Welcome back to the Grounded Podcast! I hope you are having an incredible week.
Sherry and I are out of the country for the next few weeks on an assignment that is part ministry and part Sabbath for the two of us. We run pretty hard on the schedule, some days having six meetings back-to-back, and it’s just important to balance that with some good time of restoration.
What’s coming up?
Today we get three great questions:
Is it okay to question things you were taught growing up in church?
What do you do when God feels completely silent?
How do you maintain personal faith when you’ve seen so much hypocrisy in the church?
Bonus: and I talk a bit about how God brings revelation to us through others.
I wanted to highlight the second question because it’s something I have experienced myself, so I can really sympathize with others who are going through it.
Life Can Wear You Out
We all get worn out, sometimes. The most important things in life need sustained effort on our part. It even seems that the more important something is, the harder it is to do because it gets resisted by the darkness.
I mean, nobody stumbles into a great lifetime marriage or launching a bunch of happy, healthy, solid kids. Or building a God-honoring business that balances making profits with being a blessing to people. These things are so resisted in the world that we have to push harder in our efforts to achieve them.
We Meet a Tired Man
Sherry and I just returned from the Pastors Coalition meeting in Tennessee this past weekend. This is a group of excellent pastors who want to go the extra mile and not only run a healthy church but also influence that church to do something powerful in global missions and humanitarian work around the world.
In this group, there was one notable leader, a man I truly admire. A year ago, I felt compelled to drive to his city and have a meeting with him although I did not know why.
When I called to set it up, he didn’t seem too excited about the prospect of me coming to have a talk with him. After I got there it was a little awkward but eventually we got to an amazing fish house, where we ate a lot of shrimp and ended up having a long talk about dryness and the need to take a sabbath rest.
The essence of our conversation was that maybe he wasn’t really burned out, nor was he finished in his calling. He was just tired and exhausted, and he needed to let things idle for a year.
At this week’s meeting, he told me that our conversation probably saved his ministry, because he was, in fact, resisting meeting with me out of the secret knowledge that he was about to leave it all behind.
His wife said, “We were depleted, but our ground was depleted too. We needed to let the land rest.”
Putting Things into Sabbath Mode
He quietly put everything in this big dynamic church into maintenance mode without announcing it to anyone. Every time someone had a great idea, he said, “That’s a great idea. Write it up and email it to me!” but he never did anything new the whole year.
He slowed the busy-ness of his church and focused on health in the church.
Sabbath year. Just let the land rest.
He spent more time on his personal health, and he and his wife logged a lot of missing hours together and renewed their strength and rebuilt themselves on the inside for twelve whole months. The core leaders from the church got a rest too as things got simplified for a whole year.
The end of the story is that they’re both revived and the church with them. This year they’re actually going to start eight micro churches under other leaders. This will have minimal drain on them or the church but will ignite eight new people in their circle to do something visionary with God in a house group or small-sized church setting.
That’s usually the fruit of truly unplugging for a season. Maybe you need that, and if you do, I hope you will not argue yourself out of it, but just start pulling plugs out and making space in your calendar for a season of doing nothing.
But that’s not even what this episode is about
That part is for free, folks! What I talk about in the video is something totally different. It’s about the reality of a place called the wilderness—a dry, arid, vacant place you end up somehow wandering into even as you faithfully follow Jesus.
You don’t intend to go there.
It just happens.
Things get quiet and you sense that you’re just alone in a desert place, and no matter how loud you cry out to God, you don’t hear anything in response. Maybe this lasts a week or a month.
I felt nothing.
It lasted for three years.
Journeying Through a Spiritual Desert
In Manila, I preached each week, and we had great harvest. Typically, 25 people every Sunday came to Christ over an 8-10-year period. For a long while, I could sing. I could pray. But inside I just felt silence.
(I talk more about it in the video.)
Thank God, the thing about all deserts is that they don’t go on forever. I got out of mine eventually, so I can fully understand what this experience feels like to other people and can assure you that it is not a permanent state.
Actually, this phenomenon is well recorded in Christian history. Many of the people considered spiritual heroes in Christian history report a season in their life where a similar thing took place.
So if you’re in that condition right now, please take heart. Yes, it’s a time to ask God if you’ve done something to cause it, and if you have, you need to fix it, but it’s also very possible that you didn’t do a thing.
It’s just a process, and somehow we need it—for reasons we can clearly see and for some reasons that we may not understand in this lifetime.
Life with Jesus is so amazing, whether it’s in a desert or on a mountaintop. As long as he’s there, it’s a precious experience.
I think one of the main things Jesus came to teach us was how to be fully human—how to live a life that is fully engaged with God and others in this physical world. I want to taste my food, feel the wind on my face, and enjoy every slobbery kiss from babies.
Sherry and I love our days, and we pray God will help you to love yours also.
ReJesus Everything!
Love,
Chuck and Sherry
