Hurry is Killing Us
Matthew 11:28-30
28 Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
Hurry and love are incompatible. When we are in a hurry we normally live out our worst moments. As a Father who travels a lot with my family. When I am in a hurry to get some place, I am normally at my worst.
- Anger
- Tension
- Short fuses
- Words I can’t take back
We are late for appointments, late for practices, late for church, and work. We spend the majority of our time trying to stay on time.
Corrie Ten Boom once said “If the devil can’t make you sin, he will make you busy.”
Sin and busyness effectively help you cut off your connection with God, people and even your own inner reflections.
Most of us think of the devil as shows up to wreck your life. Whether it be a lust, a pride or anger situation. Yet how many of us think of the devil as an alert on our phone, a television show that causes us to watch or hear something that is dishonoring to God? Something to feed our dopamine addiction is Tik Tok, Instagram, or any other distraction that causes us to pull our attention away from God, his voice, his community, and his rest?
Apostle Paul’s definition of love is first that it is patient, it is kind. Hurry and busyness normally cause us to transgress both of those descriptors.
We live in a culture where we have flipped what wealth is. Just a century ago your status and wealth was defined by the amount of time you had. If you were wealthy you had more leisure time. The more time you had to relax, travel, read a book was considered a trait of your wealth. While I believe that the Sabbath is on Saturday up until the 1960’s blue laws in America forced businesses to close on Sunday and it limited the pace of American’s lives.
Now we have seen the death of the blue laws and people treat Sunday like any other day. Filled with busyness. The day of rest is now gone.
We fill each day with our phones, social media, emails, news and many other time sucking vices that we fail to admit that we are addicted.
A recent study found that the average iPhone user touches their phone 2,617 times per day. Each person is on their phones roughly two and a half hours per day. Another study shows that millennials users are double those numbers.
A similar study found that just being in the same room as your phone even if they are turned off reduces your working memory and problem-solving skills.
Our phones are making us dumber. This is just our phones. This doesn’t even account for other social media, email, news related desktop or tablet use.
In America we have an addiction. We are addicted to our phones and busyness. The church spends millions of dollars and countless hours talking about addictions to alcohol, drugs, pornography, and other addictions tied to our mental and physical health yet the majority of the church is addicted to the distractions of the digital world. In fact, there is a real fear that if we cut of our livestream, reduce our churches digital footprint we would instantly lose attendees, influences, donations. God has become conditional yet our behavior shows that social media and news feeds are not.
God has been lowered on our priorities to the anxiety driving force of popularity and busyness. Our souls are paying the price with depression, ADHD, suicide, and mental health is past the breaking point.
Jesus didn’t come so that you could accumulate the wealth of this world, he came to make wounded people whole.
Jesus didn’t teach us to pursue positional and financial wealth so that we could ruin our marriage. He didn’t teach you to go into debit so that your kids could get a high-level degree in the knowledge of something so that they could have no knowledge or relationship with Jesus. God didn’t teach us to prioritize Yellowstone and forsake our prayer life.
705 hours on social media, 2,7000 hours on tv. Yet we wonder why so many can’t hear God speak to them. Why so many are struggling to read their Bibles. Why so many can’t remain in prayer. Yet we wonder why the lost are still lost and those who have found salvation cannot see the power of God manifest itself. We are lost ourselves. We have effectively shut ourselves off from hearing God and for the power of God to move through us.
Matthew 11:28-30
28 Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
Like every Rabbi in his day, Jesus had two things.
1. He had a yoke. This wasn’t a literal yoke. He was a teacher not a farmer. A yoke was a common idiom in the first century for a Rabbi’s way of reading the Torah. Yet it was so much more. It was a set of teachings on how to be human as a believer. His way to shoulder the weight of life. In your marriage, divorces, prayer, money, sex, conflict resolution, government. Imagine two oxen yoked together. It was how they shouldered the burden of the load.
What made Jesus unique wasn’t that he had a yoke, it was that he had an easy yoke.
2. Jesus had apprentices. In Hebrew the word is talmidim. It’s usually translated as “disciples,” and that’s fine, but a better English word to capture the idea behind talmidim is “apprentices.” To be one of Jesus’ talmidim is to apprentice under Jesus. Simply put it is to organize your life around these three basic goals:
1- Be with Jesus
2- Become like Jesus
3- Do what he would do if he were you.
To solve the busyness hurry culture, we have to actually apprentice our life after Jesus. In doing so we will recover our soul.
Jesus kept the Sabbath. It was a time for the apprentices of Jesus to be with Jesus. To learn how to become like Jesus. In the 1st century to allow Jesus to model what they needed to do to be able to discern what to do when He wouldn’t be here. Jesus isn’t walking this earth today. Yet He modeled how we should walk as apprentices of Jesus. It’s the only way to take back our souls.
This blog post includes excerpts from “The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry” by John Mark Comer which is the inspiration for this post. For a more in-depth look at this topic you will definitely want to purchase his book.