Chapter 4 Jesus Spent Time Alone

Summary

In this episode, Troy Kennedy explores the practice of spending time alone with God, following Jesus' example. He emphasizes the importance of silence and solitude in deepening our relationship with God and becoming more like Jesus. Troy discusses the challenges of carving out space for silence and solitude in our busy lives and encourages listeners to make intentional time for this practice. He also highlights the weight of Jesus' mission and the significance of his role in initiating a new covenant with God. Overall, the episode invites listeners to journey closer to Jesus and embrace the transformative power of silence and solitude.

You can find the book "Hero Worship" on Amazon or christianbook.com to purchase.
Amazon Link
Christianbook.com

Takeaways

Spending time alone with God is an essential practice for deepening our relationship with Him and becoming more like Jesus.
Silence and solitude can be revealing, allowing us to hear the still small voice of God and become more aware of who we are and who He is.
Carving out space for silence and solitude can be challenging in our busy lives, but it is necessary for our spiritual growth.
Jesus' mission and role in initiating a new covenant with God carry immense weight and significance, and we are invited to participate in this relationship through Him.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction
00:49 Becoming an Apprentice of Jesus
02:16 Jesus as the Author of Scripture
03:21 Jesus' Practice of Spending Time Alone
05:00 Silence and Solitude in Jesus' Time
06:07 Being Alone with God
07:45 The Challenge of Carving Out Space for Silence and Solitude
08:22 Revealing Ourselves in Silence and Solitude
09:04 Jesus' Extended Time Alone with God
10:27 The Weight of Jesus' Mission
12:10 Jesus' Role in Initiating a New Covenant
13:00 Jesus' Invitation to Relationship with God
14:01 Carving Out Time for Silence and Solitude
15:08 Closing Remarks

Creators & Guests

Host

Troy Kennedy

Husband, Dad, Pastor. A disciple of Jesus. Author of new book "Hero Worship: A 12 Week Journey to Become More Like Jesus." https://t.co/Zgr4SrEOab

What is Troy Marshall Kennedy Podcast?

Jesus always has more life for you than you have known. How do we follow him and discover what it is to flourish and thrive in today's complex, challenging world? How do we have the intimate relationship with God our hearts long for? Troy Marshall Kennedy responds to these all-important questions as a veteran pastor, teacher, and author. Join us as we explore rhythms of life and practice to help us love Jesus, become like Jesus, and share Jesus in our everyday lives. Season one episodes will accompany Troy's new book, "Hero Worship: A 12 Week Journey to Become More Like Jesus."

You can find the book "Hero Worship" on Amazon or christianbook.com to purchase.

Troy Kennedy (00:00.738)
Hey everybody, welcome to.

The hero worship podcast. My name is Troy Kennedy and this podcast is meant to be an accompaniment To the book hero worship a 12 week journey to become more like jesus And i'm so glad you've been joining with me on this journey We are in our fourth week here as we go through this exploration of what it is To follow jesus in the most practical ways. How do we walk an imitation? of the savior But for all the right reasons Right, and we're not trying to score points with god

manipulate anything with God what we're trying to do is because we love and admire Jesus we want to be more like him we want to get close to him we want to intentionally come before him and carve out space in our lives where we're saying here I am

change me, rewire me, recalibrate me from the inside out. I'm here because I'm your disciple, right? And Dallas Willard used to say that a disciple of Jesus is someone, is an apprentice of Jesus, learning to live life in his kingdom as if he were in your shoes. And that's not to say that we do everything, we live in first century Palestine just the way Jesus did, but what we're saying is,

Would Jesus live the life that I'm living right now? In what manner would he be a policeman? Would he be a teacher? Would he be a parent? Would he be a neighbor? Would he be the guy who's working out on the bench next to you at the gym? In what manner and what posture, what perspective, what attitude would Jesus bring to the table at all the normal situations that you and I find ourselves in? And so we have this hero worship journey where we're saying we want God to wire us

Troy Kennedy (01:49.676)
us and rewire us from the inside out so that we become the kind of people who intuitively do what love requires. So this last week we went through this idea, this Jesus New Scripture, this sounds kind of obvious, but what we discovered was Jesus knew scripture in an encyclopedic way and he was the author of scripture. When you go to that passage, the first chapter in 1 Peter, we just see how it's the spirit

Troy Kennedy (02:19.636)
covenant scriptures to look forward to the coming Messiah. And that Jesus then says, I will send the Holy Spirit out to everyone. He will indwell everyone. And he will then he will inspire these New Testament apostles to write about me this message that was spoken by me to the prophets of the Old Testament. So we see Jesus is permeating everything in the message of the gospel. The kingdom of God is near

Jesus has come near, the author of the Scriptures.

the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, and He's the one who is our central reference point for all of scripture. He is the interpretive center of all of scripture. He's the one who helps us understand the momentum and the weight and the direction of all of it because He authors all of it. So I pray that was really rich time for you this last week as you went through the practices every day. And this week we're in this chapter where we learned that Jesus spent time alone.

read the chapter you're gonna see that there was a natural rhythm this back and forth rhythm that Jesus had he was with the crowds he was with his disciples and then he was with his father he had carved out time to be literally alone in that culture Luke 5 16 says but Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed I don't know if lonely is the best translation of that word but this idea

Troy Kennedy (03:53.396)
about discrete alone time to be with his father. Now

This is different from Jesus prayed because Jesus prayed obviously we pray alone. We pray with other people We pray at church. We pray in community. We pray with our kids. We pray at meals Those are all wonderful ways. But if Jesus found it necessary to carve out this distinct time Where he was in silence and solitude with his heavenly father It kind of behooves you and I to do the same kind of thing as we are modeling our lives in every way that we can after him Jesus had this rhythm he went away with the crowds

He went away to the wilderness to pray. And so we see this wonderful rhythm and silence and solitude can be very revealing. In first century Palestine, there's no Netflix, there's no radio, no TV, no magazines, no internet. The very little printed material. Um, no airplanes, you know, no, like extraneous noise that we're so used to the hum of civilization, the way you and I know it in our everyday lives was absent. So when you went away.

to be still. When you went away to be silent, there's no notifications popping up on your phone. It's just you and God and the wilderness and the living creatures that are out there. Can you imagine how deafening the silence must have been? Maybe that's terrifying for you. Maybe that's exciting for you. This idea that you could be that detached from all of the electric noise that constantly

our lives. But Jesus found this time and you and I can find this time too. And for some people who are maybe more extroverted this could be really difficult and for some people like me who's not as extroverted I find it to be really refreshing. You know Psalm 23, the Lord is my shepherd I lack nothing.

Troy Kennedy (05:53.098)
He leaves me beside the still waters. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He restores my soul. I find it really restorative to kind of get away and not just to be silent, not just to be alone, but to be with him.

See, you're not alone. Jesus wasn't alone. That's why I kind of object to lonely places. Maybe it's lonely for everybody else, but for Jesus, he was very much in the presence of his heavenly father. And for you and I, we are very much in fellowship with the Spirit of God. And as we quiet our souls, we quiet our minds and we push aside the noise and the clutter of everything.

We get into the place where maybe, just maybe, we start to hear the still small voice of our Heavenly Father, who knows your heart, He knows your story, He knows your journey, He knows your struggles, He knows your victories.

and he has more in life for you than you have previously known as you plumb the depths of your relationship with him. Just as we talked about with scripture, what we're doing is we're cultivating a real relationship, a coming and going practical relationship with God. We are talking to God about what we are doing together.

And so as we seek Him in scriptures, we seek Him in the silence, in the solitude, we clear the table for nothing else but an appointment with the boss, with an appointment with our Father. And so...

Troy Kennedy (07:25.366)
That's the challenge for you and I sometimes it's, it's hard to carve out that space. It's really difficult to just be still, to just have nothing else going on. Some people find that actually a little bit frightening, right? Cause you're really alone with your own thoughts. You, it's very revealing. What are the things that surface in your heart that surface in your character?

when the clutter is gone, when all the extraneous external voices are no longer shouting at you, what is it that you hear? Who are you really just between you and God?

And maybe the most beautiful revealing thing about that is you realize you're not hiding anything from God. You're not concealing anything. It is all bare before him all the time. But perhaps in the silence and the solitude we become more cognizant of that. We become more conscious and aware of who we are. Who he is. And what has he done?

So, Jesus, he goes away overnight and he prays in the wilderness. And the next day he comes back and he picks the 12 apostles out of his, perhaps hundreds of disciples that were following him. He found it necessary before a big important decision like that to have an extended period of time with his father. After the death of his cousin, John the Baptist, he goes away to the wilderness to pray, to be quiet, to be still.

And I don't know why he would he would need to do to go away and to grieve the loss of his cousin But scripture is very clear that this is what he did Even when he goes to the garden of Gethsemane

Troy Kennedy (09:06.598)
and his last night with his apostles. He had spent time with them in the upper room. He'd sort of redefined what the Passover meal would be like for them. Then he goes to Gethsemane, which scholars would say it was probably a place he frequented quite a bit to go and pray. And then he says to the three who were close to him, you guys wait here and I'm going to go over there and pray.

Now you think he could have invited them to go with him. They could have been right by his side as he was praying to his heavenly father. But he said, no, I want you to wait here while I go and be alone to pray. And then he comes three times before his father submitting a request. And he did not get the answer that he seems to have wanted. Jesus models this for us over and over again.

And even Jesus, the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the fully God and fully man, we don't really know how much he understood, how much he knew, how much was revealed to him. But I believe that he knew the weight of what was happening even back when John the Baptist was killed, when his cousin was killed. You see, John was kind of like the last of the old school, Old Testament prophets. He was sort of the last of that breed of guys like Elijah and Elijah and Ezekiel and Jeremiah.

Isaiah and Jesus has the utmost respect he says and then men born of women there was no one greater than John the Baptist and I think this is just me guessing is that when John was gone he was sort of like the momentum

was moving towards the cross. You saw the flywheel moving faster and faster. And Jesus knew it was the end of the old era, the end of the old covenant with the death of his cousin and history is racing forward towards the cross, which was going to initiate a new covenant. Jesus knew the weight of this, the weight of the change, the weight of the challenge.

Troy Kennedy (11:12.778)
And I imagine just as he experienced anxiety in the garden, he knew what was coming and he knew what his mission was going to be. I don't know if there's a good analogy for this. I think if you were to go to your family and say, OK, tomorrow we're going to get on a rocket ship and we're going to go to Mars and we're never coming back, it's never going to be the same. You're leaving behind everything that was familiar, everything that you knew, everything

Troy Kennedy (11:42.672)
behind, and we're going into a new future, we're going to a new world. This is what Jesus was doing for us. He was the first one to pioneer the faith, the first one to step forward into a new covenant, a new arrangement with God where it wasn't going to be just for the Jews. It wasn't just the Old Testament prophets speaking about a coming Messiah for the Jews. This is going to open up a new arrangement with God for everyone.

Jew, Gentile. Everyone was going to have the kingdom accessible to them, the kingdom where Jesus is the King, and the way into his kingdom is through Jesus himself. This is an enormous shift, an enormous change. I don't know if we, you and I, can understand the gravity and the weight of that and what was going to have to occur for this change to occur.

the cosmic struggle that Jesus faced when he met with Satan in the wilderness and was tempted. The huge weight of the change of God's arrangement with humanity that is going to happen at the cross and an empty tomb and the era of the church that would be initiated in the second chapter of Acts.

Now maybe you've been a Christ follower for a long time and the things I'm talking about sound really familiar and maybe you're kind of new to your faith and so forgive me for speaking with maybe some assumptions about the things that you understand. But here's what I would say is Jesus made a way for all of us to come into relationship with God through His work.

He set it up so that His world, His kingdom, His goodness, the character of His kingdom of love, joy and peace and patience and kindness and faith and hope would be available to everyone. If you want that life in Him, you can have it. And if you don't want that life in Him, the source of life, you're not forced into that relationship.

Troy Kennedy (13:51.242)
isn't coerced or manipulated, love is offered. Forgiveness is offered. And Jesus made the way to have those offers accessible to all of us.

So that's a little bit of a digression from Jesus spent time alone, but Jesus did spend time alone. And if he needed it, it's fair to say that you and I need it. So carve out some time, make an appointment with the boss, make a sacred space and a sacred time for you to be alone for some extended time as you walk through this season of hero worship.

And I would love to hear from all of you. If you have the wherewithal to do this, you can email me with questions or thoughts anytime. You can email me, Troy at Troy M. As in markkennedy.com. I would ask you to consider leaving a review on Amazon for the Hero Worship book. Apparently that is really helpful to put it in front of more people. And here's what I would say.

I'm not saying that this is the greatest book ever written on the topic. I'm sure that it isn't, but here's what I know is if someone will journey through hero worship the way it is intended as a way to get to know Jesus, to say, here I am. I want to be like you.

I know that I know that it will be helpful to them. And if you think it would be helpful to someone else, pass it along to someone else. Invite them into that journey with you and point them to this podcast, point them to my website, point them to the book on Amazon. But whatever you do, let's all together learn what it is to journey closer to Jesus and become more like him and let him work out his goodness, his plans, and his character in and through.

Troy Kennedy (15:39.64)
and beyond us in ways we never would have imagined. So next week the chapter is Jesus slowed down and that will be interesting one for you if you've never observed the practice of slowing down the way Jesus did for all apparently to according to the disciples and the Pharisees he slowed down for all the wrong people. We'll unpack that just a little bit next week. In the meantime God bless you on your journey with the Savior and I'll talk to you next time in