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July 25 - September 8, 2018
But there is no greater area that sits waiting for recovery than our life with God. The damage, distance, and disillusionment we experience between ourselves and God—well, it’s time to close the gap. The gap between ourselves and God—the gap between the life we are living and the life we could live—needs to close.
Life is difficult, and through the perils, difficulties, attempts to try this or that, we find ourselves the bull’s-eye target of Jesus’ own words: Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly. (Matt. 11:28–30)
What do you need to recover from? Has someone or something stolen the life you wanted? What’s not working in your life? Do you feel like your life and your faith have been hijacked? What is your part in recovering the life you want? What will God do for you?
“There has got to be more to the Christian life than we’ve been told. We’re trying to do ‘it’ all right, but we feel like someone has torn out some of the chapters of the book. We’re missing something. Going to church, tithing, and serving feels like it’s killing us. We’re so bone tired, and we are afraid to tell anyone how empty and desperate we really are. So many are looking to us for the answers.”
Our best hope for actually experiencing this abundant life is for us to go back to the One who said, “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6 NIV). The problem is that many of us have majored on only one-third of this amazing, self-disclosing, God-revealing decree.
We go to Bible studies, attend seminars, and listen to countless sermons, but this one reality remains: Information and the amassing of information, no matter how true it is, does not lead to life transformation.
We have believed that the pursuit of truth alone will yield a life worth living, and so we have emphasized doctrine over life, facts over vitality, and information over transformation. Because of our relentless pursuit to get everything right, we’ve gotten it all wrong.
Remember, Jesus did not come to just teach us new truths so that we can believe; He came to show us how to live.
Do we follow the Way or are we following a denomination, a person, a culture, or a program, or even a church?
Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to walk from here? The Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to. Alice: I don’t much care where. The Cat: Then it doesn’t much matter which way you walk. —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland If you don’t care where you’re headed in life, then it really doesn’t matter which way you follow. But if you want to live, it does; in fact, it matters a lot.
For Jesus, it was about obedience, not excellence. For Jesus it was never about moving toward greatness or mega-ness. He was focused on the few, the small, the overlooked, and the insignificant. Jesus had a soft spot in His heart for the outsider and stooped to honor children, women, and those marginalized by the culture.
When church talk replaces Jesus talk, when church power struggles replace struggles against principalities and powers of this world, when church emphasis usurps devotion to Jesus, we have lost ourselves and left the Jesus way.
Dr. Thom Rainer, president of LifeWay Christian Resources, said, “We have dumbed down what it means to be part of the church so much that it means almost nothing, even to people who already say they are part of the church.”4
He wrestled with power issues but learned in following Jesus that the life-giving way to lead is to serve.
1. Read Jesus’ words in Matthew 11:28–30.
2. This chapter presents three key questions about recovering your life. Take some time to answer these questions perhaps by journaling your thoughts and sharing them in your group or class: a. What do you need to recover from? b. Has someone or something stolen the life you wanted? c. What’s not working for you in your life?
Stephen Covey stated, “The challenge of work-life balance is without question one of the most significant struggles faced by modern man.”1
Some of this is connected to our toys, aka modern technology. We’re constantly connected—always checking to see who might have emailed, texted, or posted on Facebook. We might be “needed,” so we keep ourselves plugged in—wired 24/7. For many of us, always being on leaves us feeling completely off.
There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to
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We can receive our days as gifts from God and find Him in each one, or we can squander them as if they can easily be replaced. A life of rhythm helps us tell time rather than let it imprison us. Living in healthy rhythm allows us to experience more of the abundant life, mindful of God’s faithfulness every day.
Luke 4:16 tells us that Jesus observed the Sabbath “as was his custom” (NIV). For thirty years, even before He started His ministry, He lived according to a 6:1 rhythm: He worked six days, then rested one.
This regular rhythm of remembering and worshipping anchors our faith in the life and death as well as the teachings of Jesus Christ.
Good opportunities will keep coming to us, but do we have to do everything? Is there a way to choose a few things and do them well rather than do a lot of things halfway or not at all? Can we accept the fact that we may be in a season when we need to say no with the understanding that the season will not last forever?
A life out of control, a life spinning on the hamster wheel, and a life running on empty are all indicators that something is wrong. We want “it” all, but the problem is that the “it” keeps changing; the bar we have to jump over to succeed keeps getting higher, and then there’s the shame we wallow in when we fail, get rejected, and can’t measure up.
Can you imagine your life with less stress, less fatigue, and less discouragement? How about more peace, more hope, and more joy?
We live at the speed of nanoseconds, tied to our smart phones and constantly available. We may be moving, but there’s no rhythm. And where there’s no rhythm, there’s little living.
The real truth is, as one writer put it, “balance is bunk. It is an unattainable pipe dream.… The quest for balance between work and life, as we’ve come to think of it, isn’t just a losing proposition; it’s a hurtful, destructive one.”4
Consider what the modern-day equivalent might be for you to begin enjoying some twenty-first-century festivals—times of celebrating, feasting, and enjoying. By having certain times marked and observed, you’ll find a rhythm of expecting and anticipating a time away with a life-giving friend or a season of rejuvenation with your spouse.
Creative ideas such as family reunions, getaways with spouse, quarterly weekend retreats, or a monthly day of soul care and reflection can all become twenty-first-century ways of living according to a rhythm that sustains and replenishes rather than a lifestyle that drains and leaves us feeling empty.
One such prayer is found in the new book Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals: Lord of Creation, Create in us a new rhythm of life composed of hours that sustain rather than stress, of days that deliver rather than destroy, of time that tickles rather than tackles.6
Many Christians have focused on the teachings of Jesus and the doctrine taught by Paul and lived out in the early church at the expense of neglecting the intentional decisions Jesus made about how He would live His one and only life. His deliberate choices about how He lived offer us the way we can live today. In other words, His lifestyle was just as important as His teachings.
One of the dilemmas that propels us into a plate-spinning, white-water kind of life is that we forget that Jesus was a Jew, not an American, Brit, or German. Our tendency is to Americanize Jesus and re-form Him into our own image. Without fully realizing what we are doing, we transfer our values to Jesus. We believe He thinks the way we do and He would act the way a good American would act. We have built an illusion about Jesus.2
We cannot just read them and use our yellow highlighters to mark the outstanding verses that seem to speak to us. We need to watch what happens in the flow of Jesus’ life. We do this because we want to know both the truth and the way.
Luke was clear in presenting a rhythm of Jesus’ life that looked like this: Engage then disengage; work in the crowds but always make time to rejuvenate with time alone. Luke revealed that Jesus was not always on, He was not always available. This important lesson is key to sustaining a resilient and satisfying life. Throughout both volumes Luke wrote—the gospel of Luke and Acts—he was quick to convey how times of quiet, solitude, and prayer are essential to a rich and abundant life.
Intentional Faith Development
Luke then said that “at daybreak,” Jesus went out to a solitary place (v. 42 NIV). Jesus knew that something would happen in solitude that did not happen in the midst of a busy day. He both wanted and needed a change from the demands of work. He sought solitude as a change of pace, a change in perspective, a change to what was happening in and around Him.
Here we see again the rhythm of Jesus’ life: Pour your all into your work; then seek rest, quiet, and solitude. Jesus knew that something would happen in His soul by disengaging from people and engaging with God—alone.
Author Madeleine L’Engle wrote these words: I, who live by words, am wordless when I try my words in prayer. All language turns to silence. Prayer will take my words and then reveal their emptiness … in this strange patterned time of contemplation that, in time, breaks time, breaks words, breaks me, and then in silence, leaves me healed and mended.3
Jesus knew the power of silence—wordless prayer—throughout His life. He knew the unparalleled energy of solitude and silence and incorporated these two shaping forces into the regular rhythm of His life. We have to simply ask ourselves this question: If the Son of God found it necessary to practice silence and solitude, who are we not to do the same?
We see this life-giving rhythm in Jesus’ own words that we explored in the first chapter: “Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life.” We recover our lives by taking regular times to get away and be alone. Then we are ready to share and invest our lives once again.
Listening requires a posture of the heart and body to cease from activity and to listen to His voice. Amid the busyness of daily and weekly agendas, listening is God’s priority for us. Listening happens best in a rhythm of quiet and stillness when we are “still” and invited to “know … God” (Ps. 46:10 NIV).4
In his book Landscapes of the Soul, Robert Hamma said that certain places are known to be “thin,” because in them we can see the Sacred. How true this was for Jesus, who sought the solitude of certain places to be alone, draw near to God, and hear God’s voice.
Luke 22:39–40. “Jesus went out as usual to the Mount of Olives” (v. 39 NIV). It’s Luke’s reminder again of what Jesus did in Luke 5:16: “Jesus often withdrew to lonely places” (NIV). It was the norm and not the exception for Jesus to withdraw and be alone. He knew that something would happen in the alone times—the times of solitude that could not and would not happen in the crowds or even with His close companions.
But if we pause in these words, we will begin to see how significant they were to Jesus, and then we must ask what place they have in our lives. We learn not just from the words Jesus spoke but also from the way He lived.
We really do not know how to be off, unwired, and untethered from the demands of the world, and yet, imagining Jesus doing just that is frankly beyond our comprehension.
I’ve discovered that most of us as busy Americans actually do not know how to listen to Jesus as God told us to do. Our minds are so filled with noise and our hearts are so rattled with busyness that we don’t know how to be quiet, to be still—nor do we know how to really know God as the psalmist described in Psalm 46:10: “Be still, and know … God” (NIV).
I am simply trying to clear my mind and turn down the volume knob of my heart so I might hear from God. To listen to God, I must quiet my mind as well as my heart.
Henri Nouwen called these voices “monkeys in the banana trees” that are squealing and fighting until you throw them a banana. It is helpful to learn how to quiet the monkeys in your head that are telling you lies instead of the truth.
This practice is how many of the spiritual fathers and mothers throughout the history of Christianity have told us to begin. In our busy culture, there is no doubt that learning to be quiet, unplugged, and silent is among the most important and most revolutionary disciplines you can implement into your life right now.
well. In the dailiness of our lives the holy meets the ordinary. Glory intersects with ruin. The sacred meets the routine. The lifelong journey to heaven is often marked with ordinary days where we simply do our work and serve God the best way we believe we can.
Dailiness is where we most long for our transformation—whether it involves losing your temper with your child, speaking curtly to someone at work, losing patience in the checkout line at the store, arguing with your spouse then muttering words you hope he or she doesn’t hear, or neglecting your prayers or Bible reading for long seasons. The ability to fast-forward music and movies tempts us to think that we can fast-forward through the parts of our lives that seem boring or too difficult to face. But we really can’t.
