It feels like we really never got to celebrate summer. There are a few students here today. The students who had to start school a few weeks ago are probably already starting to begin to feel a little bit of stress and strain from the heavy curriculum that they took on or the heavy course load they took on. Maybe thinking initially I can handle those 18 credits and AP classes and all of a sudden you are feeling stress and tired about that. The parents are usually glad the kids get back to school, but at the same time they are probably feeling a little bit of anxiety and stress because they are beginning to see the homework their kids are going to have and the projects and they realize they are the ones that have to do most of the work. I used to hate those projects. Plus the running around of the kids to all the different sporting activities and extracurricular activities and that sort of thing. So they might be feeling already a little bit of tiredness and worriedness. Then you have the people that just constantly are always feeling tired or weary just because they are overloaded with the burdens of life. Constantly living in a state of being tired. Going from one season to the next and not even having the time to celebrate something like summer or something like Labor Day.
If you fit into one of those categories, then today’s passage would apply to many of you. This is Jesus saying “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” This passage is probably one of the most liberating and freeing passages in the entire New Testament if not the entire Bible. In this passage, Jesus is making this phenomenal invitation. He is saying if you are tired, burned out, worn down, tired of running the rat race of life, just come to me and I will give you complete rest. I will give you rest not just for the body, mind, and spirit but rest for the entire being. Rest for your soul. I don’t have time to get into the idea of what a soul is. I will spend some time with it hopefully in the next few months and I will be talking about the soul. Today, I just want to think about this definition of the soul that is given by a theologian and philosopher named Dallas Willard. Dallas Willard writes “The soul is that aspect of your whole being that correlates, integrates, and enlivens everything going on in the various dimensions of the self. It is the life center of a human being.” The soul can be thought of as the thing that holds everything together; body, mind, and spirit. It is what makes you uniquely you. If you have a body, mind, spirit, and soul, and if your body is worn down, your spirit is worn down, and your mind is worn down and tired, you are pretty much going to have a tired soul. That is what we are talking about today. I wanted to address first these various dimensions, body, mind, and spirit, and how they do weigh upon the soul. Many people, including many people here today, are probably feeling a little bit of tiredness in your body. You are just feeling worn down maybe because you are overworked or maybe simply because you do not get enough sleep. I was reading a recent study that said the average American gets 6.8 hours of sleep per night. Back in the 40s, people were getting 8 hours. They are saying we need between 7 and 9 hours of sleep. If that is true, then we know that there are a lot of people walking around just tired, including people here today. Including myself. I am a little tired because I got about 4 hours of sleep last night. The body can be tired. I don’t know what they use nowadays. When I was in college, we would pump ourselves with caffeine and the drug of choice was No Doz. It was basically a caffeine pill. Nowadays they have all these things like Red Bull and 10-hour energy and energy bars. Those are things to help us get through our day especially when our bodies are tired. We know a tired body can hurt your health. It contributes to things like heart disease. It contributes to things like obesity and depression and diabetes and all these types of things. An unhealthy body or a tired body contributes to a tired soul. So a lot of people have tired bodies.
A lot of people have tired minds. There are some people that just never know how to shut off their mind and shut down their mind. Their mind is constantly filled with all sorts of work things and the to-do list or the grocery list. Some of you are probably thinking about what you have to do at home today. Some of you are thinking about all the things you have to do. Some people’s minds are just consumed, like we mentioned a few weeks ago, with worry. Thinking about their children. Thinking about what could go wrong in their life. Thinking about what is going wrong in the world. Their minds are just consumed constantly with thinking and thinking and thinking about all these things. They never get any sort of rest. Just by virtue of living in America, we are bombarded constantly every single day with all sorts of information that our minds just cannot take in. It is just constant information flowing at us. So much so that when we get home, we just want to veg out. Instead of vegging out we turn on the TV or open up the Kindle or the Mac or the smartphone or the iPad and we begin to engage there. We think that those are relaxing things and actually it has been proven that those types of objects, technology, actually overstimulate the brain so the brain never gets any rest. It contributes to all sorts of things like anxiety, depression, and in kids ADHD. It is basically contributing to mental fatigue. We have tired bodies and we have tired minds that contribute to a tired soul.
Many of us have tired spirits. That is a little bit harder to get our hands around. A tired spirit is a spirit that really is trying to do too much on its own. Instead of being connected to God and the spirit of God, it is a spirit that is walking and doing its own thing. Following its own will and desires. Possibly engaging in some form of sin. We don’t like to use the word sin. I know sin is not a popular word out there, but if you don’t like sin then think about bad choices. There are people out there that just make one bad choice after another. Over time, that becomes taxing not only on the body and mind but also on the spirit. It becomes very heavy. It is very hard for people to continue to engage in these wrong choices without feeling exhausted or tired. In any given week, we have probably at least two or three calls to the church. They are usually people outside of the congregation that are part of the community or some other community in Pittsburgh and you can just tell by their voice they are exhausted and they need some sort of help. Granted, there are some people that need help because of things that are totally out of their control, but I would say nine times out of ten the calls we get are from people who just make habitual bad choices in life. Bad choices. It could be simple choices. It is just choices that are out of line with God. When you make choices that are out of line with God’s will for your life, what happens is you end up carrying a burden and that burden is called sin, but you also carry all the garbage that goes with that. Things like guilt and unforgiveness and financial problems and relational problems and all this stuff that is happening because you choose to live a life outside the will of God. Your spirit is not connected to the Spirit. That does weigh on the soul. In 1 Peter, Peter talks about this when he advises the people. He says “I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires which war against your soul.” When you yield to those sinful desires, they create this constant war in your soul. I think it is because they disconnect you or distract you or entice you away from the very person who can help balance your soul and help keep that peace in your soul and again that is Jesus Christ. We have a body that is tired, we have a mind that is tired, and we have a spirit that is tired that all contribute to an overall restless soul or tired soul.
In the midst of that, Jesus sits in the middle of all of it and says “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Learn from me. That is language of discipleship. That is what we have been talking about for the last few weeks. Jesus has this discipleship and teacher relationship going on. He is saying just pay attention. Just learn from me and I will teach you a thing or two or three about how to get through life. As a side note, when he speaks about this idea of a yoke, he is talking about this device that they used to put on farm animals like oxen. They would put it on two of them that would help carry the load and relieve a little of the burden. What Jesus is saying is put my yoke on you. Yoke yourself to me. Put yourself under the authority of me, under the kingdom authority, and you may begin to see that your load is being lifted a little bit. Your life is becoming a little bit lighter. You will be able to not rely on your own strength, your own yoke, or the yoke of the culture, or the yoke of even religion, but you will be able to rely on My yoke, and you will gain strength from that. I think it is Philippians 4:13 “For I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength.” This is really what he is talking about. Be yoked with Christ and you will have the strength to get through the day without being mentally, physically, and spiritually exhausted.
You might think that is all well and good, but I need something practical. My life is always busy. I am always running. I am always tired. I am always mentally or physically tired. What does it mean to learn from Jesus? As I start to wind things down, I started thinking about a few things that I think, if Jesus were standing here today and he was saying learn from me, these are some little bits of advice, very practical advice that he might give each one of us. The first bit of advice he would tell us is I think some of you people need to practice what I would call the discipline of saying no. Can anybody say no? No. See you can say no. I think Jesus, even though you might not see the word No in the gospel, Jesus knew what to say yes to and what to say no to. The reason he knew that was because he took his orders from the Father. He took them from God. He knew what his purpose was in life. He would not allow himself to be distracted by a million other different things. He was very intentional about going through life. The people that he interacted with he chose to interact with them. He did not go running around allowing people to pull him out of his agenda. He knew his agenda and he walked in that agenda. He did not even allow his disciple to pull him away from his agenda. You might recall Peter tried to pull him away from his agenda, and he said get behind me. You may recall that even Satan himself tried to pull Jesus away from his agenda and he said I am not taking any orders from you. He knew when to say yes and when to say no. Likewise, if we are feeling overburdened, especially in our physical bodies, we have to learn when to say yes and when to say no. I say that all the while knowing that everybody has things they need to do. Everybody has some sort of to-do list whether it is written down or in your brain because we all have jobs and families and work and school. I get that. You can’t just say no to everything. The problem with some people is some people feel they need to say yes to their to-do list and yes to everybody else’s to-do list. They end up carrying all these to-do lists of the entire world and what happens is eventually they experience burnout. They allow themselves to be burned out because they don’t know how to say no. It begins to affect not only their own health but the health of the people around them. They have to learn to practice the discipline of no. In order to practice the discipline of no, you have to first ask yourself why do you have to say yes to everything. Why do you say yes to everything? If we are honest with ourselves, some people would say I say yes to everything because I don’t want people to reject me. If somebody asks me to do something and I say no, they might not like that and they might reject me. I don’t like rejection. Some people are just looking for the affirmation that maybe they didn’t get as a kid. They feed off this affirmation. When they do a bunch of stuff, their to-do list and everybody else’s to-do list, all the people are saying great. You are a wonderful person. They feed off that affirmation. Because they have the need for affirmation and the world has all this need out there, the world is more willing to accommodate people’s need for affirmation over and over and over again. They run around like chickens with their heads cut off. They are doing everybody else’s job. Doing things that they might not even have the expertise to do but just feel the need to do, which is actually in some sense robbing people of their ability to do it. In some form, it is a form of arrogance. Thinking you are so important that you have to do everybody’s job or that job won’t get done. For the last year or so, God has been teaching me the lesson of no in a big, big way. Probably for about a year and a half. Slowly he is saying you don’t need to do all this. You don’t need to be a big shot in the community. You don’t have to attend every meeting. You don’t have to run every meeting. You don’t have to prepare the agenda for the meeting. You don’t have to do all the stuff. Just say no. I started saying no. I became free. I kind of like this. This is kind of nice. I can say no and if it is important enough for it to be done, somebody else will pick up the slack. Maybe somebody that needs to say yes to some things. Chuck doesn’t have to do everything in the church. When I think about it, I think that actually the ability to say no has gotten me to the place where I can have heart surgery on Tuesday and be gone for four to ten weeks, or if God-willing forever, and things will be fine because Chuck is not indispensable. Nobody is indispensable. In fact, if I have done my job correctly, there shouldn’t even be a hiccup when I am gone. I think God has gotten me to the place by teaching me to just say no. You don’t have to be the guy doing everything. You need to focus on your gifts, on your calling. That is why it is so important to know your strengths, to know your spiritual gifts, and to know how God has wired each of you in a very special way to do what you are called to do and not everything else. The clearer you are about how you are wired, your unique giftedness, the easier it is going to be to say no to certain things. It is not because you are being lazy. It is because you know that when you say yes to something, you are saying no to something else. A lot of times you are saying no to the very thing that God wants you to do. You have to know your giftedness. Jesus knew his calling. Jesus knew his purpose. Each one of you needs to know your purpose. Otherwise you are going to run around like crazy. You are going to be responding to everything everybody needs. Especially if you have this deep inner need for significance and affirmation from people, you are going to drive yourself nuts. Many of you people do. You talk about being tired. The reason you are tired is because you don’t know how to say no. That is what I think Jesus would offer. A little advice if you still have a hard time saying no, here is a little trick. Take control of your calendar. Sunday night get your calendar and fill up the whole week. Fill it up with stuff that relates to your calling. Fill it up with things that are going to be life-giving to you whether it is taking a nap on Saturday afternoon from 2-4 or dinner with the family on Friday night. Fill it up. When somebody calls you or emails you and says I need you to help me move on Saturday from 2-4 you know what you say? You don’t say no, you just say my calendar doesn’t allow for it. Most people won’t have a problem with that. They have a problem with you saying no but they won’t have a problem with you saying my calendar doesn’t allow for it this week. You are not lying. You have taken control of the calendar before somebody else has taken control of your calendar. That is a great tool. It works especially for the people who can’t say no. Just say my calendar does not allow for it. That is one bit of advice. Learn the discipline to say no.
The second discipline that you need to learn I think Jesus would say would be the discipline of learning to let go. Learning to let go of things like pride. Learning to let go of the need to be right. That frees up a lot of space in your brain. Learning to let go of the need to control others’ behavior. Learning to let go of the need to control anything, others’ agenda. Jesus really wasn’t a control freak. Jesus walked through life speaking in truth and acting in love. Some people didn’t like it. Some people loved it. But I don’t think Jesus went to bed at night and said you know what I said something, I did something, I healed this, I said something to the Pharisees or whatever. I am just really worried what they are thinking about that. He didn’t lose sleep over worrying about what other people are thinking about. He didn’t think about my agenda is so important that if I don’t control this person’s behavior, if I don’t send out this email, if I don’t reply on Facebook to this comment that I don’t like, well that person may mess up my agenda or my control. I don’t think Jesus would do that. Jesus didn’t have the need to control. He was willing to let go. He just went through life. Spoke truth and acted in love and it was fine. He didn’t have all this baggage in his brain that we use because we have the need to control because if we don’t control things, then somebody is going to have control over me. Somebody is going to mess up my agenda. Letting go is one of the most freeing things that you can experience. If somebody sends you that email and you don’t like it that is what they think. That’s fine. It’ll be fine. I am not talking about arrogance. I’m not talking about going through life and saying I just don’t care what people think. Live as a Christian with integrity, speaking truth in love. What I am talking about is understanding what is in your control and what is outside your control and what people think about you is way outside of your control. That has been very freeing for me to know this last year as a preacher. I stand up here and I say stuff. I could go home thinking all day long what people are thinking about what I said. It will drive me nuts. All I can control is my preparation and my delivery. What you guys think about it, I can’t control it. I just let it go. I throw it out there and let it go. I try to do better. I take feedback, but I don’t think about what you guys are thinking about what I said. Not that it doesn’t matter. It is just that I have no control over that. We have to learn about what is we have control over and what do we not have control over. What came to mind is the serenity prayer that they talk about in AA groups and that sort of thing. The serenity prayer goes like this: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Where we lose sleep and mental rest is when we try to control the things that we can’t. We try to change the things that we can’t. We cause all this stuff going on in our mind that ultimately just consumes space and is not necessary. You need to learn the discipline of letting go.
Finally, the last discipline I think we need to learn is the discipline of unplugging. Jesus was a master of knowing how to unplug. There is a story in mark that talks about the disciples were sent out to do ministry and they come back. They are telling Jesus and all the people about all the great things they did and all the miracles they performed. Crowds are gathered around. You know what Jesus says? He says to the disciples “’Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.’ So they went away by themselves in a boat to a solitary place.” Why would Jesus say this? Because he knew the importance of rest. He knew the importance of the discipline of solitude. Of being able to unplug from life. He did it constantly. If you read the gospels, you will see that Jesus got up and he went away to a solitary place and he prayed. He was a master of disengaging because he knew the importance of disengaging from life for a little bit. If it was good enough for Jesus, don’t you think it would be good enough for us. Yet that is the most infrequent discipline ever practiced is the discipline of solitude. Everybody in this room, including myself, has to figure out how to make solitude a part of your spiritual rhythm and spiritual routine. You have to find a place of solitude. Whether it is your basement, a closet, your special park bench, a place downtown, or the place on the lake. Wherever you need to go, you need to find that place where you can spend in solitude alone. In solitude is actually the place where you will experience rest. You will if you do it right. Any extended period of time you are going to experience rest for the body. If you do it right, you are going to experience rest for the mind. Most importantly, you are going to experience rest of the spirit. That is what it is about. That is what solitude is about. It is a place where you can recharge your battery. It is a place where you can disengage from life. It is a place where you disengage from technology. From the cell phones and the emails and the iPads and all that kind of stuff. It is a place where you disengage from your to-do list that you think is so important that if you don’t do it, it won’t get done. It is a place where you disengage with people. It is said if you are not comfortable being away from people, you can never be comfortable being with people. Until you get comfortable being alone, when you are with people you are going to be a sponge on people. You are going to try to get what you need inside off of other people. When you get to the place where you are comfortable just you and God hanging out being together and you get all your fresh springs from then, when you go out with people you engage them in a real way that is not sucking the life out of them. There are so many benefits to solitude that I can’t even begin to talk about it. It is through solitude. It is that disengaging that people are refreshed and rested. I really think that is what Jesus meant when he said “Come to me, all you who are weary.” When you read something like that, how would you do it? I am open for ideas. When he says come to me and I will give you rest, what does that mean? How would you do that in a very practical way? He is not physically here. The only way you are going to do that is to make space for him. To make space for the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ to come in to push everything aside to make space. When you get alone with the spirit of God, he will come in and give you that rest. He will point out to you and say why do you feel the need to say yes to everything? If you are honest with yourself, I guess I need for affirmation. Why do I need to feel the need to control things? I don’t know. I am just not sure why I feel this need to be in control, but I know that I am a controlling person. Why do you have to go in there and feel the need to be affirmed? Maybe you are going to say because my mom or dad never said they love me. That is where you get real. Then He will say I will give you rest.
I know that if two people in this whole place today get this, I will be surprised. Solitude in America equates to lazy. If you are to take a day off of work and go just out in the woods or wherever you like to go and sit and talk with God, most people would say you are lazy. We have the need to do. We have to feel comfortable with doing nothing. If we can do nothing, we are able to sit in peace with Jesus Christ. You think it is the most counterproductive thing you can do when it is actually the most productive thing you can do because you are proceeding in your activity from a posture of rest. There is a write, Eugene Peterson, who wrote the book The Message and wrote dozens of books including his book called The Contemplative Pastor. In this book, he is talking about the need for pastors to have rest. He is talking about the need to proceed from rest and how if you proceed from a posture of rest, you will be more effective in ministry. Your sermons will be more powerful and everything like that. Really what he says to the pastors really applies to anybody. If you learn to proceed from a posture of rest, you will be more productive, more accurate, more efficient in everything you do. He illustrates that by telling a brief little clip from the story Moby Dick. I don’t know how many of you read Moby Dick but most of you know the story about Captain Ahab and the Great White Whale. I would like to read this section really quickly. He writes “In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, there was a turbulent scene in which a whale boat scuds across a frothing ocean in pursuit of the great white whale, Moby Dick. The sailors are laboring fiercely, every muscle taught. All attention and energy concentrating on the task. In this boat, however, there is one man who does nothing. He doesn’t hold an oar. He doesn’t perspire. He doesn’t shout. The man is the harpooner. Quiet and poised, waiting. And then this sentence, ‘To ensure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooners of this world must start to their feet out of idleness and not out of toil.’” What he is saying is the most effective people in the world are the people that start from a posture of rest before they do anything. Rest of the body. Rest of the mind. Rest of the spirit. Rest of the soul. Again, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” Let us pray.
