Sermon Tone Analysis

Busyness: Knowing God’s Peace in a Chaotic World

 

I can’t imagine a better picture than that movie clip (from          ) of the pace of our culture.

Today we are going to talk about how to find God’s peace in the midst of a frenetic life, how to handle the busyness of our culture without losing what is most important to us.

And I don’t know when it happened, but at some point in the last couple of decades somebody pushed the big red button and plunged our culture into hyperdrive.

All of us are moving faster and pressured to pick up the pace even more.

Over the last two years in business has been brutal.

Companies are much leaner but have even greater expectations for productivity.

That means longer hours, bigger pressure, and if you don’t want it there are lots of people lined up to take your place.

Over the last decade or so, there has also been an opportunity explosion for our families and our children.

When I compare the number of very well-organized and beneficial opportunities available to my kids today versus when I was a kid, there just is no comparison.

It is amazing how many wonderful opportunities there are out there, and for many of us we just can’t imagine how we could possibly deny little Johnny or Mary that new opportunity to learn or play or enrich their lives or get ahead of the other little kids.

We feel we have to say “yes” so much for our kids that they are more rushed and pressured than ever.

There has also been an explosion of stuff over the last decade.

I thought there was a lot of stuff ten years ago, but the last ten years has tripled our expectations of all the stuff we think we need to have…we have to work harder and harder to just keep up with all the stuff and learn how to use it and take care of it.

At easter I asked people to raise their hands if they could relate to a feeling of being overwhelmed with life, and everybody just laughed as they raised their hands.

We take being overwhelmed and overbooked for granted.

Our culture rushes at hyperdrive speed, and most of us are along for the ride, just watching the stars go by as we speed through life.

Yet, in the midst of all that we do feel overwhelmed and at times tired and empty and have a strong feeling that with all this speed we are losing something significant.

And we would be right.

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself the question, “What am I losing by moving so fast?”

Because the best things in life don’t happen in hyperdrive.

They happen when we are willing to slow down.

Relationships with God, with friends, with spouses, with kids don’t develop at 90 miles an hour.

Our soul doesn’t grow bigger as we rush through life like we drive on Central Expressway.

Most of us know that, but what are we to do about it?

How does God want us to live in a culture gone nuts?

How do we be responsible and grab on to opportunity without over-doing it?

How do we handle busy lives without being overwhelmed?

Today that’s what I want to talk about.

Now, please understand, I’m not advocating idleness.

We have too big of a mission to fulfill, too many opportunities to seize, too many relationships to deepen than to be idle…but I don’t think idleness is the big sin of our age.

I think over-busyness is.

And if we don’t watch it we will kill everything good in our life.

We will live such shallow, tired, overwhelmed lives that we really don’t build anything rich or deep or substantive.

And none of us want that.

In fact, most of us know that we could and should do better.

But the stakes are high, and we need to quit aspiring to a more healthy life and learn to live better.

So, how do we handle demanding lives without losing what is most important?

How can we know God’s peace in the midst of busy lives?

Today we want to look to God’s Word to answer the question.

1)      Take a vacation every week

 

Sounds good doesn’t it!

And it should, because that is how you were created.

And what I am talking about is a day of rest, what the Old Testament calls the “Sabbath.”

Now you’ve probably heard about the Sabbath day.

In fact, it is one of the ten commandments, which was the heart of the Old Testament law.

Here is the fourth commandment:

 

/Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.

Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.

On it you shall not do any work, neither your, nor your son or daughter, not your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates.

For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day.

Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

Exodus 20:8/.

Now you and I are not under Old Testament law.

We live under a new covenant in relationship with Jesus.

So we don’t have to be legalistic about keeping a Sabbath day as they would have in the Old Testament…or some of you may have grown up in religious traditions where the Sabbath would be kept that way.

Can’t swim on Sundays and that kind of thing.

We no longer live under the law, yet, I don’t believe we can ignore the principle of the Sabbath either.

We may not have to repeat the same form as in the Old Testament, but a principle of Bible study when looking at the Old Testament law is to look for the reasoning, or the principle behind the law, to find out what to apply to today.

When you look back at the fourth commandment, think back to the reason that was given for taking a day out of every week as a change of pace…a day of rest, of recreation.

What reason?

The verse said, “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day.

Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”

God modeled it.

At creation, he created for six days and rested on the seventh.

Why did he do that?

Not because he was tired.

He wasn’t saying, “Well, people, one time I worked six days in a row and I was really pooped.

So, I think you need to rest.”

No, God doesn’t get tired or weary.

He did it as a model to you and me.

And in that way he blessed that day and set it apart as a special day, a day to change your pace and recharge your batteries.

God created you and me with the need for cycles of work and rest.

Just like a car or a sailboat, you and I to function properly must work and we must rest.

Both are necessary, otherwise we will fall apart.

When driving my little Accord on a long trip, I have to stop every four hundred miles or so and fill up with gas again.

As great a car it is, it must stop and get refueled in order to keep going.

And every 3000 miles or so I have to stop longer to have an oil change, if I want to keep the car running for years.

That’s just the way cars are made.

And the Creator of the world made you a similar way.

Now the Old Testament law specified certain ways of keeping the Sabbath that you and I are not obligated to.

And by the time Jesus came along, the Pharisees had added all kinds of rules and regulations that were just ridiculous, and Jesus broke most of them right in front of the Pharisees just to drive them nuts.

But he did keep the pattern of work and rest, work and rest.

You and I were made for such a pattern.

A couple of years ago, a wealthy person with a big heart for the local church, paid for me to go through an executive coaching process that I am sure costs a lot of money.

To qualify you have to make a salary of over 120,000 dollars a year, and I don’t qualify.

But he got me in and paid for me to go.

The whole point was to learn how to manage time in a way where you could be more productive in order to make more money and add greater value to your company.

But I was surprised when I found out the key.

I thought I was going to get some gimmick or new formula, but it wasn’t.

The lynch pen of the whole time management system is free time.

They divide your week into focus days, buffer days, and free days.

But the whole point is for you to have free days, which they define as 24 hour period of time where you do not work one minute of that time.

And they convince you that you need at least one free day a week, and the busier you are the more you need.

Now, picture this.

All these hard chargers who are competitive and busy and they just paid a bunch of money and invested a good bit of time just to hear that what they need to be doing is taking free days, what the Old Testament would call a Sabbath day.

To convince people, they showed a graph that looked like this.

The point is that the more you work without free days the less creative and productive you become.

When you work without free days, you are really shooting yourself in the foot, because you don’t work smart, you get irritable, you lose creativity.

The best leaders are ones who know the need for free days.