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Noisy

Sam Stringer

Jan 5, 2025

So He Himself often withdrew into the wilderness and prayed.
Luke 5:16

A very common activity of Jesus was for Him to draw away from others and to go into solitude
as He prayed to the Father. Have you ever thought about that? I’ve been reading and studying
about this concept recently and one of the conclusions drawn was this: the noisier life got, the
more you’ll see Jesus going away to quiet places to pray. As crowds build or pressures mount,
even the cross looms on the horizon, what does Jesus do? He gets away to pray.

You and I live in a world full of noise, and as technology advances, it seems harder and harder
to quiet it down. Everything is constantly stimulating us while grabbing for our attention and it’s
getting harder to just be still. That is, if we’re not taking action to quiet things down ourselves.

Meditation is a strange thing without God. The idea of just sitting there and being at one with the
universe, it’s just not how we’re actually made to be, as though the whole process is just turning
down the volume on life; it’s not. We’re made to be in communion with God, so think of this like
faders on a soundboard. There’s two things you need to do today to enhance your relationship
with God if you’re getting drowned in the noise (I can raise my own hand to that):

Number one: turn down the noise of the world. Turn off the TV, put the phone down, drop the
paper or the book, step away from the incessant need to be busy, whatever you do that
generates noise in your life, step away. Turn down the volume so you can do the second
necessary step.

Number two: turn up the voice of God. Now, I know you can’t make God speak, but you can
listen for Him, and that comes from reading your Bible, praying, listening to God-glorifying music
(what I mean is, music that directs your mind to think about God), whatever you need to do that
will help you listen better. If God was speaking, would you hear Him? In all of the noisiness of
our lives, perhaps this is why it’s so hard for us to hear Him: something else is not only making
noise but also drawing away our attention from Him.

Think about this today: the Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan. The
wilderness. A place where the noise of the world is pretty much obsolete. Yet, in that place of
quiet solitude, there was the Devil, making noise by questioning Jesus’ identity as the Son of
God in an effort to get Him to stumble. There is no place where the Devil will not try to make
noise in this world in your life or mine if he didn’t leave Jesus alone in the wildnerness. We have
to turn down the noise and turn up the voice of God. Hopefully you see that when Jesus quoted
Scripture to Satan, that’s exactly what He was doing: turning down the voice of the Devil and
turning up the voice of God.

In the quiet of the Garden of Eden long ago, in a perfect place, the noise of distraction and
disillusionment entered in and both Adam and Eve listened to it. Be brave enough today to wake
up to the bait of noise. Be wise enough to not simply identify the noisiness, but to also turn it
down and crank up the volume on hearing God. We are not incapable of doing that so don’t tell
yourself you can’t. I think you will find, as I do when I am wise enough to take these steps, that
the peace of God is never far away. Be blessed today.

Sam Stringer

Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Braver Than Lions

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