Ray Bradbury wrote a very prophetic book called Fahrenheit 451.  In this book he told of a world where humanity had become so precise and efficient at entertaining and distracting itself that contemplation was frowned upon and books were illegal. This is a world where you could get run over by a car and it would automatically be your fault because the driver was simply trying to get to his/her destination on time.  This is a world where people sleep with devices in their ears that provide a constant noise.  This is a world where TV screens in a home’s parlor were like walls and you could interact with your with canned people.  This is a world that is much like ours today.  And in this world there was a special group of men who would go about and burn any remaining books that people may have secretly kept.  Montag was one of these men, but he began to question this system that was killing his wife and was eating away at his soul.  He steals a book from one of the jobs where he is supposed to be burning them.  To a Fireman this would have lethal consequences.  The book he steals happens to be the Bible.  And there is this surreal scene on the subway as Montag is taking the book to a wise old man he had met, and he begins thinking that he will have to destroy it so he starts trying to memorize it and he happens to read this part in the Sermon on the Mount “consider the lilies of the field, they neither toil nor spin…” and all the while he is trying to memorize this there is an annoying commercial being blared over the loud speaker of the train.  A commercial about toothpaste.  And all the other people on the train are obliviously singing with the commercial.  And Montag knows he is holding truth in his hands, but he can’t focus on it because the incessant moan of the advertisement is distracting him.  It was a clash of the infinite and the inane.  

Our world has so many distractions.  The media bombards us at every turn whether we are driving down the road and see a billboard, or standing in line at the grocery store and our eyes are drawn to the tabloids, or the fact that most of us drive around with the radio going all the time, or when we get our mail we are faced with a myriad of different deals that could possibly change our life.  Sometimes it feels like all the noise from this world just drowns out our souls.  And every once in a while we get a breath of air as we take a moment to relax and be content with where God has us.  

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these

Simplicity and Solitude go hand in hand.  Simplicity is one of the disciplines that is very easy to measure and thus is often turned into legalism.  It is outward sacrifice of material goods.  But without an inward simplicity, without inward solitude our attempts at simplicity will be spiritual deadening and burdensome.  Simplicity is that outward discipline that flows from the firm assurance and security we have in Christ.  Both simplicity and solitude have trust as their foundation.  Simplicity trusts Christ for our provision and solitude trusts Christ alone for peace.  

Today it is difficult to say that we trust God for our provision.  The ancient world was very harsh place.  When Jesus taught the disciples to pray: Give us Lord our daily bread.  He literally meant their daily bread.  They weren’t sure where their food was going to come from day to day at times. In our culture it is hard for us to grasp this because for us it is more like, ‘monthly bread’.  I mean we can go to Sam’s and get a whole year’s worth of bread and freeze it in our deep freezers.  If in a comparatively simple society Jesus lays such strong emphasis upon the spiritual dangers of wealth, how much more should we who live in a highly affluent culture take seriously this economic question?

Think about this:

It is dangerous when we start thinking that our world is the world and we become comfortable because we can’t see suffering.  We become comfortable in our world.  But the other danger of this discipline is to pursue simplicity for simplicity’s sake.  Even though our world is very complex and distracting people desire simplicity.  And though it may be superficial simplicity they recognize a need to get away from the clutter.  You can see this with iPods – a very complex computer that can play music, videos, look at photos, but is designed very simply with only five buttons.  Or google – this is the number 1 internet search engine and if you were to navigate to the google homepage you would see only a handful of links and a space to type your search out as compared to the mind-numbing pages at Yahoo! and MSN.  

The desire for simplicity can even be seen in a child's toy.  The Bilibo is pretty much a large plastic bowl, but it gets five star reviews all over the internet as the most ingenuitive kid's toy ever.  One happy customer wrote: “This product is so great. It's built for the child to sit on it, sit in it, spin in it, use it as a hat, put toys in it, roll balls in it, hide things under it, the list goes on and on. My 6 year old and 22 month old both love it. There are endless options of creative play with this toy. It's all up to the imagination. I think we'll have it around a long long time. (A lot longer than electronic toys that have already been cast aside.)

225 reviews on one website with an average rating of 4.5 out of 5

I sometimes think that my generation is slightly schizophrenic.  We want to change the world, but not our lifestyles.  We want people to simply live, but we are not ready to live simply.  You can see this passion in this election year.  I am not endorsing any candidate but simply observing a phenomenon with the busters and mosaic generations.  Barak OBama has captured a generation’s heart.  And he has done so by offering change.  Again, I am not endorsing a candidate simply observing.  There are music videos created by popular artists set to the speeches of barrack obama.  And they all center on changing this world for the better.  But the thing that I always think about is that I do not see my generation sacrificing to make that change.  I instead see a generation that is more in debt because of the want of material things than any generation before.  

Simplicity has to go beyond an outward lifestyle and must flow from an inner reality.  And the place these two meet is the cross.  

The thing that should be first and foremost in our hearts and pursuits is God’s Kingdom.  The kingdom of God must be sought first even before a simple lifestyle… and a freedom from anxiety is a sign of it.  The inward reality is directly related to solitude.  Solitude is not asectisicism or being a hermit.  "Lonliness is inner emptiness.  Solitude is inner fulfillment."  Solitude:  the ability to hear the voice of God through the clutter of life.  Sometimes this comes from living in a way outside of mainstream culture (John the Baptist).

Practical steps for simplicity (careful not to turn into legalism):

So these spiritual disciplines that we have been studying are really practical ways to hear God’s voice.  They are ways to put us in a position for God to transform us from the inside out.  And here again is your disclaimer:  There are two big dangers.  The first is turning the disciplines into Law.  We can easily slip into legalism and believe that if we are practicing the disciplines then we are super spiritual and if someone doesn’t then they haven’t quite arrived yet.  We can easily become as Jesus described the Pharisees, whitewashed tombs – looking spiritual on the outside but actually being dead on the inside.  The other, and possibly graver danger, is to merely study the disciplines and fail to practice them.