By Sherita Jones | The Anointing Grace
Sis, when was the last time you sat in complete silence?
Not the kind of quiet where the TV is still murmuring in the background. Not the kind where your phone is face up beside you, ready to light up. I mean real silence. No playlist in the car. No podcast while you fold the laundry. No scrolling in bed until your eyes give out.
If you are honest, the answer might be that you cannot remember. And if you are even more honest, the thought of it might make you uneasy.
I want to talk about why.
We Are Still Eating From That Tree
We do not have a physical tree of the knowledge of good and evil in today's world. But we are still eating its fruit, knowingly and unknowingly, consciously and subconsciously.
"And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat." (Genesis 3:6, KJV)
Read that slowly. Eve saw. She desired. She took. She ate. The fall did not begin in her hand. It began in her eyes.
The Hebrew word for "desired" is chamad, the same root used in "Thou shalt not covet." And the word for "pleasant" is ta'avah, a craving that rules the one who has it. The eye was hungry before the mouth ever opened.
Now look at your hands. We no longer stand in front of a single tree. We hold thousands of them. Every screen is a garden full of fruit that is "pleasant to the eyes," arranged by people who study exactly what makes us reach.
And here is what we miss: the sin of Eden was not curiosity. It was autonomy. The serpent promised, "ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil" (Genesis 3:5). The bait was the right to decide for ourselves what is good.
That is what we do every time we say, "It's just a show." "It's just music." "I know what I can handle." We make ourselves the judge. We never ask the Father what He calls good.
The Silence Is Not Empty. It Is Loud.
We need noise to calm the silence. Because in the silence, we see just how loud our spirits really are.
When everything goes quiet, we hear what is actually inside us. The anxiety we have not given to God. The grief we have not grieved. The fragments of ourselves we have never surrendered. The poison we have been taking in without noticing.
Silence does not create that chaos. It exposes it. And because we do not know what to do with what we see, we fill the space again. We reach for the remote. We open the app. We turn the volume up.
"Be still, and know that I am God." (Psalm 46:10, KJV)
The Hebrew word for "be still" is raphah. It means to let drop, to slacken, to release your grip. God is not asking you to sit politely while still clutching everything. He is telling you to let go.
Isaiah records one of the saddest sentences in Scripture: "In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength: and ye would not" (Isaiah 30:15). God offered strength through quietness, and His people refused. They were not unable. They were unwilling.
So let me ask you plainly: are you unable to be still, or unwilling?
What "Entertain" Really Means
The word "entertain" comes from the Latin inter, meaning "between," and tenere, meaning "to hold." At its root, to entertain is to hold someone in between.
That is exactly where so many of us live. We are not in open rebellion against God. But we are not fully surrendered to Him either. We are suspended. Occupied. Kept in a holding pattern. And tenere does not stop at "hold." It also means to keep, to possess, and to occupy. What begins as something we hold ends as something that holds us.
The entertainment industry does not need you to hate God. It only needs to keep you busy enough that you never seek Him.
An Empty House Does Not Stay Empty
"When he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there." (Matthew 12:44-45, KJV)
Yeshua describes a house that was cleaned out but never filled. The Greek word for "empty" is scholazo, meaning unoccupied, at leisure.
Here is what stopped me: Paul uses that very same word in 1 Corinthians 7:5, "that ye may give yourselves to fasting and prayer." The word for an empty house is the word for devoting yourself to prayer.
Your free time is never neutral. Every unoccupied hour will be given to something. It will either be given to God, or it will sit vacant until something else moves in.
This is why so many of us delete the app, feel convicted for a week, and then find ourselves right back where we started, often worse. We swept the house, but we left the door open. The question is not whether something will occupy you. Something will. The question is who.
Found in the Things of the Father
When Yeshua was twelve, Mary and Joseph searched for Him for three days. When they found Him in the temple, He said, "wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" (Luke 2:49).
There is no word for "business" in the Greek. It reads literally, "in the things of my Father." Yeshua was not describing a job. He was describing where He lived.
Later He told His disciples, "My meat is to do the will of him that sent me" (John 4:34). His food was obedience. That is Eden in reverse. Eve ate what the Father forbade and died. The Son fed on what the Father willed and lived.
So here is the question I cannot shake: if someone had to search for you the way Mary and Joseph searched for Him, where would they find you? In whose things are you living?
As long as we are still at the level of needing to be entertained, we will not walk in all that God has for us. Because we keep poisoning our own soul.
This Is Not a Call to Joyless Faith
Let me be clear. Yeshua went to a wedding at Cana. He ate with people. He commanded His disciples to "come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while" (Mark 6:31).
The line is not between enjoyment and holiness. The line is between rest that returns you to God and noise that keeps you from Him.
True rest has a direction. Notice where Yeshua sent His tired disciples: apart, away from the crowd, toward Himself. He did not send them to distraction.
So before you press play tonight, ask yourself: when I finish this, will I be closer to God or further from Him? Will I be refreshed, or just sedated?
Sis, the silence is not your enemy. It is where He has been waiting for you.
Where to Begin
You do not have to fix everything tonight. But you can begin.
- Take inventory. For one week, write down everything you watch, listen to, play, and scroll, and how you feel afterward.
- Ask the hard question. Even if it is not sinful, is it worthless? David vowed, "I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes" (Psalm 101:3). The Hebrew word is beliya'al, meaning worthless, without profit.
- Sit in the silence. Give God fifteen minutes with no sound at all. When something surfaces, do not run from it. Hand it to Him.
- Occupy the house. Do not just remove things. Fill the hours you reclaim with Scripture, prayer, worship, and service.
- Guard your first and last hours. Give the first moments of your morning and the last moments of your night to the Father, not to a screen.
A Prayer for Today
Father, I confess that I have eaten from the tree You warned against. I have trusted my own appetite to tell me what is good, and I have filled my house with things that do not come from You. Today I let go. Show me what is in me, and heal what You uncover. Fill every room of my soul with Your presence so that no space is left empty. Teach me to be found in the things of my Father. In the name of Yeshua, amen.
