Noise Vs. Silence

We're going to talk about the seven enemies that are coming for us in our generation. We're going to talk about everything from anxiety to victimhood to noise. I want to talk about noise because it's the most obvious and it's coming for every single one of us.

We live in the noisiest generation that has ever been. No generation has had to deal with more inputs than ours.

What does it look like to shift the spiral? The idea of a spiral is how we have actually built out all of these chapters in the book. So when you look at this chapter on stillness, you're going to see the spiral that says, "Discontent is this emotion I feel."

And then the thought that you have is: "I'll feel better if I stay distracted." And we're watching the spiral of an emotion hitting a thought, a thought hitting a behavior, a behavior hitting a relationship, and those spirals are going through our minds all the time. And what God wants to do is he wants to shift the spiral from a negative spiral that's spiraling down.

He wants to shift it to one that's going up, one that is going toward him. But that interruption and that distraction that constantly has you pulling away from God, that distraction is our responsibility.

We have a choice to change the way we think, but we have to choose it.

I tell my kids this all the time, but I think sometimes we need a parent telling us the same thing, bossing us around just a little bit.

The reason we named it Get Out Of Your Head was because when we were thinking about a title, I said, "The thing that I want to happen is I want to be able to grab everybody by their shoulders and speak as clearly and boldly as I can to them." Because in the midst of a spiral that's been constant in your life, you need somebody to just grab you by the shoulders and say, "Hey, stop. You don't have to do this anymore."

I want you to picture me right now grabbing you by the shoulders and saying to you, looking you in the eyes and saying-

"You have a choice. You don't have to spiral out."

We can set up things that can limit our time on Instagram. We can set up things that limit the noise in our lives, but we have to choose it. We have to choose it. Ultimately, we have to choose the truth. The truth that is going to cut through the noise, that is going to cut through the lies because all that noise isn't ambient random noise.

That noise is feeding us lies. It's feeding us ideas about our worth, ideas about what we need to be happy, ideas about our relationships. It's not like that noise is just subtle background noise, elevator music.

That noise is telling us things and most of what it's telling us is lies. We have to see it that way. We've got to do a better job of surveying our lives, noticing our inputs, and noticing the things that we are believing because of those inputs.

My daughter, Kate, you all know Kate if you've been at the podcast for long. If you don't, go back and listen to her episodes, they're incredible. My daughter, Kate, she is so zealous about this. She's better than me about this. She will take social media, Instagram everything off of her phone and leave it off unless she wants to share something, a post or something, she'll put it on and she'll scroll and see what her friends are up to.

But she generally has it off of her phone. And I think of it, both my older kids are good at this, I think of it like old money and new money. The idea of new money is that you just blow it all at once and that's kind of how our generation has been with our phones and with technology. We have just overdone it. And I think this generation coming has watched their parents do that and they've watched themselves and the temptation that this is and they are aware this is toxic and dangerous.

They are aware that they are filling their minds with lies and that it is affecting their generation. My other daughter who wanted Instagram so badly, was begging me for it. Finally, I sent her an article and I said, "I'm going to tell you really clearly why I'm not giving this to you."

When she read the article about mental illness and Instagram in comparison in this younger generation, she quit asking, she didn't want it.

Now years later she has it, but she wasn't as eager to have it when she realized that's the reason her friends are depressed. That's the reason her friends are anxious. We've got to be better surveyors of our life, but we also have to be better fighters for the truth.

All of us have a choice when we wake up in the morning.

In fact, I told the story in the book about waking up in the morning and immediately spiraling out because I had the thought, "I need to spend time with Jesus" and instead I picked up my phone.

That is all of our realities every single morning. We always have a choice. And the reason it's urgent that we spend time with Jesus is not because there's some angel in heaven checking off, "Did she spend time with Jesus today? Did she spend time with Jesus today?" It is because we are at war and we need the truth in our minds first. We need to know who we are in Christ. We need to know who God is.

We need to know what the point of our lives are before we head into him every day. We need to have truth so clearly before us that when we see other inputs coming our way and when we're attacked by all this noise, we can sort out the lies and the truth.

When the truth is set before our minds completely clearly, this is who God is, this is what is true, then when a lie comes, we notice it's a lie. We know how to fight it. We know what's true.

That is why God wants time with us. It's not so that we know more and more and more about God, it's that we can fight better, that we can actually live the things that we know about God better, but we have to know them first. We can't just expect God to fight for us when the main way he is fighting for us is through his word. It says that his word is a two-edged sword, that it cuts through marrow, that it cuts through bone, that it pierces our soul, that there's nothing else that has the power to do that. The word of God can change us.

It says it will never return void, that it will always enter us and change us. Connection with God is the foundation for every other God-given tool we're going to talk about that we have to fight with.

We cannot know God, we cannot give God, we cannot rest in God, we cannot find hope without time with him. That is how we get God. We need stillness with God. We don't just need mindfulness. I mean, that was the lack I saw in the self-help world.

I read a lot of those books and they were so interesting and fascinating, but I always wondered how do they actually think this works when the answer in their book was how awesome we are. I'm like, "I'm not that awesome." That falls apart pretty quickly. Or when the answer is just be still and think about your thoughts. I'm like, "Well, that falls short if you don't have hope." Y'all, that's why I love Jesus. That's why I preach the gospel.

Our minds are actually physically built for silence the way God designed us. Your brain actually physiologically alters.

Scientists have found that brains of the people who spend hours in prayer and meditation alone are different. Your imagination gets rewired. When you're relaxed, anxiety and depression actually decrease. Several studies that demonstrated that subjects who meditated for a short time showed increased alpha waves, the relaxed brain waves and decreased anxiety and depression.

You guys, this changes our brains. And so yes, what scientists discover about them happen to reflect the brilliance and power of that design that God built. So are you ready? I want you every single day, I want you to put your Bible by your bed and I want it to be what you read before you grab your phone. I want you to read it every single day because it matters that much, because this is how we go to war.

This is how we fight better. In the middle of the night, I told you about that season of doubt, and in the middle of the night one thing I did was I bought this little light that could clip on my Bible and I put my Bible by my bed and I put that little light on it because I didn't want to wake up my husband, but I just had to start reading truth. And so what I would do is I would go to a Psalm that I love, that my kids had memorized when they were young at their school and I wanted to memorize as well.

I would open it up to Psalm 1:39 and it talks about if you go down to the pit, if you go down to Sheol, he is there. And if you ascend to the heavens, he is there. That there is nowhere you can go away from God. And that comforted me because my fear was, and the middle of my doubt was that he wouldn't be in death, that he wouldn't be in the grave, that it would just fade to black. And guys, I had to fight that with truth.

Fast-forward, I'm in Uganda with some dear friends and I'm sitting because I've fixated on that scripture. I'm sitting in a devotional, staff devotional with Food for the Hungry. Their entire team was in there. All local Ugandans and South Sudanese refugees that serve up there in northern Uganda. I'm sitting in this office, I mean, way off the beaten path of life. I mean, we're talking took a little small little plane to get out there and a bus after that and we were just in the middle of nowhere.

And guess what they opened to in the middle of my war with my mind? He opens to Psalm 1:39 and he reads specifically that part of the passage. I start weeping because I know that God is fighting for me. How did he fight for me? With his word. He fought for me with his word. That is how God is fighting for you right now. That book that you feel burdened by that you think, "Oh, it's an obligation. I have to do that. I've got too much to do."

That book is God fighting for you, fighting for you to be more free, fighting for you to know him more and his love for you more, fighting for you to understand how much he has done and how much he wants to do for you.

That's what this is. And so when we receive that, there is a relationship that's built. It's not about us checking something off a list. It's like, "Gosh, my God is there. I want to be with him. I want to know him."

Psalm 84:10 says, "For a day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere." Do we believe that? Do we belive that time with God is better than any other place we could be. It is. The only place I have ever felt true peace, it is with God. And especially peace in the midst of difficulty, but even peace in the midst of a morning or anxious thoughts or worry. Y'all, pulling out, when I say get out of your head, I don't mean get out of your head into nothingness.

I mean get out of your head into a relationship with God. And when we put God and fixate him in the center of our mind, then there is this accountability. Because guess what? God knows every thought we think before we think it, Psalm says. So we have a God that knows our thoughts already.

He's in them with us and we have to realize that that should bring some accountability and it should also bring some companionship, right? We are not alone in our own thoughts. God is with us in them.

He's not angry at us about them, he just desperately wants us to be free of the lies that we are choosing to believe.

This also applies to our kids. We got to fight for them. They're getting inputs every single day. All day long, my sweet 11-year-old boy goes to a public school and you cannot believe, he's such a talker.

He comes home and tells me everything that he's heard that day and I'm like, "This is worse than an X-rated movie." This is fifth grade at public school. My kid is being bullied on certain days. I'm sure my kid is bullying on certain days, but I'm just saying the inputs in his life are legit. They're dark and they're legit. And all of our kids are fighting more darkness than we can understand and we've got to fight for them.

How do we fight for them? We give them the same truth that we have to have. We sit over them. We read scripture over them.

Yesterday morning, Cooper had had a bad day at school and I pulled him on my lap. I said, "I want to tell you, I've been praying for you. And I know we talk about Jesus a lot, but I want to tell you about grace again because grace has changed my life and I think it is the greatest gift that God's given us."

I just started talking him through it. And I said, "Today, when you feel frustrated with people and you feel bullied, I want you to think about grace. I just want you to think how much God likes you and that that's enough." And I think he was distracted, but I'm fighting for him anyway. I mean, that's what we've got to do. We've got to fight for ourselves and we've got to fight for our people.

You got to start with a few tools and make it easy for yourself. Beth Moore has a little box that she keeps and I have a backpack where it's just easy. Everything's together. You have your pens, you have your headphones, you have a highlighter. And so I think that's a starting place, is just build whatever that looks like for you.

If it's beside a chair. I like to go into nature. I like to go in my car sometimes. Or sometimes it's downstairs, sometimes it's in my bed. But I can just take that backpack wherever I go.

And so within that is just a few simple things, a journal, a bible, and a pen and a highlighter and my headphones. So that's what's in the backpack. But some of you are like, "Just keep it simple." What I do is I sit down and at first, I'll read a scripture. Sometimes on certain days I'll listen to it.

Sometimes I'll listen to it and read it. I have have something called Dwell app that reads in incredible voices, the scripture, and it'll just bring it to life. Especially if I'm in a book or a passage that I'm uber familiar with, I'll just listen to how it's read and I can receive it differently. And so Dwell app is a great app. Then I have my Bible and I will typically work through a book.

So recently I worked through the book of James and I just read a few verses. I rarely will read a whole chapter in a day. I usually feel my point in spending time with Jesus is connection with him, but also life change. So I rarely feel like I can apply a few verses. So I don't really try to dissect a whole chapter usually, unless it's just so fascinating and I find myself continuing to read.

But lots of times I'll just block a little passage and I'll write that passage at the top of my journal and then I'll mention things that I learned from it, so. I'll have a few takeaways. That’s as simple as it is. Now when I'm studying in a deeper way, which I often do on Wednesdays, I'll get away and I'll really dig in and I'll pull out my commentaries and all of that, I will look at context of the book or things about that.

I'm a super curious person, so I'll usually find myself becoming curious and wanting to understand what was James thinking when he wrote this? He sounds kind of harsh. I want to understand where's James coming from, who is James? I'll do that research kind of naturally. But some of you don't know where to find that research. And a great free website is called Precept Austin, and it has a lot of the best commentaries there.

You can put in the passage at the top. I used this for years before I had Logos. Logos is a great one too, if you can afford it. I certainly depend on it now, but in the beginning I just used Precept Austin and I just put in the scripture and then you can see all about that scripture and find commentaries to go with it. I know it can be intimidating.

Some of you have never been in church, some of you have never had anybody hold your hand and disciple you and say, "This is how you read your Bible." And I get it. It is intimidating.

What I always tell people, if this is your first time and you're just starting, is open to the Book of John. It is all about Jesus.

And it was written by one of his dearest friends and disciples. So you can just know the context immediately off the bat. What it is, it's a gospel that describes who Jesus was. It's about his entire life. So that's a great place to start.