Untitled Sermon

Introduction

“Pre-requisites”

When I was a student at Clemson, there were certain courses I had to take before I could continue on to take higher level courses in my major. In other words, I had to take 100 and 200 level classes before I could take the 300 level ones specific to my major.

These foundational classes are called “pre-requisites” — required coursework that you must complete so that you can continue to the higher levels of education.

Today’s message is kind of a pre-requisite course for all of the New Years Resolutions you’d like to make in the area of spiritual growth.

Scripture Reading

Last week Darren Russo preached from Colossians 1:1-8 to show us how the Gospel can and should effect our daily lives. The question he answered for us was, “What does the manger have to do with Monday morning?” How quickly we move from Christmas to normalcy again without really considering this question!

Today I want to keep reading in Colossians where Darren left off, but with a slightly different approach. Rather than going deep into this passage and expositing its meaning, we’re going to use it to set up the topic we’re addressing across all of Forest Hill this morning. So don’t be surprised if after we read it, we use some of the ideas as a spring board into some other areas rather than unpacking it verse by verse.

The passage is from Colossians 1:9-12. If you’re able, will you stand for the reading of God’s Word.

Colossians 1:9–12 (ESV)

9 And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, 10 so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God; 11 being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy; 12 giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.

This is God’s Word. You may be seated.

"That we may present everyone mature in Christ.”

As a pastor, my concern for you — as well as for myself — is Paul’s concern for the Colossian church. He explicitly states his concern a little later in chapter one of Colossians:

Col 1:28-29 “28 Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. 29 For this [presenting everyone mature in Christ] I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.”

This is my New Years resolution in ministry: to toil and struggle over this one thing with laser focus: to present each one of you mature in Christ.

But what does it mean to be mature in Christ?

That’s what’s defined in the verses we stood and read together a moment ago. Consider these qualities again in list format, which Paul is praying for the Colossian believers:

That they would be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in spiritual wisdom and understanding

That they would walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing Him

That they would bear fruit in every good work

They they would increase in the knowledge of God

That they would be strengthened with all power . . . for all endurance and patience with joy.

That they would give thanks to the Father.

One who is “mature in Christ” exemplifies these qualities, and so Paul is striving to help the Colossian believers realize these things.

No doubt, there were specific challenges that made growing mature in Christ in these ways difficult — challenges which you can see Paul addressing through the letter if you read on.

But this has led me to ask: what are some of the specific challenges to us, Forest Hill Church, to growing in Christian maturity? What uniquely prevents us in our cultural moment, time, and place from growing in Christ?

That’s what today’s message is about.

As we kick off this new year together, I want to help you grow in spiritual maturity by helping you identify the one thing that is likely undercutting all of your attempts to grow in your faith.

So what is the major, if not surprising, problem we need to deal with if we want to experience dynamic life in Christ?

The Problem of Hurry

Time magazine reported in the 1960s that a US Senate subcommittee predicted that in the future, due to increasing technological advances, the greatest threat to Americans would be too much leisure time. They predicted that technology would continually reduce the workload to the point that three or four day work weeks may become standard, and therefore helping Americans learn what to do with all their free time would be an increasingly important strategy.

While technological advances have allowed us to do incredible amounts of work in a fraction of the time to previous generations, we have not received the time saved as a gift. Rather, we’ve just crammed it with even more work.

We are, as one commentator put it, rich in material goods and wealth, but poor in time for relationships and reflection. This is the exact opposite of most cultures in the world and indeed in human history.

Corrie ten Boom famously said: “If the devil can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy.”

We are a chronically and sinfully busy people.

Hurry Sickness

Our addiction to “more” has created the phenomenon known as “Hurry Sickness.”

Yes, it’s a real thing. Google it.

Here’s how it’s defined:

A behavior characterized by continual rushing and anxiousness.

—

A malaise in which a person feels chronically short of time, and so tends to perform every task faster and to get flustered when encountering any kind of delay.

—

A continuous struggle and unremitting attempt to accomplish or achieve more and more things or participate in more and more events in less and less time.

What might the symptoms of hurry sickness look like in your own life?

Speeding up daily activities

Reading, talking, angling at stop lights, picking the fastest check out line at the grocery store

Multi-tasking

Doing more than one thing at once. Studies show: this does not work!

Clutter

Lacking simplicity in material things as well as time due to calendar

Superficiality

Ortberg: “Depth comes slowly.” 81

Ortberg: “Today we have largely traded wisdom for information. We have exchanged depth for breadth. We want to microwave maturity.” 81

“Sunset fatigue”

“When we come home at the end of a day’s work, those who need our love the most, those to whom we are most committed, end up getting the leftovers. Sunset fatigue is when we are just too tired, or too drained, or too preoccupied, to love the people to whom we have made the deepest promises.” 82 ...

You find yourself rushing when there’s no reason to

There is underlying tension causing sharp words or sibling quarrels

You set up mock races that are really about your own need to get through it

You sense a loss of gratitude and wonder

You indulge in self-destructive escapes from fatigue: abusing alcohol, watching too much TV, getting lost in social media, etc.

Inability to love — this is perhaps the most significant issue with hurry

Consider what’s known as the Great Commandment, a set of verses many of you are no doubt familiar with:

Matthew 22:37-40 ESV

37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment.

39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.””

To simplify:

Love God.

Love others.

The common action verb: love.

Love requires two things:

Time

Presence

On time:

John Ortberg: “Love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible. Love always takes time, and time is one thing hurried people don’t have.” 81

On presence:

Consider how Jesus qualifies each of these loves:

Love God with all of your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.

In other words, love for God requires being fully present to God with all of your being.

Love neighbors as yourself.

How do you love yourself? Well, we tend to put our own interests ahead of the interests of others by default, sure. But also, to truly love yourself, you must be present to yourself.

On being present:

We know that being present to yourself — having what psychologists call a “mindfulness” of your emotions, your body, your deep-rooted desires, anxieties and fears — is tremendously important for your overall health and well-being. In fact, learning to simply be present — not hurrying and worrying about “what’s next” increases joy and contentment.

But what happens when you hurry? Anxiety and depression skyrocket, along with preoccupation with self.

In other words: when you hurry, you lack the two things required for loving God and loving others: time and presence.

This should strike us as significant when, you know, there’s something so pervasive which prevents us from doing two of things Jesus commands us to do above all else.

Hurry sickness is not a benign, superficial reality we have to just accept.

Hurry sickness is a cancerous, spiritually formative reality we have to learn to resist.

Hurry is killing you. It’s killing our families, our churches, our teenagers.

Hurry is a problem.

The Sources of Hurry

So what are the primary sources of hurry? Let’s consider two.

Disordered Schedules

To put it simply, we’re over committed and stretched thin. To the point that the things that truly matter are pushed to the margins.

This is the external source of our hurry.

Look at your calendar.

How many hours in a 24 hour day are allotted to the most important things in your life, however you might define them?

My guess is a small minority.

Our careers dominate us five or more days a week, then our kids’ travel sports teams weed out our weekends.

We work all day, have a few hours of family or friend time, another 1-2 of “decompression time” with a beer and Office reruns, then we go to bed. Wake up and do it again the next day. Rinse, repeat.

We run from thing to thing during the day, many of us without a chance to ever sit in silence.

Long commute? Maximize the time: make a call or two, listen to that book or podcast.

Devotional time with takes a backseat to everything else. “I’m just too busy to get up that early in the morning — I’ll be exhausted by the end of the day.”

Family time takes a hit. “The kids will be thankful for my hard work someday. They’ll understand why mommy or daddy wasn’t there a lot in the evenings.” Not realizing that kids spell love T.I.M.E.

Actual biblical community is hard to come by. You’re already so scheduled with work and family, where is there room to schedule time with people from church? People you maybe don’t even know very well?

At the end of the day, it’s just simple math: we try to do more than we’re capable of doing in a single day and lifetime. We stretch the limits, say “yes” to things that don’t matter, and our priorities take a hit.

It’s not a sin to be busy.

Some of you, at this point, might be thinking that I just want to go back to a pre-Internet age of horses and buggies where most people never travelled more than 5 miles from their place of birth, living quiet lives of boredom

It’s not a sin to work hard. In fact, it’s a sin not to work hard!

It’s not a sin to want your kids to excel, to be well-rounded, to have all the opportunities you can possibly give them.

It’s not a sin to live from the Chick-fil-A drive thru and eat most meals in your car.

The problem isn’t necessarily that in your hurry you are sinning, but that in your hurry you are distracted from what’s most important in your life, and in that way you’re guilty of sinning.

We have disordered schedules. But why?

Disordered Hearts

Ortberg; “Hurry is not just a disordered schedule. Hurry is a disordered heart.”

We have disordered schedules because we have disordered priorities — or, to put it in biblical language, we have disordered hearts.

This is the internal source of our sense of hurry.

Jesus said in Matthew 6:21 “21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

What do you treasure most?

Not theoretically.

Really.

What does your calendar say you treasure most?

No, I’m not talking about the surface-level answers.

Not your kids, your job, your schoolwork, your hobbies, your bowling league, whatever.

I’m asking: what does your passion around these things reveal about your heart?

Why do these things dominate our schedules?

The reason we have disordered schedules that cause us to live in a state of hurry is because we have jacked up priorities, or desires or loves, in our hearts.

We love what our busyness signifies to other people about our significance, so we keep running.

We love how our work-ethic, follow-through, or performance in our jobs — whether in corporate or as a stay-at-home parent or student — reflects on our sense of identity, so we keep pressing.

We love what our constant calendar notifications make us feel about our value to other people, so we keep clicking “accept.”

We love how our kids’ success reflects on us, so we run ourselves ragged around extracurriculars like cheer and band and travel ball.

And here’s the dark part.

Our hearts not only want this significance — this valuation from others, this sense of identity formulated by our performance — but the more we engage in these activities in order to satisfy the disordered longings of our hearts, the more we are entrenched in these desires, and therefore we hustle and hurry our way even more.

A race to broken cisterns.

The problem of hurry has two sources, one external with our schedules and jobs and commitments, the other internal with our hearts.

The Antidote to Hurry

So what do we do about it?

That’s really what we need to know, isn’t it?

If the problem of hurry has two sources, one external with our schedules and one internal with our hearts, than we need antidotes for each of those things.

Preach the Gospel to yourself.

In order to heal the internal heart issues that lead us into a life of hurry, we must preach the gospel to ourselves.

The most important sermon you will hear this week is not this one — it is the one you tell yourself when you’re on the precipice of falling off temptation’s mountain towards a valley of works-based righteousness, thinking you have to perform in order to be valuable, thinking your identity is tied up in what you do. In those moments, you must reject the lie and remind yourself of the gospel.

Hurry is anti-grace. It is about achievement.

The heart of hurry is an anxiety towards shoring up your identity or proving yourself. The gospel reveals to you that you can’t shore up your identity or prove yourself enough for God to love you, but then it gives you the incredible news that God graciously gives you what you could never achieve for yourself: forgiveness, identity, value, stability and security. Hope.

The gospel is a message of grace, and grace kills hurry.

The gospel is the good news that Jesus died for your sins and rose again from the dead to defeat the power of sin and death, so that whoever trusts him with their life is fully forgiven, righteous, and called a son or daughter of God — not on the basis of your actions, but on Jesus’ actions alone.

Like Darren reminded us last week: when you believe that your identity is given by God rather than earned by you, you can exhale. You can breathe. The rat race is put into perspective.

Then, with eyes open to the love of God in the Gospel, you see Jesus as your Lord, your master, and you begin to follow Him.

Your heart-level desires change. The Holy Spirit works in your heart so that increasingly, little by little, your priorities align with what matters most in his kingdom:

You begin to love God with all of your being, fully present to him, spending time with him, because love requires time.

You begin to love others with a Christ-like love that is sacrificial, generous, grounded in truth and saturated with grace.

Your call to follow Him comes first.

Your relational commitments and covenants to family and the church come next.

Your vocational calling — your work — comes next.

And so on.

Here’s the truth: for many of you today, your hope is set on the day after the next big thing. You say, “If I can just get past this .... then we’ll finally get to rest.”

That’s not how this works. Life can either be lived repeated this in cycles until you die, constantly in search of external peace in order to feel at peace in your heart, or you can flip the script.

You can realize that peace is not dependent on your external circumstances, but instead on your internal presence to God.

The offer of the gospel is that you can be going through hell on earth, and yet experience the peace of Christ that transcends understanding, that grounds you, sustains you, and focuses you on what is true about you and your life.

Start with the heart. Preach the Gospel to yourself.

Ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.

This was the advice given to a young John Ortberg by the late Dallas Willard, a philosopher at Southern Cal and a giant in the world of spiritual formation.

Preparing for ministry a large megachurch in Chicago, Ortberg called Willard, who was a mentor to him, and asked him what he needed to do in order to care for his soul in this new important church and position.

Willard, on the other end of the line, gave a long silence which he was known for, then finally said these words:

“You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”

Silence.

John asked, taking notes and waiting for the next point, “What else?”

Another long Willard silence. Then this:

“There is nothing else.”

Dallas Willard, and Ortberg after him, and John Mark Comer — who has recently written the book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, which I highly recommend — all understood that following Jesus meant more than just believing the things Jesus said and did, and trying to do them, too.

They recognized that following Jesus actually means following him — his way of life, his pace, his cadence.

“If we are to follow Jesus, we must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from our lives — because, by definition, we can’t move faster than the one we are following.” John Ortberg

The example of Jesus:

Jesus had a lot to do, but was never in a hurry.

Jesus was by all accounts busy and productive, but was always present to those around him.

Jesus was frequently interrupted, but never distracted.

How did he remain so anchored in the midst of the normal human life?

Yes, He was God — but he was also human and experienced human temptation just like you and me.

Yes, He lived during a time before digital devices — but should we expect he would be any different today?

He was anchored because he regularly retreated to be with God in silence and solitude.

In other words, no matter what was happening around him externally, his soul was always at peace, in stillness and in communion with God, because he had formed his hear with the practice of silence and solitude.

What if you could be at peace, even when the world around you is chaotic, disordered, loud, and fast-paced?

What if you could experience true quiet in your soul, true rest, true fulfilment — in a way that allowed you to take a step back from the anxiety-inducing rat-race of our modern society?

What if you really followed Jesus like this?

Implement rhythms of resistance.

One of the most neglected commands of all Scripture is found in Psalm 46:10. It says this:

Ps 46:10 “Be still, and know that I am God.”

We put this on coffee mugs and repost pretty images overlayed with this text on Facebook and Insta.

But this isn’t a command given in the context of peace, when the psalmist is on the side of a mountain watching the sunrise and drinking hot chai.

This is a command given in the midst of war, conflict, struggle.

Dare I say, hurry?

And what God gives is not a sweet sentimental inspiration for monks or text filler for decorations at Hobby Lobby.

He gives a command of resistance: “BE STILL.”

“STOP. Striving and pressing and worrying and believing it’s all up to you are expected and normal right now, and everyone else is in such a hurried state. But not you. Stop. Be still.

“I know it sounds counter-intuitive — there’s a war raging outside! — but just trust me. Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations. I will be exalted in the earth!”

Practically

Being still, in other words, is a practice. It takes effort and intentionality.

How can you ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life?

Identify your roles and your priorities. Who has God called you to be? What has God called you to do? Who has God called you to lead?

Schedule time for these things with appropriate goals before scheduling anything else. Actually create appointments for these things in your calendar.

Say no. Resist the temptation to do everything. Say no to that travel ball season. Don’t take a promotion if you know it will disrupt your top priorities. Say no to the lie that you have to hustle and hurry if you want a life that is satisfying and full.

Implement rhythms of resistance. Silence and solitude. Sabbath. Scripture reading. Prayer. Community with the church. Serving.

I did a four week, in depth teaching on this last fall. You can access all of that content on our Fort Mill Campus Youtube Page.

What I’m really saying is be a rebel. As Matt Chandler says it, make “good trouble” for the devil in the world. Disrupt the status quo.

Ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life, and watch what God does.

Conclusion

I said earlier that I’m focusing my efforts where Paul’s were: to present you mature in Christ. To toil and struggle after this.

Here’s what I know: You are a people who are hungry to grow. Who desire to be mature in Christ.

You want to be more like Him by the end of this year than you are right now.

You want to be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in spiritual wisdom and understanding

You want to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing Him

You want to bear fruit in every good work

You want to increase in the knowledge of God

You want to be strengthened with all power . . . for all endurance and patience with joy.

You want to be the kind of grateful people who regularly, through good or ill, give thanks to the Father.

I want this for you. You want this for you.

You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.

BE STILL.

Let’s pray.