New Balance

New Balance

http://gbcdecatur.org/sermons/NewBalance.html

Ecclesiastes 3:1

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

1 Corinthians 14:33

For God is not the author of confusion [disorder], but of peace…

Proverbs 28:2

…by a man of understanding and knowledge the state [balance] thereof shall be prolonged.

GOD WANTS US TO LIVE BALANCED LIVES

All of the world is based on this principle of balance. The world of nature is perfectly balanced. The earth is tilted at a certain angle and rotates at a certain number of miles per hour without any vibration. If the world were a little bit closer to the sun we would burn up and if it were a few miles further away from the sun we would freeze to death. The only global warming to worry about is when fire and brimstone again fall from the sky! Until then, the world is in balance.

In nature, the ecologists study the ecosystems where the food chain and the checks and balances in nature take care of each other.

In your body, doctors say when you get sick, it is an imbalance in your body. Health comes when your body is restored to balance. The red and white corpuscles are balanced and your hormones are balanced…ok, sometimes they aren’t!

All through your life, in everything we look at, it all focuses toward equilibrium -- the principle of balance. And God wants our personal lives to be balanced.

There is a problem that I see all the time in people I counsel. Probably the most common problem I encounter is this problem of imbalance. Imbalance is a disease that has many different symptoms, but the root is the same. You can be imbalanced in anything. Sleeping? Yes. Eating? Yes. Work? Yes. Play? Yes. Everything. You can be imbalanced in the way you use your time, in hobbies, in anything. The problem is that most of us have a tendency to work on our public lives and let our private lives slide. We work on how we look and how we smile and how we talk, but people don’t see your private life, so you sometimes let that slide.

People’s lives are like poor photographs: over-exposed and underdeveloped. I think that’s true. A lot of lives are overexposed. Everybody sees us and knows us and we have contacts with a lot of people, but our private lives are underdeveloped.

Problems when your personal life is not balanced. Two things happen:

1. Frustration

Last summer at the library we took the kids to see a juggler, and he had those poles to balance dishes on. He’d start spinning the dish ntil it was perfectly twirling and balanced. Then he would take another pole and dish and start that. Then another and another. The problem was, that about the time he got down to number nine, number one started to fall off. So he’d run back real quick and get that one going... then he’d run back and start another...

I thought, “A lot of people live their lives that way”. They go from this to that. They work on this area of their life a little bit and then they stop and work on that area of their life a little bit. Then another area. It’s frustrating. Just about the time you get one thing in balance, the other one starts to fall off. Can I get a witness?

Frustration is a result of imbalance in your personal life.

2. Fatigue

You get tired when your life is out of balance. Anybody who’s ever bought a car or a new set of tires knows that when you buy new tires, you need to get them balanced. If the tires on your car are not balanced, you’re going to have a bumpy ride. There are going to be vibrations. The car doesn’t handle the shocks and bumps so well.

That’s what happens in your own life. If you get an imbalanced tire, eventually it will rub in the wrong place. You get a a bald spot [some of you guys have unbalanced heads, evidently!] and it will blow out. Likewise in your life, you will get rubbed the wrong way and eventually have a big blow out. Tires blow out but people burn out because of imbalance. Just like a tire that is out of balance wears the wrong way, when your life is imbalanced you wear out much quicker. You get tired.

What does the Bible have to say about being balanced? Does it have anything to say? Yes!

Luke 2:52 we see an example of Jesus Christ. Jesus was the most perfectly balanced person. "And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man." Jesus Christ grew in these areas. He grew in wisdom. That means He grew intellectually. He grew in stature. That means He grew physically. He grew in favor with God. That means He developed spiritually. He grew in favor with man. That means He developed socially. He was a perfect picture of balanced humanity.