Deeper: Developing Deeper Intimacy With GodSample

Embrace the Stillness

I decided to put embrace the stillness of God after the actual commitment to the spiritual disciplines because I believe we often get the spiritual disciplines down only to drown out what God wants to reveal to us. Sometimes, when we sit in silence and focus on the Lord, He shows Himself in and through us.

Today, we are bombarded by distractions, sometimes masking themselves as good things. A good thing could be the Christian podcast you listen to, the sermon you watch, or even the Bible plan you read. Inherently, these aren’t bad things. But when we depend on them for spiritual nourishment, we can often miss what God is trying to communicate.

This often looks like bouncing from stream to stream, conference to conference, service to service, and never genuinely spending time with God for ourselves. Then, when we do, we convince ourselves we readily share our thoughts, prayer requests, and what we think God is saying before we take the time to listen.

Psalm 46:10 tells us to be still and know that He is God. 1 Kings 19 describes God’s voice as a still, small voice. We cannot embrace God if we do not sit still long enough to hear it. James 1:19 tells us to be quick to listen and slow to speak. I believe this applies to building intimacy with God as well.

As we take the time to listen in prayer and embrace the silence, I believe God reveals Himself to us in ways that we never imagined. There have been countless times when I took the time to sit in the quietness, focused on Him, heard solutions, or found the peace I needed in chaos.

Now, as you lean into the quietness, you may not hear anything, but be satisfied with having spent time drawing closer to Him by focusing on Him without distraction. I pray that this encourages you to take the time to focus on the Lord and embrace the stillness of God.