Episode 111
The One Spiritual Discipline Every Christian Leader Needs
Christian leaders are burning out and mistaking it for faithfulness. Jesus modeled three non-negotiable practices: silence, solitude, and rest. If you're running on fumes while others look to you for direction, this episode is your reset.
There are 3 practices Jesus never skipped: silence, solitude, and rest. Skipping these is why exhausted Christian leaders keep mistaking burnout for faithfulness. This episode breaks down a sustainable rhythm for leading from fullness instead of running on fumes, a practical spiritual discipline for the leader who can't afford to stop but knows they can't keep going like this.
Key Takeaways:
• Why decision fatigue quietly erodes your leadership judgment
• What Elijah's story in the cave teaches about where God actually speaks
• The critical difference between reacting and responding under pressure
• A simple 10-minute morning practice requiring zero prep, no program, and no guilt
If leadership principles without spiritual roots have left you drained, this conversation bridges biblical wisdom with real-world stress management, so your faith sustains your leadership, not the other way around.
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Transcript
Welcome to Equipped for Purpose. I'm your host, Vincent Ream, and this is the podcast where
Speaker:discipleship meets impactful leadership. Whether you're new to faith or a seasoned follower of
Speaker:Christ, this podcast is designed to help you deepen your relationship with Jesus, grow as a leader,
Speaker:and make a difference in every area of your life. Together, we'll explore practical tools,
Speaker:biblical insights, and real-life strategies to equip you for the purpose God has called you to.
Speaker:Let's dive in.
Speaker:The most impactful leadership decision you make today will happen before anyone else is awake,
Speaker:And it will involve no thinking at all.
Speaker:Stay with me.
Speaker:Most Christian leaders are addicted to noise.
Speaker:Podcasts in the car, music while they work, sermons during the workout, notifications buzzing every six minutes.
Speaker:And oh yeah, I'm the first to raise my hand and say, yep, that's me.
Speaker:We have confused input volume with spiritual depth, as if the person consuming the most Christian content must be the most spiritually grounded.
Speaker:But here's the counterintuitive truth.
Speaker:The best leaders I know have three habits in common, and I rarely hear anyone talking about them.
Speaker:Not because they're complicated because they're terrifying their silence solitude and rest
Speaker:so at the end of this you'll have one thing to actually do tomorrow morning not one more thing
Speaker:to feel guilty about let me see if i can describe your morning or something close to it alarm goes
Speaker:off you reach for the phone not to pray but to scan social media emails texts news headlines
Speaker:maybe a quick scroll through whatever app you had open last night when you went to sleep
Speaker:then the day starts rolling and it doesn't stop meeting after meeting decision after decision
Speaker:people pulling on you from every direction and in the gaps the 90 seconds between meetings the
Speaker:drive to the office the lunch you eat at your desk you feel the silence a podcast a worship song
Speaker:a youtube clip something anything because silence feels unproductive silence feels like nothing is
Speaker:happening and if you're a leader nothing happening feels like failure so you stay full input on top
Speaker:of input decision on top of decision task on top of task there's never a gap there is absolutely
Speaker:no white space on your calendar and at the end of the day your head is spinning and your soul is
Speaker:running on fumes and you couldn't tell someone one thing God actually said to you because there
Speaker:was never enough quiet to hear it. Here's the diagnosis. You're not too busy to be still. You're
Speaker:too afraid because in the silence you might have to face something. The doubt you've been out
Speaker:running, the decision you've been avoiding, the quiet sense that you're leading empty and you don't
Speaker:know how to refill. Noise, constant company, and non-stop work are three ways of avoiding the same
Speaker:thing. And the psalmist wrote in Psalm 46:10, "Be still and know that I am God." Not, "Be busy and know
Speaker:that I am God," not, "Be informed and know that I am God," be still. When's the last time you were still,
Speaker:on purpose, for longer than it takes to microwave your lunch? This isn't just about feeling frazzled.
Speaker:Running on fumes has real, measurable consequences in your leadership, and you're not the only one
Speaker:feeling it. Here's a number that might surprise you. A recent research shows roughly 40% of pastors
Speaker:are now at high risk of burnout. It's nearly a 400% increase since 2015. If that number is true,
Speaker:those who've given their whole vocation to ministry, what do you think it's doing to you?
Speaker:Leading a team or a family when trying to hold your faith together on the side?
Speaker:There's a reason for that.
Speaker:Researchers who studied parole board judges found their approval rates dropped from around 65% early in a session to nearly zero by the end.
Speaker:And then jumped right back up after a break.
Speaker:It's part of a body of research on what's called decision fatigue.
Speaker:The idea that the quality of our decisions tends to decline the more decisions we've already made that day.
Speaker:Leaders make an outsized number of decisions every single day.
Speaker:And you may have felt this yourself.
Speaker:You know that feeling.
Speaker:It's 4 or 5 p.m.
Speaker:Your kid asks you something totally normal and you answer sharper than you meant to.
Speaker:Or you're in a meeting and you just go along with whatever the loudest person in the room wants
Speaker:because you're out of gas to disagree.
Speaker:That's not you losing your character.
Speaker:That's your brain running out of decision-making fuel.
Speaker:And this isn't just about feeling frazzled.
Speaker:The noise addiction has real consequences in your leadership.
Speaker:First, you lose the ability to distinguish your voice from God's.
Speaker:When your mind is constantly full of other people's thoughts, the podcast host, the pastor on YouTube, the author of whatever book you're skimming, it gets hard to know what you actually think.
Speaker:And harder still to know what God is saying directly to you.
Speaker:You start mistaking conviction for anxiety.
Speaker:You hear a sermon illustration and think it's a personal word.
Speaker:because you haven't built any space for God to speak into your actual life.
Speaker:The prophets knew this danger.
Speaker:Elijah in 1 Kings 19 is hiding in a cave, burned out, afraid, ready to quit.
Speaker:God sends a wind, then an earthquake, then a fire.
Speaker:Big, loud, impressive.
Speaker:But God wasn't in the wind.
Speaker:He wasn't in the earthquake.
Speaker:He wasn't in the fire.
Speaker:Then came a still, small voice, a whisper.
Speaker:And that's where God was.
Speaker:Elijah could have missed it.
Speaker:And most leaders do.
Speaker:Second, you default to reacting instead of responding.
Speaker:When you're always in motion, you don't make decisions.
Speaker:You make reactions.
Speaker:the crisis drives the calendar, the loudest voice wins. And psychologists call this the difference
Speaker:between your reactive system and your reflective system. One is fast and driven by motion,
Speaker:the other is slow and deliberate. And there's actual research on this. Quentin Durkhan and a
Speaker:team of researchers at University College London published in the journal Psychology Medicine
Speaker:taught people a simple technique called cognitive distancing. Just pausing to step back from your
Speaker:immediate emotional reaction before responding. The group who practiced it made more consistent
Speaker:decisions and adjusted faster when something wasn't working compared to people who reacted
Speaker:right away. That's not a corner office luxury, that's a skill and it's exactly what silence and
Speaker:solitude train in you. Third, you burn out and call it faithfulness. Of these, this is the one that
Speaker:breaks my heart. People who are exhausted, depleted, running on empty, and they tell themselves
Speaker:it's because they're serving hard, giving everything. But sometimes it's not sacrifice,
Speaker:it's depletion dressed up as diligence. And the cure isn't more effort, it's less noise,
Speaker:less isolation from stillness, less non-stop output. Let me show you something about Jesus that
Speaker:hides in plain sight. We talk about his teaching, his miracles, his leadership.
Speaker:He built a team of 12 that changed the world. We talk about his compassion, his boldness,
Speaker:his perfect timing, but there's a rhythm underneath all of it that we mostly skip past
Speaker:it's not dramatic. Jesus withdrew constantly. I've talked about this verse before, but in Mark 1:35
Speaker:it says, and rising very early in the morning while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a
Speaker:desolate place, and there he prayed. In Luke 5:16 it says, but he would withdraw to desolate places
Speaker:and pray. Before Jesus chose the 12 disciples, he spent the night alone. Even at Gethsemane,
Speaker:the most intense moment, he stepped apart from his closest friends to be alone with the Father.
Speaker:And it wasn't just for himself. In Mark 6:31, when his disciples were exhausted from ministry,
Speaker:Jesus didn't hand them a new strategy. He says, come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and
Speaker:get some rest. Rest wasn't a reward for finishing the work. It was part of how the work got done
Speaker:sustainably. Here's the question I can't shake. If Jesus, fully God and fully man, perfect in wisdom,
Speaker:never made a bad decision, needed to withdraw, needed quiet, needed rest to lead well,
Speaker:What makes you think that you don't? Now, watch this because it's easy to hear,
Speaker:withdraw and pray, and think you already do that. But Jesus didn't just go away to talk. He went
Speaker:away to be with the Father. There's a difference. Again, in Psalm 46:10, God doesn't say,
Speaker:be busy telling me things and know that I'm God. He says, be still.
Speaker:What I'm about to show you isn't one habit.
Speaker:It's a rhythm with three movements, three ways Jesus made room for what he couldn't get any other way.
Speaker:Most of us have never tried even one of them on purpose.
Speaker:Not for 10 uninterrupted minutes.
Speaker:Not as something we return to.
Speaker:The first movement is silence.
Speaker:Deliberately stopping the input.
Speaker:even for a few minutes, so you can hear something other than your own noise.
Speaker:Here's the practice, the 10-minute pause.
Speaker:Before you make your first decision of the day,
Speaker:before the emails, before the meetings,
Speaker:before you give anyone else a piece of your mind,
Speaker:you give the first 10 minutes to silence.
Speaker:Not Bible study, not prayer requests, not journaling, silence.
Speaker:find a place where you won't be interrupted set a timer for 10 minutes close your eyes if it helps
Speaker:and then don't fill the space your mind will fight you it'll throw up to-do lists it'll
Speaker:replay conversations it'll feel unproductive like you should be doing something let it fight
Speaker:after a minute or two when the agitation settles ask one question god what do i need to know
Speaker:before i leave today and then wait no agenda no pressure for something dramatic you're not
Speaker:manufacturing a revelation you're making room for one the second movement is solitude and it's
Speaker:different from silence. Silence is about noise. Solitude is about people. It's stepping away
Speaker:from everyone who needs something from you, even for a short window so you can think and pray
Speaker:without performing for anyone. This matters for leaders specifically. Leaders who build in regular
Speaker:solitude, make better decisions under pressure, and can catch blind spots that they'd otherwise
Speaker:miss when they're always surrounded by input from other people. Here's a practice. Pick one
Speaker:20 to 30 minute block once a week where you go somewhere alone. No calls, no meetings, no messages
Speaker:and just think and pray about the decisions in front of you before anyone else weighs in.
Speaker:Not to avoid people to hear yourself and hear God before the noise of everyone else's opinions drown both out.
Speaker:The third movement is rest.
Speaker:What scripture calls Sabbath.
Speaker:And this one might be, no, this one will be the hardest because it feels the most unproductive of the three.
Speaker:But look at where it starts.
Speaker:In Genesis 2, God himself rests on the seventh day.
Speaker:not because he was tired but partly to establish a rhythm built into creation itself. In Exodus 20
Speaker:the commandment to rest is tied directly to trust. You can stop because God is the one
Speaker:actually holding everything together not you. Here's the practice for rest and I want to make
Speaker:this realistic, not aspirational. You don't need a full day off starting this week. Start with one
Speaker:guilt-free hour. Pick a block of time where you are completely off. No leadership responsibilities,
Speaker:no just checking, and let yourself do something that has absolutely nothing to do with performance
Speaker:or output. This isn't laziness. It's a weekly rehearsal in trusting God with what you can't
Speaker:control. Silence quiets your input. Solitude removes the crowd. Rest lets go of the need
Speaker:to produce. Together they're not a program, they're a rhythm. And a rhythm practiced weekly
Speaker:changes how you show up tomorrow morning far more than any single life hack ever will.
Speaker:Elijah heard God in the whisper, not the wind, not the earthquake, not the fire, in the whisper.
Speaker:Jesus withdrew to solitary places over and over and told his own exhausted disciples to go rest,
Speaker:not because withdrawal and rest were necessary to overcome weaknesses,
Speaker:But because that's where the power came from.
Speaker:And you, you've been running on fumes because silence, solitude, and rest all feel like things you couldn't afford.
Speaker:But you can't afford to keep going without them.
Speaker:Try this tomorrow morning.
Speaker:Ten minutes, no inputs, just stillness.
Speaker:One question.
Speaker:God, what do I need to know before I leave today?
Speaker:And that's it.
Speaker:That's the one move to get started with.
Speaker:Not a new program, not a workbook.
Speaker:One question, 10 minutes tomorrow morning.
Speaker:And if you're going to try it, drop one word in the comments.
Speaker:Silence, solitude, or rest.
Speaker:Whichever one you need the most this week.
Speaker:If you're listening to the podcast, email me the word when you get a chance.
Speaker:Because the leaders who change things aren't the loudest in the room.
Speaker:they're the ones who learn to hear what nobody else is listening for.
Speaker:One step, that's it.
Speaker:Thank you for tuning in to Equipped for Purpose.
Speaker:I hope today's episode gave you tools and inspiration to deepen your discipleship
Speaker:and strengthen your leadership.
Speaker:Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.
Speaker:And if you found value in today's content, share it with someone who could benefit.
Speaker:Let's connect on social media and through my website.
Speaker:And remember, you are being equipped for a purpose.
Speaker:Go make an impact.
