Learning to Rest
Only when we let God have control of our ministries can we rest.
This world has nothing for me, and this world has everything. I was a football-watching freak. It was a full-fledged addiction. My typical fall weekend was structured something like this: two college football games on Saturday, approximately four hours each, two pro football games on Sundays, approximately three and a half hours each, and a Monday night football game to cap it all off. I often watched with friends, but they rarely had the stamina and endurance I had to sit, eat popcorn, and watch football. They often gave me grief about it, but I figured it was just my way to unwind and relax. I got my work done; I wasn't so addicted that I was anti-social; I didn't gamble on the games. What was wrong with it? Then one Sunday as I turned off the TV after the late afternoon game, I evaluated how I actually felt. In truth, after 15 hours of watching football over the previous two days, I was sluggish and my eyes were glazed over. All I really wanted to do after "resting" for the past two days was take a nice, long nap. I was trying to find rest in something that wasn't bad, but it didn't restore me. This realization was a bit startling at the time. I'm ashamed to say it took me several more years to shake my habit, but the realization that Sunday woke me to the bigger issue in my life: where does rest come from? For leaders, most of whom are enthusiastic and energetic, the discipline of resting is a foreign one. But to work this into your leadership journey is essential for a healthy and glad ending down the road. In Exodus 33, God promised Moses that he would be with him. God is our good; he is our life. Apart from him, there can be no eternally good thing. But in that chapter is a second promise to Moses, which touches on this key issue of rest for leaders. 12 Moses said to the LORD , "You have been telling me, 'Lead these people,' but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. You have said, 'I know you by name and you have found favor with me.' 13 If you are pleased with me, teach me your ways so I may know you and continue to find favor with you. Remember that this nation is your people." 14 The LORD replied, "My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest." 15 Then Moses said to him, "If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. 16 How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?" 17 And the LORD said to Moses, "I will do the very thing you have asked, because I am pleased with you and I know you by name." (Exodus 33:12-17) Reckless RestIn this conversation, God promised Moses his presence and rest. Rest is a significant word for leaders. Most leaders I know, including myself, aren't good at resting. We haven't worked out the spiritual discipline the way Scripture invites us to. Our culture holds out all sorts of promises for rest, but it simply can't give the soul-caliber rest that God promised Moses. A couple of years ago, I was meditating on this passage in preparation for a conference that I was going to help lead. I would be speaking on this passage and wanted to make sure my points were tight and my presentation flawless. As I thought about this promise to Moses of presence and rest, the Holy Spirit convicted me. I wrote in big letters in the margin: Where do I go for rest? My honest answer? I had been living for days off and vacations. My sin of over-scheduling, controlling, and making poor decisions with my time had led to the sin of looking for rest in all the wrong places. The world looks for rest from weekends, holidays, media, and vacations. Moses' assumption in this passage is that God's people are to be different. Don't misunderstand me—time off, holidays and vacations are all good things. God made the Sabbath, the original weekend. In the Old and New Testament, celebrations lasted for days and weeks, and one even lasted a whole year. These rhythms of resting and celebrating were God's idea from the start. But these times are gifts, intended to point us to the giver. To join in building our golden calves out of days off, computer games, DVD players and vacations is to cast our souls in with the tide of our culture's greatest vacuum. This world has nothing for us, even as it has everything. Ultimately and always, God is our good and our rest. Leaders must learn to enter into this rest and lead others into it as well, or they will burn out and descend into anger and bitterness. It has been said that life is a marathon, not a sprint. However, I recently heard someone challenge that maxim. Life is not a marathon; it is a series of sprints. The key to surviving a series of sprints is to know when to push yourself, and when it's time to rest. When it's time to sprint, we need to have the energy and resources to do so. When we don't need to sprint, we need to build in healthy disciplines of resting and renewing our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual energies. (Jack Groppel, Willow Creek Leadership Summit, 8/12/05). Where are you spending your best energies? When are you resting? In these Scriptures, Moses had just come down off of the mountain with the Ten Commandments. Commandment number four was the command to rest on the Sabbath. For the Israelite nation, a nomadic people, God built into every week one day to refuel, worship, and rest. Sabbath rest was foolish. The Israelites were dependent on agriculture for survival. In farming communities when the conditions are right for the harvest, everything else stops. The window of opportunity is small and specific. Given this, it was madness to declare a regular weekly day of rest with no regard for the season. Sabbath rest was a reckless rest of faith. It trusted God to provide the crops in his good timing. Sabbath rest was a weekly faith-stretching exercise. It reminded them that God was the sovereign provider, and they were not. This Sabbath-rest posture of leaning into the provision of God was to carry them into the work of the other days of the week. Marva Dawn says this about the importance of Sabbath keeping in our day: "When we order our lives around the focus of our relationship with God by letting our Sabbath day be the highlight of our week, toward which everything moves and from which everything comes, then the security of God's presence on that day will pervade the week" (Keeping the Sabbath Wholly, p. 34). To rest as leaders is to base our lives recklessly on the fact that God is God, and we are not. Rest reminds us that God was at work long before we got on the scene, and he will continue to do his work long after we leave. God invites leaders to live a life of reckless faith—both in our activity and in our inactivity. Activity or inactivity done outside of faith ("everything that does not come from faith is sin" Romans 14:23) will put us off track. There is work to be done—good work that he has prepared in advance for us to do. We are to do that work and stop. No less, no more. Reasons for our Rest-lessnessThere are probably as many motives for leaders' lack of rest as there are leaders. However, in talking with leaders, a few core motivations seem to emerge: earning God's favor, earning people's approval, and grasping for control. Each of these issues deserves at least a cursory discussion. All three of these are rooted in bad theology—they are misunderstandings of God and the world around us. Ministry burnout is a theological problem. Earning God's favor. My son Davis was born four weeks early. Because of this, he wasn't quite fully cooked. Babies only do three things: eat, sleep, and poop. Davis only did one of those well: he pooped like a champ; he wasn't nearly as prolific at the other two. The first ten months of my son's life would often find me up with him for the day at four or five in the morning. I had kept my ears open in the months preceding Davis's birth about things that we could do as parents to help raise a healthy kid physically, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally. I heard about a study that had shown that infants who had been exposed to classical music, especially Mozart, had generally scored higher on IQ tests and had better memory skills. So each morning that I would get up with Davis, we would listen to Mozart together. I only had one CD, and it was a little scratched up, but if we were going to be up at 4:30 A.M., at least we were going to be productive. Mozart plus Davis equaled passive intelligence. There was nothing that Davis was going to have to do to earn that gift. All he had to do was listen. It was a free gift from Mozart (posthumously) and from his loving and groggy dad. There is an analogy for us in the Christian life. If you are in Christ today, you are given a righteousness that is not yours. You are in right standing with God not because of anything you ever did or ever will do. Martin Luther described this as the passive righteousness of Christ. Christ's righteousness falls on his children like rain, and there is absolutely nothing that you do to earn it or make it more effective. You are in Christ—that is the definition of what it is to be a Christian. You cannot be in Christ to varying levels or degrees: you are either in Christ or you are not. In Christ, you share in the life in the land of the Trinity. In Christ, you share in the glad life of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Your religious performance does not affect whether or not you are in Christ. So many times our warped thinking leads us to believe that there are varying levels of closeness to God. We think the truly spiritual among us are very close. The rest of us are on the roller coaster of religion, which only looks Christian on the surface. If we have quiet times, volunteer at the food pantry, and don't duck a conversation about Jesus with our coworker, we are closer to God that week. If we cuss at our family, sleep through devotions, and don't even think about cracking open our Bibles, we are further away. This is the roller coaster of religion, and while it sells books and makes for creating some good guilt motivation, it is not in line with reality. Reality is this: for those of us who are Christians, we are firmly and forever rooted and established in Christ. Our religious performance does not create or negate reality. It is like gravity—you could act as though it was not there, but that doesn't change what's true. The fact that you are in Christ is more real than gravity. Here's some profoundly good news: Christianity is not about you. The gospel is not about your performance. It is a gospel of grace. It is about God and what he's done, not about you and what you have to do for him. My first and hardest lesson I learned in ministry was that I am not as important as I think I am; instead, I am loved far more than I ever hoped or imagined. God delights to give rest to his people, so that they might be reminded that it's not about them and their performance. For those of you who struggle to feel as though you have to work to earn your place in God's family, here's good news. You can rest. Rest in Jesus. He has done it for you; it really is finished. You have a place in the glad dance of the life of the Trinity. God has already showered his favor on you in the righteousness of Christ. A friend of mine studies this equation every day: G + 0 = RSWG. Grace plus Nothing Equals Right Standing With God. Rest. Earning people's approval. If you have read the book of Exodus, you saw that the people of Israel have a love-hate relationship with Moses. At points they revere him so much it's almost idolatry, and sometimes they are so bitter towards Moses that they ask why he brought them out to the desert to die. I want people to like me. Sometimes I want it so much, I'll go to great lengths to make sure that it happens. Because of my nature as a people pleaser, I can often find myself doing ministry to impress the people around me, rather than the Lord whom I claim to be serving. It was two weeks before the start of my eighth year in campus ministry when we got the word: construction had knocked us out of our usual space for our Thursday night large group worship meeting. In fact, there was no space on Thursday nights when we could meet. In just two weeks we were supposed to have our first meeting and the start of what I hoped would be a renewing year of ministry after a couple of years of a slow decline in numbers. Now we were scrambling just to find a room where we could meet. The solution came to me as I rode in the car with my wife. "What if we did two large groups every week?" She looked at me cautiously, trying not to say that I was psycho and had lost it. "What if we did one large group on Thursday nights that targeted non-Christians, then we could do a large group on Sunday nights where we could worship and raise the bar on calling Christians to live for Christ." She was less than enthusiastic about the idea. I thought I was brilliant. I imagined doing a write-up on the two-large group concept, and how it would reshape campus ministry for decades to come. Millions would come to Christ, and I would be famous. Everyone wins! By mid-September it was clear that we were in over our heads—it was hard work coming up with quality, creative programming week in and week out. By October it was clear that my leaders were about burned-out—they had meetings every night of the week. By November we had already scaled back the concept for the next spring to once a month. I had fallen in love with an idea and the supposed fame that would come with it. Maybe your version of people pleasing and performing doesn't quite take this form. Maybe it's an inability to say no and a lack of boundaries. Maybe you impress or aim to please people in other ways. Either way, Jesus' words in Matthew cut those of us to the quick who live for the applause of people: "And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full" (Matthew 6:5). Here's the catch: to live for a "well done" is part of what it means to be human. It is not bad. The question is, whose well done will you live for? There is the well done of the people around us, whose approval we so often manipulate to receive. This is passing and never satisfies for long, because it is not the well done that we were made for. It is too small. Ah, but there is one well done worth living for, worth building your life around. It is worth the wait. It is the voice of the Good Father, the one who's well done we were made to live for. You can choose: you can either live for the applause and approval of people today, or you can live for the well done of God that will echo and flower into all eternity. You cannot have both. Only one will truly give you life. At various points in my life, I have devoted time to listening prayer. I listen for anything the Lord might want to say to me. Most often I get a large silence or a word. Peace was the first word and is the most recurring one the Lord has given me—a gift I wasn't too thrilled with until he showed me how badly I needed it. One morning he gave me an image. I was swimming in a race of some sort, the stands were full, and there was lots of splashing and cheering. I felt as though the Lord was giving me a challenge: I could either kick across and stay in the race, working for the roar of the crowd, or I could kick down and die to all of it, the race and the roar, and see what he might have for me on the other side of that death. Kick down, or kick across. It is a battle I fight nearly every day. By God's grace, I am learning to kick down. I am learning what it means to trust him, to die to those things I am so deeply tempted to live for and to look for real life in eternal things. What people think of you does not determine your value or worth. Living for the approval and applause of the people around you will not give you life. Live for the applause of heaven. Rest. Grasping for control. Perhaps the most powerful thing about Moses' story is not how it began, or how he carried out his mission, but how it ended. The Lord told him that he would not be the one to lead the people into the Promised Land, even after all his years of serving God and the stiff-necked people of Israel. In the face of that kind of disappointment, most leaders would throw a severe tantrum. But Moses is so willing to let go of control and trust the Lord with the people and the mission that he's willing to pass along the privilege of the Promised Land entry to Joshua. Often leaders are rewarded and tapped for leadership because they are control freaks. We call it taking initiative, stepping up to leadership, or filling gaps, but really it's about control. It's difficult to repent of when it's the thing that gets us noticed, but it's the very thing that will kill our ministries if we don't learn to give it up. Having a baby taught me other things besides the joys of Mozart at four in the morning. Sometimes when Davis was fussing, I would pick up his stuffed pink pig (other kids have teddy bears, Davis loved his pig) and I would animate it—voices, hand motions, break dancing, whatever. Davis, of course, was enthralled. His response was to reach out and grab the pig. As soon as Davis had the pig in his hands, the pig went back to being a regular old stuffed pig. Nothing wrong with a stuffed pig, but not exactly what Davis had in mind when he grabbed for it. As soon as Davis had control of the pig, the life that he had enjoyed about it was gone. The same thing is true for us in ministry. The only way for the ministries that we are leading to have real life, for us or for anyone else, is for Someone Else to have control over it. When Jesus is genuinely the author and perfecter of what we do, it has power. As we let go of control, the Spirit is free to breathe life into the work that we long to see happen. When we grab for control of ministry, the life-giving power and freshness is gone. All analogies break down somewhere, and this one is no exception: at some point Davis will be old enough to give the stuffed pig "life" himself—perhaps he will be able to update his dance moves. But at no point is having control our goal. At no point do we become mature or seasoned enough to run things by ourselves. Control is something to be released and repented of again and again and again, anytime it rears its ugly head. Control is an illusion. Rest realigns our souls with the reality of the way of the universe. Rest reminds us that there is one God, and we are not he. The invitation comes from a good God who loves to give life anywhere and everywhere: let go. He is in control. We can rest because he does not. Jesus told a kingdom parable of the farmer who sowed his seed and then went to sleep; the crops grew he knew not how. Go to sleep, brothers and sisters, go to sleep. Alex Kirk is on staff with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at UNC-Chapel Hill. This article is excerpted from his very hypothetical book Starting Well: Lifelong Leadership for Beginning Leaders, which is currently sitting on several Christian publishers' submission desks. You can contact him at alex_kirk@ivstaff.org with questions, comments, or smart remarks, or check out his blog Piebald Life. |              |
