EXHORTATION
Psalm 62:5 says:
For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence,
for my hope is from him.
As Christians in America, our faith runs the risk of being colored and shaded by the values of the culture we inhabit. If culture loves excess, the unconscious church will value self-indulgence. If culture worships success, a blind church will begin promoting growth and numbers more than holiness and true proclamation.
Our culture is obsessed with noise and busyness. The apps on our phones constantly ding, flash notifications, and vibrate. The watch on our wrist begs to show us texts, our heart rate, and the current state of the Dow Jones. We scroll down the social media rabbit hole flicking from a political article to pictures of our cousins, to a viral video about why Pineapple doesn’t belong on pizza. It doesn’t, by the way. Yesterday was National Ice Cream Sunday day, today is National Mac N Cheese Day and tomorrow will be National Tapioca Pudding day.
Our culture has gladly given up the ability and responsibility to sit in silence and deeply reflect on what matters most. Everything in our culture seeks to distract us. It seeks to prevent us from giving our full attention to what matters most.
And into this distracted world, Psalm 62 commands: For God alone, O my soul, wait… in… silence.
Christians, and the churches they belong to combat distraction through cultivating disruptive silence. We bring our phones under the mastery of Jesus Christ and his gospel. We submit our smartwatches and surrender our social media addictions to the Creator King.
In our gathered worship we limit the use of our screens and videos. We obey Psalm 62 several times through scheduled silence. We force our hearts, which are so terrified of the emptiness silence might reveal to come to grips with who we really are so that God can remake us in the gospel of Jesus.
In this age of noise, one of the greatest ways you can take a stand is by cultivating moments of silence before your God.
This reminds us of our need to confess our sin, so let’s bow in prayer now.
CONFESSION
Our Father,
You are great, and your throne is exalted. In your hands are the depths of the earth, and the mountain peaks are yours as well. You made the sea and you formed the dry land with your hand. In response to your majesty, we come and worship. We bow down. We kneel before the Lord, our God, our maker.
We know that your majesty demands silence, yet we live in a world of noise. Your beauty commands our gaze, but our eyes wander. Father, we live in a distracted world. We rarely break away from our digital routines to enjoy silence before you. We impulsively open our phones, but we neglect your Word. We fill up our days with busyness and crowd out prayer. Indeed, Father, we suppress the truth in unrighteous distractions.
Lord God, we are sinners. And you know all of our sin. Nothing is hidden from you. We know that you are the forgiving God and so we ask that you would bring to mind anything we have not yet made right with you so that we might do so.
We confess our individual sin to you now. Hear our prayers.
We ask all this in the mighty name of Jesus Christ, Amen.
Please rise for the assurance of pardon.
ASSURANCE OF PARDON
The Lord is merciful and gracious,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
He will not always chide,
nor will he keep his anger forever.
He does not deal with us according to our sins,
nor repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
so far does he remove our transgressions from us.
Psalm 103:8-12
If you have placed your faith in Christ, then in Christ your transgressions have been removed from you, and your sin is forgiven.