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January 12 - January 15, 2020
“There is nothing else. Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”
Corrie ten Boom once said that if the devil can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy. There’s truth in that. Both sin and busyness have the exact same effect—they cut off your connection to God, to other people, and even to your own soul.
“The number one problem you will face is time. People are just too busy to live emotionally healthy and spiritually rich and vibrant lives.”
Hurry and love are incompatible. All my worst moments as a father, a husband, and a pastor, even as a human being, are when I’m in a hurry—late
To restate: love, joy, and peace are at the heart of all Jesus is trying to grow in the soil of your life. And all three are incompatible with hurry.
To walk with Jesus is to walk with a slow, unhurried pace. Hurry is the death of prayer and only impedes and spoils our work. It never advances it.
For many of us the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.
Cue a terrifying trend: our attention span is dropping with each passing year. In 2000, before the digital revolution, it was twelve seconds, so it’s not exactly like we had a lot of wiggle room. But since then it’s dropped to eight seconds. To put things in perspective, a goldfish has an attention span of nine seconds.20 Yes. That’s right. We’re losing, to goldfish.
hurry is a form of violence on the soul.
Because what you give your attention to is the person you become.
Put another way: the mind is the portal to the soul, and what you fill your mind with will shape the trajectory of your character. In the end, your life is no more than the sum of what you gave your attention to.
I love how John Ortberg framed it: “Hurry is not just a disordered schedule. Hurry is a disordered heart.”
One of the key tasks of our apprenticeship to Jesus is living into both our potential and our limitations.
‘No’ is a complete sentence.”
And how we spend our time is how we spend our lives. It’s who we become (or don’t become).
To be one of Jesus’ talmidim is to apprentice under Jesus. Put simply, it’s to organize your life around three basic goals: Be with Jesus. Become like Jesus. Do what he would do if he were you.
If you want to experience the life of Jesus, you have to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus.
The reality is, I want the life, but I’m not willing to adopt the lifestyle behind it.
Good example of wanting results without work
Here’s a conviction of mine: the Western church has lost sight of the fact that the way of Jesus is just that: a way of life. It’s not just a set of ideas (what we call theology) or a list of dos and don’ts (what we call ethics). I mean, it is that, but it’s so much more. It’s a way of life based on that of Jesus himself. A lifestyle.
If the results you are getting are lousy—anxiety at a simmer, mild depression, high levels of stress, chronic emotional burnout, little to no sense of the presence of God, an inability to focus your mind on the things that make for life, etc.—then the odds are very good that something about the system that is your life is off kilter. The way you’ve organized your morning (or evening) routine, your schedule, your budget, your relationship to your phone; how you manage your resources of time, money, and attention, etc.—something is out of whack.
margin is “the space between our load and our limits.”
If a vine doesn’t have a trellis, it will die. And if your life with Jesus doesn’t have some kind of structure to facilitate health and growth, it will wither away.
Back to the trellis metaphor: The point of a trellis isn’t to make the vines stand up straight in neat rows, but rather to attain a rich, deep glass of wine. It’s to create space for the vine to grow and bear fruit.
A discipline is any activity I can do by direct effort that will eventually enable me to do that which, currently, I cannot do by direct effort.
Eventually, through discipline, you become the kind of person who can do something you previously could not do.
But Jesus never commands you to wake up in the morning and have a quiet time, read your Bible, live in community, practice Sabbath, give your money to the poor, or any of the core practices from his way. He just does these practices and then says, “Follow me.”
Jesus isn’t anti-command, not by a long shot. But for Jesus, leadership isn’t about coercion and control; it’s about example and invitation.
The wilderness isn’t the place of weakness; it’s the place of strength. “Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness” because it was there, and only there, that Jesus was at the height of his spiritual powers. It was only after a month and a half of prayer and fasting in the quiet place that he had the capacity to take on the devil himself and walk away unscathed.
In Luke’s gospel in particular, you can chart Jesus’ life along two axis points: the busier and more in demand and famous Jesus became, and the more he withdrew to his quiet place to pray.
Where does this strange urge come from to reach for NPR the moment we get in our cars? Or always have music on in the background? Or flip on the TV while we’re cooking dinner? Or listen to podcasts during our workouts? As easy as it is to blame the devil, could it be that we’re using external noise to drown out internal noise?
For clarification, by solitude I don’t mean isolation. The two are worlds apart. Solitude is engagement; isolation is escape. Solitude is safety; isolation is danger. Solitude is how you open yourself up to God; isolation is painting a target on your back for the tempter. Solitude is when you set aside time to feed and water and nourish your soul. To let it grow into health and maturity. Isolation is what you crave when you neglect the former.
Henri Nouwen said it bluntly, yet eloquently: Without solitude it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life…. We do not take the spiritual life seriously if we do not set aside some time to be with God and listen to him.21
There’s a saying in parenting literature: “To a child, love is spelled T-I-M-E.” There’s truth in that. And not just for parents and children.
Restfulness Relentlessness Margin Busyness Slowness Hurry Quiet Noise Deep relationships Isolation Time alone Crowds Delight Distraction Enjoyment Envy Clarity Confusion Gratitude Greed Contentment Discontentment Trust Worry Love Anger, angst Joy Melancholy, sadness Peace Anxiety Working from love Working for love Work as contribution Work as accumulation and accomplishment
No wonder the writer of Hebrews, speaking of Sabbath and its spirit of restfulness, called us to “make every effort to enter that rest.”7 Notice the irony of that command; we are to work hard to rest well.
Walter Brueggemann has this great line: “People who keep sabbath live all seven days differently.”
We have become perhaps the most emotionally exhausted, psychologically overworked, spiritually malnourished people in history.
When we fight this work-six-days, Sabbath-one-day rhythm, we go against the grain of the universe. And to quote the philosopher H. H. Farmer, “If you go against the grain of the universe, you get splinters.”
I’ve had people laugh off the call to Sabbath with a terrible cliché: “Yeah, well, the devil never takes a day off.” Ummm, last time I checked, the devil loses. Plus, he’s the devil.
If you’re new to the Sabbath, a question to give shape to your practice is this: What could I do for twenty-four hours that would fill my soul with a deep, throbbing joy? That would make me spontaneously combust with wonder, awe, gratitude, and praise?
Dan Allender, in his book Sabbath, had this to say: The Sabbath is an invitation to enter delight. The Sabbath, when experienced as God intended, is the best day of our lives. Without question or thought, it is the best day of the week. It is the day we anticipate on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday—and the day we remember on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. Sabbath is the holy time where we feast, play, dance, have sex, sing, pray, laugh, tell stories, read, paint, walk, and watch creation in its fullness. Few people are willing to enter the Sabbath and sanctify it, to make it holy, because a full
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If not, you will. Sabbath is coming for you, whether as delight or discipline.
On the Sabbath all we do is rest and worship.
Often people hear “worship” and assume that means singing Bethel songs all day while reading the Bible and practicing intercessory prayer. That’s all great stuff. But I mean worship in the wide, holistic sense of the word. Expand your list of the spiritual disciplines to include eating a burrito on the patio or drinking a bottle of wine with your friends over a long, lazy dinner or walking on the beach with your lover or best friend—anything to index your heart toward grateful recognition of God’s reality and goodness.
Sabbath, as the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann so famously said, is “an act of resistance.”33 It’s an act of rebellion against Pharaoh and his empire. An insurgency and insurrection against the “isms” of the Western world—globalism, capitalism, materialism, all of which sound nice but quickly make slaves of the rich and the poor. Sabbath is a way to stay free and make sure you never get sucked back into slavery or, worse, become the slave driver yourself.
But honestly? I wouldn’t really care if I don’t have to keep the Sabbath anymore. I want to keep the Sabbath. Even if the Sabbath is no longer a binding command, it’s still the grain of the universe. It’s a gift—and one I want to open and enjoy.
After all, Shabbat is a verb. It’s something you do. A practice, a skill you hone.
To begin, just set aside a day. Clear your schedule. TURN OFF YOUR PHONE. Say a prayer to invite the Holy Spirit to pastor you into his presence. And then? Rest and worship. In whatever way is life giving for your soul.
Mark Twain perceptively noted, “Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.”
No matter where you live, your emotional well-being is as good as it’s going to get at $75,000…and money’s not going to make it any better beyond that point. It’s like you hit some sort of ceiling, and you can’t get emotional well-being much higher just by having more money.
