A June 2012 article in The New York Times online
apparently struck a nerve for many people. The article received over 800
comments and was often quoted and retweeted. The following quote captures the
essence of the author’s analysis of what he calls “the busy trap.”
If you live in America in the 21st century, you’ve
probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s
become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So
busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint.
And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to
have,” or “Better than the opposite.”
Busyness serves as a kind of … hedge against emptiness;
obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you
are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day…. [We’re] busy
because of [our] own ambition or drive or anxiety, because [we’re] addicted to
busyness and dread what [we] might have to face in its absence.[1]
Jesus was a busy person too. When you put
together last week’s text with the one we are about to read this morning, you get
a snapshot of one 24-hour period in Jesus’ life. During that one day, Jesus
taught in the synagogue, cast an unclean spirit out of a man in that same
synagogue service, healed Simon’s mother-in-law, healed and cast out demons for
the entire town of Capernaum, and then, presumably, went to bed very late. That
is where our text for this morning picks up. Listen for God’s Word for you from
Mark 1:35-39….
In the morning, while it was
still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he
prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they
said to him, “Everyone is searching for you.” He answered, “Let us go on to the
neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is
what I came out to do.” And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message
in their synagogues and casting out demons.
Jesus was obviously a very busy man, but he was
not addicted to busyness. I believe that one way he got free of this addiction
was through prayer. Let us look together at what Jesus did, step by step.
First, he got up early. Apparently, Jesus spent the
night at Simon’s house. In that house we have Simon, his mother-in-law, perhaps
Simon’s wife, Andrew, James, John, and Jesus. The house was, no doubt, not very
big. The only way Jesus could spend some time alone in prayer was to get up
early when everyone else was asleep.
We do not know if Jesus got up early every day to
pray. The Bible does not tell us. Furthermore, the Bible does not command us:
“Thou shalt get up every morning at 5 o’clock to pray.”
However, it is interesting to me that we read of
others in the Bible who rose early in the morning to meet the Lord. In Genesis
28:18, we read that Jacob rose early to worship the Lord. Moses rose early and
built an altar to God (Exodus 24:4). On another occasion, Moses rose early to
meet God on Mount Sinai (Exodus 34:4). Gideon rose early to talk with the Lord
(Judges 6:38). Elkanah and Hannah rose early to worship the Lord (1 Samuel
1:19). Job got up early to offer sacrifices to the Lord (Job 1:15). David said
in Psalm 5:3, “In the morning, O Lord, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay
my requests before you and wait in expectation.”
Down through church history, the people of God
have risen early for prayer. Martin Luther remarked that when he knew he was
going to have a particularly busy day he would get up even earlier and pray
longer. D. L. Moody said, “We ought to see the face of God every morning before
we see the face of man.”
Dawson Trotman, the founder of the Navigators
ministry, got up every morning and prayed from 5 to 7 with a friend, before he
went to work at his construction job. Daws and his friend began by praying for
their boys’ Sunday school class. They ended up praying for many places around
the globe. Today, the Navigators has a ministry in all those countries for
which Daws and his friend prayed.
When I was in seminary, there was a group of
Korean students who got up early every morning to pray. How do I know? I know
because they prayed below my dormitory room and often woke me up,
unintentionally. I know that the activity of pious prayer warriors can be irritating
to those of us who do not feel we have that gift.
Maybe you are not an early morning person. Maybe
you are a night owl and that is the best time for you to set aside a special
time to pray. Or maybe it works best for you to take a few minutes during lunch
at work or at home. I do not know. However, I do know that we will not have a
set aside time for prayer unless we make it a priority.
So that is the first thing we see about Jesus in
this passage: Jesus made prayer a priority by getting up early to pray. The
second thing we see is also important: Jesus
went to a solitary place.
Jesus had to leave the house where he was staying
to find a solitary place to pray. If you try to pray where there are many
distractions—other people, television, or radio then you will probably have
difficulty focusing. Jesus went to a place where he could focus and he tells us
to do the same.
In Matthew 6:6 Jesus says, “But when you pray, go
into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then
your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”
I believe that in our time and culture we need to
have time alone with God more than ever because of the hectic pace of our
society and the voices that are constantly bombarding us.
The July 2011 issue of Real Simple magazine offered the
following statistics and observations about the proliferation of noise and the
lack of silence in our world:
·
In 1920, a Nebraska
inventor designed the first automobile alarm. In 2004, New Yorkers proposed a
bill to ban car alarms as a public nuisance.
·
Between 1975 and 2010
the average number of TV sets per household rose by 87 percent (from 1.57 TV
sets per household to 2.93).
·
Out of the
approximately 111.8 million households accounted for in the U.S. Census
Bureau’s 2009 American Housing Survey, about 25.4 million (nearly 25 percent)
report being bothered by street noise or heavy traffic.
·
In a 2006 Pew
Research Center poll, 82 percent of respondents said they had encountered
annoying cell phone chatter in public. (Amazingly, only 8 percent of the
respondents felt that their
cell phone habits were irritating to others.)
The article quotes George Prochnik, author
of In Search of Silence, who said, “I
think we’re seeing noise tied to a host of problems of the age—problems of
attention, aggression, insomnia, and general stress. Noise is now the default
position as a society. But I believe we have to make an effort to build a
passionate case for silence.”[2]
At a church denominational headquarters,
it was customary for all employees to pause for prayer each morning at 9
o’clock. A “prayer bell” signaled the beginning and ending of this daily
routine. Occasionally, though, employees would find themselves on the phone
during prayer time, and the entire office, now quiet, would overhear the
conversation.
One morning during prayer time, a man
could be heard in his office shouting: “Hello? Hello? I can hear you. Can you
hear me?”
After the ending bell, someone else in the
office commented, “I think Paul is having a hard time getting through to the
Lord this morning.”
Perhaps we all have a hard time “getting
through to the Lord” because we do not remove distractions from our life. We
each need solitary places where we can be alone with the Lord in prayer.
A third thing we see Jesus do in this
passage is simply pray. Sometimes
the best way to make prayer a priority is simply to make a start. Like the old
Nike commercial said, “Just do it!”
We are not told what Jesus prayed on this
occasion. The important thing is that he communicated with his Father in
heaven.
For four years, I received spiritual
direction from a Catholic priest, Father Mario Claro. I realized very early on
in our acquaintance that Father Mario meant something different when he used
the phrase “prayer life” than what I meant. When he used that phrase, I thought
of the time I was trying to set aside every day, to talk to God and to hear
from God through reading Scripture. However, I soon learned that what Father
Mario meant by “prayer life” was really the whole of my life. He emphasized the
importance of what Paul calls “praying without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17),
of simply having a running conversation with God throughout the day.
If we are going to have that kind of prayer
life, we probably need to start by having a set aside time to pray in a
solitary place just as Jesus did. Some of you may feel like saying to me:
“Well, how do I pray on my own? I do not even know how to go about it.”
The resource I use now for my daily
prayers is called “Pray as You Go”. You can get it as an app on your phone and
you can pray while you are in the car, or exercising, or wherever you are on
the “go”. “Pray as You Go” provides a guided time of prayer, with music,
Scripture, and pertinent questions to think about.
Whatever resource or plan you use for
prayer, the key is to find what works for you and then do it. As someone once
said, “It is not the plan that works, but the plan you work that works.”
A final thing we see Jesus doing in this
passage is going and serving.
When people came looking for Jesus he did
not say, “Don’t bother me; I’m praying!” No, he got up and went with the
disciples and served throughout Galilee in preaching and healing people because
that was his purpose in coming to earth in the first place. On another occasion
Jesus said, “For the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to
give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:45)
Prayer was never meant to be our only
priority in life. A set-aside time of solitary prayer to the Lord is best when
it acts as a springboard to service and conversational prayer throughout the
day.
The Lord talks about many other priorities
we need to have in life. Some of them, like prayer, are “big rocks” too. Work,
family, church, loving people to Jesus, all these things are important
priorities in life. I believe that the Lord wants to revitalize us through
prayer so that we can go through our day with strength and power and joy from
him to meet every challenge.
However, sometimes it takes the Lord
intervening in our lives, stopping us in our tracks, to get us to see our need
for spending time alone with him in prayer. In Leadership magazine, a friend of our family named Ben Patterson, a
former pastor who is now the chaplain at Westmont College in California, tells
this story….
In the spring of 1980 I was suffering great pain from
what was diagnosed as two herniated discs in my lower back. The prescription
was total bed rest. But since my bed was too soft, the treatment ended up being
total floor rest. I was frustrated and humiliated. I couldn’t preach, I
couldn’t lead meetings, I couldn’t call on new prospects for the church. I
couldn’t do anything but pray.
Not that I immediately grasped that last fact. It took
two weeks for me to get so bored that I finally asked my wife for the church
directory so I could at least do something, even if it was only pray for the
people of my congregation. Note: it wasn’t piety but boredom and frustration
that drove me to pray. But pray I did, every day for every person in my church,
two or three hours a day. After a while, the time became sweet.
Toward the end of my convalescence, anticipating my
return to work, I prayed, “Lord, this has been good, this praying. It’s too bad
I don’t have time to do this when I’m working.”
And God spoke to me, very clearly. He said, “Stupid
(that’s right, that was his very word. He said it in a kind tone of voice,
though.) You have the same twenty-four hours each day when you’re weak as when
you’re strong. The only difference is that when you’re strong you think you’re
in charge. When you’re weak you know you aren’t.”
Sometimes it takes a special intervention
of God for us to realize how weak we are all the time, and how dependent we are
on him, and how much we need to pray. The good news is that Jesus is praying
for us weak people right now. In Hebrews 7:25 we read that Jesus “is able for all time to save those who approach God through him, since he
always lives to make intercession for them.” I believe that means Jesus is
praying for you and for me right now.
As if that was not good enough news, Jesus also
gives us his Holy Spirit to help us pray, to pray in us and through us. In
Romans 8:26-27 Paul says, “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we
do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs
too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of
the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will
of God.”
Thus, we have Jesus
praying for us in heaven right now, and we have the Spirit praying in us and
through us, when we do not even know how to pray. What more could we ask for?
What greater incentive to pray could there be?
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