Latest / The Living Waters Podcast / Waiting on God, Praying Through His Word, Resting in the Lord. - Highlight Episode 335

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Waiting on God, Praying Through His Word, Resting in the Lord. - Highlight Episode 335 · The Living Waters Podcast

• 1:04
  Speaker 1: All right, friends.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: Today's topic is why Christians struggle with silence and solitude.
• 1:12
  Speaker 3: Because they know you.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: I give no unrest, do I?
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: It's something that when we look back, I think in church history, at least in the writings of men of old, it was something that was emphasized.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: It was almost kind of a given you wait on God.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: It was almost kind of a given you wait on God.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: I mean, you look at the journals of some of the greats and they were filled with indicators that they sat with the Lord, they waited on the Lord.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: And it's difficult, I mean, I'm guilty.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: I have a hard time sitting in solitude.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: I've had to discipline myself to be consistent in prayer.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: I have accountability.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: I have a brother and I.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: We text each other prayer hands every day after we've spent time in solitude and in prayer, because there's just something about FOMO, right, the fear of missing out.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: That's why I love reading on planes, fomo.
• 2:05
  Speaker 4: I've never heard that Fear of missing out.
• 2:06
  Speaker 4: No, I fell, as I've missed out all these years.
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: They haven't told me Fear of missing out.
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: It's something that we, as believers, must get back to, I think, to have walks with God that bear that depth and that richness.
• 2:23
  Speaker 4: Silence is golden.
• 2:24
  Speaker 4: So we're talking about something that's totally unnatural for human beings, because you put any human being into solitary confinement, often they go insane.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:33
  Speaker 4: Because they so need fellowship.
• 2:34
  Speaker 4: We've got fellowship with God.
• 2:36
  Speaker 4: We're talking about silence and how important it is.
• 2:39
  Speaker 4: It's something we should appreciate, and I didn't really appreciate the fact that I can actually have silence until I met a lady many years ago.
• 2:45
  Speaker 4: She was an elderly lady.
• 2:46
  Speaker 4: She was standing on a sidewalk and a guy started his motorbike and it wasn't a Japanese motorbike, it was American, which means it was very, very loud.
• 2:55
  Speaker 4: It burst her eardrum and she spent the rest of her life with screaming in her ear.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: 24 hours a day.
• 3:02
  Speaker 4: Every time I met her, she just said it's still there, it's still there.
• 3:05
  Speaker 4: It's driving me crazy.
• 3:05
  Speaker 4: So we shouldn't be afraid of silence, but be thankful that we can have silence.
• 3:10
  Speaker 4: Just get someone to be with the Lord.
• 3:12
  Speaker 4: When we talk about waiting on God, what do you get from waiting on God?
• 3:16
  Speaker 4: Easy?
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: Well, I think your strength gets renewed, like the word talks about.
• 3:22
  Speaker 4: The wings as eagles.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you get revived, you get perspective, you get healing.
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: Like Oscar was talking about confronting those things that you just don't want to confront, to let the Spirit convict you and put His finger on things in your heart and in your mind.
• 3:39
  Speaker 4: We talk about God speaking to us through His Word, but do you hear the voice of God when you're waiting on Him?
• 3:44
  Speaker 4: Is there a time when you hear God speaking to you?
• 3:46
  Speaker 4: I don't mean audibly, but just about things in your life.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think, conviction through the Spirit, you know not, yeah, like you're saying, not in an audible way or in a way where it's like revelation, but yeah, just, I think the Lord does it through natural means, as we're seeking him, as he brings things back to mind and heart and gives us, you know, thoughts and ideas that relate to our lives.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: Silence is nothing else but waiting for God's Word and coming from God's Word with a blessing.
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: Wow, yeah, sitting and waiting.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: You know I love the incorporating of Scripture in prayer.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: In our times of Salted Oscar, that's a big part of a lot of worship traditions, where scripture is incorporated into worship.
• 4:31
  Speaker 4: It's done every day by millions through the Lord's Prayer.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah that's true.
• 4:35
  Speaker 3: Right, Oscar.
• 4:35
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that actually brings it back to the question that you asked earlier, which is practical steps.
• 4:40
  Speaker 3: What do we do?
• 4:41
  Speaker 3: And I think it's important to recognize there's a difference.
• 4:43
  Speaker 3: Right now, one of the most downloaded apps of 2022, I think was the mindfulness app, which is more Eastern view of silence and solitude.
• 4:53
  Speaker 3: So there's definitely a desire, a secular desire, out there.
• 4:57
  Speaker 3: Nowadays, if you buy an Apple watch, it's got like a breathing mindfulness app built into it, so everybody's looking for this.
• 5:05
  Speaker 3: So then it begs the question what does silence and solitude in a worshipful way?
• 5:10
  Speaker 3: How does that sound different than just mindfulness?
• 5:13
  Speaker 3: The practice of mindfulness that's more rooted in Eastern traditions.
• 5:16
  Speaker 3: Right, and I think we've talked about this too which is to empty your mind, is mindfulness, but silence and solitude before the Lord.
• 5:26
  Speaker 3: There's a next step to that.
• 5:27
  Speaker 3: It's not about being alone, it's about being with God.
• 5:30
  Speaker 3: You empty your mind from all of the external distractions phones, internal distractions, the thoughts that are in your own mind and then you fill it up with the thoughts of God.
• 5:42
  Speaker 3: And one of the practical ways we can do that is, just before entering into that silence and solitude, either spending time in God's word or spending time praying through God's word, praying through the Psalms, praying through anywhere in the New and the Old Testament.
• 6:00
  Speaker 3: To turn God's words into your prayer words is a great way to prepare yourself to sit in the presence of the Almighty.
• 6:11
  Speaker 2: Opening.
• 6:11
  Speaker 2: You know, if somebody says I don't know what to pray, pray in the Word of God.
• 6:14
  Speaker 2: I mean almost any text you come across you can pray in.
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: You come across something like Judas went and hung himself and you go.
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: Lord, help me not to ever get to that place where I feel like my only avenue of escape is to go do that dastardly deed right.
• 6:29
  Speaker 2: It doesn't matter what text it is, you can pray in the text and you can be focused.
• 6:34
  Speaker 2: I did this kind of unusual exercise today on the way to work, where I was thinking Imagine if the Lord granted me the ability to pray anything I wanted to pray from the moment I left my house to 30 minutes later I'm at work.
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: And he was going to say yes to everything.
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: I'm about ready to pray, wow, and I consumed my mind and my thought with this could be my very last day, my last opportunity to pray, and I found myself so focused on my prayers and careful with what I was praying.
• 7:07
  Speaker 2: It's like somebody says give me $100 million, you'll see what I'll be able to do.
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: Careful what you pray, right, don't say anything.
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: I know Ray wants to buy tracks for the whole world, but the idea of what we're praying, that we have the bent ear of God when we talk to God, that we have the bent ear of God when we talk to God, you can't get that in the midst of the commotion.
• 7:29
  Speaker 2: Right, silence your commotion because God's not going to compete with your commotion.
• 7:34
  Speaker 4: And I was looking at Psalm 62, verses 1 and 5.
• 7:38
  Speaker 4: Truly, my soul waits, silently waits for God.
• 7:43
  Speaker 4: From him comes my salvation.
• 7:46
  Speaker 4: So if anything should make us wait silently on God, is meditation on the fact that God brought salvation to us, salvation from death, expressed his love through the cross.
• 7:54
  Speaker 4: That should keep us silent.
• 7:56
  Speaker 4: Yeah, this is what Samuel Chadwick said.
• 7:59
  Speaker 4: The soul, isn't it great.
• 8:01
  Speaker 4: I hope you enjoyed that.
• 8:02
  Speaker 4: The soul is never less alone than when it's alone with God, isn't?
• 8:10
  Speaker 4: that good, that's deep, oh, less alone Never less alone, never less alone than when it's with God.
• 8:16
  Speaker 4: In other words, you're not alone when you're with God ever.
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: Richard Baxter the Puritan, the theologian.
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: He said Noise is not strength.
• 8:23
  Speaker 2: A still and quiet Christian is often the strongest Spurgeon, he said.
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: There is no better cure for the soul than to be alone with God, and solitude is not an absence of something but a presence of someone.
• 8:39
  Speaker 3: There's an addictive behavior in every single one of us, and when you start this new spiritual practice, it's going to be hard, it's not gonna.
• 8:49
  Speaker 3: The fruitfulness of the reward is it might not be instantaneous, but the reality is it reminds me of what Augustine said, which is that our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you, god.
• 9:03
  Speaker 3: And so what, ultimately, we in the Lord mostly are inviting you to is to find the rest that your soul is desperately seeking, and that is something that is just.
• 9:16
  Speaker 3: It's going to take time for you to understand Amen.
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: You go to like bare minimum, right, Bare minimum.
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: What you need right now is accountability, which means, if you're convicted by this right now solitude with God, shutting out the noise, sitting with the Lord you must communicate about this with someone right now.
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: So that's your first step.
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna talk to a brother, I'm gonna talk to a sister, I'm gonna talk to my wife, my husband, and I'm gonna say I have this problem and I want to get it right.
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: Will you please hold me accountable?
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: And then, from there, what you do is with that person, you chart a course Again, just like this brother and I.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: For six months now almost, we have had a commitment to send each other prayer hands every time we finish our prayer time, and it's become a routine and it's beautiful.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: So we established an accountability mechanism.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: So do that and then, from there, begin to weed out the things that distract you, Identify them Again.
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: It's not about getting rid of your phone altogether.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: It's about how do I not let my phone control me, how do I not let social media control me?
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: How do I not let work control me?
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: For those of you workaholics out there, you must put the priorities in order.
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: Thank you for tuning in to this week's highlights from the Living Waters podcast.
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: Friends, we value your time, so we've created a bite-sized version of our podcast for listeners who want to get equipped.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: Without the jokes and fellowship.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: Be sure to check out the full episode every Thursday where we dive deeper into the topic.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: Until then, you can watch the full podcast episode available now on livingwaterstv.