Silence And The Future World
So I had other plans for a blog this week, but I found myself reading "The Way of the Heart" by Henry Nouwen again and it was too incredibly meaningful not to journal about. I have to commend this book to you. The whole book is a masterful description of disciplines that transform us into the image of Christ at the end of the age. But this time around, I noticed two segments of the book that really grabbed me. I'll write a little about the first today and maybe I'll write about the second next week.
The desert fathers (the subject of "The Way of the Heart") found themselves in a transitional period of history where the meaning of being a witness for Christ dramatically changed. The church went from a three century period of persecution into a period of time where the whole Roman Empire was flooding the ranks of the "Christendom." As Nouwen comments, "If the world was no longer the enemy of the Christian, then the Christian had to become the enemy of the dark world." Many practiced this by fleeing to the desert. These men discovered a new martyrdom by offering themselves as living sacrifices to God (Romans 12). Nouwen sums up the content of the desert father's lives by the story of Abba Arsenius. He was well educated and entrenched in the court of Emperor Theodosius. He asked the Lord how to enter into sanctification, and the Lord spoke to him, "Arsenius, flee, be silent, pray always, fore these are the sources of sinlessness." These three disciplines (solitude, silence, and prayer) become the central focus of Nouwen's book. Today I want to write about silence, because it seems of its importance and relevance to Christianity at the end of the age..
First, I have to say one more thing about the book as a whole. It becomes progressively more difficult to understand because each chapter is deeper than the last. To understand the chapter on silence, you have to really be able to relate to the first chapter on solitude. And to relate to the chapter on prayer, you must be able to truly understand silence. I realized this after reading my wife's copy. My wife is notorious for writing in the margins of books that are hers, and she puts question marks by things she doesn't understand. As we've loaned the book out to others, we've found, especially with this book, that they totally agree with all of her question marks in the margin. And its in the section on silence that I found the most question marks. One of the most frequent questions was next to statements that assert a connection between silence and the future world. According to Nouwen, the Desert Fathers believed, "that if a word is to bear fruit, it must be spoken from the future world into the present world. The Desert Fathers therefore considered their going into the silence of the desert to be a first step into the future world." Its this disicipline of silence that brings us into the presence of the future that I want to write about.
The reality that silence brings us into the presence of the future shouldn't surprise us. It's what we're called to. Jesus Himself speaks of "this age and the age to come," (Matthew 12:32). This age is the world we currently live in and the age to come is the Kingdom of God that will be fully realized at the return of Jesus. Hebrews 6, in describing some who fall away, mentions they "have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come." There is a power of an age to come that is avaible for us to taste and experience right now. It is the power of the Kingdom of God, the power of another age that will descend upon us at the end of this one, and the future the Nouwen is calling us into. As we fellowship with God in silence, we come under His Lordship, He becomes the Center, and the power of God that we sometimes relegate only to Heaven or the Second Coming begins to work in us now.
How does this work? Silence strips away all distractions. Silence makes us come to grip with the internal noise in our souls. As we gain victory over all these internal noises, a still, small voice emerges that engages us with the conversation of another, heavenly realm. The subtle whispers of heaven (that will be amplified dramatically at the end of the age) begin to be heard. There is no mystical power in the silence. It's that we're finally undistracted enough to enter into true communion and the power of an indestructible life becomes ours.
And as crazy as it sounds, silence affects the way we speak. Silence creates a boundary space for us to receive the love of God. It's in receiving this love that the words we speak become powerful. The words become more than clanging symbols (1 Corinthians 13:1). They go from well intentioned words of encouragement which are helpful but so often feel shallow to prophetic words crafted by hearing clearly from Jesus. One of the prophetic ministries I became familiar with in Kansas City continually teaches silence as the path to revelation from God. When our silence is filled with the presence of God, we emerge from that silence with words freighted with power from Heaven. We become friends of God in silence and the secrets we utter when we emerge betray that friendship to the world.
To be real practical, this only happens in a significant degree when we are deliberate about it. We can only enter into silence if we take it out of the realm of theory and into the realm of our schedules. We must make time for it. We have to be willing to take an hour, a few hours, or even a day or two where we can sit before the Lord without interuption, without the sounds that so stroke our souls, and without our voice which creates so many distractions. Actually getting time in silence really is the biggest fight.
Once we get there, we must learn the companion discipline of communing prayer. I may talk a little bit about that next week. But the real issue is to believe that this is for us. This isn't a discipline for spiritual giants, it's a source for all true believers. It will free us from the shallowness of this world and begin building in us the qualities of a Kingdom that is coming. And that's what we're called to be: heralds of another age that is already breaking in on this age now.
The desert fathers (the subject of "The Way of the Heart") found themselves in a transitional period of history where the meaning of being a witness for Christ dramatically changed. The church went from a three century period of persecution into a period of time where the whole Roman Empire was flooding the ranks of the "Christendom." As Nouwen comments, "If the world was no longer the enemy of the Christian, then the Christian had to become the enemy of the dark world." Many practiced this by fleeing to the desert. These men discovered a new martyrdom by offering themselves as living sacrifices to God (Romans 12). Nouwen sums up the content of the desert father's lives by the story of Abba Arsenius. He was well educated and entrenched in the court of Emperor Theodosius. He asked the Lord how to enter into sanctification, and the Lord spoke to him, "Arsenius, flee, be silent, pray always, fore these are the sources of sinlessness." These three disciplines (solitude, silence, and prayer) become the central focus of Nouwen's book. Today I want to write about silence, because it seems of its importance and relevance to Christianity at the end of the age..
First, I have to say one more thing about the book as a whole. It becomes progressively more difficult to understand because each chapter is deeper than the last. To understand the chapter on silence, you have to really be able to relate to the first chapter on solitude. And to relate to the chapter on prayer, you must be able to truly understand silence. I realized this after reading my wife's copy. My wife is notorious for writing in the margins of books that are hers, and she puts question marks by things she doesn't understand. As we've loaned the book out to others, we've found, especially with this book, that they totally agree with all of her question marks in the margin. And its in the section on silence that I found the most question marks. One of the most frequent questions was next to statements that assert a connection between silence and the future world. According to Nouwen, the Desert Fathers believed, "that if a word is to bear fruit, it must be spoken from the future world into the present world. The Desert Fathers therefore considered their going into the silence of the desert to be a first step into the future world." Its this disicipline of silence that brings us into the presence of the future that I want to write about.
The reality that silence brings us into the presence of the future shouldn't surprise us. It's what we're called to. Jesus Himself speaks of "this age and the age to come," (Matthew 12:32). This age is the world we currently live in and the age to come is the Kingdom of God that will be fully realized at the return of Jesus. Hebrews 6, in describing some who fall away, mentions they "have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come." There is a power of an age to come that is avaible for us to taste and experience right now. It is the power of the Kingdom of God, the power of another age that will descend upon us at the end of this one, and the future the Nouwen is calling us into. As we fellowship with God in silence, we come under His Lordship, He becomes the Center, and the power of God that we sometimes relegate only to Heaven or the Second Coming begins to work in us now.
How does this work? Silence strips away all distractions. Silence makes us come to grip with the internal noise in our souls. As we gain victory over all these internal noises, a still, small voice emerges that engages us with the conversation of another, heavenly realm. The subtle whispers of heaven (that will be amplified dramatically at the end of the age) begin to be heard. There is no mystical power in the silence. It's that we're finally undistracted enough to enter into true communion and the power of an indestructible life becomes ours.
And as crazy as it sounds, silence affects the way we speak. Silence creates a boundary space for us to receive the love of God. It's in receiving this love that the words we speak become powerful. The words become more than clanging symbols (1 Corinthians 13:1). They go from well intentioned words of encouragement which are helpful but so often feel shallow to prophetic words crafted by hearing clearly from Jesus. One of the prophetic ministries I became familiar with in Kansas City continually teaches silence as the path to revelation from God. When our silence is filled with the presence of God, we emerge from that silence with words freighted with power from Heaven. We become friends of God in silence and the secrets we utter when we emerge betray that friendship to the world.
To be real practical, this only happens in a significant degree when we are deliberate about it. We can only enter into silence if we take it out of the realm of theory and into the realm of our schedules. We must make time for it. We have to be willing to take an hour, a few hours, or even a day or two where we can sit before the Lord without interuption, without the sounds that so stroke our souls, and without our voice which creates so many distractions. Actually getting time in silence really is the biggest fight.
Once we get there, we must learn the companion discipline of communing prayer. I may talk a little bit about that next week. But the real issue is to believe that this is for us. This isn't a discipline for spiritual giants, it's a source for all true believers. It will free us from the shallowness of this world and begin building in us the qualities of a Kingdom that is coming. And that's what we're called to be: heralds of another age that is already breaking in on this age now.
posted by Travis at 3:26 PM
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