The Integrated Life: Balancing God, Work, Life and Rest

With only 24 hours in a day and so many things that vie for our attention, how do we balance everything? Something invariably gets cut. This sermon looks at the principles to follow to help in that integration.

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All right parenting a, a toddler is a constant balancing act, you want them to have some independence. You wanna give them the confidence to go explore stuff, but then you also wanna prevent them from going and eating dirt and pulling on the dog's tail. On one side, you wanna say yes but you don't want to say yes too much because that'll be permissive. You'll be too permissive. But you don't wanna say no too much because then they're gonna resent you. On one side, you want them to hang out with you, late in the evening it's fun, but then it gets crazy and then you don't get your sanity, so you put them to bed you've got to put them to bed at some point. So it's a constant balancing act when you are parenting a toddler, and that's true for anything in life. It's a constant balancing act. So today, in a session called The Integrated Life, we wanna look at how to balance God, work, life, and rest. So what I'm gonna do today is I'm gonna talk about four different parts. We'll talk about work, rest, we'll talk about the example of Jesus, and then The main part is the five guidelines or the five circles that we want to look through to see how to best balance all these things. So first let's look at the call to work, and I'm gonna go through this really quickly because This is something that we all know, we've all heard. I'm just trying to have a complete picture before we go into our discussion. So first is the call to work, and work is not something humans manufactured. God worked first, and the big picture is that God works across all six days of creation. He was speaking, He was forming, He was naming, He was filling. And creation reveals a working God who brought order from chaos and beauty from raw materials. And God is still working. In John 5:17, Jesus said, "My Father is working until now, and I am working." In Philippians 2:13, it says, "For it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure." Of course This is God working in relation to us. And I wonder if we have made it harder for God to work because of our sinful nature. So God worked first, and then we are created to work. And work was established before the Fall, right? It was a creation ordinance. Genesis chapter 2 verse 15 says, "The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it." And that phrase, to work it and keep it, shows work as a calling. So we are by nature designed, created to work. when we work well, we mirror something that's true about God. Of course, we don't know what kind of work God did outside of the human sphere, if he worked before creation. But as far as we know, he worked for creation, and he's working even now. But work was distorted by the Fall. The Fall distorted work. It did not eliminate it, but it distorted it. Genesis chapter 3 verses 17 through 19 says, cursed is the ground because of you. In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you, and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread." So part of the curse because of the Fall was the curse on work and the effect on work. And because of that, work becomes a toil, right? It's not fun to work. I wish we could say that all of us enjoy our jobs, all people everywhere enjoy their jobs. But how many people really like their jobs? How many people would leave the workforce if they didn't have to work? How many people would leave to part-time work if they didn't have to work? So there is obstacles at work, and the work has become a toil. The project doesn't go smoothly. Coworkers are not easy to work with. Patients are non-compliant, and that's true everywhere. It makes it difficult to manage their own health. The climb to the top is not easy. The work is not recognized. The benefits don't really come. So work is a toil. I don't know how you guys were during your residency. I absolutely hated it. It was... I was on call every fifth night when I was in New Orleans for a year. I was on call every third night doing 36-hour shifts when I was on call in Kansas City, and I absolutely hated it. Work was an absolute toil. And because of the fall, there is no balance. on one side there is workaholism, on the other side there is laziness. And because of the fall, work is useless apart from God, and that's what the writer of Ecclesiastes says. Yet work is a gift that God has given us. So in Ecclesiastes 2 verse 24, it says, "There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also I saw is from the hand of God." So he's putting... The writer of Ecclesiastes is putting working on the same plane of enjoyment as eating and drinking. So if you enjoyed Brazilian food or you enjoyed, other food it's on the same plane as enjoying work according to the writer of Ecclesiastes. So we are called to work. That is part of the original design, even though it has now been distorted because of the fall Then there is the command to rest. There is a command to rest. So just like with work, God demonstrates how we have to rest, and God rested first. The seventh day of creation is actually extraordinary theologically. This is what it says in Genesis 2:2-3: "And on the seventh day, God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it, God rested from all his work that he had done in creation." So God obviously doesn't rest because he's tired but he rests as a declaration that work was complete and good, and that is why he rested. And so rest and the Sabbath was built into creation built into reality before it became a commandment. Then it became a commandment and God commanded us to rest. So we are called to work, but we are commanded to rest, and rest is our right as created beings. When you look at the Sabbath was extended to everybody in Israel, whether it was the Israelite, whether it was the foreigner, whether it was the animals. It was extended even to the land in Exodus 20:11, this is what it says. This is part of the Ten Commandments. This is what it says about the Sabbath: "For in six days, God made heaven and Earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore, God blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy." So observing a Sabbath rest is essentially to align yourself with the rhythm that God had set in place for the cosmos. But the Sabbath rule is not just a religious rule, isn't it? It's for the system to work well. I love cooking, and two weeks ago I made Japanese milk bread, and when you make bread, you mix everything up, and then you gotta let it rest. During the World Cup finals, we had a family over, and what is now a tradition, I cook food based on the four semifinalists. So one thing I made for the Argentina team, it's a Argentinian dish. It's called a choripan. So y- there's chorizo, and there's bread, and I made chimichurri sauce. And when you make a sauce, you gotta let the sauce rest so that the flavors meld together. When you cook meat, you gotta let the meat rest. When you paint the house, you gotta wait for the paint to dry up. When you build with concrete, you gotta wait for the concrete to set. When you do a surgery, you gotta wait for the tissues to heal. If you did if you stitched it up, then well, you gotta wait for primary intention. If you didn't, you gotta wait for secondary intention for everything to heal up. When you give an antibiotic, you gotta wait for it to come to the minimum inhibitory concentration, right? The therapeutic levels in the body. So work and rest go together, and it is part of the system, and this rhythm that includes rest means that work is not everything Third, we are redeemed to rest. Now, rest was distorted at the fall and you know this. There are two accounts of the Ten Commandments, The Ten Commandments were first given when the people of Israel came outside about six, eight months later after they left Egypt. They came to Mount Sinai, and there God gave the Ten Commandments. And then about 13 months or one and a half years later, they were knocking on the doors of the Promised Land, but then they couldn't get in because they doubted God. Then they wandered for 38 years. By the end of the 40th year... So now we're in the book of Deuteronomy. There is another account of the Ten Commandments, and this is because Moses is recounting the Ten Commandments. And so there are two accounts of the Ten Commandments. One is what we read in Exodus chapter 20, and the other one is in Deuteronomy chapter 5. Now, very interestingly the Sabbath rest that's based on Exodus chapter 20 is based on creation. But see what the Sabbath rest in Deuteronomy chapter 15 is based on. It says, Deuteronomy 5 verse 15, "You shall remember that you were slave... you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore, the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day." Now, we have Sabbath rest as part of creation, but the fall resulted in a distortion of the rest. And so here we have Sabbath because we are redeemed. It's based not on creation, it's based on redemption. And this is what the psalmist says in 127 verse 2, "It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for He gives sleep to His beloved." So it's as if a person who is a believer or a person who's redeemed should have more rest than a person who's not a believer. Which raises the question, do Christians experience rest more than others? And of course, that's a difficult question to answer because the answer is actually no, we don't experience rest. Why don't we experience rest more than someone else? I actually talked about this in a lecture I gave about two months ago in Thailand, which I asked this, this very specific question, why do Christians not experience rest more than others? Of course, I'm not gonna talk about it today. If you're interested, you can, you can listen to that. We looked at work, we looked at rest, and third, let's look at the integrated life of Jesus. So let's look at the example of Jesus, and Jesus worked, He had relentless demands of the ministry. He walked everywhere, and he had so much to do. There are times I think, "Man, If I were Jesus, I would have come in this day and age." I mean, Transportation was easy. There's air conditioning. He comes to this Middle Eastern uh, town with the hot, dusty weather, and he has to walk everywhere, and Jesus worked, and we read a verse also earlier that he worked. But Jesus also rested, in the gospels repeatedly note that he withdrew to quiet places to pray. And in Mark chapter 6 verse 31 it says, "Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while." So he took his disciples into his rhythm of rest when they were being constantly interrupted Now, we do a lot of study. We've done, you know, college and med school and residency and fellowship, and then we start the practice and maybe you join the practice, and then you gotta set up your name. You gotta, you got to get your name out there and establish who you are. Now, imagine I said that, you know, you worked hard this entire time to get to finishing up and you're about to start your work. Let's say that just before you start, I said, "You have three years to work." Okay? Three years. What would your work ethic be? I mean, We would work our tails off, right? If there are 168 hours in a week, we would work 150 hours in a week to pay off the student loans, to pay off the house, to pay off the car to save for any future money for uh, kids' colleges. You know, you gotta, You gotta accumulate everything because you have only three years to work We will work like crazy. But Jesus had only three years, He had 30 years when he was living in obscurity, and then three years of ministry, and you still never see Jesus in a hurry. I mean, It's absolutely fascinating to see how Jesus, his life was so integrated and balanced even though he had this entire burden of humanity on his shoulders, and he had only three years to set this entire thing up. But you never see Jesus hurried or running around. He was always balanced. His life was always balanced, and that's, that's an example that, obviously we're not Jesus but to get that kind of balance is one of the hardest things. So for the next few minutes, what I wanna look at is five circles that I thought of. I'm sure you can think of more circles. Five circles that I thought of to... that we need to hold together at the same time to have kind of a balance of our God, work, life, and rest. So these are the five circles. First is God first. God first. Jesus summarizes the law and established the hierarchy of devotion when he says in Matthew 22:37-38, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment." And several chapters earlier in Matthew chapter 6, he's talking about anxiety and worry, and he says in 33, "Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you." Of course, there are seasons when you're more busy than others. There was a time when I was working uh, 100 to 120 hours a week during residency. Some Sundays I was on call, some Saturdays I was on call, and we couldn't make it to church. So, uh, There are seasons when you're busier than others. You have 11-month-old, and you're, you're up all night, and you may not make it to church the next day. So there are certain seasons, but what is our posture? Is our posture a posture of work toward God? And the question is, does my life reflect a foremost commitment to Jesus and his kingdom above all? It's not well, I go to work and then I come and I meet with God, but it's, it's how do I integrate God in my work? In the middle of my work, how is God a part of my work? A second circle is work as worship. Paul talks about work in terms of worship in Colossians 3:23 and 24. He says, "Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ." So when you work as for the Lord, even the most mundane task becomes an act of service to Christ. But what does this mean really? What does it mean work as unto the Lord? Working as unto the Lord So if we work as unto the Lord, it's as if God is the focus of our work. So, So let's say that, you are washing your coworker's coffee mug, okay? Now, suppose that coffee mug was used by your father, okay? And you're washing it. There is a certain level of compassion or affection that goes into your work because you're washing your father's cup. If you did that, you're working as unto your father. Let's say that the appendectomy you did on your last patient, let's say that instead of the last patient, that last patient is your father. Let's say you're doing an appendectomy on your father. How much care and pride would you take in the work because you are working as unto your father? And the same thing on a much grander scale. When we are working as unto God, it is as if God is the focus of that work. It's like I'm doing an appendectomy on Jesus. I mean, How much care am I gonna take? Of course, Jesus does not need an appendectomy. But if we were doing an appendectomy as unto God, we would take so much pride and so much care because we are treating God himself. And this is what we see in Matthew chapter 25 when Jesus says, "I was hungry, you gave me food. I was thirsty, you gave... me drink. I was in the hospital, I was naked, and you clothed me. And whatever you did to the least of my brothers, you did unto me." So when we work as unto God, when work is worship, we are working unto God, then everything changes. Of course, this doesn't mean that all work is equal. It just means that we uh, that we are judged by our faithfulness to the work. We're not judged by the complexity of the work we do, but by the faithfulness to our work The third circle I wanna talk about is the boundaries of the body, the boundaries of the body. Now, I wanna show you a verse that's actually talking about sexual purity, but we can apply it in this case. In 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, this is what Paul says: "Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price, so glorify God in your body." Now, this is true for sexual purity, but it's also true if we damage our body through overworking, right? We are stewards of creation, we are stewards also of our bodies because our bodies are not our own. A few years ago, I wrote a blog on abortion and, the, the idea in favor of a- abortion is, this is a woman's body, she can do what she wants with it. And my counter to that is for a believer, our body is not our own. A woman's body is not her own. A woman's body is also the temple of the Holy Spirit, just like a male's body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, therefore you can't do what you want. So if we damage our body through overwork, we are extending the boundaries of our body, that actually belongs to God. All right. The fourth circle that we need to hold when we try to have a balanced life is family. Now, I'm gonna point to a verse that Paul was actually talking about widows and orphans, and this is what he says in 1 Timothy 5:8: "If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever." And the verb provide for means to think ahead. It is to have prior planning and execution of a appropriate material provision. So this can be financial provision, emotional provision, physical provision. Usually what happens is when we fail in one we try to compensate with another, isn't it? When we fail in providing one aspect, we try to compensate with another rather than trying to provide in all aspects. Let me give you an easy example. An easy example, if we have less attention and time to give our family, we try to compensate with more money and gifts. Isn't it? But obviously, we need to be giving everything in proportion. We have a couple kids in my children's school where the parents are divorced, and for those kids It may be different in the, kids you have seen, but in these particular kids who are kids of divorced parents, they seem to have the best stuff. They have the latest gadgets. And the reason is they are with one parent one week and with the other parent the other week. Neither parent says no. They don't have time and attention to give to the kid, and so they just buy them the latest and the best gadgets. So part of the principle to have a balanced life is to provide for our families whether it is financial, whether it is emotional, whether it is physical needs, The fifth and last one is culture. Is culture. We can't deny the fact that we live in a capitalistic and a materialistic culture. Even though it wasn't that much of a rich culture when Jesus taught, this is what he said in Matthew 6:24. He said, "No one can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money." And Paul also says this in 1 Timothy, "The love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs." let me ask you a question. In a capitalistic society, is it possible that what we call ambition and hard work is just our desire to make more money? The antidote to the love of money is not laziness, as in not making money, but the antidote is contentment, isn't it? In 1 Timothy 6:6-7, which is a few verses before what we just read, "Godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world." So learning to be content with less is one of the best lessons, but one of the hardest lessons in a capitalistic, materialistic culture that we are living in. A person who is content with less can work without being enslaved. Yes, it's not just the small stuff. It's usually the big stuff that matters. Yes, the small stuff, if you are getting a $8 Starbucks coffee every day, sure, that can add up. But it's usually the big stuff that, you know, the big house, the big car, the, the second car, third car that you can't afford, that really sets us back. Let me just tell you a personal thing, and then I'm gonna open it up to all of you to talk. When I graduated, every person in my graduating class from residency, and everybody else, seniors, they bought the latest car and the latest gadgets and latest everything. I had a three-year-old Ford Fusion when I finished my residency in 2015. It was a 2012 Ford Fusion. I kept it for 13 years. I would have still kept it but our kids are getting old enough to drive, so I handed over the 13-year-old Ford Fusion to them. It's the big stuff that we need to be content with so that work is not a burden and a toil. And it is a constant battle. Any God, work, life, rest integration, we need to consider all five of these circles, and we need to work at balancing all five of them.