Untitled Sermon (2)

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Overcoming spiritual tiredness

27 Oct 2024

SDG

Intro

Awesome! Hey, why don’t you grab your seat and tell someone that you’re glad to see them in church this morning.

Are you good! How awesome is this!? Last week we had an amazing kick off sunday, and now we get to continue to build church and to be the church, and to gather as the church and celebrate together who God is and what He’s done. I love that we get to do this week after week.

And I want you to know that here at Lifecenter we’re not just about gathering a crowd, we’re about building a church. A church is a home, its a place where people are needed and known, it’s a place where people can meet friends and find themselves in community with people who actually care about them and want to see them take new steps in life. And I’m so thankful that as a church we get to be a part of seeing that happen in so many people’s lives. It’s a privilege.

Alright, I’m really looking forward to preaching to you this morning. And you should know by the way, that if you hear me say anything that you agree with, you can say amen! You can say preach it! You can say come on you Canadian kid preach it! Or you can just sit there that’s alright too haha. I understand that this is Sweden.. But why do we say amen in church? Amen means let it be! And I believe that there’s power in saying let it be together as a church when it comes to God’s word: Let it be! When we are unified around this together, the bible says that where there is unity God commands his blessing, amen!? Amen! That was a test haha.

Alright, let’s open our bibles… Today I want to read to you one of my favourite passages of scripture, it comes from Isaiah 40

The bible is the most sold book in the world. It’s also the most stolen book in the world. It’s the most influential life changing book in the world. Whether you believe it’s God’s or or not, you cannot deny that it has already impacted every aspect of your life - without scripture the very morals of society that give you a platform to choose to live how you want wouldn’t even exist. We believe that the bible is God’s word, and that it is entirely relevant to our lives today. And so, we turn to scripture this morning.

So if you’ve got your bible with you, why don’t you open to Isaiah 40:28-31

This passage of scripture tells us that faith in God’s promise empowers His people for endurance!

Do you not know?

Have you not heard?

The Lord is the everlasting God,

the Creator of the ends of the earth.

He will not grow tired or weary,

and his understanding no one can fathom.

29 He gives strength to the weary

and increases the power of the weak.

30 Even youths grow tired and weary,

and young men stumble and fall;

31 but those who hope in the Lord

will renew their strength.

They will soar on wings like eagles;

they will run and not grow weary,

they will walk and not be faint.

If you’re taking notes this morning, you can write down the title: Inside out

Sub-title: Overcoming Spiritual Tiredness.

Let’s pray. And everyone said, Amen!

How many people here right now would say, I’m tired? Anyone? Too tired to raise your hand even! I get it!

If you’re tired, you’re not alone, in fact, based on anecdotal evidence, almost everyone I meet is tired! Hey! How’s it going? I’m tired. Hey, I’m tired too! In the morning, after a night’s sleep - I’m tired. And then at night, you’re tired, but you can’t fall asleep for some reason. And you’re tired of not being able to fall asleep. After a long summer, with many weeks off, we get back into the swing of things and: I’m tired. I need a vacation after my vacation! Parents are tired, students are tired, young people, old people, all tired! I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of being tired!

Why are we all so tired!?

In fact, a recent study shows that 70% of people say their sleeping habits have become less consistent due to the pandemic, and 63% of people think that their sleeping patterns are permanently ruined due to the pandemic. The study also showed that of those working from home, nearly half admitted to not getting out of bed until 10 minutes before they start work, 67% of people are staying up until the middle of the night binge-watching netflix, and many people are taking two naps a week while at work.

We’re tired people!

But I don’t believe that we are called and equipped by God to be a tired, fatigued, lazy group of Christians, too exhausted to be of much influence on the world around us. I believe that God wants to give us vitality, a renewed sense of energy, and a life marked not by tiredness, but by impact and becoming more like Jesus.

But we cannot give away what we do not possess. And sometimes we have to let God do a work in us before he will do a work through us.

Today I want to talk about bringing order to our inner selves, and how that can give us the abundant life that scripture talks about. We’ve got to enter the center of ourselves, and see what’s there.

There are different kinds of tired, aren’t there?

You can be physically tired. When you stay up too late watching netflix, or doom scrolling through tik-tok, and then have to wake up early for a meeting. And you try and overcome that tiredness by drinking non stop coffee in the morning, and grabbing for a couple of red bulls in the afternoon, and give me all the sugar, and I’ve got to rush from one thing to the next, and we live a hurried life where we can’t just stop for a moment and catch our breath.

Last monday Victoria and I had one day to see as much of rome as we could. I was on a mission to see everything. We were powered by two days of only eating pizza and pasta, and I was ready to go. We set out and walked 30,000 steps in something like 6 hours, and let me tell you, we saw it all! Trevi fountain, spansih steps, st peter’s basilica, the roman forum, the colosseum… But by the end of it we were so tired that Rome started to become un-insteresting.

I remember standing at the Colosseum, being like, I just want to be sitting down in an air-conditioned hotel room.

And honestly, my legs still hurt a week later! We were physically tired!

Then there’s being mentally tired. We’re surrounded all day long with information. Our is the information age, we can know anything in about two seconds, and I really mean anything.

I’m just old enough to remember what life was like before the internet was in our pockets at all times.

Back when you would just be bored.

Back when you just had to wonder about stuff. Remember that? I remember just not knowing things, and if we didn’t have a book at home that answered the question, it was just a big mystery. And you had to go on a hunt for the answer. And hopedfully you would come across someone who might know the answer. But even then, you couldn’t verify if they were correct or not.

A friend would ask, I wonder how many birds live in Sweden?

And you would be like, huh, I don’t know.

And that was the end of it!

Now, you’re like: let me check:

and within two seconds you know that 140 millions birds live in Sweden, consisting of 275 different species, and 25 subspecies, and that roughly 25 of those species just pass through Sweden on their way to nest in the siberian tundra.

That ability would have been considered a superpower only fifty years ago!

But now we’ve got screens that are always begging for our attention, we carry around mental to do lists of all that must be completed, and all the bills that need to be paid. We try to push important things under the surface in our lives, a lot like trying to hold a beach ball under water in a pool - it’s mentally exhausting. Not necessarily always a bad thing, but nonetheless, knowing everything that’s going on in the world all the time can leave us mentally exhausted.

Then there’s being emotionally tired. Very often this is a tiredness that attacks the will. It’s that I don’t feel like it. It’s Decision fatigue. There are so many things to make decisions around. Even little things like trying to decide what clothes to wear, or trying to decide what to eat at a restaurant. Steve Jobs was famous for wearing the same black turtleneck and blue jeans every day. He did this because his day was so packed with having to make decisions, he didn’t want to add another decision into his routine.

There’s a restaurant in North America called the Cheesecake factory. Have you ever been there? Depending on who you are, it represents everything wrong, or right, with American restaurant culture. I can’t handle this restaurant because I can never decide what to eat. You get seated at the table and they plop a menu as big as a textbook in front of you. They have 85 chicken dishes on the menu alone! I don’t trust a restaurant that has 85 chicken dishes on the menu. That’s a real number by the way, I looked it up. The full menu has 250 items on it! When I see that many choices, I just end up tired.

These various categories of tiredness feel almost impossible to navigate. It’s no wonder we’re exhausted physically and mentally and emotionally!

But the bigger problem is that these categories also make us feel separated from God, and we become exhausted not only physically, mentally and emotionally, but spiritually.

Spirit fatigue is a real thing. It’s time to take back our souls in Jesus name.

You are not meant to be a fountain run dry, you are meant to be a spring of living water. We are not meant to be couch potato christians, we are meant to shine the light of Jesus to the world around us. Actively engaging this world, deriving our energy from a source that is beyond ourselves.

And I believe that kind of life is available to you today. A life that is not marked by tiredness, but a life activated by the renewing presence of God working within you.

And that is where we must start. Within. The inner world.

There’s a famous building in NYC, it’s called the Citicorp building. It’s a famous building, and you’ve probably seen it before if you’ve ever seen New York’s skyline. The building is unique because it sits on stilts, and from the ground it almost gives off the impression that its floating - that it has no ground floor. It’s a spectacular feat of engineering. The reason this works is because in the middle for eh building it has something called a tuned mass damper, which is essentially i giant counterweight, that would be able to keep the building standing straight even in the middle of high winds.

Then one day, a college student who was writing a paper on the building realized that there was a fatal flaw: The architect had not properly calculated the effect of the wind when it blew on the corners of the building, and in the event of a power outage (as is often the case in bad wind storms) the building would fall over. They contacted the architect, who did some quick math, and realised that a storm with the ability to topple the building hit New York about once every sixteen years.

They immediately started emergency repairs on the building, and fixed everything, and it’s all okay now, but,

I can’t help but feel that this is exactly like us. We spend so much time arranging the exterior of our lives to look impressive, to be perfect, to make people say, “wow! Look at their life!” but we neglect the center, the core of who we are, and suddenly in the middle of a storm, we run the risk of falling flat on our face.

The cause of much of our instability in life does not have to do with us arranging our exterior in a better way, it has to do with us taking care of our interior in a better way.

I think that for a lot of us, our solution to the tiredness that we face is to try and bring order to our outer world first. We think if we can just put a pause on the pace of life, that will fix all our problems. “If I could just get a couple of days off! Ya! Then I would be totally better. Then I would love to read my bible, otherwise I just don’t have the time…” And so we plan moments of leisure, and we do things that amuse us. And that’s wonderful but even that can make us tired.

Because, until our center is in order and at rest, our outer world never will be. We need to start from the center and work our way out. If we’re trying to be less emotionally and physically and mentally tired but we continue to allow our souls to be exhausted, then we won’t experience a real break from tiredness. Leisure and amusement, while lots of fun and enjoyable in the moment, they are what candy is to the digestive system. It provides a momentary lift but not lasting results.

In the words of John Ortberg, “if we aim at having easy circumstances, life will always be hard, and we will always be tired. But if we aim at having an easy soul, your capacity for tackling hard problems will actually grow.”

Just to fix the outside pace of everything, is that really the biblical solution? I don’t think so. In fact, in the bible God rarely gives anyone an easy job. God didn't come to Moses and say, hey I got an assignment for you, but don’t worry it’s not going to take too long, should be easy. The circumstances were not easy, but that doesn’t mean the soul can’t be at ease. When the soul is at ease, our ability to navigate the difficult and otherwise tiring aspects of life becomes greater, and like Moses, we make a great difference in the name of God.

How do we put our soul at ease?

We just read from the book of Isaiah, and this passage of scripture was written to the Isrealites who were living in exile in Babylon. They were captured people. They had been taken from their home - their home had been destroyed! I’d be pretty tired of it at that point. But Isaiah is speaking God’s word to the people, reminding them that hey! I know you’re probably tired, but You know who doesn’t get tired? You know who doesn’t grow weary? God. Put your faith in Him, because He gives strength to the weary…

31 but those who hope in the Lord

will renew their strength.

They will soar on wings like eagles;

they will run and not grow weary,

they will walk and not be faint.

But those who hope in the Lord. If you’re tired and want to experience renewal in your spirit today, put your hope in the Lord.

Placing our hope in God is something that happens at our center. When we place our hope in God - no matter what else is going on in life - we begin to see Jesus at the center of our lives. And it is at this divine center that we experience His majesty, and it is at this center that we are filled by the power and the strength of the Holy Spirit, and there is a sudden resurgence of confidence, and expectancy. And we receive insight and wisdom, and the kind of faith that moves mountains is generated, and a love for others, even the unlovable, begins to grow, and a spirit that has otherwise been marked by exhaustion is renewed.

We see David place his hope in the Lord when he is faced with conspirators trying to overthrow him, but he writes in Psalm 62:1-2

1 Truly my soul finds rest in God;

my salvation comes from him.

2 Truly he is my rock and my salvation;

he is my fortress, I will never be shaken.

David’s circumstance wasn’t easy, but his soul was at rest in God.

When the private world is brought into order under the hope that we have in Christ, then we can actually make an impact on the public world.

There was a christian psychiatrist named Frank Lake who worked with many christians who wanted to be used by God in ministry, but the stresses and demands and difficulties of life and ministry got to them and they soon became bitter and drained and cynical and discouraged. He got together with a Swiss theologian Emil Brunner and they began to reflect on the life of Jesus in the gospels. The interesting thing about Jesus is that for all the enormous stress and difficulties He faced, he never became sarcastic or cynical or unloving. Nothing took away his joy. And although at times he grew physically tired, he did not grow spiritually tired. When they looked at Jesus' life, they saw a different pattern to it. Jesus lived in a divine rhythm where grace was constantly flowing into him and then flowing out from him.

What did this look like practically for Jesus?

He prayed.

He had a circle of close friends - sounds like a Life group

He engaged in regular corporate worship - i.e. He went to church! (just an aside, the answer to your tiredness is not to skip church)

He fed his mind with scripture

He enjoyed creation - mountains, gardens, lakes

He took long walks

If we don’t put things into their proper place on the inside, then we invite the sinkhole syndrome to be a part of our lives.

I’m sure you’ve seen a sinkhole right? It’s when everything looks fine on the outside, and then all of a sudden one day the ground opens up and swallows up a whole street or something because slowly there has been an erosion of substance underneath. Sinkhole syndrome is something that has taken out way too many christians over the years. Nobody saw it coming! Wow, I can’t believe that person would do that! How could that happen to that leader?

It takes two things to topple a large tree. A strong wind, and inner decay.

But that’s part of the difficulty of soul-fatigue: it’s hard to spot, much like decay in the center of a tree. Physical fatigue is very easy to spot - if you run a marathon, your body is going to be tired and whether you like it or not it will make you slow down. But soul fatigue can last under the surface for years. But here are some sign of soul fatigue, see if you can relate to any of these today:

Things bother you more than they should

It’s hard to make up your mind

You favour short terms gains over long term gains

Your judgement suffers

Your relationships suffer

You’re less courageous. There’s a quote that says, Fatigue makes cowards of us all. This has been attributed to Shakespeare, General Patton and Vince Lombardi - it endures because it’s true. The same disciples who ran away afraid when Jesus was crucified eventually sacrificed their lives for him. What changed was not their bodies, but their souls.

If we want to overcome the kind of tiredness that is constantly trying to take away our joy and our passion we must start at the center of ourselves. We must “enter the center” so to speak, and deal with what’s there. If we just try to go through motions, it won’t work. If we just try and make it into being, it’s not going to happen. We have to truly take care of our souls. We have to place Jesus at the center of our lives. We must surrender control to Him.

INSERT: The remedy to tiredness that Jesus gives… If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’” (John 7:37–38)

If you’re thirsty today for a life that is not marked by tiredness, then go to Jesus. Spend time in His presence. Worship him, pray to him, meet him through scripture, believe in Him. As we go to Jesus, out of our hearts will flow streams of living water! A living water that will satisfy the world around us - a living water flowing from our lives into the dry and thirsty world around us. We get to show the awesomeness of God by being filled in His presence.

Again, we can’t give away something we don’t have.

The world doesn’t need to know how impressive you are, it needs to become more aware how impressive God is.

Trying to be impressive all the time is exhausting. But resting in God, and allowing his power to be on display is energising.

I also think that these rhythms of grace can be found in John 15 - where Jesus taeaches about the vine and the branches. To sum up the teaching, Jesus says that we need to stop trying to be the vine, and learn to be the branches. He;’s the vine - we’re meant to live out of his abundance.

Jesus is saying, hey, stick to me, pray to me, soak in my word, be with me, love me, all you need to be is a little branch, and I will make you to bear fruit.

Jesus has a big mission for us, there’s no doubt, but He will. Cause the big part to happen. We are made to display his power, not our own.

Perhaps you’ve been coming to church for a little while, and you hear things like, “we’re going to see this city reached for Jesus! We’re going to see the world transformed in Jesus’ name! And you’re thinking, honestly… that sounds pretty exhausting. I don’t know if i have it in me. It took me most of my energy just to get myself to church this morning.” Let me just say I get it. The truth is that the task of reaching our city is too big for you, and it’s too big for me. But it’s not too big for God. And if we try and do it all in our own strength and might, and if the center of our lives is filled entirely with ourselves and our preferences, then of course we’re going to find ourselves tired with little results to be seen.

So are you tired today? Are you worn out? Are you burned out on trying to measure up all the time, trying to prove yourself?

What if, instead of waking up feeling empty, you were to wake up feeling full of joy and wisdom?

What if instead of living in fear of others disapproval, you were seeing how God reached others through you in ways you didn’t imagine were possible

What if instead of being afraid of the future, you saw the future bursting with potential?

What if instead of trying to self medicate your exhaustion through Netflix and YouTube you were free to live the life that God created you to live?

This is the kind of life available to you today!

I believe that there is a life available to you that begs the question from others: How can they live with such passion? What is it about them that when they face setbacks they are able to hold their head high? How come they live with hope? Why are they happy? How did you make your marriage work like that?

But we must first and foremost arrange our lives in such a way that Jesus is at the center of all we are: all we say and do and believe and think. We must arrange our lives in such a way that we bring glory to God in all we do!

And to be honest with you today, I am preaching to myself first and foremost. There have been so many times in my life that I have just been tired. There have been times in my life, as a pastor, where I haven't been excited. Where I feel like maybe I just need a break from church or something. But I have found that that’s never the solution.

But I am reminding myself that even in the midst of an exhausting outer circumstance, the overwhelming peace of Jesus can fill my soul and I know that no weapon formed against me shall prosper, and that

Psalm 73:26 says

My flesh and my heart may fail,

but God is the strength of my heart

and my portion forever.

And I believe that even in the midst of my tiredness, I can be more alive than ever in my spirit - the center of my life will hold, because I am held in the hands of Jesus Christ!

And I don’t tell you this looking for sympathy, or because I want to be cheered on, I’m saying this to encourage anyone tuning in right now that is dealing with fatigue, anyone who feels tired of life, anyone who feels exhausted by their circumstance, for the parents not knowing how they can continue, anyone who feels depleted spiritually - keep on going. God has more in store! There is renewal for your exhaustion, peace for your panic, hope for your future. Invite Jesus to be the center of your life, step aside and let him reinvigorate your spirit. A life with Christ at the center is one that shines bright in a world of darkness.

Let’s Pray.