This episode talks about the significance of pausing to reconnect with God, positing that such moments are not merely beneficial but possess transformative power. I explore the notion that, contrary to societal pressures to remain perpetually active, true strength and clarity are found in stillness and intentional reflection. Through biblical insight, I emphasize that God's presence is most accessible during these pauses, allowing us to experience His love and guidance more fully. I invite listeners to consider the importance of positioning themselves to hear God's voice, suggesting that this deliberate act of pausing can lead to healing, direction, and a deeper relationship with the divine.

Takeaways:

1. The podcast emphasizes the importance of pausing to reconnect with God and find spiritual strength.
2. Listeners are encouraged to create intentional spaces to allow God's presence to be felt clearly.
3. It discusses how pausing can lead to redemption of time, making life more effective and meaningful.
4. The episode highlights that God meets us in our pauses, providing clarity, healing, and direction.
5. In moments of stillness, one can experience God's love, which quiets the storms within us.
6. The importance of living intentionally aware of God's presence is a recurring theme throughout the episode.

The content shared on Living the Selah Life is for spiritual encouragement, personal reflection, and informational purposes only.

It is not intended to diagnose, treat or replace medical, psychological or professional advice of any kind.

Please consult a licensed healthcare provider or qualified professional for any physical, mental or emotional health concerns.

The views expressed are those of the host, Kimberly Lockanore, and are based on personal experience and Biblical insight, not clinical training.

Welcome to Living the Selah Life.

It's a podcast that invites you to slow down to breathe and reconnect with the presence of God.

I'm your host, Kimberly Lockanore.

You can call me Kim and this space is for anyone longing to become more familiar with his presence.

Maybe you're feeling worn out by life or simply want to grow closer to God.

Each episode is an intentional pause, a moment to reflect, realign and remember that God meets us when we develop a desire for him to do so and we create a space for Him.

Whether you're in a season of healing, reset, or transitioning, take a breath.

You're right on time.

Let's live the Selah life together.

Welcome back my friends.

I am so glad that you are here for episode two.

So in our first episode we talked about what Selah means and how this podcast was born.

From one of my raw seasons in my personal life, I shared how I learned that being still allows God to refill so many things in us and that sometimes we don't even notice that we're empty.

Because I didn't Today we're going to go deeper into one of the truths of living this way.

And that is there is real power in pausing.

And I mean actual power.

Not just a fuzzy feeling or a temporary break from stress, but life changing power that comes when we connect with God.

So we'll go right into our main teaching.

So what I'm going to say may sound a little backwards because it goes against how we usually think.

So when we pause, we reconnect with God.

We actually redeem time in a way that makes everything else more effective.

And most times when you think of pausing or stopping, you think that there's so much stuff to do that I have to go, I have to go, I have to go.

That pausing seems not effective.

And here's what I love about God.

He meets us in the pause every single time.

There's a verse in Isaiah, chapter 30, verse 15 that says, in returning and rest ye shall be saved, and in quietness and confidence shall be your strength.

I absolutely love this verse because it shows us something that goes completely against what our culture tells us.

While the world is telling us to push harder and to work faster, fill every moment with productivity.

God is whispering something totally different.

Return to me.

Rest in me.

Be quiet.

Trust me.

Your salvation, your deliverance, your breakthrough, your peace is connected to rest.

Your strength comes from quietness and confidence in God, not from grinding more or grinding harder.

This pause is sort of a divine positioning.

It is putting yourself in the place where God can work most effectively in your life.

So let's think about what it means to be positioned or about positioning.

If you want to hear someone clearly, you have to position yourself close to them.

And I'm talking about in our world for having a conversation.

And we want to hear someone, and we want to actually hear what they're saying.

If we're in person, we have to get close enough to be able to hear them.

Or if you want to catch something, you have to position yourself where it's going to land.

If you want to receive a WI FI signal, you have to be in range of the router.

So positioning directly does matter.

And when we pause, we're positioning ourselves in a place where God's voice can be heard clearly, where he is more accessible to us, and where his peace can actually reach us.

When we're constantly moving and constantly doing, constantly thinking about the next thing were like someone trying to have a conversation while running past the person who's speaking, we might catch a word here and there, but we're going to miss most of what they're trying to tell us.

But when we pause, when we deliberately stop and create space, we're positioning ourselves to hear what God wants to say.

We're creating the conditions where his presence can be felt, where his wisdom can be received, and where his peace can settle in our hearts.

This is why the pause is so powerful.

You're putting yourself in the exact place where God does His best work in your life.

And that is the place that you make room for Him.

And what makes this even more significant is that pausing goes against everything our natural instinct tells us to do.

It seems backwards.

Everything in us wants to keep going, but God says to be still.

It's often worship when we're constantly busy, but he tells us to stop.

We think we're falling behind or we're missing something.

But God says that stopping will actually help us gain momentum.

We feel weak, but he says that surrendering will give us strength.

Everything feels like it's just too much.

But he says that silence will help us hear the most important truths.

This kind of pausing is a deliberate choice to resist always needing to be doing something.

It's saying no to the world's addiction to constant motion and yes to God's invitation to be present with Him.

So when you pause in this way, it realigns your perspective.

You stop simply reacting to whatever comes at you, and you start returning to what God has revealed about you and about himself.

You do more than take a breath.

You remember where your breath actually comes from.

You don't just settle your thoughts.

You awaken your awareness of God's presence.

And this is what it means to live the Selah life.

You're aligning yourself with heaven's way of doing things.

Isaiah, chapter 40, verses 31 reminds us.

But those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength.

The word wait in Hebrew means to bind together or to intertwine like horse cords being braided.

When we pause with God, we're aligning ourselves with his strength.

We're exchanging the burdens that we're carrying for the strength that he provides.

Now let's just think about that for a minute.

A moment.

Where our limitations meet.

His grace and his grace wins every time.

Some of the most important moments in scripture began with a pause.

A simple pause.

Moses was going about his regular routine when he turned aside to see the burning bush.

And that's in Exodus 33.

That pause shifted the entire course of his life and an entire nation.

And Elijah, he withdrew to a cave and heard God's whisper.

Jesus also regularly stepped away from the crowds to pray in solitude.

These pauses were what gave these people their purpose.

There were turning points that shifted things and how they understood God and their calling.

So there's a few things that the pause creates.

The pulse creates space for clarity.

When we're still enough, all the mental chatter quiets and we can hear and think clearly.

We can see our situation from God's perspective instead of our own.

We get direction.

God's voice becomes clearer when we're not distracted by a million other things that are demanding our attention.

We receive healing when we stop trying to fix everything ourselves.

We create space for God to restore what's broken and strength.

We remember that we're not walking through life alone, that we're connected to God who has unlimited resources.

And lastly, when we pause and create a lifestyle of pausing, God is no longer this big mystical spirit out there.

He becomes a father that's right here.

And I feel like a lot of people live from a place of God being out there.

I have to summons God to come here to help me to do this, to do this.

Like they're summons in him.

Summonsing, summoning him from this distant place that's far, far away and nothing could be further from the truth is an awareness of his presence or a lack of awareness of his presence.

As you begin to live a life of intentionally incorporating his presence in it, that distant spirit out there somewhere becomes null and void.

He is a present help.

He, he becomes to you and realer to you than any other person that walks this earth with you.

He becomes that real to you.

And I believe that that's one of the benefits that he supernaturally provides by just taking the time out and the willingness and the intention to want to sit with him.

Because he delights in us.

He delights in us.

So for so long, I mean, we'll hear words of if you're not perfect, God's not listening.

And if you're not this and then God's not this.

And I, in my own personal experience, I have found nothing to be further from the truth.

Nothing to be further from the truth.

It is a lie from the pit of hell to try to clean yourself up before you decide and try to experience God for yourself.

That is a lie.

Because the truth of the matter is you will never be clean enough.

You can never clean yourself up enough.

Because even when you think you're clean, because you've put off all visible habits that man can see, he still says our righteousness is filthy rags.

And that's another gift of sitting with him, is that self righteousness goes completely out the door.

Because the closer he comes to you, the more you see yourself and realize there is nothing you can do to clean yourself up, even without any, any outward sin, without any outward anything.

We are a mess, y'.

All.

We are.

We are.

And you realize that more as he draws near.

But what you also realize is that he loves us.

He absolutely loves us, and that we were made in his image.

Even the angels look and say, why do you love them so much?

He loves you.

And so I encourage you to take some time within your days and just practice it, even if it's only for a few minutes at a time to start.

It will transform the way that you think in more ways than I can explain.

Okay, so we're going to move to this episode's pause prompts.

And again, these are just gentle prompts to check in with your soul to see where, where you are.

They are not to judge yourself.

They are not to beat yourself up.

We do not do that.

Here it is simply because once we take inventory of where we are, we can move past that place.

We can take that to God, and He will help us move past it.

But he can't move us past some things that we won't admit are things so this week's Paul's prompts.

What is my soul carrying right now that I haven't put into words?

Where in my day do I feel most rushed or disconnected from God?

What would it feel like to pause for five minutes and let God simply love me there?

Am I confusing being busy with making progress in my relationship with God?

Am I afraid to be quiet?

If so, what am I afraid of?

Let these questions sit with you.

Let them be gentle invitations to notice what's happening in your heart.

So our scripture spotlight from today comes from Zephaniah, chapter 3, verses 17.

And that scripture says, the Lord your God is in your midst.

The mighty One will save.

He will rejoice over you with gladness.

He will quiet you with his love.

He will rejoice over you with singing.

I love this scripture.

I'm going to read it one more time.

The Lord your God in your midst.

The mighty One will save.

He will rejoice over you with gladness.

He will quiet you with his love.

He will rejoice over you with singing.

So this verse shows us that God want us near, that he sees, and that he sings over us.

But there's something else very specific that I want you to notice.

It says, he will quiet you with his love.

Sometimes we're not the ones doing the quieting at all.

Sometimes it is God Himself that steals the storm inside of us.

This is the kind of quiet that comes from feeling completely secure when we know that we're safe.

He quiets you with his love.

With love that says, you don't have to prove anything to me.

I already delight in you.

He rejoices over you.

He sings over you.

He saves you.

Not just your eternal soul, but your focus, your heart, your peace.

This is the kind of stillness that the pause makes room for.

You only have to access it because before you ever pause for him, he was already singing over you.

And before you ever stilled your mind at all, he had already drawn near.

Before you ever knew you needed to be quieted, he was already preparing to quiet you with his love.

So living the Selah life means creating space to be stilled by the love of a God who is not only mighty and sovereign, but he's tender.

So before we close, I want to invite you into our Selah moment experience.

So wherever you are right now and let your spirit slow down.

Put your hand on your heart if you can and feel it beating.

That's God sustaining your life right now.

This is your Selah moment, a space to receive what God has been speaking throughout this episode.

Let these words settle over you.

He is in your midst.

He rejoices over you.

He quiets you with his love.

He is not far.

He is not frustrated with with you.

He is not waiting for you to do more.

He is already near, already singing.

So Father, we thank you that you are with each person listening right now.

We thank you that you are not a far away spirit in Neverland and that you are near.

You quiet us with your love because that's who you are.

I pray that each listener would feel the freedom to pause.

Help them see that there's power in pausing.

Help them exchange God burdens for your strength.

Sing over us again, Lord.

Still our souls in your joy.

Let your love be louder than our worries.

Let your nearness quiet every storm.

Help us carry this Selah into every part of our day.

Let pausing become our posture.

Let stillness become our strength.

It is in Jesus name we pray and it is so.

And again, although I said this prayer over you audibly, we are going to take a minute and lean into the pause.

Sam.

Alrighty, so we are coming to the close of this episode.

Next week we're going to dive deeper into what it means to live aware of God's presence.

In future episodes, we're talking about creating daily patterns that keep us connected to God, how to hear his voice in the middle of ordinary life, and how to rest without guilt.

So thanks for pausing with me today.

If this encouraged you, please share it with someone who needs permission to slow down.

If you're wondering how to put this into practice in your everyday life and want someone to walk on your journey with you, I'm starting a 21 day mentor group where we'll walk through this together and I also work with people one on one.

If you'd rather have that kind of focused attention, just email me at livingthese laliferoton me and I'll send you the details.

Or if you're one who want to try this on your own first at your own pace.

I do have a 21 day guide that you can work through at your own pace.

Again, just email me at Living the Selah liferoton me.

May you go from this place rested not just in body but in spirit, carrying the awareness that his presence is always near.

May you be rooted not in the shifting voices of this world, but in the unshakable word of God, the Logos that grounds you and the rhema that guides you.

For man does not live by bread alone, but every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

And may you keep rising into the life he designed for you, into purpose, into peace, into the fullness of his calling.

It is in Jesus name that we pray, and it is so.

Sa.

Sa.

Sam.

Sa.