SUNDAY: Bible Study - 9:00 AM | Worship - 10:00 AM | PM Worship - 6:00 PM WEDNESDAY: Bible Class - 7:00 PM ~ 8110 Signal Hill Road Manassas, Virginia | Office Phone: 703.368.2622

            Be still and know that I am God…Psalm 46.10

It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD. Lamentations 3.26

Absolute silence is impossible to achieve. If you didn’t know this before, just stop for moment and list the number of things you can hear. If I turn off the Julie London album I have playing I can hear: cars, crows, a mockingbird, a siren, adult voices, children’s voices, the fax machine, two clocks ticking, the wind, my own breathing.  If go to one of the baptistery rooms – which are the quietest in the building – I can still hear the trickle of water, the buzz of a motor, my watch ticking, and my own breathing. If I were to enter a perfectly sound-proof, anechoic chamber I would find that I could hear my heart beating, and the blood circulating in my veins. It seems as long our pulmonary and circulatory systems are working we will never experience perfect silence.

In fact we rarely experience even a small measure of quiet. The Clean Air Act and The Clean Water Act have done much to unsully our environment these past forty years.  But noise pollution just seems to increase. This is a problem. This is a problem because our brains have to process all this noise, and that distracts focus and energy away from what we have tasked our brains to focus on. It is a problem because we have been told that silence is a necessary element of our connection to God.

Jesus tells us to enter our inner room to pray (Matthew 6.6). Indeed, he regularly sought out empty places to pray (Luke 5.16). The verses cited above both emphasize the element of silence as a prerequisite for encountering God. If silence is in short supply we have a problem.

Psalm 46.10 is particularly appropriate to this discussion because it more precisely describes a state of calm, rather than just a state of silence. We know that even though we might be in that anechoic chamber, alone with our breathing, our heartbeat, and our thoughts – those thoughts can be louder than a brass band or the front row of a Deep Purple concert. Aural quiet may not achieve mental quiet by itself.

We think of quiet and calm as passive. My point is that they will have to be actively, deliberately achieved, if they are to be achieved at all. In order to have space and time to think, to pray, to meditate, to process, to yield we will have to create that space deliberately.  We will have to carve it out of the hard hectic rock of our daily lives or it will not exist at all. Quiet won’t just happen.  We have to generate it, insist upon it. We cannot neglect quiet, not for long.  To neglect quiet is to neglect God.

Is someone listening to you if they have ear-buds in their ears, if  their eyes are glued to a hand held screen, and their thumbs are tapping a keyboard? Are we listening, thinking, yielding if we are similarly distracted?

“Be still.” “Wait quietly.”  Those are commands, unless I am mistaken.

Quiet is not a luxury. It is a necessity.

NewManassas Side

8110 Signal Hill Road | Manassas, Virginia

Let us know about your interest in Studying the Bible

Members Login

Bible Study

biblestudysd

Top
                                                                       © 2013 Manassas Church of Christ