We are six weeks into this series called Beholding: Disciplines for Imagers, and we're exploring together the disciplines that God has graciously given us. Part of my heart in this series is that I want you to see the disciplines not as a burden, but as a blessing. These are not duties — they're delights. These are God's gifts to us. God doesn't ask us to do these things because He gets something out of it. He asks us to do these things because He loves us and He knows our needs and He knows that we will get what we need out of them. The disciplines are a gift, and they're the gifts that allow us to behold the glory of God, which is what produces transformation within us.
This morning we're going to tackle a difficult discipline; the discipline of attention. The discipline of attention is difficult, and I want to prove that to you right now. I don't want to describe it; I want you to experience it. So here's what we’ll do. For two to three minutes, we going to be silent. We’re going to be still — or at least as silent and still as we can be in a room with beautifully crying babies and all of that. That's just life, and I love it, and that's a good thing. There will be no music in the background, nothing on the screens. The invitation is simply to pay attention — pay attention to your heart, to your mind, to what happens in your body as we do this. Pay attention to the God that we've come to worship together this morning. You don't have to make anything happen. Just be, and be in God's presence.
2-3 Minutes of Silence
That was hard, wasn't it? Easy or hard — it's different for all of us. For some of you, that might be the first sustained, intentional quiet you've had in a long time. For others, it might be what you've been trying to avoid. My guess is that within the first thirty seconds, most of us started to feel a little bit of anxiety. There's this strange thing in quietness where time starts to elongate, and it creates this weird sense of pressure. Our hands start to twitch to reach for something — our phone, our watch, a wedding ring, anything for our fingers to occupy themselves. It's an interesting reality, because then the inner dialogue starts to happen. You start to think of your to-do list. You start to think of your wife's to-do list for you. You start to replay the recent conversation that didn't go so well. You start to think about what you're having for lunch. The mind, given the opportunity, begins to talk at us with great enthusiasm about everything except what we're actually supposed to be trying to do — be present with God.
It's a very interesting thing, and I want to say that when — if and when — you encounter that kind of difficulty in silence and stillness, it is not a moral failure. That is the result of a nervous system that has been trained and conditioned to never be without external stimulus. Attention, silence, and stillness — being present — is extremely difficult for us in our cultural context, because we have engineered a world in which there is very little silence and stillness. We fill every waking moment with noise and distraction. When we're in the car, we're listening to music or a podcast. When we're in the bathroom, we're scrolling on our phones. Wherever we are, whatever we find ourselves doing, we're never far from noise and stimulus and things that grip our attention. From the moment we wake up until we fall asleep, we're bombarded by noise that demands and consumes our attention. And then we wonder, in the rare moments of stillness and quietness, why our souls feel so fragmented, why we feel so spiritually tired.
Now, before some of you start to feel the all-too-common sense of relief — "Oh good, this sermon isn't for me, it's for somebody else"; let me address that. Some of you don't doom-scroll on your phone. Some of you cut the cord; you don't watch TV. And you think, "Well, I'm not being distracted because I'm not in front of a screen," which is the problem for most of us. But noise isn't just a screen. Noise is anything that gives my attention something to grip so that I'm not fully present — either to myself or to the God who made me for Himself. Noise can be the constant rehearsal of grievance in your mind. I know nobody here would ever do that, but I've read about it, so I thought I'd bring it up. Noise might be the constant demand of busyness, the pressure and urgency of the details of our lives. Noise is the steady internal monologue that keeps our minds full and busy so that we don't have to feel what we're actually feeling.
Life is noise. And here's the tricky part: even the absence of noise can be noisy. Most of us are living lives that are engineered to be noisy. We're productive and we're useful. Things have to get done and we're the ones that “git-er-done.” So, there's this reality of life that demands our attention. But underneath it, for so many today, is this fear — and it's usually not spoken aloud or even recognized, but it's very real nonetheless. A fear of what happens when the noise goes away. What happens when I'm not needed in the same way? What happens when I'm not busy? What happens when the urgency becomes less urgent? If I'm not doing something, if I'm not producing something, then what am I even worth? And so we continue to surround ourselves with the noise because it justifies our existence.
But others of us have a different relationship with silence and stillness — an unchosen one. It started when your spouse died, when your last child moved out and you became a true empty nester. It's the silence that began when the divorce papers were signed, when life went a different direction than what you anticipated, and suddenly, against your will, your problem is too much silence, an unchosen emptiness. And here's the deal: wherever you find yourself on that spectrum, whether you're constantly surrounded by noise or you're constantly surrounded by silence, the solution that God lays out for us in the scripture is actually the same, because they're just two sides of the same coin.
The discipline of attention is God's answer to both of these challenges. God is inviting all of us to intentionally choose to enter into a posture, into a rhythm of chosen silence and stillness and solitude, for the purpose of beholding God that we might be transformed. Silence and stillness are not the goal — all the disciplines function this way; they're just the pathway. The goal of being still, the goal of being silent, the goal of being alone is to pay attention. So we still ourselves to pay attention. We quiet ourselves to pay attention. We isolate ourselves to pay attention. We pay attention to ourselves. We pay attention to the God who made us. We pay attention to the life that He has generously given us. It is the posture of paying attention — the chosen, intentional, deliberate, patient work of paying attention — that allows our hearts and our minds to become undisturbed enough to see clearly. Not to see what we think or assume or even what we wish or want is there, but to see what is actually there. This is the discipline of attention.
I've been grounding each of these disciplines in creation because I really believe that the disciplines are acts of new creation, of recreation. So I want to frame them that way and I want you to see them that way. Let's go to the very beginning of the scriptures, the creation account. Genesis 1, verse 1:
1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
This is a Hebrew turn of phrase meaning everything that is. All that exists, exists because God makes it to exist. And when we think of Genesis 1, it's natural to think of it as a chapter about God making everything that exists. But verse two throws a really interesting dynamic into the creation narrative.
Verse 2 says this:
2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
This is before God says "let there be light," before God speaks anything into existence. Verse 2 gives us a framework that establishes a pattern of how God works. Before God speaks, there is this reality of potential. The earth was formless and void — that's a decent translation, technically accurate, but it's kind of theologically thin. The Hebrew here is תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ — tōhû wābōhû. And you'll notice instantly that it is a rhyming sort of phrase, and that's intentional. It's memorable. When God creates, the reality is tōhû wābōhû, and there is this instant impression of sound and rhyme.
The first word, tōhû, is a word that means emptiness or formlessness. It is the word used throughout the scriptures to describe the wasteland, the desert, the wilderness. It's the word used in Deuteronomy chapter 32 for the howling waste of the wilderness in which God found Israel. In Jeremiah chapter 4, it's the word used to describe the chaos that comes from the judgment of God upon covenant-breaking Israel. So tōhû is the word for a place that has no shape, no order, no form — a place that resists habitation because nothing about it is ready for life.
The second word, bōhû, is only used three times in all of scripture, and it is only ever used when it is connected to tōhû. tōhû gives you formlessness. bōhû gives you emptiness. tōhû names the absence of shape. bōhû names the absence of context. And together — and they always show up together — they describe a place that is both unshaped and uninhabited. Not just chaotic, but empty, formless, void. Tim Mackey and the Bible Project translate this as "wild and waste." The earth was wild and waste. That phrasing works well because it gets you into that rhyming, alliterative connection, and it describes conceptually what is happening here.
Verse one establishes that God is the creator of all. Everything that exists exists because God made it. Verse two, though, tells us about the process and the pattern. God comes to the wild waste, which on one hand can be thought of as chaos, but on the other hand can be thought of as potential. God comes to nothingness, but to God, nothingness is an open door. To God, nothingness is not an obstacle.
So the verse continues. It says:
2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
The Hebrew word here for "deep" is תְּהוֹם — tĕhôm. It is a word for the primeval abyss, the great waters. So in verse two, we have two conceptual images given to us. One is the wilderness, and one is the depths — the deeps. These are the Bible's two primary symbols for chaos, for the lack of order, and for potential. They come together. What we have pictured in verse two is this kind of watery wilderness — a place where nothing lives, a place where nothing can live, until God shows up.
This is the pattern.
2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
Hovering comes from the verb רחף — rāḥap, and it is a rare verb that means to hover, to flutter, to brood. It is only used a couple of times in the Bible, and only twice in this verbal stem. The other place is in Deuteronomy
11 Like an eagle that stirs up its nest, that flutters over its young, spreading out its wings, catching them, bearing them on its pinions,
That is the same word there as in Genesis 1:2. The Spirit of God is pictured like a bird hovering, brooding, fluttering over its young.
This is not a flyby. It is not a passing. It is a picture of attention. The mother bird is focused on the eggs or the newly hatched chicks in the nest. They have her complete and undivided attention. It is the attention of a parent — loving and life-giving.
That imagery frames Genesis 1:2 differently than I think many people see it. Before there was light, before there was order, before there was anything in the universe that could yet be called good, before there were stars or fish or land or animals or human beings or any of it, the Spirit of God was hovering, brooding, attending.
The first picture of the Spirit in the whole Bible is not the Spirit empowering. It is not the Spirit speaking. And it is not the Spirit moving in power. The first picture of the Spirit of God is the Spirit attending to the wild and the waste with the patient, generative, loving care and attention of a mother bird brooding over her nest. Before God speaks, the Spirit broods. Let me say that again — this is the pattern that is established. Before God speaks, the Spirit broods. It is a profound biblical pattern.
So you have wild, watery waste, which on one hand can be seen as chaos, and on the other hand can be seen as potential — to which the Spirit comes and pays attention, broods, flutters, hovers. And then out of that, God speaks, and from the wild, watery waste, order and life emerge. It is a beautiful and important pattern, because this pattern of creation holds true for you and me today. This is how the new creation offered in Christ works. It follows this same pattern.
If we are honest, there is within us a watery wild waste. Is there not an unsettled, fragmented, broken reality? We know it, we feel it, we fear it. This is why we fill our lives with noise — to avoid seeing what is truly within us. This is the part of us that has not yet been ordered, not yet been filled. Here is the good news. The Spirit of God is still fluttering. He is still hovering. The Spirit of God is patiently waiting over the chaos of your heart, of your mind, of your body, of your life, ready to prepare it for God's creative life. This is the pattern.
The discipline of attention is what allows us to enter into and participate in that process. The disciplines are participatory. It is not something we do by ourselves, and if we do it well enough, God rewards us. No. The disciplines are designed for us to enter into the life of God, to join in the work of the Spirit and participate. We still ourselves so that the Spirit can still us. We quiet ourselves so that the Spirit can quiet us.
We settle ourselves so that the Spirit might settle us. It is our work and the Spirit's work at the same time, in the same place, on the same soul. We don't do this alone. The Spirit who hovered over the watery wild waste is hovering right now. And the discipline of attention is how we say yes to what He is already doing.
So, I want to turn now to the New Testament, to the life of Jesus, because I want to show you how this pattern works. My guess is that maybe some of you are already thinking about the baptism of Jesus. We've looked at that in the last several weeks — how Jesus goes into the water, He comes up out of the water, the Spirit descends upon Him, the Father declares, the Father speaks. You see the pattern there, it's just right there in your face. But I want to look this morning at the life and ministry of Jesus and see that there is a persistent, consistent pattern of Jesus organizing His life intentionally to pay attention.
So, if you've got your Bibles, I want to look starting in Luke chapter 5. Luke 5 says this:
12a While he was in one of the cities, there came a man full of leprosy.
This is an interesting phrase — "full of leprosy." It's not just that he had a little bit of leprosy. It had filled him up. It's an interesting phrase. This man comes to Jesus full of leprosy. Now, in the ancient world, leprosy was a dreaded disease. It was a disease that brought with it forced ostracization and marginalization. Lepers were not allowed to be in and among the general populace. Lepers were driven off and driven out. No one wanted to touch a leper. No one wanted to be near a leper. So one that is full of leprosy — this is a guy that nobody wants to be near.
12b And when he saw Jesus, he fell on his face and begged him, “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.” 13 And Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, “I will; be clean.” And immediately the leprosy left him. 14 And he charged him to tell no one, but “go and show yourself to the priest, and make an offering for your cleansing, as Moses commanded, for a proof to them.”
So Jesus does the unthinkable — He touches a leper — and the unthinkable happens. The leper is healed.
Now this is a huge deal. Like, a huge deal. If this were to happen today, Twitter — or X, or whatever they want to call it this week — would be blowing up. Every news station would be wanting to carry it, and people would be rushing to find video footage, and this would have been what everybody was thinking and talking about. And it was no different in Jesus's day. Verse 15 says:
15 But now even more the report about him went abroad, and great crowds gathered to hear him and to be healed of their infirmities.
So this is an interesting dynamic. Jesus has just begun His ministry, and He heals this leper, and out of it Jesus's reputation, His fame, begins to spread. And the power of the grapevine is just as powerful as social media — it gets out, and everybody now wants a piece of Jesus. The result is the crowds grew. The demands intensified. More and more and more people clamoring for Jesus's attention.
I want you to listen carefully to how Luke says Jesus responds to this. I don't think He responds to it in the way that we would expect, in the way that the American evangelical would expect. It says:
16 But he would withdraw to desolate places and pray.
Jesus performs this miraculous event, and the crowds grow. See, we love crowds in America. We love crowds. We chase crowds. And when the crowds grew, when the demand increased, what does Jesus do? He walks away from it. He would withdraw to desolate places and pray.
This is so important. The word here in the Greek for "would withdraw" is ἦν ὑποχωρῶν = ēn hypochōrōn. For those of you that are grammatical nerds, it's in the periphrastic imperfect, which means this is not a one-time event. Luke is not saying, "Well, just that one time after the leper, Jesus took off for a while." He is saying this is the habit. This is the pattern. Dare I say, this is the “normal traffic pattern of life” for Jesus. Jesus was in the habit of withdrawing. This is what He kept doing again and again and again and again.
And where He withdrew to is important. He would withdraw to desolate places and pray. The Greek here for "desolate places" is ἐρήμοις = erēmois. It is the same word that the Septuagint uses for the wilderness that Israel wandered in for forty years. It is the same conceptual territory as the wild, watery waste of Genesis 1:2. Which is to say, Jesus didn't retreat to a spa. He didn't go to a conference center. Jesus went to the wilderness — the exposed place, the empty place. And why that is important is something we need to sit with carefully.
It's the place where nothing competes for your attention. In the watery wilderness, we're able to actually pay attention to what truly matters. This is what Jesus did intentionally, consistently, persistently. It was His regular practice. He would go to the wilderness, the wild waste, and spend focused time paying attention to His Father. This is how Jesus lived His life. This is how Jesus did ministry. And the busier He got, the more He withdrew.
This reminds me of a quote by Martin Luther. He once said, "I have so much to do today that I'll spend the first three hours in prayer." That seems so counterproductive to the American roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-it-done mentality. Like, I've got so much to do today, I don't have time to pray. He goes the exact opposite way. He normally prayed for an hour or two every morning. He says, "I've got so much to do today. I'm going to pray for three hours this morning." This is something Martin Luther understood about the reality that the success, the power, the fruit of our ministry flows out of our identity, and our identity is formed by paying attention to God and to ourselves in His presence. I got so much to do today — I've got to spend more time in prayer.
See, the busier life gets, the more we need the discipline of attention. Which reminds me of another quote that's often attributed to Luther, but I don't think he actually said it. It goes like this: “if the devil can't make you bad, he'll make you busy.” I think that's a deep and profound truth. The greater the external demand, the deeper the interior life is required to sustain it. You cannot let your calendar determine your soul's center of gravity. That's how far too many of us live our lives — reacting to external stimulus, reacting to the noise, constantly driven to and fro, rather than proactively choosing how we live our lives.
So Jesus — the one who is spoken of by the Father as "My Son, the beloved one, the one with whom I am pleased," the one who at His baptism is recognized and empowered and anointed by the Spirit — is immediately led into the wilderness to be tempted. And in that, Jesus is formed and shaped. He is empowered to do the work that God has called Him to do. Jesus's identity comes before His productivity. And it's beautiful to see that that's not a one-off event. The Spirit constantly brought Him back to the wilderness. This becomes the pattern of Jesus's life. He's going to be the Son of God before He's the servant of God. He's anchored in His identity received in the presence of God, and out of that His ministry and life flows.
I get it — I get that it's low-hanging fruit — but I've got to say it. If Jesus needed to do that, maybe you and I should consider it. Don't you think that maybe we too need to learn how to have our life and ministry flow out of an identity received from God rather than an identity construed by our circumstances? The discipline of attention is God's gift to us to slow us down — not just to slow us down, but to shut us up. Not just to shut us up, but so that in that reality, we might actually be able to hear the Father's voice and receive our identity from Him.
So let me ask this of the busy people in the room — the professionals, the leaders, the soccer moms, the retirees. Isn't that one of the greatest lies that our culture tells us? Oh, when you retire, everything will slow down. That has not been my experience watching people retire. Now, I will say, knowing what day of the week it is can be a problem once you're retired, but that's a whole different deal. But for those of you who are busy, here's my question: what is your version of the wilderness? How do you pay attention to the Father and hear His voice? How do you receive your identity from Him? Or is your identity being constructed and reconstructed every day out of the next thing — the next accomplishment, the next acquisition, the next applause you receive?
I want to ask a similar question to those of you with the opposite problem — those of you in a season of unchosen silence, where you didn't go to the wilderness but the wilderness came to you. My question is this: what will you do with the silence? Will you use it for formation and let God form you? Or will you choose to drown in the silence? For all of us, it's a choice — how we engage, how we live, how we structure and organize our lives, and what we choose to give our attention to. And it's not an easy discipline. It is, after all, a discipline.
I love Paul's words to his son in the faith, Timothy. He says,
7b Rather train yourself for godliness; 8 for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.
You train yourself for godliness. Godliness doesn't just happen. Godliness isn't accidental. Godliness is the result of consistent, persistent choice and attention. So he says, "Train yourself for godliness, for bodily training is of some value…"
I'm embarrassed to admit that I'm sore this morning after playing golf yesterday in the BBQ Mission Golf Tournament. It's been a long time since I’ve played golf, and that's not a movement I'm used to. That's just reality. When you use muscles you haven't used in a long time, they're going to let you know about it. So there's value for working out, there's value for physical training, and that's something we all understand. Paul's point is, yeah, that's good, but actually training yourself for godliness is better because it holds promise for this life and for the life that continues. So I'm working on my spiritual six-pack.
He says, "Train yourself." This is the Greek word γύμναζε = gymnaze, which sounds familiar. This is the word we get gymnastics from, or gymnasium. It's a word that means to exercise vigorously, to train in the manner of an athlete in disciplined, repetitive preparation. It's not casual. There's nothing casual about it. It's the language of athletes who get up at five in the morning and put their bodies through the same drill they did yesterday, because they know the only pathway to the result they want is the unglamorous repetition of the activity that they don't enjoy in the moment. This is where the rub comes, because we think that the disciplines should feel good. We want the disciplines to be instant gratification, because that's how we want everything in life to be. Paul doesn't say drive through the spiritual drive-thru and pick up a little godliness on your way. He says train yourself. Train yourself.
Interestingly, the word gymnaze comes from the word gymnos, which means “naked”, because that's how the ancient Greeks trained, they trained naked — imagine the first Olympics, they would be really difficult to televise today! And when you think about it, it's such an appropriate term and word. This is what the discipline of attention does. It strips us to our core. It removes all the obstacles, all the masks, all the distractions. The discipline of attention is the discipline of being naked to ourselves and being naked to God. It reveals who we really are and how we really are.
So please — I say this with all the pastoral love I can muster — if you're going to really engage in the discipline of attention, it's going to be really hard. The first time you try to sit in silence for ten minutes, it's going to be miserable. Your mind's going to riot. Your body's going to get antsy like a toddler. You're going to think of forty-three things you forgot to do. You're going to wonder if you're doing it wrong. And it's going to feel — and see, this is the part nobody wants to talk about — it's going to feel like the most useless ten minutes of your life. It's going to feel like you accomplished nothing. And to that I say, welcome to the gym. This is what the training of an athlete feels like on day one, and on day two, and on day fifteen. The form is awful. The endurance is short. The discomfort is real. And the only way through it is through it.
The discipline of attention is not a spiritual technique. It's not a trick. It's not a hack. It's the chosen, bodily, habitual, effortful practice of seeking God. Dallas Willard used to say that the disciplines are training, not trying. I like that. You cannot try your way into godliness. You cannot try your way into fully alive, image-bearing. You can only train your way into it. And the training is hard. It's hard enough just in our own bodies. But we don't exist in a negative, empty space. We exist in a cosmic conflict, and we're faced every day with an enemy. So it's hard enough on our own. It's harder still with the reality of the enemy.
Remember we looked a few weeks ago at 2 Corinthians 4:4:
4 In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
The tactic of the enemy is to blind unbelievers from seeing the glory of Jesus. And that doesn't leave you off the hook this morning. The enemy will do everything in his considerable power to blind you from seeing the gospel of the glory of Jesus, who is the true and perfect imager. Because the enemy knows that if you actually see Him as He is, you will be transformed from glory to glory.
The enemy knows that if you will slow down and settle yourself and retreat into the watery, wild waste, in that place you will encounter the brooding Spirit. In that place you will hear the voice of the Father, and in that place you will be transformed. So the enemy does everything he can to keep you out of that place. And here's the reality: we are tragically, comically, easily distractable. I've used this illustration so many times, and I'm going to keep using it because it's so perfect. Do you remember the Disney movie Up? Do you remember Doug the dog? He's one of my favorite characters.
We've been trained to be like Doug, constantly chasing the squirrels that run through our lives. The phone buzzes — squirrel. The headline catches the eye — squirrel. The conversation gets uncomfortable — squirrel. The silence starts to bite — squirrel. How many times a day do you just get lost in the noise and the circumstances, and you realize an hour has passed, two hours have passed, and you don't even know what happened? This is not benign. This is war. The God of this age has gotten very, very good at squirrel attacks.
The discipline of attention is the deliberate, militant, day-by-day refusal to chase the squirrels. You can't stop the squirrels from coming. You can only change how you respond. Thankfully, God knows this about us. He knows the discipline is difficult, He knows the war is raging, He knows that we need help, and He gives it. Listen to Paul's word to Timothy in 2 Timothy, and many of you know this verse and have memorized it:
7 for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.
The Greek word here is σωφρονισμός = sōphronismos. It's a word that means a disciplined attention, a unified integration and settledness. It's a word that describes what a person has and is when their soul is no longer fragmented, no longer disturbed — it's focused and settled. And notice where it comes from. It's the gift of God. God didn't give us a spirit of fear, but He graciously gives us a spirit of power, a spirit of love, and a spirit of self-control, sound mind, settledness. God helps us.
And this is important: the discipline of attention, as I've already said, is a participatory discipline with the Spirit. You can train yourself all day to be still and silent without God, and many people do this. There are other religious practices, there are physical practices, and meditation is so big right now, and all these sorts of things. When you do that without God, when you do it on your own, all you get is emptiness. But when you do it with the Spirit, then you get what only the Spirit can give — the creation of life, the creation of order, the formation of identity, the very power and presence of God. We're called to participate with God in this discipline.
Throughout the last two series, the IDOL series and this series, I've been using this metaphor for our lives of a mirror. What it means to be made in the image of God, what it means to be an imager of God, is that we're like a mirror — we're to receive God's image and then reflect it back. There's something else naturally that is reflective. Mirrors are made, but there is a natural reflective reality that covers actually most of the earth. Water is naturally reflective. It's a natural mirror. But the thing about water is that when it's still, it's an unbelievable mirror. Sometimes it's hard to tell what's the thing and where's the water reflecting it.
We were driving at an ungodly hour yesterday for the barbecue Mission golf tournament, and we drove by the lake and it was perfectly still, and the reflection was so beautiful. But the thing about water is that once the wind starts to blow, once the waves start to come, it's still reflective — but that reflection becomes distorted. The more disturbed the water is, the more distorted the reflection becomes. I think that's part of what is at play in the Genesis 1 picture of the Spirit hovering over the waters, stilling them, creating the environment for the Father to speak and bring life.
And I think that's really what the discipline of attention is all about. Our hearts, our minds, our souls, our bodies are designed to reflect the glory of God. And if we're honest, they're more often turbulent and choppy and disturbed than they are still and peaceful. The discipline of attention is designed to still the waters, to calm the waves, so that we might accurately reflect the glory of the One that we're spending time with — the One that we're made to image.
You know when you're around somebody like this you know it. Many of you had the privilege of knowing one of the founding elders of our church, Don Smith. I love and I miss Don Smith and his wife Judy. I miss them so much. They're in the presence of the Lord, doing better than all of us are. But I used to spend a lot of time with Don. I spent a lot of time with Don before I moved my family down here. I used to stay with him and his wife Judy, and Don and I would stay up till two or three in the morning, and he would just tell me stories about God. And I would share stories, and we would pray and laugh and cry, and we'd do it out in his living room. I've told this before, and many of you have spent time in his living room. He had a director's chair in the living room with Jesus's name on it. It was so cheesy. The first time I saw it and I'm laughing internally. I'm thinking, that is so nerdy. Until I spent time in that living room and realized, no, Jesus really was sitting there. And Don had been shaped by that. Don had a stillness, a calmness, a depth to him because he'd spent so much time in the presence of God that when you were around it, for me, I just wanted to spend more and more time with him because he wasn't driven by the tossing waves of circumstance. He was settled.
When I think of Don, I think of Psalm 131. That's where I'm going to close this morning. It's one of the shortest Psalms in the Bible, only three verses, written by David. Psalm 131 says this in verse one:
1 O Lord, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.
It's interesting. David the king. David the decision maker. David the center of the kingdom. This must have been written later in his life. David says three things: I haven't done this. I'm not lifting up my heart. I'm not lifting up my eyes too high. I'm not filling my mind with things that are beyond me. These are all images of pride, right? Lifting up our heart, lifting up our eyes, trying to grapple and wrestle with things that are beyond our ability to actually do anything about. These are the images of pride. And David is saying, I'm not walking the way of pride anymore. I'm choosing the road of humility. I will not lift up my heart. I will not raise up my eyes too high. I will not occupy myself with things too great and marvelous for me. He's saying, I choose the path of humility. And oh, how we need to hear that from David this morning.
We live in a culture that has confused busyness with significance. And we are addicted to information. We need to know about every global crisis. We need to know about every political opinion. We're addicted to the outrage of the day. Why? Because we're addicted to being important by proximity to important things. So we leave the cable news on twelve hours a day. The endless scrolling of the social media feed, the compulsive need to be right about every issue all the time so that we can win every argument — this is a compulsion of pride. It's the fruit of trying to find our identity in the busyness and the reality of external circumstance. And the result of it is that we don't actually live the life that we have. We don't live the life that we have because we're spending so much of our time and energy imagining the life that we think we should have. We spend our time outraged about things that we can do nothing about and end up ignoring the things that we can actually make a difference about.
The discipline of attention is the slow, deliberate, humble refusal to live that way. It's the intentional choice to live the actual life that God has given you today, here and now. And David continues and he gives us this beautiful metaphor. He says, "I have calmed and quieted my soul." That is the discipline of attention — silence, stillness, solitude. He says:
2 But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me.
This beautiful illustration of a weaned child — a child that is no longer dependent upon the mother for nursing. The word there for weaned in the Hebrew is גָמֻל = gāmûl, and it's used to describe the ending of nursing because it's a word that means fullness, or maturity, or completion. So when the child has reached a certain level of fullness or maturity or completion, they move on from the mother's breast to finding nourishment in food in other ways. So, the child who has been weaned has been brought through the long, difficult, very often tearful process of letting go. And on the other side of that process is a settled child, a satisfied child, a matured child.
The infant at the breast is desperate by design. The infant cries, the infant grasps, the infant needs, and the mother gives. And the mother gives, and the mother gives and gives and gives, because that is what the infant requires. But the weaned child is different. The weaned child is held against the mother but is not grasping. The weaned child is leaning against the mother but is not crying. The weaned child is with the mother — fully with her. But that withness is not transactional. The child is not there to take anything. The child is simply there with the mother, present, settled, full, and most importantly, loved.
This is the image that David puts together. He says, this is what my soul has become with God. Not the desperate, grasping, demanding soul that needs God to fix the next thing and answer the next prayer and resolve the next crisis. David says, my soul has been quieted and settled. My soul has come through long discipline and long grief and long practice to the place where being with God is enough. Not because God owes me anything. Not because being with Him will produce anything. Just because He is the one I was made for, and He is the one in whom I find life.
I remember when I was in my early twenties, I went to a conference with Dallas Willard on spiritual formation. There was a season of my life where I was feeling a little discouraged and a little lonely. The ministry that I was in was having some chaos and problems, and I was unsettled. I was playing a victim a little bit — woe is me. And I'll never forget, in that conference, he said this: “the cure for your loneliness is solitude.” And I thought, that doesn't make any sense. The cure for your loneliness is solitude?
But the more I thought about that, the more I saw the wisdom in it. The cure for loneliness is not necessarily more company, because ultimately the lonely person is the person who has never learned how to be alone — which is to say, we've never learned how to be alone with God. And the cure for that is not surrounding yourself with more people, because this has been my experience: I'm actually more lonely in a crowd than I am in a room by myself, because it's an interior problem, not an external one.
The problem is we keep filling the space of our mind, the space of our heart, the space of our lives with people, with noise, with activity, with screens, because we really don't want to slow down and see who we really are and how we really are. The only thing that cures that is the weaned child experience — of being with God, of learning to truly be.
So let me say this to the widow, to the empty nester, to the grieving, to those of you who are involuntarily alone. The silence — the all too staggering silence — is not a sign to you that you've been abandoned. It's God inviting you into that place where the Spirit broods and the Father speaks. It's the territory of Psalm 131. You've not been left. You've not been abandoned. You've been brought — yes, against your will — but you've been brought to the place where being with God can be enough.
Discipline doesn't change your circumstances. It changes you.
And to the busy person, the productive one, the noise-saturated one, the same geography is the destination. But you won't arrive there by accident. You'll only arrive there by training, by choice. You must choose to return again and again to the desolate place and let the Spirit who broods do His work in the wild, watery waste of your soul — daily, deliberately refusing to be the dog who chases the squirrel. We're all called by God to the discipline of attention, to the discipline of the Spirit.
David ends the psalm:
3 O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and forevermore.
I love how he ends this with a communal call to hope in God. The individual's settled heart becomes the clarion call to the community. We must be weaned. We must be settled. We must together reflect the image of God, and we only do that in stillness, from stillness.
So church, we must attend to our hearts, our minds, our lives. We must engage and endure the discipline of attention to create space for the Spirit to hover — to create space for the Spirit to bring life and order out of the wildness of our hearts.
Church, I call you to the discipline of attention. I call you to the training of yourselves for godliness. Put down the phone. Turn off the podcast. Take a long walk. Hide in a closet. Do whatever you have to do to pay attention to your heart, your mind, and your soul, and to pay attention to the God who made you for Himself. Let the Spirit settle you. Because, church, the Spirit right now is hovering, fluttering, brooding over the wild watery waste of your life, ready to bring order and life to you. Amen.
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