Exhausted? Here’s God’s Plan to Reshape Your Life|09.28.25|Beating Burnout pt.4
When I was a kid, we went to a beach and I saw one of the most insane things I had ever seen: two trees had been bent and braided together into a beautiful archway along a path, and they were still alive and growing!
Someone had spent the time when the trees were young to bend them and then twist them together over months and years, and then the trees just became permanently conformed to that shape.
They had been forever changed, and even though the result was beautiful to me, it was permanent and unnatural for the trees.
And it makes me think of my posture. When I was in seminary, I was writing a lot of papers on my laptop and trying to do classes and work at home, and Megan would look over at me and say, “You’re turtle-ing again.”
Because I was hunched over my book or my laptop or my phone, and she was making sure I didn’t get stuck that way.
But with the advent of phones, so many of us spend our time bent towards these little devices. And then we have our favorite chair at home that has actually been conformed to the shape of our backside over time, and our posture has become conformed to the shape of the chair.
But it’s not just physical posture. We’re not just bending our bodies into shapes. Our hearts are being bent, too.
We’ve been talking about the burnout culture that seems to surround us because life is filled with things that call to us and draw us in: pursuing money, more stuff, higher status, a nicer home, a better car, next year’s latest release. And the more enticing these things are, the more our lives bend towards them.
And we try to follow the models of others we see. If we want to be successful in our field like a family member or mentor, we follow their model of hard work and long hours.
If we want to have the influence and notoriety of some leader we respect, we’re going to squeeze ourselves into the mold of acting like them, dressing like them, participating in the types of events they do.
But the problem is that we are left running on fumes. Overworked, over spent, like butter spread over too much toast. And that’s why we’ve spent this month talking about the spiritual habit of Sabbath.
[Four steps of Sabbath]
We’ve looked at the four movements of Sabbath: stop, rest, delight, and today we arrive at worship.
We’ve talked about how our soul longs for sabbath, because it has been built into the rhythm of creation since the beginning. But our world and the lifestyle it promotes is one of endless striving, endless work, restlessness.
And even though all the advertisements and marketing agencies try to sell us “rest” and “peace” through vacations, leisure, and stuff…it’s all counterfeit because it doesn’t actually restore and renew us.
Because Sabbath is more than a day off. It’s more than a nap. At its core, it is actually a way to WORSHIP God.
[Genesis 2:2-3]
In the beginning, when God had made everything in creation, he stopped and created REST on the seventh day. And Genesis 2 shows us that he BLESSED the seventh day.
We talked about that last week: The word “blessed” can also be translated as “make happy.” The Sabbath is a happy day, a day for delight.
And God blessed the day to have life-giving and restorative effect on us. It actually renews us and re-creates us to be able to join Jesus in our work the other six days.
But God also made it HOLY. And I know that “holy” is a super religious-sounding word, but I found this fascinating.
In the ancient world, the “gods” were found in some PLACE, not time. By that I mean that you had to travel to a holy mountain, or a holy temple, or a holy cave to connect with this “god”.
The river god was in the river, and the sun god went to sleep at night, because the sun was gone.
But the thing that makes Yahweh God different is that he doesn’t make a holy PLACE. He makes a holy day.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel calls the Sabbath “architecture in time” and said, “The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals.”
Because for this God, the one, true Creator God, the entire universe is his temple. There is no place we can go where he is not there already. So, if you want to find the true God and connect with him, you don’t need to climb a certain mountain or travel to a shrine or find the perfect seat in church on Sunday, because he’s all around you. You just need to set aside the TIME to stop your striving, rest from your work, and come awake to his presence.
But what exactly does it mean to make a day “holy”?
[blank]
In Hebrew, the word for “holy” literally means unique, or special, or uncommon. When we’re talking about spiritual holiness, we mean something that is “set apart for God’s special purposes.”
We tend to think that holiness is describing the moral quality of something, like saying that something is good or evil. But holiness isn’t just a moral word.
In the OT, there are holy pots and holy pans and holy utensils that have been SET APART for worship in the Tabernacle. A certain pair of tongs can’t be good or evil, but it can be “set apart for God’s special purposes”... or it can just be a normal pair of tongs used for normal life.
Maybe when you were growing up, your parents or grandparents had a set of special china dishes they only brought out for special occasions. They had normal, everyday dishes, and then the special set that was only brought out for Thanksgiving or Christmas.
It’s set apart for a special purpose. And when we bring it out, it changes the way we act…it changes our posture.
So God made the Sabbath day holy. Set apart. Sacred. The Sabbath isn’t just ordinary time, it’s SACRED time given to us by God and set aside for God. Not just for rest from work, but for connecting with God, which can also be called WORSHIP.
And the reason we NEED to have spiritual habits like Sabbath to help us worship God is because everything around us is constantly pulling us to bend in directions away from God’s design.
There’s a social critic (who is not a Christian) named David Foster Wallace, who gave a famous commencement address and said this about worship:
“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship [...] is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough…
Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you…
Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.
Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.”
Put another way, everyone worships something. And if we become like who or what we bend our lives towards, what we worship…then what kind of person is your worship forming you into?
That’s why we need Sabbath, because Sabbath is worship. And God works through Sabbath to restore us in his presence and reshape us…transform us…to be ready for the work he created us for.
[scripture Ref]
So open your Bibles with me to Romans ch12. Because this passage is one of the apostle Paul’s most famous descriptions of what worship actually is…that it isn’t a ritual that we do once a week, it’s not just an activity that happens inside the gathering on Sunday…but it’s a whole-life offering.
And we want our lives to be shaped by God. We want our lives to be shaped by Jesus, and the way that we experience that is by ensuring that we aren't molded by the other things in life that compete with our worship of God.
[Romans 12:1-8]
[Romans 12:1]
Our passage starts with, “I appeal to you THEREFORE…” so we’ve got to see what came before it so we know what the “therefore” is there for…
The first 11 chapters of the book are setting up Paul's argument for salvation, for righteousness, for faith. And then we get to chapter 11, and Paul is talking about “why do the Jews seem to be hard-hearted to the gospel?” But he proclaims that even in their disobedience, God is merciful.
Because even in our disobedience, God is merciful.
And then right at the end of chapter 11, he gives a praise to God of who he is, for his mercy, for his love. And then that's what sets up Romans 12:1.
Therefore, so it's because of everything that comes before it: even in our disobedience, God is merciful…we give a praise to God, and therefore, in view of God's mercy, I appeal to you to…worship.
The word for “sacrifice” in v1 can mean offering. It refers to a figurative sacrifice to God, and a spiritual act of worship.
That word “spiritual” can also be translated reasonable, because it comes from the Greek word logikos, which is where we get logical from. It means being carefully thought through, being thoughtful, being reasonable.
And then we get to the spiritual act of worship, that word worship, means an act of worship or service to God, talking about performing rites. And so he's contrasting the previous way of worship, which is through the law and the performative rites of the Jews, and he's talking to Romans about their rituals and performative rites of Roman deity worship.
And he says, “no, for the true God, in view of God's mercy, I appeal to you to offer your bodies as your spiritual act of worship,” your full selves. I appeal to you to give your full selves to God, holding nothing back.
The old way of worship was about rituals and traditions. Make sure to leave the sacrifice, say the prayer, and then you’re good! Go about the rest of your week.
But Paul is saying, “a whole-self offering to God is the only reasonable and true worship.” Holding nothing back, because of the mercy that he has shown you and continues to show you.
[Romans 12:2]
Then v2 says, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” And that word conformed means to be formed or modeled after a pattern or a mold.
To be formed like, to be guided by, or to be squeezed into. And Paul's saying “don't do that. Don't be guided by this world. Don't be squeezed into the pattern of this world.”
But, instead, be transformed. Be changed in form. And the word that is used is actually metamorpho. That's where we get the word metamorphosis. And so the idea is of a worm changing into a pupa, changing into a butterfly. And so there's an actual change in form.
So, don't be conformed, don't be squeezed into or guided by the pattern or mold of this world. But rather, actually be transformed, changed in your form completely into a new thing.
How? By the renewing of your mind. The word renewing is a person's spiritual rebirth. By the rebirth of your mind, your intellect, your perception, your understanding.
And so Paul is saying in vv1-2, give your whole selves to God. Don't be squeezed to fit into the shape of this world. But be completely transformed through a spiritual rebirth of your intellectual perception.
So that, the end of v2, you may discern what is the will of God. You may determine the genuineness. You may put it to the test. You may examine God's will, so that you can see what is good and gainful and godly.
[Romans 12:3-5]
Verse 3 says, “by the grace given me, I say to everyone among you, not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.”
Paul is saying, we're not supposed to think more highly of ourselves, but think of ourselves according to what God has gifted us for, and called us to… “for, we're all different.”
He is using a metaphor about a body part, and how the body parts work together. He's saying we're all different, but that's on purpose, because we work together like the parts of a body are supposed to work together.
[Romans 12:6-8]
So then, he continues in vv6-8, saying, “so in that way, we also have different gifts that are different according to the grace given us. Notice that the emphasis is on gift and the word grace.
Both gift and grace are supposed to help us think that these are given to us, they are not earned by us. They're given. And so we each have different gifts that are given, not earned, that differ according to how Jesus designed us, so that we can contribute to his overall mission, because he's the head of the body.
Your unique and individual identity is a gift that was given to you by God. You were made on purpose FOR a purpose, and we were designed to work together like a body. And just like a body, we belong to each other and to our head, King Jesus.
[Worship is whole-life]
Paul is trying to help us see that worship is whole-life orientation around God and his will. Worship is not just singing, or praying. It’s not just what happens when we come to church.
It’s not LESS than those things, but it is definitely MORE. Because it’s orienting our whole life, it’s allowing ourselves to be completely transformed around the character and mission of God.
[Exodus 16:23]
When the people of God had been rescued from slavery in Egypt, God used Sabbath to help them learn rest and freedom, but it was also to be set aside as a “Sabbath TO THE LORD.”
It’s a special day, a holy day, dedicated for a special purpose. Set apart for God’s purposes.
Sabbath is worship because it actually reshapes us. It realigns us with God’s presence and will, so that we can be sent outward to join Jesus in his mission.
[Sabbath is worship]
Sabbath is worship because God restores us in His presence and reshapes us for His work.
And we need that, because the whole world is designed to bend us and shape us AWAY from God and his purposes. And it’s literally sapping the life from us.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned how they tried to change to a ten-day week during the French Revolution. They were trying to increase productivity, but instead, productivity crashed and even worse than that, the number of suicides and mental illness soared.
[Romans 12:2]
Paul is warning us of that. The world is trying to squeeze us into a different mold, and it’s squeezing the life out of us.
But Paul is not only talking about our personal worship by giving our bodies fully over to God, he’s also referring to the Christian community as a body. And so we as a whole community are working together as a body that is submitted to God as a spiritual act of worship.
So not only do YOU need the habit of Sabbath in your personal life, but WE need you to have Sabbath, because we’re connected to each other.
It’s like when one part of our body is overworked or injured or just fatigued, that part of our body is not going to operate as it should. I think of times when I have gone to the gym and done a very difficult workout, and I have overworked a single muscle.
For the next few days, that single muscle is so fatigued, it is so overworked that it actually holds back the rest of my body from being able to function well.
So when you have a part of your body that is overworked or injured, it's not going to operate as it should. It's going to hold back the rest of the body from its mission.
Do you see how this connects with our role as members of the body of Christ? We were designed on purpose, that means uniquely, for a purpose. So part of how we worship God is to submit ourselves fully to him so that he can work through us as he designed, not only for our own personal activity in his mission, but also our communal participation in his mission as a spiritual act of worship.
And so we’ve got to understand, Sabbath is God's gift to keep us in his rhythm so that we can live the way he designed us for. Sabbath is not just stopping, it's not just resting, it's not just delighting… it's obeying him. And therefore, it is worship.
Sabbath is worship because God restores us in His presence and reshapes us for His work. And practicing Sabbath is one of the ways that Jesus brings us into what he called “the kingdom of God.” It’s how we enter a set aside time where God reigns, and we obey.
The Sabbath is a day when God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven through the worshipful obedience of his people connecting with him and being reshaped by him.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel says that Sabbath gives us a taste in this world for what eternal life will be like in the world to come. And I love thinking about Sabbath like that: it’s a way to practice eternity. It’s a way to get a weekly preview of heaven, when every aspect of our existence will be fully submitted to God’s reign and we will be fully formed into the life he designed us to live.
[Set aside]
So this is what I hope you do this week: set aside your Sabbath as SACRED so that you can stop, rest, delight, and worship God. Because you need it. Because WE need it.
If you don’t, I fear that we will continually be on the brink of burnout and exhaustion. And whenever we are that tired or that worn thin or that stressed out, we never make good decisions that align with the fruit of the spirit or contribute to our wholeness or someone else's goodness.
We often find ourselves escaping, numbing, coercing, or taking from the world around us and from people around us.
But the more we practice Sabbath means the more that we are practicing learning God's rhythm, learning God's pace of life, learning God's providence. It means that we're learning how to trust God more.
And the more we practice Sabbath, the more we practice for the eternal life we are destined for.
[end]
The apostle John gives us a glimpse into heaven, and what our lives that are full worship will be like in Revelation ch4:
“Day and night without ceasing they sing, “Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God the Almighty, who was and is and is to come.” And whenever the living creatures give glory and honor and thanks to the one who is seated on the throne, who lives forever and ever, the twenty-four elders fall before the one who is seated on the throne and worship the one who lives forever and ever; they cast their crowns before the throne, singing, “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.” - Revelation 4:8-11
Our worship now is rehearsal for our forever. And Sabbath is worship, helping us recenter in God’s presence and become transformed by him to join him in his work. Isn’t that good news?
“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship [...] is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough…
Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you…
Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.
Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.”