Pastor Mark's series on spiritual disciplines explores the Scriptures to help us live in pursuit of God. Here are quick links to all the posts in the Spiritual Disciplines series:

• Spiritual Disciplines: Solitude & Fellowship, Part 1
• Spiritual Disciplines: Solitude & Fellowship, Part 2
• Spiritual Disciplines: Worship
• Spiritual Disciplines: Chastity
• Spiritual Disciplines: Sabbath & Work, Part 1
• Spiritual Disciplines: Sabbath & Work, Part 2
• Spiritual Disciplines: Lovemaking
• Spiritual Disciplines: Fasting
• Spiritual Disciplines: Service

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Service

Mark 9:33–35 records one of the more curious arguments in all of history—a debate between the disciples about which of them was the greatest. Upon overhearing their arrogant conversation, Jesus responded in a most unpredictable manner. Rather than simply rebuking them, Jesus actually told them how to become the greatest and achieve their objective. His stunning answer was that being a humble servant is the only way to spiritual greatness.

Service is one of the innumerable ways in which we can make God’s love visible to other people. Christian love is not merely an emotion, because it compels us to action. Perhaps 1 John 3:18 says it best: “Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.”

Jesus’ Example

Curiously, we live in an age when much of our economy is built on service but there is a seeming decline in personal service to others without employment obligation or financial compensation. For the Christian, however, it is God’s love and Jesus’ example that compel us to humbly serve in love. Consequently, because of how Jesus serves us, our Christian service is not motivated by guilt or duty, but rather gladness and love. As Psalm 100:2 exuberantly proclaims, “Serve the LORD with gladness!” and Galatians 5:13 extols: “through love serve one another.”

Jesus is our perfect model of a humble, loving servant. In fact, Jesus’ entire ministry is often summarized as humble service that included everything from feeding people to washing their feet and dying on the cross for their sins (Matthew 20:20–28; Philippians 2:5–11). Many Scriptures encourage humble service and provide examples of what it looks like:

• “Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Matthew 20:26–28)
• “Now there was in Joppa a disciple named Tabitha, which, translated, means Dorcas. She was full of good works and acts of charity.” (Acts 9:36)
• “I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a servant of the church at Cenchreae, that you may welcome her in the Lord in a way worthy of the saints, and help her in whatever she may need from you, for she has been a patron of many and of myself as well.” (Romans 16:1)
• “For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” (Galatians 5:13)
• “. . . in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant . . .” (Philippians 2:3–7)

In the church, humble service is so important that Scripture declares that the exercise of all natural talents and spiritual gifts are simply varied ways that service is conducted. On this matter, 1 Peter 4:10 says, “As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace.” God not only commands every Christian to serve, He also imparts to some the spiritual gift of helps/service (1 Corinthians 12:28; Romans 12:7).

Serve Humbly

Inextricably connected to Christian service is humility. Service that is done in secret without the pursuit of human praise reminds us of how Jesus faithfully served us during His humble life on the earth. Furthermore, by receiving the service of others, we likewise learn the gift of humility. This lesson was perhaps most visibly learned by Peter, who refused to allow Jesus to wash his feet until Jesus convinced him otherwise. Jesus was seeking to give Peter the great gift of humility, through which we are willing to not only serve, but also be served as an admission that we too are people in need of grace.

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Fasting

Fasting is the voluntary act of abstaining from something for the purpose of growing in self-discipline, which is the essence of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. Perhaps the most common form of fasting is from food. This is because, as Paul says, for some people their stomach is their god. By fasting from food, they are learning to enjoy food as a gift from God without allowing it to become an idolatrous functional god that controls them.

Good Things Become Idols

However, there are seemingly innumerable other things that, though they are good, can become bad when they rule over us in a way that only God should. Modern examples include fasting from the internet, email, or cell phone for a period of time if you find yourself compulsively spending too much of your time and energy checking websites, emails, phone calls, and voicemails.

This point was painfully illustrated to me at a recent dinner out with my children. My wife, Grace, was teaching at a women’s event, and so I took the kids to a restaurant. Sitting around us were many other families like us, with one exception. Every single father was either talking on the phone or responding to emails on his BlackBerry throughout the meal, not connecting with his children in any way. Sadly, rather than visiting with their kids and having some fun, these daddies allowed their technological gods to rule over them. Their gods required the sacrificing of their own children, not unlike Molech in the Old Testament.

When You Fast

Jesus Himself exemplified the discipline of fasting for us in His own earthly life. One of the most well-known examples is Jesus’ forty days of fasting in Matthew 4:1–11. When Jesus spoke to His disciples about fasting, He said, “when you fast,” as if it was simply expected to be done (Matthew 6:16–17). As an aside, anyone wanting to practice an extended period of fasting would be wise to first speak with their doctor about how to do so safely.

Other Scriptures also include reports of fasting. In Nehemiah 9:1, we are told that the entire nation of Israel fasted. Esther 4:16 likewise records a national three-day fast. In the New Testament, Acts 13:2 reports that a leadership decision regarding who should be sent out from the church at Antioch to plant another church was made after a period of seeking the Lord through fasting and worship. Acts 14:23 reveals that upon appointing new elders for some churches, Paul and Barnabas commissioned the new pastors with prayer and fasting.

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Lovemaking is the enjoyment of physical oneness that God permits for heterosexual married couples alone.

It is God who made us male and female for sexual pleasure, God who said it was not good for us to be alone, and God who created and blessed both marriage and the sexual enjoyment it provides.

Furthermore, it is God the Holy Spirit who inspired the writing of Scripture that provides great freedom in the marriage covenant and encourages the pursuit of pleasure within marital intimacy. Examples of this include the very liberated book Song of Songs, as well as various other Scriptures, such as the following:

• "Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed." (Genesis 2:24–25)
• "Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love." (Proverbs 5:18–19)
• "The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control." (1 Corinthians 7:3–5)

In our age of rampant sexual sin, God intends for us to learn the spiritual discipline of sexual chastity while we are unmarried. However, God also blessed marriage as the holy outlet for sexual desire and one means of protection from the temptation to engage in sexual sin.

Free Sex

Married couples who do not have free and frequent intimacy together are warned by Paul that they are leaving themselves vulnerable to Satan’s temptations to either sexual sin or bitterness. Therefore, God’s answer to our desire for oneness and pleasure is to overcome our shame and fear through the gospel so that we can give ourselves in every way to our spouse, and also receive them as God’s gift to us.

Continued from Part 1.

Work

Work is laboring well as an act of worship that glorifies God. Subsequently, the father who goes to work, the mother who stays home to care for her young children like the woman in Proverbs 31, and the student who heads off to school are each called by God to labor in their work. Each has sacred tasks that God has appointed for them to capture as opportunities to worship Him.

For the first roughly thirty years of His life, Jesus worked a common laborer’s job as a carpenter. For the remaining roughly three years of His life, Jesus said He was about His Father’s work (John 4:34; 5:17, 36). Jesus’ ministry work included exhausting preaching, teaching, feeding, healing, traveling by foot, and more.

Both the Old and New Testaments have much to say about work. For example:

• The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work… (Genesis 2:15)
• Six days shall work be done, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of solemn rest, holy to the LORD. (Exodus 31:15)
• In all toil there is profit, but mere talk tends only to poverty. (Proverbs 14:23)
• Whoever is slack in his work is a brother to him who destroys. (Proverbs 18:9)
• The desire of the sluggard kills him, for his hands refuse to labor. (Proverbs 21:25)
• So I saw that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his work… (Ecclesiastes 3:22)
• Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ. (Colossians 3:23–24)
• If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat. (2 Thessalonians 3:10)
• But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. (1 Corinthians 15:10)

The Scriptures are clear that God made us to work and that despite the curse which makes our work all the more difficult, it is good and honorable for us to labor as unto the Lord Jesus. Then, as we have examined, we can enjoy a restful Sabbath as God intends. Sadly, however, this sort of balanced lifestyle is sorely lacking in our culture.

Overwork

The advent of electricity has distanced us from the creation rhythms of day and night. It brought about a twenty-four-hour lifestyle that includes constant interruption by technology such as phones and BlackBerries, even on our Sabbath days. The result is that we are overworked; the average workweek grew from forty to fifty hours in the U.S. in the past twenty-five years. We now work more hours than any nation other than Japan, which works an equal number of hours. Furthermore, the proliferation of temporary jobs that lack security mean that people are less likely to take a day off or vacation. It is success that causes even more stress and a work load that pressures people not to take their Sabbath days or vacations.

Timothy Egan reported this trend in a New York Times article on August 20, 2006: “at the start of the summer, 40 percent of consumers had no plans to take a vacation in the next six months, the lowest percentage recorded by the group in 28 years” (“Vacation? Americans are laying it to rest”). In another survey, 43 percent of respondents had no summer-vacation plans. Furthermore, roughly 25 percent of U.S. workers in the private sector do not get any paid vacation time while 33 percent will take only a seven-day vacation, including a weekend. A spokesman for AAA said, “It's kind of sad, really, that people can't seem to leave their jobs anymore.” In fact, “the average American expects his or her longest summer trip to last six nights . . . [but] it takes three days just to begin to unwind, experts say.”

Indeed, God in His loving wisdom instructs us to work and Sabbath equally well. If we fail to do so, we must ask ourselves what our god truly is and where our faith truly lies.

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Six days shall work be done, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of solemn rest, holy to the LORD. (Exodus 31:15)

As we examine the spiritual disciplines, it is important to remember that some disciplines are contemplative, while others are active. The contemplative disciplines replenish our spirit, renew our mind, and reorient our focus. The contemplative disciplines prepare us to be more effective in the practice of our active disciplines.

In this article we will examine the contemplative discipline of Sabbath and the correlated active discipline of work. We will learn that, from the early pages of Genesis, God has modeled for us a rhythm of first labor and then rest to enjoy the fruit of that labor. Scripture also tells us that heaven is an eternal Sabbath (Hebrews 4:9), which means that when we Sabbath we are practicing in faith for our eventual entrance into God’s eternal kingdom.

Sabbath

To Sabbath is to rest from one’s labor. The first Sabbath day was a Saturday: “And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done” (Genesis 2:2). The first recorded command for humans to Sabbath is in Exodus 16:23, and the Sabbath is listed as the fourth commandment in Exodus 20:8–11.

In regards to the purpose of the Sabbath, it does indeed have benefits for all people. Workers and animals are permitted to rest as an act of justice and compassion to ensure the dignity of God’s creation. Both rich and poor are invited to stand in equality for one day as they rest from their labors, knowing that our sovereign God is on our side and is able to hold the universe and our lives together even when we rest and sleep.

Saturday or Sunday?

In regards to the day of the Sabbath, some have maintained that it should be celebrated on Saturday like the Hebrews did, the final day of their week. However, the early church abruptly changed the day of worship to Sunday to commemorate the resurrection of Jesus from death (Matthew 28:1; Mark 16:1–2; Luke 24:1; John 20:1) on that first day of the new week (Acts 20:7; 1 Corinthians 16:2). Sunday remained a work day in the early church until Emperor Constantine instituted it as an official day of rest in AD 321. In America, there was a debate as to whether the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday or the Christian Sabbath of Sunday should be recognized and the compromise was to keep both, which is why we have two-day weekends.

The True Sabbath

Legalistic attempts have been made to rob the Sabbath of its worship and joy by carefully mandating what can and cannot be done. However, Jesus seemed to have intentionally lived in public view to serve as a contrary model of the Sabbath than that given by other legalistic teachers. For example, Jesus healed on the Sabbath (Matthew 12:1–14, John 9:1–17), taught on the Sabbath (Mark 6:1–2), and promoted evangelism on the Sabbath (John 7:21–24). Jesus demonstrated that the Sabbath is not to be enforced legalistically, but that it exists for worshipful fun and rest. Furthermore, our true Sabbath is not in a day but ultimately in a saving relationship with Jesus where we can rest from trying to earn our salvation and rest in His finished work (Matthew 11:28–30; Romans 4:5; Colossians 2:16–17). Therefore, the Sabbath is not a law for believers to obey, but instead a grace to enjoy.

In conclusion, by setting aside a day, we are showing that we are a people who are set aside (holy) and who rest in Jesus. Worshiping is our primary objective and our weeks are purposefully ordered around worship. Then, our worshipful work can be rightly undertaken.

By Pastor Mark Driscoll

"Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous."(Hebrews 13:4)

Chastity is the fasting from all sexual activity for the purpose of holiness. The best example of chastity in all of Scripture is Jesus Christ, who never married and never committed any sin, including sexual sin (Hebrews 4:15). As an unmarried man, Jesus is the perfect example of appropriate male-female loving friendships that do not violate propriety or holiness in any way. The Scriptures command God’s people in numerous different verses to remain chaste in both their actions and appearances:

• "The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord" (1 Corinthians 6:13).
• "Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body" (1 Corinthians 6:18–20).
• "We must not indulge in sexual immorality" (1 Corinthians 10:8).
• "Everyone who is sexually immoral or impure... has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God" (Ephesians 5:5).
• "For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor" (1 Thessalonians 4:3–4).
• "Women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control" (1 Timothy 2:9).

The Single Culture

The issue of chaste purity before marriage is particularly pressing in today’s culture because the number of unmarried people continues to rise. Statistically in the U.S., the number of unmarried adults has continually increased, with 36 percent in 1970, 39 percent in 1980, 41 percent in 1990, and 44 percent in 2000. In 2006, for the first time in history, the number of unmarried people exceeded 50 percent of the adult population. Both men and women are waiting longer to marry for the first time; the median age for men went from 23 in 1950 to 27 in 2003, and the median age for women jumped from 20 to 25 in that same period.

The resulting increase in the number of older singles has, in many ways, reshaped the entire social landscape. At Mars Hill Church our congregation is comprised of roughly half married and half unmarried people—unusual for any church, but particularly one of our size. According to researcher John Vaughan, most large churches (two thousand or more people) have less than 20 percent singles.

Sexual Sin is Everywhere

A 2006 report on NPR said that 80 percent of Americans are sexually active by the age of 20, and only 20 percent of women marry as virgins. Furthermore, cohabitation has increased 72 percent between 1990 and 2000, and the cohabitation rate increased ten-fold between 1960 and 2000. Fully 41 percent of Americans will cohabitate at some point during their life.

Many people who attend Mars Hill Church come with sexual sin in their distant or recent history. This includes unmarried people who have been guilty of fornication, as well as married people who have been guilty of adultery. Thankfully, Jesus died and rose to forgive such sin, thereby enabling us to put these sins to death in our own lives by His empowering grace. Furthermore, according to Scripture, one of the defenses against sexual sin is getting married (1 Corinthians 7:1–2) and having frequent and free marital intimacy so that sexual desires have a holy outlet.

Worship is continuously living our lives individually and corporately as living sacrifices to the glory of a person or thing. This connection between glory and worship is clear in places such as Romans 11:36–12:1 (NIV), which says, “To him be the glory forever! Amen. Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.”

In this packed section of Scripture, Paul connects a number of vital truths regarding worship. First, we hold a person or thing in a place of glory. Second, we then worship that person or thing. Third, our worship of that person or thing we hold in glory is done by means of making sacrifices.

Glory

Glory means weightiness, importance, preeminence, and priority, or our greatest treasure, deepest longing, and fountain of hope. People can and do hold various people and things in a position of glory and then worship them by making sacrifices. Because we have limited resources (time, energy, money), we must allocate them to what we consider most important or glorious to us. Thus, we make sacrifices for our functional god. Whatever we hold in the position of highest glory is by definition our god.

Practically, worship is making sacrifices for what we are living to glorify. Because we were made for the express purpose of worshiping God, every person is a worshiper. The only question is what or who we worship.

Sacrifice

The biblical word for worship is also sometimes translated “sacrifice.” This helpful insight indicates that we can uncover what we truly live to glorify by examining what exactly we are making the greatest sacrifices for. In short, we give our time, energy, body, money, focus, devotion, and passion to that which we glorify most, and we make sacrifices to worship that person or thing.

False Worship

The first two commandments (Exodus 20:1–6) state that there is only one God and that that God alone is to be worshiped. According to Martin Luther, we only break the rest of the commandments after we have broken the first two. What he means is that if I only have the One True God as my God and I only worship that God, then I will not end up committing idolatry by worshiping such things as my job and not taking a Sabbath, worshiping my anger and becoming violent, worshiping sex and committing adultery, worshiping things and stealing them, or worshiping success and becoming covetous of what other people have.

Worship or Idolatry?

The opposite of worship is idolatry (which is worshiping something or someone other than the One True God of the Bible, or worshiping God in a way that is contrary to His Word). On this point, Christian philosopher Peter Kreeft has said, “The opposite of Christianity is not atheism, but idolatry.” This theme of worship versus idolatry is in some ways the theme of the entire Old Testament. Romans articulates the pattern of false worship as failing to glorify God, which leads to an over-inflated and arrogant view of self that ends in worshiping created things rather than the Creator God alone.

Trinitarian Worship

The Trinity is our perfect model for worship as each member honors and glorifies the others ceaselessly and perfectly. That Trinitarian God made us in His image, which means that we were made for unceasing communion with Him in a life of continual worship to His glory. Our unceasing worship has been broken by sin, which separates us from God. As a result, Jesus entered into human history to take away our sin and reconnect us to God as we were created to be.

The Perfect Worshiper

Not only do we worship through Jesus, we must also worship like Jesus. Jesus is the person who has worshiped God the Father with the most glory of anyone who has ever lived. He is the perfect worshiper. Jesus lived a life of perfect glory to His Father and thus we can look at everything in His life, from the ordinary to the extraordinary, as born out of a life of ceaseless worship that glorified God the Father.

Unceasing Worship

Jesus’ life destroys any notion that worship is a sacred thing we do at a special time and special place. All of life is to be lived as ceaseless worship; cutting our grass and cleaning our dishes are as sacred and God-glorifying as raising our hands in church. Jesus Himself modeled this: He spent roughly 90 percent of His earthly life doing chores as a boy and working a carpentry job as a man. Paul sums up the life of unceasing worship best in 1 Corinthians 10:31, “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.”

While the introverts love the discipline of solitude and the extroverts struggle with it, the opposite is true with the discipline of fellowship. Fellowship is living life together with Christian brothers and sisters as the church. The first thing the Bible says is “not good” is for us to be alone. This is because even God exists as the Trinitarian community of Father, Son, and Spirit. We are made in His image and likeness and are therefore made for loving community. God intends for us to have fellowship together as His people.

In addition to regularly taking times of solitude, we also see in Scripture that Jesus spent considerable amounts of time in community with others. In fact, Jesus spent most of His time in community with His disciples and frequently had dinner in the homes of the people He was befriending. Jesus seemed to have particularly close fellowship with the youngest disciple, John (John 13:23), the sisters Mary and Martha, and their brother Lazarus, whom He loved very much (John 11:5).

The Scriptures often speak of fellowship in community:

• Mark 12:33 “To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
• John 13:34–35 “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
• Acts 2:42 They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.
• Romans 12:10 Be devoted to one another in brotherly love.
• 1 John 1:7 But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.
• Hebrews 10:25 Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

It's a common myth that Christianity can be practiced in isolation. It is sin that separates people and it is Jesus who takes sin away so that we can have fellowship. Therefore, one of the primary purposes of the Christian faith is reconciliation—to God and one another through Jesus. Furthermore, much of the Bible itself is written to communities of people, instructing them how to live together in love as God’s people.

In fellowship and by God’s empowering grace, we can obey the Bible’s commands to:

• Live in harmony with one another (Romans 12:16)
• Love one another (Romans 13:8)
• Accept one another (Romans 15:7)
• Instruct one another (Romans 15:14)
• Greet one another (Romans 16:16)
• Serve one another (Galatians 5:13)
• Be kind and compassionate to one another (Ephesians 4:32)
• Speak to one another (Ephesians 5:19)
• Admonish one another (Colossians 3:16)
• Encourage one another (Hebrews 3:13)
• Spur one another on (Hebrews 10:24)
• Offer hospitality to one another (1 Peter 4:9)

Through the spiritual discipline of solitude, we are reminded that in one regard our relationship with God is intensely personal. God called us to Himself alone, converted us alone, and one day we will die to stand before God alone. Through the spiritual discipline of fellowship, we also see that we have been saved into the community of the church. We are reminded that on the final day when we rise from our graves, we will rise together to be with Jesus forever as a family with our spiritual brothers and sisters and our Father God.

Recommended reading:

• Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life (Donald S. Whitney)
• Celebration of Discipline (Richard Foster)
• Sacred Pathways (Gary Thomas)
• Life Together (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

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But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places . . .
–Luke 5:16

As we study the spiritual disciplines, we learn that there are two sides to every discipline. On one hand, there is a contemplative practice, and on the other, there is a corresponding active practice. A healthy relationship with God involves both being and doing.

Subsequently, anyone who practices one aspect of a spiritual discipline without the other becomes increasingly immature and imbalanced in their walk with Jesus. In the next series of posts we will examine the importance of both solitude and fellowship. Speaking of this in his wonderful book, Life Together, German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer (who was murdered by the Nazis) wrote, “Only in fellowship do we learn to be rightly alone and only in aloneness do we learn to be rightly in fellowship.”

Solitude

Solitude is fasting from people for a prescribed time to connect with God and replenish the soul. Solitude is not a punishment like that inflicted on prisoners, and it is not intended to be indefinite, as practiced by some extremist monks.

Instead, solitude is the recognition that just as we need time with those we love to build our relationship, we also need time with Jesus to build our relationship with Him. Like all relationships, this includes using the special times we get with Him to listen to Him as we read Scripture and speak to Him in prayer.

Despite the constant pressures family, friends, and fans placed on His time, Jesus’ own life was marked by ongoing times of solitude. The following verses speak of how Jesus often practiced the spiritual discipline of solitude:

• Matthew 14:23 After he had dismissed them, he went up on a mountainside by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone…
• Mark 6:31 Then, because so many people were coming and going that they did not even have a chance to eat, he said to them, “Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.”
• Luke 4:42 At daybreak Jesus went out to a solitary place.
• Luke 5:16 But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.

Jesus used solitude for a multitude of purposes.

• Following His baptism, Jesus spent forty days in solitude preparing for His public ministry (Matthew 4:1–11).
• Following the beheading of His cousin John the Baptizer, Jesus spent time alone to mourn (Matthew 14:12–13).
• Jesus used solitude as occasions for intense and focused prayer (Matthew 14:23; Mark 1:35; Luke 5:16).
• He used solitude to rest after a hard day of work (Mark 6:31).
• He used solitude as an opportunity to pray and seek the Father’s will before choosing the twelve disciples (Luke 6:12).
• Knowing He was going to be crucified soon, Jesus spent time alone in the Garden of Gethsemane coming to grips with the painful obedience that was required of Him (Mark 26:36–46).
• Other biblical figures also used solitude for a litany of purposes. Moses spent time alone on the mountain with God in order to receive a word from God, namely the Ten Commandments (Exodus 19–20).
• Isaiah was both saved and sustained by God through his times of solitude with the Lord (Isaiah 30:15).
• David says that in solitude, God calmed his fears and encouraged his soul (Psalm 62:1–2, 5).
• Paul spent some three years in varying degrees of solitude being prepared by the Lord for ministry (Galatians 1:17–19).

Clearly, time alone with God serves innumerable good purposes in our lives. In order to exercise this discipline, you may need to schedule a day of solitude to ensure that this is a regular part of your spiritual life. I do this at least one day a month and find it to be the most important and refreshing part of my life. It enables me to function in the other areas of my life by helping me remain continually connected to Jesus. Find a place that you like to go to. This may mean that you spend a day in God’s creation hiking or simply resting. If you are a parent, you may have to get up early or stay up late to get some time to yourself at home.

There are many things you can do during your periods of solitude, including:

1. Nothing
2. Meditate on a short section of Scripture
3. Rest
4. Read long sections of Scripture
5. Pray, including a prayer walk/hike/bike
6. Journal your thoughts
7. Read a good book

Personally, I tend to be a very organized person who uses every minute of every day very efficiently. As the church grows, it is getting increasingly harder to get some time alone without being recognized. I have come up with a plan that works well for me and I will use it as an illustration. I schedule at least one day a month to get away and connect with Jesus. Because every minute of my day is normally scheduled, I don’t plan these days but just wake up and go wherever I end up. I do not answer my phone, do not meet with anyone, and usually get out of town. During a few hours of driving I do a lot of praying and sometimes worship God in song by myself. I like to drive until I am out of the city and find a small town or hidden secluded place in God’s creation. There, I do whatever I feel like. Sometimes I go for long walks and hikes alone to get fresh air, think, and pray. Sometimes I check into a bed and breakfast and take a nap and then go out to dinner. And sometimes I don’t do anything.

An example trip started with a desire to enjoy the sun with the top down in my Jeep. I ended up in a small town called Easton in the mountains and found a national forest. I followed the road until it turned to a dirt path and continued into the forest until I came to the end of the road. I went off-road and followed a rocky old snowmobile path along a river into the middle of nowhere where there was no sign of people and no noise could be heard from anyone. I drove my Jeep through the river and parked on the other side. It was a glorious sunny day and I took my folding chair out of my Jeep and put it in the middle of the river where I sat to eat a hamburger and do nothing for a few hours. I just sat in the river enjoying the sun and solitude, got some time in prayer, and spent time doing nothing by myself and was incredibly refreshed.

To be continued.

Rain City Hymnal

The first offering from Re:Sound is the Rain City Hymnal. Listen online and get the record from the Re:Sound website. Find out more.