Dear Friends,
Sometime the most spiritual thing you can do is to rest. I needed to
hear that message yesterday. I had been going hard for the last month, and the
pace of my activities had out distanced my energy to keep up. I had been in a
‘holy hurry’ for too long, and my body was saying, stop, rest, and yes, “take
it easy.” As a long time competitor, I don’t like to hear those words, but
sometimes it is necessary to heed them.
Yesterday I was up early for a prayer time at church, had spent
the morning making a number of visits to some of our elderly sick and shut ins,
arrived home to find a lengthy list of e-mails to answer, and by evening I when
I needed to get ready for our small group. I recognized; I didn’t have enough
energy left to make it. While my heart was saying “go,” my body was screaming
“no” and my body won out. Hard as it was for a pastor to skip his small group,
that is what I did.
And as I sit at the typewriter this morning, I am writing this
message to me, and perhaps to some of you who have been running on fumes.
Being a Martha and not a Mary, a person who prefers action and
accomplishment to rest and relaxation, I sometimes find myself neglecting the
thing I need most: sitting alone with Jesus and letting him write the script
for my life.
As a pastor for over 50 years, I have developed a competence in
ministry that makes it easy to get by on my past experience rather than relying
on the Lord as I once did in my earlier days. It is so easy to let
self-confidence and self-sufficiency creep into our lives while allowing trust
in Jesus to be crowded out.
While we may find ourselves feeling more successful from a human
and earthly perspective, we find ourselves less and less fulfilled in what we
are doing. Busyness, and productivity, and things to do lists, have a way of
pushing Jesus to the periphery of our lives, and we find ourselves spending
less and less time with Him because we have so much to do. I have been there
and done that more times than I would like to admit, and it isn't fun. I
suspect that many of you know what I'm talking about.
What's the key to avoiding this busyness syndrome? Simple. It's
called ‘abiding.’ In John 15, Jesus says “I am the vine and you are the
branches. If a man abides in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; Apart
from me you can do nothing.” (John 15: 5) It's a simple message:
Jesus wants us to spend more quality time with Him. I don't know
if you have ever wrestled with this issue of spiritual dryness, but if not,
someday you will, and when it happens, I suggest that you ask yourself the
following questions, the ones I asked of myself this morning.
Am I feeling so competent and so self-confident in what I'm doing
that there isn't as much dependence on God as there once was in my early days?
Do I desire to ‘do more’ for Jesus or ‘be more’ with Jesus?
How's my devotional life? Have I been spending the kind of quality
time devotionally that I once did?
I think the answers to these questions might well reveal the
prescription for our problem.
And if you forget any of the above questions, just remember the
words of one pastor who once wrote this simple little sentence of
encouragement: “You will be fine, if you just cling to the vine.”
Stop running and start resting, and relaxing and spending more
``time with Jesus, who is the ultimate refresher of our souls. Amen?
Yours in faith,
Tom
P.S. And I almost forgot. If we are too busy doing things for
Jesus, good things I might add, but we are neglecting times to be with Jesus,
we are too busy. Let us never be guilty of neglecting our honored guest who
bids us come and sit at His feet for He has much to teach us and much we need
to learn from Him.
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