One winter morning, I got a last-minute phone call that our school carpool fell through. Someone was sick, and so I was asked to drive instead. A few scrambling minutes later, I was driving north, then backtracking south, before finally heading west on the road to school with a minivan full of kids. An already long commute became twenty minutes longer. Internally, my heart was stuck on how very inconvenient this was. I was annoyed by the detour God had providentially planned for that morning.

Those extra minutes on the road gave me extra time to look into my heart. Why was I valuing convenience above serving my neighbor? If I was honest with myself, wasn’t my annoyance evidence that I had become unwilling to go out of my way for others? Was I even thinking about convenience and inconvenience in biblically sound ways?

God seems to prioritize something other than convenience as his plan of salvation unfolds. He was in no hurry to bring the promised offspring, Isaac, to Abraham and Sarah. He provided manna in the wilderness just one day at a time. Resting every seventh day was an inconvenient boundary for God’s people, considering how often they failed to keep the Sabbath. A suffering Messiah, an infant born of a virgin, and an already–not yet kingdom are neither comfortable nor convenient methods for redemption by human standards.

Might it be that delayed fulfillment, desert detours, and daily bread are effective teachers precisely because they are inconvenient? Maybe the high value our world places on convenience — from smartphones and GPS to grocery delivery and overnight shipping — makes us wrongheadedly expect God to change us in some easy way, apart from uncomfortable circumstances. In times when convenience is so valued, expected, and even demanded, it might be worth asking how God matures us specifically through inconvenience.

Consider four benefits that regularly come to us through inconvenience.

1. Welcome the fruit of the Spirit.

Inconvenience is an opportunity to cultivate the fruit of the Spirit. Uncomfortable, inconvenient circumstances are often the very means the Holy Spirit chooses to cultivate his fruit in us, perhaps patience most acutely. Like many others before me, I thought of myself as a patient person until God gave me children. The baby that wouldn’t fall asleep, the toddler who needed so many reminders, the teenager who kept losing his newest coat — these have revealed to me just how impatient I truly am. But how can I grow in patience unless my patience is tried?

“In his wise providence, God ordains convenience and inconvenience alike.”

Just as God tried his people in the furnace of affliction (Isaiah 48:10), so God tries me in the furnace of inconvenience. If I am honest with myself, even the most petty inconveniences can cause impatience, grumbling, and self-centeredness to flare up in my heart and my speech. How necessary joy, patience, peace, gentleness, and self-control are in such moments, however insignificant they seem — and what an opportunity such moments offer for growing in these precious qualities!

2. Heed the call of Christlike love.

Inconvenience caused by others’ needs gives us an opportunity to practice costly love. In Matthew 5, Jesus gives our heart a reality check. Easy love, he says, is neither remarkable nor a mark of God’s kingdom. “If you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?” (Matthew 5:46). Instead, he presses us to do something much more difficult and costly, something that he does — love sacrificially, looking to a greater reward than convenience (Matthew 5:44–45; John 15:12–13).

Sacrificial love is not convenient. It assumes a loss, a sacrifice of some kind, whether large or small. It could be the sacrifice of time or a good night’s sleep. It could be the sacrifice of comfort in order to have a difficult conversation or helping to bear the burden when someone is going through a difficult trial. It could be the sacrifice of a kidney donation to a relative or postponing needed chemotherapy for the sake of a child growing in the womb. Whatever the sacrifice, it won’t be convenient. But the heavenly joy that comes from giving of ourselves for others is far greater than the temporary benefits of convenience.

In Philippians 2, Paul reminds us that sacrificial love begins with humility, ends in glory, and is always a reflection of Jesus:

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind in yourselves which is yours in Christ Jesus. . . . He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death. . . . Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name . . . to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:3–11)

If we are determined to keep our lives convenient, then our lives will display little of the glorious love of Jesus. Inconvenience is often an opportunity, however small, to look out for the interests of others and be rewarded by our Father in heaven.

3. Embrace your creaturely limits.

When I drive from Minneapolis to St. Paul, I’m limited to roads with bridges across the river. The Mississippi is an unavoidable reality, at times an inconvenience, but it is the kind of inconvenience that reminds me that God made this world and I am only a creature in it, hemmed in by God-ordained limits. Just as a river moves within the borders of its banks, I too live within the mortal limits that God has given me. I can rage and rebel against those limits, and my life will grow increasingly chaotic and destructive, like the Mississippi in flood season. Or I can embrace the limits God has given me and thank him for hedging in my days and my ways.

Sickness regularly reminds us of our humble creatureliness. Food poisoning, pneumonia, a high fever and aches — these have the ability to cancel whatever fine plans or high demands we had for the day. We’re often tempted to feel anxious about how this sickness will slow us down, and we lose sight of the opportunity to stop and surrender our mortality to God. Home or car repairs are often inconvenient, expensive, and frustrating, but they are yet another reminder that created things don’t last forever. Moth and rust will destroy, but our treasure in heaven is imperishable (Matthew 6:19–20). When we lay our heads on the pillow each night, we’re reminded that we cannot work nonstop, even if we want to. We lie down and rise again in the morning because our heavenly Father continues to sustain us (Psalm 4:8).

4. Remember that God is in control.

Inconvenience reminds us that God is in control. In his wise providence, God ordains convenience and inconvenience alike. Not only our sleep but also “rain and drought, fruitful and lean years, food and drink, health and sickness, poverty and prosperity — all things, in fact, come to us not by chance but by his Fatherly hand” (Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 10). The closed road, the canceled appointment, the snowstorm that prohibits travel, the school lunch that was left on the counter — all these inconveniences announce to us, like a neon sign, that God is in control and we are not.

When we find ourselves rolling our eyes in the grip of the most recent inconvenience, it may be time to take a deep breath and praise God that although “the heart of man plans his way,” the Lord “establishes his steps” (Proverbs 16:9). Every inconvenience provides a concrete circumstance in which we can live out a glad submission to our heavenly Father.

I’ve learned to laugh at myself for my rising impatience when traffic slows to a halt. How can I feel so busy and then be annoyed when God literally slows me down and gives me a minute to rest? The traffic jam, the power outage, the long grocery line, the empty printer cartridge, the lost library book, the misplaced keys — in every inconvenience, we can pray, as Jesus taught us, “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10).

Though there is far more to our lives than inconvenience, God wills that we experience it nearly every day and that we respond with faith and grace. May there be enough inconvenience in our lives that when we get a last-minute call to help a friend in need, our first response is not impatience but delight in the God-ordained detour, giving us extra miles on the road to love God with all our heart and love our neighbor as ourselves.

The habit of quiet may be harder today than ever before. Don’t get me wrong: it’s always been hard. The rise and spread of technology, however, tends to crowd out quiet even more.

Now that we can carry the whole wide and wild world in our pockets, it’s that much harder to keep the world at bay. Our phones always promise another update to see, image to like, website to visit, game to play, text to read, stream to watch, forecast to monitor, podcast to download, headline to scan, article to skim, score to check, price to compare. That kind of access, and semblance of control, can begin to make quiet moments feel like wasted ones. Who could sit and be still while so much life rushes by? Even if we don’t immediately pick up our phones, we’re often still held captive by them, wondering what new they might hold — what we might be missing.

As hard as quiet might be to come by, however, it’s still a life-saving, soul-strengthening habit for any human soul. The God who made this wide and wild world, and who molded our finite and fragile frames, says of us, “In quietness and in trust shall be your strength” (Isaiah 30:15). In days filled with noise, do you still find time to be this kind of strong? Or has stress and distraction slowly eroded your spiritual health?

How often do you stop to be quiet?

What God Does with Quiet

What kind of quietness produces strength? Not all quietness does. We could sell our televisions, give away our phones, move to the countryside, and still be as weak as ever. No, “in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.” The quiet we need is a quiet filled with God. Quietness becomes strength only when our stillness says that we need him.

Be still, and know that I am God.     I will be exalted among the nations,     I will be exalted in the earth! (Psalm 46:10)

This still, trusting quietness defies self-reliance. Quietness can preach reality to our souls like few habits can. It says that he is God, and we are not; he knows all, and we know little; he is strong, and we are weak. Quietness widens our eyes to the bigness of God and the smallness of us. It brings us low enough to see how high and wise and worthy he is.

You can begin to see why quietness can be so hard. It’s deeply (sometimes ruthlessly) humbling. For it to say something true and beautiful about God, it first says something true and devastating about us. Our quietness says, “Without him, you can do nothing.” Our refusal to be quiet, on the other hand, says, “I can do a whole lot on my own” — and that feels good to hear. It just robs us of the real strength and help we might have found.

God strengthens the quiet with his strength, because quietness turns weakness and neediness into worship (2 Corinthians 12:9–10). We get the strength and help and joy; he gets the glory.

But You Were Unwilling

The context of Isaiah’s words, however, is not inspiring, but sobering. God says to his people,

“In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.” But you were unwilling . . . (Isaiah 30:15–16)

Quietness would have made them strong, but they wouldn’t have it. Assyria was bearing down on Judah, threatening to crush them as it had crushed many before them. And how do God’s people respond?

“Ah, stubborn children,” declares the Lord, “who carry out a plan, but not mine, and who make an alliance, but not of my Spirit, that they may add sin to sin; who set out to go down to Egypt, without asking for my direction.” (Isaiah 30:1–2)

Even after watching him deliver them so many times before, they cast his plan aside and made their own. They sought help, but not from him. They went back to Egypt (of all places!) and asked those who had enslaved and oppressed them to protect them. And they didn’t even stop to ask what God thought. They did, and did, and did, at every turn refusing to stop, be quiet, and receive the strength and support of God. I would rush to help you, God says, but you were unwilling. You weren’t patient or humble enough to receive my help.

“How often do we choose activity over quietness, distraction over meditation, ‘productivity’ over prayer?”

Why would they refuse the sovereign help of God? Deep down, we know why. Because they felt safer doing what they could do on their own than they did waiting to see what God might do. How often do we do the same? How often do we choose activity over quietness, distraction over meditation, “productivity” over prayer? How often do we try to solve our problems without slowing down enough to first seek God?

Consequences of Avoiding Quiet

Self-reliance is, of course, not as productive as it promises to be — at least not in the ways we would want. The people’s refusal to be quiet and ask God for help not only cut them off from his strength, but also invited other painful consequences.

First, the sin of self-reliance breeds more sin. Again, God says in verse 1, “‘Ah, stubborn children,’ declares the Lord, ‘who carry out a plan, but not mine, and who make an alliance, but not of my Spirit, that they may add sin to sin.” The more we refuse the strength of God, the more we invite temptations to sin. Quiet keeps us close to God and aware of him. A scarcity of quiet pushes him to the margins of our hearts, making room for Satan to plant and tend lies within us.

Second, their refusal to be quiet before God made them vulnerable to irrational fear. Because they fought in their own strength, the Lord says, “A thousand shall flee at the threat of one; at the threat of five you shall flee” (Isaiah 30:17). A lone soldier will send a thousand into a panic. The whole nation will crumble and surrender to just five men. In other words, you will be controlled and oppressed by irrational fears. You’ll run away when no one’s chasing you. You’ll lose sleep when there’s nothing to worry about. And right when you’re about to experience a breakthrough, you’ll despair and give up. Fears swell and flourish as long as God remains small and peripheral. Quiet time with God, however, scatters those fears by enlarging and inflaming our thoughts of him.

The weightiest warning, however, comes in verse 13: those who forsake God’s word, God’s help, God’s way invite sudden ruin. “This iniquity shall be to you like a breach in a high wall, bulging out and about to collapse, whose breaking comes suddenly, in an instant.” Confidence in self drove a crack in the strongholds around them — a crack that grew and spread until the walls collapsed on top of them. All because they refused to embrace quiet and trust God.

“In quietness and trust would be our strength; in busyness and pride will be our downfall.”

For Judah, ruin meant falling into the cruel hands of the Assyrians. The walls will fall differently for us, but fall they will, if we let busyness and noise keep us from dependence. In quietness and trust would be our strength; in busyness and pride will be our downfall.

Mercy for the Self-Reliant

In the rhythms of our lives, do we make time to be quiet before God? Do we expect God to do more for us while we sit and pray than we can do by pushing through without him?

If verse 15 humbles us — “But you were unwilling . . .” — verse 18 should humble us all the more. As Judah hurries and worries and strategizes and plans and recruits help and works overtime, all the while avoiding God, how does God respond to them? What is he doing while they refuse to stop doing and be quiet?

Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you, and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you. For the Lord is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for him. (Isaiah 30:18)

While we refuse to wait for him, God waits to be gracious to us. He’s not watching to see if he’ll be forced to show us mercy; he wants to show us mercy. The God of heaven, the one before time, above time, and beyond time, waits for us to ask for help. He loves to hear the sound of quiet trust.

Blessed — happy — are those who wait for him, who know their need for him, who ask him for help, who find their strength in his strength, who learn to be and stay quiet before him.

Calloused knees. Prayer closet. Answered prayers. Prayer warrior.

These four phrases don’t exactly trigger me with spiritual PTSD, but they do represent markers in my journey of moving from prayer-guilt into the grace of praying. For many years, I felt more like a D-student in the school of prayer than a beloved son in the presence of God. I was afraid to not pray, but I had very little delight in actually praying.

As a young believer in the late sixties, the joy of my new life in Christ was palpable and plenteous. But pretty soon, I started to feel the pressure of a new burden to “get it right.” I had consistent quiet times, underlined verses in my Bible (in three different colors), and engaged in Scripture memory. I fellowshipped, witnessed, and prayed. Unfortunately, these crucial spiritual disciplines functioned more as a means of guilt (or pride) than as a means of grace. Many of God’s good gifts are misused and disused until they become rightly used. This is certainly true of prayer.

A part of the problem — no, the biggest issue — was that I began the Christian life with a limited understanding of what happened when God gave me faith to trust Jesus and hid my life in his Son. I was certain of going to heaven when I died, but I knew little of what God thought about me while I lived.

United Forever with Christ

In Christ, all riches were already deposited into my account, but I was clueless about them. I knew Jesus died for my sins and that I was fully forgiven. But only years later did I come to understand my union with Christ, the imputation of his righteousness, and my adoption into God’s family — to name a few of the glorious benefits of our life in Christ.

I don’t blame anyone for not teaching me about union with Christ. I’m just eternally grateful I finally learned about it, came to rest in it, and now live out of its glorious implications. It wasn’t a game changer, but an everything changer — not a new day, but a new forever.

“The effort I now invest in praying has become a delight, not a burden.”

Our union with Christ is the foundation and fountain for knowing God, and the spiritual disciplines — including prayer (when shaped and fueled by the gospel) — are the means by which we deepen our knowledge of God and learn to “glorify and enjoy him forever.” Though the gospel has freed us from all earning, it certainly doesn’t free us from all effort. But the effort I now invest in praying has become a delight, not a burden.

Moving on from guilt and fear, I now focus on three callings that have radically transformed how I engage in prayer.

Fellowship with Your Father

“Fellowship with your Father” is exactly how my spiritual father, Jack Miller, reframed prayer for me, keying off of Jesus’s glorious invitation to say, “Our Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:9). How many times did I hear (and need to hear) Jack say, “Scotty, our Father wants to spend time with you more than you are even confident and comfortable in his presence. He loves you. You’ll never shock him, and he’ll never shame you. He knows your need is greater than you realize, and his provision for you in Jesus is exponentially more than you have yet grasped.”

Indeed, the gospel frees us from thinking of prayer as a way to get God’s attention — an effort to convince him of something we need or something we want him to do. Prayer is God’s nonstop welcome to us — a grace-subpoena into his presence (Hebrews 4:16).

“The gospel frees us from thinking of prayer as a way to get God’s attention.”

Our Father is always initiating and resourcing our communion with himself. As we spend both quality and quantity time with him, all the incomplete and wrong notions we’ve had about him get exposed and expelled. He also re-parents us through unrushed time in his presence. Abba is the Father we always wanted, and he alone can be to us what no human father could ever be.

The better we know God as our Father, we more we begin to embrace how big and good his prayer-answer vocabulary actually is. Answered prayer is no longer equated with a yes to our petitions. We begin to rest in our Father’s multiple wise answers, like no, not yet, and yes, but not exactly as you are asking. The burden is off our shoulders. We can ask with abandon and trust with even greater abandon. Our Father is always doing all things well, even when he doesn’t do all things easy. Our Father’s no is sweeter than any yes we can imagine — or demand. We start giving more yeses to him rather than “needing” yeses from him.

Jack also made it abundantly clear to me, “The more you fellowship with your Father, the more you will rejoice in his plan for the nations and live as his partner in world evangelism.” Jack could not think of prayer, the gospel, and our Father without seeing and rejoicing in the day when God’s every-nation family will stream into the New Jerusalem.

Behold Jesus’s Glory

The apostle Paul’s words are as riveting as they are compelling: “We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Many centuries earlier, King David expressed a similar heart orientation and single passion — even making it his number-one prayer request: “One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord” (Psalm 27:4).

Prayer as contemplation of Jesus’s glory reorients us away from prayer as consternation about getting results. Adoration of Jesus must not be relegated to the first letter of ACTS: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication. Adoration is the meaning and essence of each and every other aspect of life. Indeed, fixing our gaze on Jesus isn’t a warm-up exercise to prayer; it is prayer.

As we marinate in the truth, goodness, and beauty of Jesus, we are changed — we become more like Jesus, which is the goal of our salvation (Romans 8:28–30; 1 John 3:1–3). Our hope is fueled, because we discover more fully what the Scriptures mean when they declare Jesus to be the emphatic Yes! to every promise God has made (2 Corinthians 1:20). Our praying becomes less about claiming God’s promises and more about seeing how God’s promises claim us — and all of history. We think less about becoming prayer warriors, and we rest in Jesus as the prayer-warrior extraordinaire — ever living to make intercession for us and in us by the Holy Spirit (Hebrews 7:25; Romans 8:26).

Adoring Jesus also deepens our intimacy with him and intensifies our longing to be with him in eternity — the better-by-far-ness Paul writes about in Philippians 1:23. It also fuels our courage to go with Jesus into a life of missional living and loving. We cease thinking of doing anything merely for Jesus; rather, we begin to live as those who do everything with Jesus. Only Jesus can, and is, making all things new. Prayer frees us to find our place in his story, now that we’re already in his heart.

Listen to the Spirit’s Testimony

Lastly, thinking of prayer as listening to the Holy Spirit’s testimony helps us include in our prayer times not only talking but hearing. In Romans 8, Paul highlights just how vital this aspect of our fellowship with God actually is: “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs” (Romans 8:16–17). The Spirit is always preaching the gospel to us — nonstop, 24/7. As we linger over God’s word, do we take time to listen?

In fact, it is by the Spirit’s voice we most clearly hear God singing over us with great rejoicing (Zephaniah 3:17). How is this so? Because the Spirit is always making much of Jesus and is constantly applying his finished work to our hearts. As we experience the wonder of God’s great delight in us, we move more fully into the true blessedness of the convicting voice of the Spirit, the voice that is now and forever void of any condemnation (Romans 8:1). Confession and repentance become a way of life and a liberating joy.

Unfortunately, too much of the time we allow other noises and voices to drown out the Spirit’s voice. We tune the frequency of our hearts to our fears, disappointments, and anger. We indulge the whispers, shouts, and lies of the devil. We let the siren songs of our world and our lusts mute the peace-giving, joy-fueling, hope-enlarging testimony of the Spirit. We pay to hear an out-of-tune kazoo band, while the triune God has graciously made us members of his every-nation orchestra that gets to play and enjoy the grand symphony of the gospel.

Let’s get still and know that our God is God (Psalm 46:10). He does all that he pleases, all the time and everywhere (Psalm 115:3). Hallelujah, it has pleased him to make us his beloved daughters and sons through the work of Jesus.