Healthy Indifference
“For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from him. He only is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be shaken.” Psalm 62:5-6
There are times in life when we hear and experience things that are unsettling or cause us to be shaken to the core. King David in Psalm 62:3-4 speaks of his enemies who conspired to overthrow him and spoke lies about him. Like David, when we feel threatened by others, or we receive some bad news, or we get turned down for a position we interviewed for, we can become shaken, discouraged or deeply disappointed.
King David was a great leader, who loved the people of God, but the decisions that he made didn’t always please everyone. There were times when even his most loyal followers turned against him (1 Sam. 30:6a). But although David had moments when he was deeply distressed, he learned to encourage himself in the Lord His God (1 Sam. 30:b). David, as his Psalms reflect, not only talked to God about his distressing circumstances, but he talked to his own soul about God. What did he say to his own soul about God? David wrote, “For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from him” (Psalm 62:5). Hope has to do with expectations. In fact, the KJV translates Psalm 62:5 as, “for my expectation is from him.” Where are you getting your hope and expectations from?
In his book, Emotionally Healthy Leadership, Peter Scazzero suggests that to be spiritually healthy Christians, especially if you’re in leadership, you should pray what Ignatius of Loyola called “the prayer of indifference.” By indifference, he doesn’t mean that we should be apathetic or not care about anything. He simply means, as Peter Scazzero explained, “we must become indifferent to anything but the will of God. The degree to which we are open to any outcome or answer from God is the degree to which we are ready to really hear what God has to say. Ignatius considered this state of indifference to be spiritual freedom. We place our lives in God’s hands and trust him for the outcome. Arriving at this place of interior indifference and trusting that God’s will is good—no matter the outcome—is no small task. We are attached to all kinds of secondary things—titles, positions, honors, places, persons, and security, and the opinions of others. When these attachments are excessive, they become disordered attachments, or disordered loves, that push God out of the center of our lives.”
When we seek to find our ultimate security in our own expectations being fulfilled or in hoping that others would see it our way, we will be very disappointed. Things will not always turn out the way we expect or hope they would. And “hope deferred makes the heart sick” (Proverbs 13:12). Therefore, to be emotionally and spiritually healthy we must detach ourselves from the expectations of others or even our own expectations, which the gospel of Jesus Christ makes possible. In Christ we are new creations (2 Corinthians 5:17). We no longer have to look to the fulfillment of our own expectations or the expectations of others to find our significance or security. We are complete in Christ (Colossians 2:10). We are crucified with Christ; dead to our own expectations. Nevertheless we live, yet not we, but Christ lives in us. And the life we now live, we live it by faith in Christ’s will and expectations for us, who loved us and gave himself for us (Galatians 2:20).
How do we practically live a life of healthy indifference for the good of our souls? Like David, we must regularly seek God in prayerful worship reminding ourselves that our expectations come from him. In view of the gospel and all that we are in Christ, we can get up every morning, release our expectations of how we want are day to go, and surrender our hearts to the will of God, trusting Him for the outcome.
In a recent message, Pastor Mark Vroegop shared these helpful thoughts on how he uses the prayer of indifference: “I’ve been regularly praying, “Lord your will be done, not after a decision is made or after a meeting I was in ended, but before I enter a meeting. I say to myself, ‘I’m releasing my expectations of how this meeting or that difficult conversation should go. I’m releasing my expectations of how people are going to respond. I’m releasing my expectations of whether I have the ability to solve this problem. I’m trusting your will no matter what happens because the gospel, not what others think of me, is what defines me.”’
The prayer of indifference doesn’t mean that it’s wrong to seek God for a particular outcome, but that ultimately, like Jesus, we desire God’s will to be done knowing that He knows best and has our best interests at heart. May we, like David, speak to our own souls saying, “For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my expectation is from him. He only is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be shaken.”
Blessings,
Pastor Marco
There are times in life when we hear and experience things that are unsettling or cause us to be shaken to the core. King David in Psalm 62:3-4 speaks of his enemies who conspired to overthrow him and spoke lies about him. Like David, when we feel threatened by others, or we receive some bad news, or we get turned down for a position we interviewed for, we can become shaken, discouraged or deeply disappointed.
King David was a great leader, who loved the people of God, but the decisions that he made didn’t always please everyone. There were times when even his most loyal followers turned against him (1 Sam. 30:6a). But although David had moments when he was deeply distressed, he learned to encourage himself in the Lord His God (1 Sam. 30:b). David, as his Psalms reflect, not only talked to God about his distressing circumstances, but he talked to his own soul about God. What did he say to his own soul about God? David wrote, “For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from him” (Psalm 62:5). Hope has to do with expectations. In fact, the KJV translates Psalm 62:5 as, “for my expectation is from him.” Where are you getting your hope and expectations from?
In his book, Emotionally Healthy Leadership, Peter Scazzero suggests that to be spiritually healthy Christians, especially if you’re in leadership, you should pray what Ignatius of Loyola called “the prayer of indifference.” By indifference, he doesn’t mean that we should be apathetic or not care about anything. He simply means, as Peter Scazzero explained, “we must become indifferent to anything but the will of God. The degree to which we are open to any outcome or answer from God is the degree to which we are ready to really hear what God has to say. Ignatius considered this state of indifference to be spiritual freedom. We place our lives in God’s hands and trust him for the outcome. Arriving at this place of interior indifference and trusting that God’s will is good—no matter the outcome—is no small task. We are attached to all kinds of secondary things—titles, positions, honors, places, persons, and security, and the opinions of others. When these attachments are excessive, they become disordered attachments, or disordered loves, that push God out of the center of our lives.”
When we seek to find our ultimate security in our own expectations being fulfilled or in hoping that others would see it our way, we will be very disappointed. Things will not always turn out the way we expect or hope they would. And “hope deferred makes the heart sick” (Proverbs 13:12). Therefore, to be emotionally and spiritually healthy we must detach ourselves from the expectations of others or even our own expectations, which the gospel of Jesus Christ makes possible. In Christ we are new creations (2 Corinthians 5:17). We no longer have to look to the fulfillment of our own expectations or the expectations of others to find our significance or security. We are complete in Christ (Colossians 2:10). We are crucified with Christ; dead to our own expectations. Nevertheless we live, yet not we, but Christ lives in us. And the life we now live, we live it by faith in Christ’s will and expectations for us, who loved us and gave himself for us (Galatians 2:20).
How do we practically live a life of healthy indifference for the good of our souls? Like David, we must regularly seek God in prayerful worship reminding ourselves that our expectations come from him. In view of the gospel and all that we are in Christ, we can get up every morning, release our expectations of how we want are day to go, and surrender our hearts to the will of God, trusting Him for the outcome.
In a recent message, Pastor Mark Vroegop shared these helpful thoughts on how he uses the prayer of indifference: “I’ve been regularly praying, “Lord your will be done, not after a decision is made or after a meeting I was in ended, but before I enter a meeting. I say to myself, ‘I’m releasing my expectations of how this meeting or that difficult conversation should go. I’m releasing my expectations of how people are going to respond. I’m releasing my expectations of whether I have the ability to solve this problem. I’m trusting your will no matter what happens because the gospel, not what others think of me, is what defines me.”’
The prayer of indifference doesn’t mean that it’s wrong to seek God for a particular outcome, but that ultimately, like Jesus, we desire God’s will to be done knowing that He knows best and has our best interests at heart. May we, like David, speak to our own souls saying, “For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my expectation is from him. He only is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be shaken.”
Blessings,
Pastor Marco