of the wilderness as a place of intimacy, that Yahweh would draw His people away from distraction into a quiet place. The rhythms are slower there. The peace is undeniable. The presence of God, while still subtle, is profound. This is solitude. It is a thing we need to put into practice.
One of the ways I personally engage it is by waking up early to spend time with God in His word, then taking a walk to think and pray about what I’ve read and written. When I was younger I thought this was just the kind of activity perfect people talked about. I could barely remember to offer up a token Oh yeah, thanks for today, God, at the end of every fourth or fifth day. But I pressed in over a couple of decades, gradually cultivating the discipline of solitude. My reward has been great even at this point, far outstripping anything I could have asked or imagined. I am alive and I know it; I am daily gaining in life because of this discipline, which is founded on faith, not works.
When I walk before sunrise, sometimes I see the flickering lights of television displays in living rooms through blinded windows. I think of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 sometimes, but mostly I wonder how anyone could hope to find peace beginning their day with such a cacophony of useless information. It’s just noise. It’s certainly not wisdom, nor is it even knowledge. Does a wise man start his day with this kind of sound and fury? I don’t think so. And I do think we are overinformed. Information isn’t wisdom, and when we constantly flood our minds with it, the results we get cannot be beneficial to us.
When was the last time you took sixty seconds to still yourself before your Maker and ask Him to speak to you? And what would you do if He did?
But what would you do if He didn’t? Would you give up and never try again?
If so, what kind of faith is that?
If so, do you think you can honestly call yourself a Christian?
Tough questions, I know. If I ask them of you, trust that I have asked them of myself first, and that I continue to do so. Either we bear fruit or we do not. Either we love Jesus or we do not. Either we burn to be with him or we do not. Either we groan until the redemption of our bodies or we do not. Either we love Him or we love the world. There is no middle ground in the kingdom of God.
If Jesus Did It, so Should I
Jesus is both God and man. He is the GodMan, the perfect prototype and archetype of what it means to be human: fully engaged, fully desperate for and driven to the presence of the Great I AM, fully intimate with the Father, fully pleasing and obedient, from the heart, to all that the Father is.
Jesus recognized distraction for the threat it was. He sought the peace of the still, small voice like it was His next breath because that was what it was for Him. He engaged the practice of solitude like a warrior training for battle.
Will we do the same? May I ask you what you are you currently training for? Too many are either training for the couch olympics or nothing at all. But a life lived passively is synonymous with death. There’s really no difference.
White Noise and Solitude
There are a whole lot of individual voices shouting out there these days. There are billions of dissonances, disunified and discordant, endlessly barking. We should be repulsed by this noise and naturally drawn into quiet and stillness, but the trouble is that society has become inured to it. We’re not even really aware of how much noise there is because it is so constant that it has become ubiquitous.
This is why the science of white noise, applied to the spirit, is so important. It is polyphony; tens of thousands of voices all singing in harmony at the same time with the same intensity and purpose until the sound that is made drowns out and obliterates unwanted noise. This is why God told us to call ourselves WhiteNoise Studio; we obeyed Him because this is our mission.
What we need is for more voices to join us.
You can do your part by engaging the discipline of solitude today. God is alive, He does speak, and He has something to say to you personally. Will you be still and listen? The sound your obedience makes is the manifest will of God. It will, when joined with every voice in the Church, drown out and obliterate the darkness.
Comments