These paragraphs hit the editing room floor from last Sunday’s sermon for length’s sake, but you might find the thoughts helpful in this format today.
Last Sunday we talked about the disciplines of acquiring peace in any circumstance—pray, think, and practice. Part of practicing is using time. Of course, praying and thinking require some minutes in your day! Your enemy does not want you to do these things, so the Devil works to fill up every minute of your time. He knows that in the silence, in the gaps, God might come.
My favorite Christian author, C.S. Lewis, sarcastically takes the Devil’s side in this quote, advising that to avoid peace successfully one must keep every moment filled and avoid any space, any gaps, at all costs.
Avoid silence, avoid solitude, avoid any train of thought that leads off the beaten track. Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) on your own grievances. Keep the radio on. Live in a crowd. Use plenty of sedation. If you must read books, select them very carefully. But you’d be safer to stick to the papers. You’ll find the advertisements helpful; especially those with a sexy or a snobbish appeal.
The Devil is a liar, and he has convinced you of the lie that these things will bring you peace. We all know that they won’t, actually—that’s why “calm” pictures usually feature a person in a wide open landscape away from all of those things. That’s why we all know the phrase, “Peace and quiet.” C.S. Lewis lived before the invention of the iPhone, or I believe he would have added that technology to his list of peace avoidance strategies.
It’s useful for Christian meditation to be given a block of time, but it should be supplemented with occasional minutes throughout the day. After all, we don’t need peace in blocks, we need it in moments. Smartphones have given us amazing benefits, truly incredible, but like most technology we have brought them into our lives without considering what they take away from us. Now, instead of two or three minutes of prayer in moments of downtime, we turn to our phones—at the red light, in the bathroom, before bed, while eating. We are searching, searching, searching for the next interesting bit of information or entertainment. But this behavior keeps our mind away from the peace we can truly find only in our Savior. The peace we talked about on Sunday—calm in any circumstance—is not found on the other side of that smartphone glass.
Pray, think, and practice. Make requests to God as you simultaneously thank him ahead of time for whatever he’ll do to answer your prayer. Think about the teachings of the Bible that put your life into the right eternal perspective. And take the time to keep on practicing these things, because they don’t come naturally. The Prince of Peace will be with you, if you are with him.
C. S. Lewis, “The Seeing Eye,” in Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), pp. 168-69.