Solitude

Exodus 33:8-9 NIV

And whenever Moses went out to the tent, all the people rose and stood at the entrances to their tents, watching Moses until he entered the tent.  As Moses went into the tent, the pillar of cloud would come down and stay at the entrance, while the Lord spoke with Moses.

What Do You Think God Wants To Do With You?

A few weeks ago, it didn’t go well for me substitute teaching.  The class had acted pretty badly and I struggled to maintain control over the group.  They kept speaking when I told them to be quiet, I had trouble explaining the material I was assigned to cover and several of the kids were disrespectful.  I felt overmatched and inadequate.  Limping to my car, I asked God what was wrong with me.  Everything about my life felt out of sorts and in disarray.  I opened the door and plopped down in my seat, glad to have a few minutes of solitude.  I sat before God in the sanctuary of my little Honda and silently gave Him time to work in me.

Probably you too have needed time alone and it was a welcome relief to find a spot where you could regroup.  Perhaps you have felt psychologically drained and wanted to get away where no one could interrupt your thoughts or agitate you.  Sometimes you have to retreat to the bathroom to find solitude.  Maybe it is your car or your office or a park bench where you gather yourself. Many retreat to their bedrooms.  You might sit in front of your computer without noticing anything that’s there, lost in your thoughts.  Do you need time alone on a regular basis?  What does solitude do for you?  Have you found it helpful?

The Bible makes it clear that we are never alone, even when we are in the loneliest of places.  The book of Hebrews even insists that we are surrounded “by a great cloud of witnesses.”  Yet, due to our lack of awareness of everything supernatural happening all around us, we ignore both angels and demons.  When we are by ourselves with no physical beings nearby, we feel alone and quite honestly are often quite grateful for those moments.  However, our difficulty perceiving the presence of God does not mean He is absent.  The Lord promises He is with you at every moment and solitude is not what is commonly thought.  If you realize that solitude is always you with God and never you just by yourself, a great benefit to your life is possible.

The Gospel of Luke begins with an interesting story that is only told by Luke.  There was a couple that was old and childless and the husband was one of many Jewish priests.  Zechariah was chosen by lot to go into the temple and burn the incense in the sanctuary.  Once when Zechariah's division was on duty and he was serving as priest before God, he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to go into the temple of the Lord and burn incense.  And when the time for the burning of incense came, all the assembled worshipers were praying outside. (Luke 1: 8-10 NIV)  Zechariah found himself alone in the inner sanctum of the Temple but what he soon discovered was that his solitude was not what it seemed.  An angel suddenly appeared in the room.  When Zechariah saw him, he was startled and was gripped with fear. (Luke 1:12 NIV)  After the angel reassured him that he was not in danger, the messenger from God gave him the joyous news that Zechariah and his wife were going to conceive and have a baby.  The angel made it clear that this was an answer to their prayers.  But this declaration was too stupendous for Zechariah to believe, even if it did come directly from an angel!  Zechariah asked the angel, "How can I be sure of this? I am an old man and my wife is well along in years." (Luke 1:18 NIV)

After all these years of praying, Zechariah had become hopeless.  He no longer believed it was possible that he and his wife could have a child. Yet here was the revelation, coming to him in the solitary place where Zechariah thought he was all alone.  We see this same formula again and again in Scripture.  God lets someone become alone and then He shifts that person’s life.  When the Lord wanted to adjust the prophet Ezekiel’s thinking, He pulled him aside.  Ezekiel describes this in the book he wrote.  The hand of the Lord was upon me there, and he said to me, "Get up and go out to the plain, and there I will speak to you." (Ezekiel 3:22 NIV)  How did God say this to Ezekiel?  Was it in an audible voice that anyone could have heard or did God speak directly into the prophet’s head?  We don’t know but what is clear is that the Lord sent Ezekiel off by himself to receive the revelation.  This is the normal process.  God waits until someone is alone…or thinks he or she is alone…and then He does something new with that person.

Consider the example of Isaiah.  The Lord got him alone in the Temple and there revealed Himself to the prophet.  In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. (Isaiah 6:1 NIV)  If God’s presence was not enough, there were flying seraphs and shaking door posts and thresholds and the whole building filled with smoke.  Clearly Isaiah was not alone and the Lord made that clear in a magnificent way.  Immediately, with all the pageantry, what struck Isaiah most was his sinfulness.  He let out a wail!  "Woe to me!" I cried. "I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty." (Isaiah 6:5 NIV)  When God meets you in the solitude, you must first face your Sin.  It becomes clear as day when you are alone with the Lord that you sin and sin badly.  You cannot go any further with the Lord unless you grasp the awful nature of your sin and solitude magnifies it so that you see your sin clearly when you become alone.  If you have not seen your sin and grown to hate it, you most likely have never been alone with God.  The Lord forces you to face your sin.  His very presence does that to you.

If you are alone with God, there are two revelations that will come to you and they will carry the force of a great hurricane.  You are sinful and only God can take away your sin.  Whatever was wrong with Isaiah, whatever evil he saw in himself, it had to do with his mouth!  Jesus said that it is not what goes into you that is bad, it is what comes out of you that matters and clearly something was coming out of Isaiah that was ugly and it had to do with his mouth.  Immediately when Isaiah realized just how wicked he was the Lord provided him with a live coal that took away the guilt of his sin.  Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar.  With it he touched my mouth and said, "See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for."  (Isaiah 6:6-7 NIV)

If there is a single lesson to learn from this passage, perhaps what rises above all is that only God can take away our guilt.  God does the work.  Here He touches the lips with the purifying live coal.  This was just a temporary solution for only in the Cross is the guilt of our Sin removed altogether.  When Christ came and became a part of us, He did so to deal once and for all time with our Sin.  You cannot be alone with God and fail to realize your complete dependence upon Him.  In a crowd you can feel secure and confident that you make it on your own.  Alone with God though you know that is a fairy tale, it is like thinking your heart is unnecessary or your brain does not matter.  Dependence upon God and reliance upon Him to save you is the clearest sign you have been alone with Him.  What is so striking about the Psalms is that this is what you see in them at every turn.  You are dependent upon God to save you and there is no greater determination you can make than to rely upon Him in everything you do.

Nearly always when there is a break in your relationship with God, it is because there is a moral barrier that stands in your way.  God would not let Isaiah go any further with Him until his mouth issues were addressed.  Sometimes it is sexual immorality, other times a bad temper or the unwillingness to forgive.  It might be cruelty that you possess or selfishness and greed or the hard headed unwillingness to do what God has said to do.  This barrier, whatever it might be must be taken apart if you are to ever go any further with God.  It is when you are alone with Him that this is done.  God penetrates your heart and works out of you what sin has worked into you.  As you stay with Christ, alone just the two of you, a miracle occurs.  The love of God starts to become your love, the peace of God becomes your peace and the joy that God has becomes your joy.  You cannot generate this within yourself.  Only Christ can do it.  Alone with God, no conversation, no distracting phones or computers, just your mind and the Lord’s mind coming together and in the miracle of Christ, you become transformed.  God will want to make you alone with Him to cleanse your actions and He will want to work out of you your sinful habits. In solitude you will be made good, and clean and like God.  In God’s grip, alone with Him in a quiet place where He can get through to you, nothing will matter that mattered so much to you before; not your accomplishments, not your gifts, not what you want to make of your life.   What will rise above everything else as you stay with Him will be His love becoming yours as you remain alone with Him wherever and whenever the Lord calls you to come to Him.  Why not take a solitude break this week?  Be alone with God for whatever time you can give Him.

Fear of God

Proverbs 9:10 NIV

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.

Do You Know Someone Afraid of God?

Before I knew anything about the “fear of the Lord” I found out about the fear of my dad.  When he spanked me, I knew I had been spanked.  I have a friend who had a fear of his mom.  When he disobeyed her, his mom had him stretch out his arms and hold them there until they began to burn like fire.  Several years ago I was passing out invitations to our church in the neighborhood and as I was walking away from one house, a man in his twenties stepped out, looked at my flyer and told me that if he ever found me stepping up on his porch again, he would kill me.  There are plenty of reasons why we become afraid.  Some of us are afraid we won’t be able to pay our bills.  Others are afraid of getting sick.  Many are afraid of getting fired or going into certain neighborhoods.  I am afraid of skiing.  Perhaps you are afraid of going to the dentist.  Certainly all of us have been afraid and sometimes for good reason, other times without cause.

Many are afraid of God.  They are afraid of making Him mad because they have done something wrong or they might have done something wrong.  There are world religions built around the concern that God is angry about something and needs to be appeased.  For those like the Hindus, this is even worse because there are so many gods to worry about.  The Bible talks several times about the “fear of the Lord” or the “fear of God” and it is important that we understand what it means by that.  Is it good for people to be afraid of God?  Should we be fearful of Him?  How do we act toward God if we are afraid of Him?  Aren’t we to have God as our friend?  How can we be friends if we are afraid of Him?  What is the psychological effect of the fear of the Lord upon us and how does it look behaviorally?

The Apostle Paul in his masterpiece letter to the Christians in Rome quoted from Psalm 36, contending that regardless of background universally among all people, "There is no fear of God before their eyes." (Romans 3:18 NIV)  Before that, he states, "There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. (Romans 3:10-11 NIV)  These two verses appear to be in parallel, describing the same character trait.  Fear of God seems to be equivalent to being righteous, possessing “understanding” and seeking God.  The Psalm that the Apostle Paul quotes, which was written about eight hundred years before by David, the second king of Israel, gives this description of what it looks like if you don’t fear God.  There is no fear of God before his eyes.  For in his own eyes he flatters himself too much to detect or hate his sin.  The words of his mouth are wicked and deceitful; he has ceased to be wise and to do good.  Even on his bed he plots evil; he commits himself to a sinful course and does not reject what is wrong. (Psalm 36:1b-4 NIV)

There are four clear characteristics here of the one who does not fear God.   This person is too proud to realize that there is real sin in him and even if he knew he was sinful, he wouldn’t care or give it much thought.  The things this person says are half-truths and intentionally or unintentionally deceitful.  He no longer grasps what is wise and intelligent because he doesn’t avail himself to true wisdom that comes from God; consequently his thinking is too shallow to grasp what is good and right and so he lives in rebellion against God.  This rebellion is planned and thought through by him so that he does what he does knowing full well it is wrong.  There is in the one without fear of God a casual approach to evil deeds, his moral compass is broken and he does what he decides is right for him without regard for what is actually “right”.  This passage has a clear summary of how the one who does not fear God lives but it is not so easy to see from David’s Psalm what it looks like when you do fear God.

Surprisingly, rather than listing all the characteristics of the one who fears God, David creates a picture of what God is like.  Your love, O Lord, reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the skies.  Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains, your justice like the great deep.  O Lord, you preserve both man and beast.  How priceless is your unfailing love!  (Psalm 36:5-6 NIV)  Now this is interesting because you would expect that if someone was interested in finding out how it looks to fear God and not just what characterizes the one not fearing God, you would think this passage would tell you.  It certainly provides a clear examination of the personal qualities of non-God fearing people.  Yet rather that stating the opposite side of the coin, what a God-fearing person looks like, it talks about God Himself.  However, when you think about it, this description of God does say something quite clearly about fearing God even if it is a bit unexpected and unusual in its presentation.  The one who fears God has a very decided view of Him.  He sees God as loving, faithful, righteous and just.  This is not a dry theological comment.  It drips with affection and happiness.  No one could have this sort of feeling toward another and be called non-committal about the relationship.  A person who fears the Lord is in awe of the goodness and rightness and love of God and does not cower in dread of God but is excited about being with Him.  Verse 7 of Psalm 36 provides a clear sense of what someone who fears God thinks of Him.  How priceless is your unfailing love!  Both high and low among men find refuge in the shadow of your wings.  (Psalm 36:7 NIV)

This is of course a far cry from what we normally think of what fearing God entails.  Most studies on the fear of God focus on the Hebrew definition of fear…that it speaks either of cowering, abject quivering in ones boots over the might and power and sternness of God or that it is watered down a bit from that…describing respect.  So either our relationship with the Lord is to be like one we would have with an absolute despot who can on a whim have us struck dead or give us great honor and power or it is like that of a student with a law professor who is really smart and cool but kind of like us…just better and more successful.  However, that is not how fear of God seems when we read Psalm 36.  The person who fears God does not pay attention to His power or to His competency but rather to His love and goodness, His rightness and fairness. We must remember that fear means one thing when we are talking about sinful beings who are self-centered and egotistical and full of sin but something all-together different when talking about God.

An example from the Old Testament might help us see this more clearly.  In Genesis, our earliest documented history of the world there is in chapter 22 a most intriguing perspective on the fear of God.  It is the famous account of Abraham hearing God tell him to bring his son Isaac up on a mountain to offer him as a sacrifice there.  Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, "Abraham!"  "Here I am," he replied.  Then God said, "Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about." (Genesis 22:1-2 NIV)  Immediately Abraham made preparations and the very next morning he brought his son along with the wood and fire up Mount Moriah where he then at the top lashed his son to an altar and prepared to strike his son dead with a dagger.  Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son.  But the angel of the Lord called out to him from heaven, "Abraham! Abraham!"  "Here I am," he replied.  "Do not lay a hand on the boy," he said. "Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son." (Genesis 22:10-12 NIV)

Let us consider this carefully.  God said that Abraham feared God and how He proved this was by Abraham’s behavior, he did not withhold his son.  By “withhold”, The Bible meant that Abraham was about to kill Isaac out of loyalty to God.  When we say “fear”, we generally mean that we are afraid of some outcome…there is something we don’t want to happen because if it did, it would be terrible.  The thought of it is dreadful to us.  Now what was it that was dreadful to Abraham?  Could there have been anything more horrid that having his son dead…or perhaps being the one who killed that son?  At one hundred-ten years of age or so, Abraham knew he would die eventually.  He could not have been afraid of his own dying.  Would he have been afraid of becoming poor?  Probably not at one-hundred ten years of age…not anymore anyway…Was he afraid of his wife leaving him for another man or of her dying of old age?  What would have made Abraham afraid of God?  Most likely, and it cannot be much of a stretch to say this, his greatest fear when it came to God was that the Lord might take his son from him!  If he had a fear of God, that would have topped his list and yet by his own volition, he was about to kill his son because he had fear of God.  That sounds crazy but of course it wasn’t.  Fear of God had nothing to do with being afraid of the worst thing that He could do to him because the worst thing that God could have done to Abraham was take his son and Abraham was doing that himself.  Fear of God was just what Abraham revealed; it was following God regardless of the cost.  More than that, it was absolute trust that God would do what was right and good no matter how things appeared.

Hebrews 11: 9 tells us that Abraham believed God could and would raise Isaac from the dead even if he did kill his son on the mountain.  Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead, and figuratively speaking, he did receive Isaac back from death. (NIV)  Of course God did not raise Isaac from the dead because He told Abraham to not kill his son.  But before that Abraham confidently raised his knife to kill Isaac because he had faith God would not let Isaac stay dead.  And here we see what it means to “fear God’ because this is what it was for Abraham.  To “fear God” means to trust Him explicitly with your life and with the lives of all those you love and to trust God so much that you will do whatever He tells you to do.  “Fear God” is unbending belief that God is good and can be trusted with everything and everyone you hold dear.  The test for you is when He tells you to hand to Him what matters most to you and let the Lord do with it as He pleases.  So few Christians ever get to this place of absolute trust in God and because they don’t, their lives are shallow and fearful and demanding and short-tempered and even greedy.  They may have their salvation but no real relationship with God that changes the quality of their lives.  You cannot and will not move forward with Christ unless all you treasure is His and you can walk away from any of it if He tells you to do so and still be devoted to God.  Your test will come, perhaps today, maybe tomorrow and you will have to decide if you really do love and trust God.  If you do and you show you do, nothing will be more certain to you in the crisis or the painful time than God’s love and care for you and you will be peacefully calm and secure in it.

Absolute Focus

The brevity of a day is just the space God needs to make a planet spin, a sun explode and a soul find refuge.  Perhaps the great oddity of our Lord is that he cares about a moment in time.  Eternal and without end or beginning and yet He contemplates the second and each second with the same attention.  For us as we grow older, the days and years become a wash; a repetitive splash of wave after wave.  But God takes the moments seriously, both past and coming with  equal affection and consideration.  The instant you find your doll in the back of the car and exult, the Lord celebrates mightily with you too.  And when your baby is found dead in your womb, the Lord weeps then just as mournfully as if He had only lived that day and seen just that one sorrow.  The Lord God lives out with you the surprising joys and the devastating losses at the time it happens and He is not looking forward to the end of the saga or backwards to before it began.  He is looking with you at the same thing you are and He sees it with clarity and attention.  Your fever burns now and God is with you in it fully engaged and your all night study session is not lost on Him either even as you fight to stay awake.  You slice your finger and God flinches with you; take your fury out on your son and he weeps in the night too.  Argue with your wife and the Lord is centering in on every part of the fight, take your kids to the zoo and He is having the time of His life with you there.  It is nothing for the Lord to be riveted by what you do and say and hear and think, but it is not inconsequential to Him either.  He bores in on your life as if it were the only one contained within the universe and does not turn His back upon it even for an instant.  You may disregard the depth of your existence but God has never done so.  It is a tangle of distracted complexity to you but simple and all consuming to Him.  The Lord sees you!

O Lord, you have searched me and you know me.  You know when I sit and when I rise...  Psalm 139:1-2 NIV