12 Scriptures That Help Us to Embrace Stillness and Navigate the Journey Towards a Quiet Life.

In my previous post, I shared 12 quotes that offer an understanding of what it means to lead a quiet life as a follower of Jesus. Those 12 quotes have helped me on my journey to embrace stillness and navigate the journey towards a quiet life. I like to think that those quotes put some practical understanding around the timeless wisdom that Paul gives us in 1 Thessalonians 4:11. In this blog post, I accentuate 12 scriptures that I think also develop further understanding of the timeless wisdom Paul gives us in 1 Thessalonians 4:11. These scriptures help us to realize that it is not just Paul’s wisdom calling us to lead a quiet life, but God feverously desires that we embrace stillness and navigate the journey towards a quiet life. This blog post highlights 12 scriptures that I think help us to understand the fruitful and faithful witnessing of leading a quiet life. I feature four scriptural passages from Jesus, four from his earliest followers, and four from the First (or Old) Testament. In some way, all of these verses share a commonality with Paul’s challenge to lead a quiet life in 1 Thessalonians 4:11. Throughout my time in the scriptures recently, I have been continually amazed about how leading a simple life – a life defined by stillness – is a blueprint for a life lived well that is found throughout the witness of scriptures.

It is worth noting that to share these scriptures in this space, I have had to lift them from – or maybe even strip them out – of their context. I am not a topical pastoral leader in my teaching and preaching, and so there is an aspect of this that feels notably dangerous. It would be my encouragement to you to read each of these passages in their context, both for a greater understanding of what it means for God’s people to lead a quiet life but also so that you understand how this way of leading a simple life creates a contrast with the world around them.

Four Scriptures from Jesus.

Surprisingly, Jesus had a lot to say about leading a quiet life in a way that embraces stillness and can help us navigate the journey toward a quiet life.

“Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” – Luke 12:15
“…the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful.” – Mark 4:19
“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”- Matthew 6:21
“Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” – Matthew 6:34

Four Scriptures from Jesus’ followers.

Those who knew Jesus best also echoed Jesus’ teaching and left us encouragements that can help us navigate the journey toward a quiet life that embraces stillness.

“…if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that.” – 1 Timothy 6:8
“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.” – Romans 12:2
“Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.” – Hebrews 13:5
“Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father[a] is not in them.” – 1 John 2:15

Four Scriptures from the First (or Old) Testament

The life lived well and quiet, a life that embraces stillness, is also found throughout some of the earliest interactions that our forefathers had with God.

“And I saw that all toil and all achievement spring from one person’s envy of another. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.” – Ecclesiastes 4:4
“Keep falsehood and lies far from me; give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread.” – Proverbs 30:8
“Better a dry crust with peace and quiet than a house full of feasting, with strife.” – Proverbs 17:1
“Better one handful with tranquility than two handfuls with toil and chasing after the wind.” – Ecclesiastes 4:6

Through this blog, I have been on a journey to discover the quiet life that Paul asked the Thessalonian followers of Jesus to pursue ambitiously and intentionally. In recent posts, I have begun to wrestle with the way an oppressive culture and its busyness and consumeristic living have derailed us from understanding the contentment and significance of a quiet life. I have also explored how Paul’s idea of a quiet life is a Sabbath-like living of stillness. Without a doubt, living the way of stillness is not only a scriptural blueprint of a life that is lived well, but each of these scripture’s contexts shows that this is a prophetic and countercultural way of living that contrasts contexts and a world that is defined by their pursuit of affirmation, consumption, and achievement. These twelve verses are only a sample of the many scripture passages that illuminate and carry the character of the quiet living that Paul also envisioned for the Thessalonian Church (and for us). Read each in their context, these twelve verses call us to live a prophetic witness that contrasts with the overwhelming and oppressive culture around us.

These 12 verses model for me a wise way of living that is also an unhurried and quiet way of living. Each of these 12 verses communicates a way of quiet living that I believe God wants to see experienced and exemplified in my own life and in yours. As I have shared before, the older I get, the more I realize that I am tired of pursuing, hungering, and achieving. More and more, my health and time in the scriptures, remind me that I need the sabbath at play in my life.

Life has a way of distracting us from the way of Jesus.

The reason Paul invites the Thessalonians to intentionally and ambitiously lead a quiet life, is because Paul himself had learned to live this wise way of quiet living. In A Spirituality of the Road, Author David J. Bosch points out that for Paul “it was only after some fifteen or more years of relative obscurity that he became the missionary we know.” This means Paul himself lived an unhurried life of stillness, humility and none-notability. His call was to live faithfully in obscurity. If more of us embraced such a call to obscurity today, I believe that the kingdom of God that we too often view as slow coming would actually be rooted faster in more permeance. Less just might be more. In those years of obscurity, Paul led a simple life, not a life defined by the insatiable pursuit of achievement and affirmation. Author Pete Greig remarks in God on Mute that “in God’s kingdom, happiness is not marked out primarily by popularity, fat bank accounts, or clean bills of health but rather by proximity to the Father.” Paul’s life of stillness and embracing quiet living was also the source of his contentment because undistractedly he was able to live in proximity to the Father. The life of a faithful quiet living is what Paul experienced in his life, and it is ultimately what Paul hopes for the Thessalonian Church as they wrestle through the pressures and persecutions of their day. The wealth and riches of this world that we too often are distracted by, that too often we pursue, take us away from experiencing this proximity with God. Nouwen echoes this reminder in his book, In the Name of Jesus when he writes that “wealth and riches prevent us from truly discerning the way of Jesus.” The way of Jesus is then rather a way of living that embraces stillness and navigates the journey toward a quiet life.