The Cure For Busyness | Silence and Solitude - Luke 5 12-16 - Clint Leavitt

Listen as Pastor Clint kicks off our series on busyness by examining one of Jesus' primary cures to busyness: the practices of silence and solitude. Sermon Resources: 1. Harvard Business Review and Gallup studies on busyness: https://hbr.org/2023/03/beware....-a-culture-of-busyne 2. Columbia University study on busyness: https://hbr.org/2016/12/resear....ch-why-americans-are 3. APA Study on busyness: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-85298-001 4. Study on how often we touch our phones: https://www.brusselstimes.com/....232851/people-touch- 5. "Horror vacui" (the fear of vacancy) -Baruch Spinoza 6. Meyer Friedman and "hurry sickness:" https://www.forbes.com/sites/p....alomacanterogomez/20 7. "Hurry Sickness: Is The Quest to Be All and Do All Costing Us Our Health?" by Rosemary Sword and Philip Zimbardo: https://www.psychologytoday.co....m/us/blog/the-time-c 8. "We suffer from interior immigration." -Douglass Steere 9. “Busyness seems to be a determination not to ‘miss out on life.’ Behind much of the rat race of modern life is the unexamined assumption that what I do determines who I am. In this way, we define ourselves by what we do, rather than by any quality of what we are inside. It is typical in a party for one stranger to approach another with the question, ‘What do you do?’ Perhaps we wouldn’t have a clue how to respond to the deeper question, ‘Who are you?’” -James Houston, "The Transforming Friendship: A Guide To Prayer" 10. “Strained by the very mad pace of our daily outer burdens, we are further strained by an inward uneasiness, because we have hints that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than all this hurried existence, a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power. If only we could slip over into that Center! If only we could find the Silence which is the source of sound!” That is, “If only we could deeply, fully, richly experience the life-giving presence of God.” -Thomas Kelly, "Testament of Devotion" 11. “I am so busy now that if I did not spend three hours each day in prayer, I could not get through the day.” -Martin Luther 12. “To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart, and there to stand before the face of the Lord, ever-present, all seeing, within you.” -Theophan the Recluse 13. “We think of solitude as a station where we can recharge our batteries, or as a corner of the boxing ring where our wounds are oiled, our muscles massaged, and our courage restored by fitting slogans. But that is not the solitude of John the Baptist, of Anthony or Benedict. For them solitude is not a private therapeutic place. Rather, it is the place of conversion, the place where the old self dies and the new self is born, the place where the emergence of the new man and the new woman occurs. Solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude, we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusion of the false self. Solitude is the place of the great struggle and the great encounter - the struggle against the compulsions of the false self and the encounter with the loving God who offers the substance of the true self.” -Henri Nouwen 14. “Silence is God’s first language.” -John of the Cross 15. “The friend of silence draws near to God.” -John Climacus