Discover God's Power in a Balanced Life

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But I want you to understand that when I talk about bringing balance into your life, I’m not talking about finding the exact amount of time between work and the other areas of your life. Because you know that is impossible. Sometimes work will take more hours. I think a more appropriate word for what we are talking about today is “harmony”. We are talking about finding harmony between different areas of our lives in a way that is best for your life and that honors God and is best for the people in your life.
Have you every been at a concert and noticed that before the conductor walks out all the musicians begin preparing their seats and playing on their instruments? It’s just awful and noisy. You wouldn’t sit through that for long. Then if you pay attention, you will see the first chair violinist stand and you will hear the OBOE play “A” note. The others stop what they were doing and begin to tune to that note. After that, the conductor appears, he taps the stand and the instruments produce beautiful music in harmony. It’s only when all the instruments have come into balance or harmony that the CONDUCTOR really begins to work and bring them all together.
If you have a part of your life out of tune, it will create dissonance and tension. The other parts, no matter how good will be affected. Just imagine a section of an orchestra out of tune with the rest. It would be unpleasant. You will feel uncomfortable.
Just like an orchestra, you need harmony in your life, marriage, work, leisure, and your walk with God. When you balance or tune the different aspects of your life, you begin to experience God’s power and beauty throughout your relationships and work.
Today, we are going to look at the four areas of our life that we need to make room for in order to experience God’s power when we balance our life. Let’s look at the first one.
1. Make room for Work. For Work
Genesis 1:1 “1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
God can create a man; He creates from nothing.
Genesis 2:15 CSB
15 The Lord God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden to work it and watch over it.
God as a worker, created us for work. We have been designed for work. My in-laws have retired from the company and careers they enjoyed for many years, but they will tell you that they work more than ever before. They lead a Life Group, they work with the Optimist’s Club to provide Christmas blessings to family’s in need. They volunteer with Operation Christmas Child. They currently assist in planting a church in a nearby town. They have never stopped working.
Billy Graham slowed down in his later years so people asked when he would retire. He’d reply saying, “I’ve looked for retirement in the Bible, but I haven’t found it yet.”
Have you ever talked with men who come to retirement and that they feared it? Why? They found meaning and purpose in work.
Ecclesiastes 3:22 CSB
22 I have seen that there is nothing better than for a person to enjoy his activities because that is his reward. For who can enable him to see what will happen after he dies?
I think we need more Christians and more people with integrity at the top of their field. We need more Christians at the top of the big financial firms. We need more Christians at the top in political offices. We need more Christians at the top of the entertainment and be better role models. I believe we need Christians climbing the success ladder so we can set examples and we can set the standard of integrity. I think that is good. I think the world would be better.
But the danger comes when work becomes our entire life. You see, we were meant to express our identity as Christians through our work. But instead, too often, our work becomes our identity. I become my job. My job is who I am. And we become workaholics. And workaholic is a lot like alcoholic and destroy their lives because they have only made room for one thing in their life. And this one thing pushes everything else out of the way. And if you are a workaholic, you haven’t made room for the other areas of your life that area important for you to be happy for you to live the life that God wants you to live.
You have to make room for the rest of life. And work is important but it can’t push the rest of your life off to the side. Otherwise, you’re not going to have joy in work as God intended. So I want you to take a moment right now, I want you to grade your work life. You can see it there in your message notes.
On a scale of one to 10, with 10 being very happy, how happy are you in your work? I want you to write that down. And just self-reflection. How happy are you in your work? And some of you may be thinking, I’m not happy because I’m not doing what I want to be doing. But really (apart from an immoral occupation) you can be happy in the Lord where you work, no matter what it is. I want you to think about why you’re not happy.
Is work taking over an area of your life?
Or are you not seeing this is what God has created you for?
So I want you to grade yourself.
Number one, I must make room for work. But to make room for real life, not only do I have to make room for work, but
*On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy am I in my work? ______
I have to make room for rest. We were created to need rest. In fact, just as God worked, God rested. Look at our next verse from Genesis 2:2-3.
2. Make room for REST.
Genesis 2:2-3 “2 On the seventh day God had completed his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. 3 God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, for on it he rested from all his work of creation.”
One Sabbath day a week, where we stop the work we do the other six days and we take a break from it and we rest. And I want you to notice. God doesn’t suggest that we take a Sabbath. God commands that we rest one day. If you are not taking a Sabbath, if you are not resting one day every week from your normal work, you are sinning because you are breaking one of the Ten Commandments. God didn’t suggest it. In fact, God created us to need a day off because He knows that we need rest.
I don’t know why He did this, but for some reason, He created us to need sleep at night. Now, He could have created us so that we could be awake all the time, but as human beings, He created us so that we need seven, or eight hours of sleep in order to make it every night. And it is scientifically proven, when we don’t rest, our performance goes down. Our health goes down. Our stress levels go up. And we can literally take years off of our life when we don’t get the amount of sleep that we need.
God says that we have to rest because He created us, for some reason, to need rest.
There is a nomadic tribe in the middle east called the Bedouins and they are mostly sheep herders, but they are very primitive and they are still there. Nomadic tribes go from place to place. Scientists, not too long ago, recognized that these Bedouins were living on average “100 years a person”. They were still healthy and traveling at 100! They scientists began to say—why are these people living so long. So they went and they began to study how they lived.
The best they could tell, the reason they lived so long was the lifestyle that they lived. Now the Bedouins work really hard, in fact, a day will go something like this. The sun comes up at 6 AM. They get up and they go to work. And they work 12 hour days. They work 6 AM to 6 PM. The sun goes down. And when the sun goes down, they stop working. They come in and have a meal together and from 6:00 to 10:00 they sit around their campfires. They eat. They talk. They play games. They enjoy each other. They go to bed at 10 and they sleep for eight hours and then they wake up at 6 AM the next day. Now, that’s hard work. That’s an aggressive day, but it also provides them plenty of time for rest and fun and for family and for everything else.
You see, our bodies were created to work this way. Our bodies were created, like I said, God created us to work. Our bodies were created to work hard. They were also created to need rest. We were created to work when it’s light. And to rest when it’s night. That’s the way God created us. And when we get off of that natural system, it messes up our body. When we get out of rhythm, out of tune with our life’s biological harmony, it creates stress and discord.
It’s simple, but it was the Bedouins key to a long and healthy life. In contrast to that primitive Bedouin society, as Americans, our initial thought is that the more financial stuff that we have, the more stuff that we get in our life, and the more technology that we get in our life, the better our life is going to be. Right? The more stuff I get and the more technology we get in our life, the better our life is going to be. It’s going to be better. It’s going to be faster. But what we find is, the more stuff that we get, the more bogged down we get. The further behind we fall and the more we end up working. Now, don’t get me wrong. I love my cell phone, lap top, streaming service. We become like New York, the city that never sleeps, we don’t shut down.
Without the appropriate rest, I fall further and further behind. And I want you to consider weightlifting for a moment. You must understand that just as important as the time we spend working, is the time that we take off and we rest.
Commit time every day to rest at the end of the day. Commit time every night to get enough sleep and commit once a week to take a day away from your work. Look at what Ecclesiastes 2:20 says,
Ecclesiastes 2:20 “20 So I began to give myself over to despair concerning all my work that I had labored at under the sun.”
Here’s the question that I have for you: What is your official day of rest? What is your Sabbath? The day that you take off from the work that you do the rest of the week. And I want you to write that down. My next day of rest will be. . .when is your next scheduled day off? For some of you, today is your Sabbath day. And that’s great. It’s appropriate to be in church on your day off. But I know a lot of you are planning to go to work right after the service today. When is your scheduled day off? When are you going to get in line? Because you have to make room in your life for rest.
*My next day of rest will be: __________________.
3. Make room for RELATIONSHIPS.
Genesis 2:18 “18 Then the Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper corresponding to him.””
Daniel Lusk visited with me this week. He shared the excitement of visiting the Philippines with his wife Elle. I asked what Elle found to be most surprising when she first came to America. Without skipping a beat, he said, “She asked, where are ALL the people?” I said, what does that mean. Daniel explained that in the Philippines that people live close together and their doors face each others homes. They have a common area and people grow up together and often retain those relationships for most of their lives. Elle, noticed that Americans go to work, come home, hit the garage door and don’t come out.

The evidence shows Americans are becoming lonelier, leading to mental and physical health problems for people of all ages. Preliminary results of a Harvard University study conducted in October 2020 found that 36 percent of Americans reported feeling seriously lonely. Among specific groups of people, that number was even higher, with 61 percent of participants ages 18-25 and 51 percent of mothers with young children reported feeling “frequently” or “almost always” lonely. In addition, there is ample evidence that older adults have experienced an increase in loneliness since the start of the pandemic.

Honestly, American culture has a huge issue. The younger generations have a huge lack of training and ability in making social connections.

Oh, they use things that say, “Social” Social Media, but they don’t really connect. Many don’t know how. They incorrectly believe they are connecting.

Loneliness has broader implications for our mental and physical health. It’s not difficult to understand how loneliness leads to depression, a growing problem in the U.S. Among older adults, loneliness increases the risk of developing dementia, slows down their walking speeds, interferes with their ability to care for themselves, and increases their risk of heart disease and stroke. Loneliness is even associated with dying earlier. Among adolescents and young adults, loneliness increases the likelihood of headaches, stomach aches, sleep disturbances, and compulsive internet use.

Health Risks Associated With Loneliness

Loneliness has a wide range of negative effects on both physical and mental health,4
including:
Alcohol and drug misuse
Altered brain function
Alzheimer's disease progression
Antisocial behavior
Cardiovascular disease and stroke
Decreased memory and learning
Depression and suicide
Increased stress levels
Poor decision-making
How many of you feel this way or know someone who feels lonely. They don’t even know why. They think there’s some magic that somehow they missed. They think because they have a cell phone that they are connected.
They don’t even know they have a part to play in seeking out and participating in relationships FACE TO FACE. They have become lost in the isolation caves of social media and video streaming.
The report advocates for a broader public response that raises awareness about the importance of maintaining and creating social ties.
As America has become secularized and less and less people attend church, we hear people say they don’t need church. BUT, in reality, the church has been designed by God to meet our NEED FOR RELATIONSHIPS.

Philippians 2:4 “4 Everyone should look not to his own interests, but rather to the interests of others.”
Today, I’m not talking about difficult people, I want you to think about people that as you are listening to this, you realize you’ve been neglecting. You’re life is out of harmony and you’ve not made time for these important people. Think about the song Cats in the Cradle. Perhaps its your kids. It could be your spouse, a sibling, a friend, a mentor, a parent, aunt, cousin, but God put them on your heart. Write them down.
*Two relationships that I need to make room
for in my life:
• Make room for GOD.
The most important thing that God created us to need, was Him. He created us to need Him. Our next verse, Genesis 1:27 says
Genesis 1:27 “27 So God created man in his own image; he created him in the image of God; he created them male and female.”
You see, one of the main reasons God created us in His image, one of the reasons God made us like Him, all of us, no matter who we are, was so that we could have a relationship, a personal relationship with Him. Because you see, no other part of creation, plants and animals, wonderful creations, but I’ve never seen my dog with a desire to worship.
Well maybe, I’ve met one. Last weekend we walked into a crew filming the Maybury Movie in Danville. One of the Stars of the show was DIXIE THE PRAYING DOG. While there MAY be one dog, I can assure you there’s not ONE CAT, and we have 4 at our HOUSE CURRENTLY, not one cat with the desire to worship. They expect us to act like we should worship them, but they don’t show any desire to worship!
But as human beings, we are. And we have an innate desire to have a connection with our Creator. All of us do, and there is an emptiness in our life when we don’t have it there. God created us to want that. And just as you were created to have a relationship with others on this horizontal plain, you were created to have a relationship with God on this vertical plain. Until you have both, there is going to be something missing in your life. You see, that’s why we oftentimes feel emptiness in our life.
1 Corinthians 1:9 “9 God is faithful; you were called by him into fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.”
See the God who created us put a place in our hearts for Him. We can try to fill it with many other things. But nothing else will fill it.
One of the main ways we relate to God is by reading His Word and listening to Him. People want to say, it’s just a book. Or they think it’s written for a different culture. I’m here to tell you that it’s more than JUST a BOOK. Yes there are cultural things and you won’t sit down and just understand everything you read in it right away. But I’m here to tell you that something more important happens. God actually meets with you and He speaks as you read His Word.
I want you to hear what happens when people “read” the Bible. Life transforms because you have connected with the One TRUE GOD:
The Center of Bible Engagement did a study among Christians who read their Bibles regularly. They reported that when people engage with their Bible four times a week, some stunning things happen:
Feeling lonely drops 30%
Anger issues drop 32%
Bitterness in relationships drops 40%
Alcoholism drops 57%
Sex outside of marriage drops 68%
Feeling spiritually stagnant drops 60%
Viewing pornography drops 61%
Sharing your faith jumps 200%
Discipling others jumps 230%
What will you gain when you study the Word?
*I will schedule a daily quiet time for _____________ AM/PM.
Spending Time with God gives GOD ROOM IN YOUR LIFE TO ORCHESTRATE YOUR LIFE.
You want to release God’s power in your life? Make time for God. Spend time with Him in His Word. You start seeing harmony and beauty flow through your life in ways you can’t do without Him.
Psalm 37:5 CSB
5 Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him, and he will act,
MY NEXT STEP TODAY IS TO:
□ Memorize James 1:5
□ Commitment my work life to God’s control
□ Start focusing more on my relationship with
_______________________
□ Be baptized
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