Episode 1. The Global Tiredness Pandemic
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So many people are tired. Not just at night time – but 24×7 it seems. Drained. Exhausted. We’re not quite sure when it happened … or even how it happened … it just happened. …
Man it’s been a tough few years, hasn’t it. Everything seems to have changed. Pandemics, wars, division, strife … not to mention the usual things life throws at us day after day. Perhaps that’s why so many people in this world are so tired, so exhausted. Perhaps … you’re one of them.
WHY IS EVERYONE SO TIRED?
I don’t know if you’ve noticed but some people seem so tired – exhausted. As though there’s a plague quietly creeping over humanity. Now I’m sure this varies somewhat from country to country and from culture to culture. I’m sure that there are some people somewhere living idyllic life, you know plenty of rest, relaxation but to tell you the honest truth most of us don’t know any.
People seem to be working harder, competing more, clamouring more to buy the things and have the things that we’re told that we should buy and have. Some people are struggling just to survive, just to get enough food on the table, many in fact. Others are drowning in debt.
Yet others still aspire to a career and then discover that this thing they idolised, this career has in fact turned them into indentured slaves. Long hours, long commute, the traffic, the train and you know, you don’t have to be working like a mad man to be tired.
There are many people who don’t work, people who are lonely who are tired. See I think that tiredness comes not just from working too hard. It comes from carrying around heavy burdens. And so that’s why I’m asking, why is it that everyone is so tired? What’s going on here? What can we, you and I, do about it?
That’s what we’re going to be looking at over the coming few weeks on the program – exhaustion and tiredness.
And just in case you should think that this is something new. Just in case that you should think that this plague of tiredness and exhaustion is something that’s exclusively related to the excesses of western materialism. Have a listen to this, this is Jesus 2000 years ago. You can read it in Matthew’s Gospel chapter 11, verses 28 to 30. Jesus said:
Come to me all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and humble of heart and you’ll find rest for your soul. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
So these weren’t people burnt out by an industrial age that He was talking to. We’re pretty much talking rural agrarian subsistence economy here back in the 1st century land of Israel. So carrying heavy burdens is nothing new. I mean we all carry heavy burdens from time to time.
It’s funny that the Greek mythology came up with Atlas. You’ve seen this picture of this man stooped over carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. And I guess that’s how many people feel. These heavy burdens that Jesus was talking about, these heavy burdens come in so many different shapes and sizes. I’ve carried a few of them around in my day and I’m sure that you have too.
Sometimes we’re just plain working too hard and we need a rest. Or there are pressures at work and maybe pressures at home and it feels like we’re living in a pressure cooker. And my hunch is that that’s not how we’re meant to live.
Sometimes it’s relationships, a particular person who is hurting us or who’s betrayed us or who’s ignoring us or who’s fighting with us or who’s trying to squeeze us into some mould into which we don’t fit. Sometimes it’s because we’re trying to do things or to be things we were never meant to do or be.
I remember when I started out as a consultant in the IT industry many years ago. I used to think that I had to pretend to my clients that I could do everything. I can tell you that’s a pretty stressful way of living. Sometimes the burdens about our self-esteem or self-worth. We compare ourselves with other people and we come up with a conclusion that we just don’t match up.
Or others have expectations of us, we have expectations of ourselves that, well, we’re just struggling to meet. Or sometimes it’s money problems, ‘I’ve lost my job, I don’t have a job’. And for many people listening today they can’t even put food on their table for their kids. Those are real burdens. Sometimes it’s loneliness, like a padded prison cell where we scream and no-one can hear us.
Do you see how this list goes on and on? And you know, sometimes it’s just this sense that something’s not quite right, something’s wrong, we just can’t put our finger on it. Other times we know what’s causing our stress, we know what’s causing our tiredness because we’re running away from God, we know that we’re rebelling.
And as much as we try and convince ourselves that we can do it our way, it’s so exhausting pulling in the opposite direction to God. Exhaustion, tiredness, man sometimes we need a rest, a holiday, a day off, a break away from the grind.
But can I tell you something? I’ve had holidays in the past where I didn’t get any rest either because while you can perhaps get away from work or even home and the day-to-day routine, many of those burdens and pressures I’ve been talking about just don’t go away because you’re on holidays, do they? You can be sitting on a sandy beach with waves rolling in and yet still carrying the heavy burden of a failing marriage or financial debt or the fear of what’s going to happen when you get back to work.
Here’s the thing, burdens come in many different shapes and sizes, they do, and over the coming weeks on the program we’re going to look at a lot of these different burdens – the things that we carry around, the weight of the world on our shoulders. The things that, try as we may, we can’t seem to put down even though we want to rest, even though we want to get rid of them out of our lives.
That’s the thing, so often these burdens are so hard to get away from and to put down and to rest from and I’ve come to the conclusion as a self-reliant individual as I am, I just can’t do that on my own. Here’s the thing, I believe, I truly believe with every fibre of my being that God wants to give us rest. I believe that God hears the cries of His people and that He has the answers.
Do you remember when God’s chosen people, the nation of Israel, the descendants of Abraham, they were in slavery in captivity in Egypt? Do you remember what God said to Moses? Exodus chapter 3, verses 7 and 8:
The Lord said, ‘I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt. I have heard their cry on account of their task masters. Indeed I know their sufferings and I’ve come down to deliver them from the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey’.
See we so often dig ourselves into a hole. So often we’re living out consequences of our own rebellion against God. So often we look at life and kick ourselves and think, ‘Oh man, if only I hadn’t, you know, whatever it is’. And that sense of regret makes things worse.
And sometimes we’re just carrying burdens that aren’t our fault. Being oppressed by other people or by circumstances completely out of our control. Well here’s the thing, I believe that God wants to set us free. I believe that God wants to give us rest and peace and well-being. In fact I don’t just believe it, I know it because Jesus said:
Come to me all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and humble of heart and you will find rest for you souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. (Matthew 11:28-30)
That’s what we are going to be exploring together over these coming weeks on the programme – God’s peace and God’s rest because He means it for my life and He means it for yours too.
WHY DID GOD REST?
You know there have been times in my life when I’ve been completely and absolutely exhausted. Sometimes it’s because I’ve worked too hard and haven’t taken a rest. Other times it’s because of pressures and risks and fears and things out there, things I haven’t been able to control.
This whole balance between work and rest is something that I’ve had to learn. In fact, I’ve got to tell you, it’s something that I’m still learning. I honestly, naturally I’m a bit of a workaholic. Well, not just a bit of one, I’m a complete workaholic. And so getting balance between work and rest right has been an important lesson for me to learn.
Both working too much and working not enough it turns out, are extremes that aren’t part of Gods plan for our lives. In fact, just so we get that right have a listen to these two verses of Scripture. On the one hand to the workaholics God has this to say. Psalm 127, verses 1 and 2:
Unless the Lord builds the house those who build it labour in vain. Unless the Lord guards the city the guard keeps watch in vain. 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 those whom He loves.
Sobering. But on the other hand have a listen to this. Proverbs chapter 20, verse 4:
The lazy person doesn’t plough in season and then the harvest comes but there’s nothing to be found.
So as it turns out God’s plan is for us both to work and to rest. And in fact right in the first couple of chapters of the Bible He actually lays this out with sharp clarity – with a clarity that can and should form the foundations of our understanding of work and rest.
I guess most of us realise that the first couple of chapters of the Bible, Genesis, the first Book in the Bible, are about God creating creation. God taking nothing and turning it into something:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
It starts off and then the wonderful story of all the things He created – the light and water and dry land and the sky and plants and birds and animals. And eventually us, people in His own image. Couple of chapters, two or three pages about the creation of the universe.
It’s pretty easy to kind of skim over them and think to ourselves, ‘Ah yeah, okay, so God created everything’ until we engage with the things He created. A trillion, trillion stars. A universe so big it takes light, which travels at 186 thousand miles or 300 thousand kilometres every second, it takes light 93 billion years to travel from one end of the known universe to the other.
And that’s just the known universe. As the NASA website tells us no-one knows if the universe is infinitely large or even if ours is the only universe that exists.
And then, then you look at all the small things and the intricate things. Atoms, cells, living organisms, animals, plants, people and they are so wondrous and so amazing. Take the human body, a heart that beats a couple billion times in a lifetime to pump blood through 60,000 miles or 96,500 kilometres of blood vessels to the 60 or 70 trillion cells in our body of which around 1.1 trillion make up the human brain which puts any computer you’d care to name absolutely to shame.
Yeah, God created the creation and any thinking person who spends just a couple of minutes engaging with any part of that creation, well you have to be blown away by what you see.
Maybe having looked at things from that perspective, over the next day or so, it wouldn’t be a bad thing for you and me to read those first couple of chapters of the Book of Genesis through fresh eyes –eyes of awe and eyes of wonder.
Now I start off with this because obviously creating this stunning, amazing, humanly incomprehensible and unfathomable universe, it wasn’t a trivial exercise. It required creativity, imagination and a mighty, mighty effort. I say that as someone who’s been exhausted just digging a little trench in my backyard for a water pipe.
Now have a listen how the first account of this amazing act of creation winds up. Beginning at Genesis chapter 1, verse 31:
God saw everything that He’d made and indeed it was very good and there was evening and there was morning on the sixth day thus the heavens and the earth was finished in all their multitude. And on the seventh day God finished the work He’d done and He rested on the seventh day from all the work He’d done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it because on it God rested from all the work that He had done in creation. (Genesis 1:31 to Genesis 2:1-3)
So He builds this whole universe and then He rests. The Hebrew word for rest used in that passage a couple of times is the one from which we get the English word ‘Sabbath’. Now, here’s the thing, you have to ask yourself ‘Why did God rest? I mean why?’
Okay it was an amazing thing that He did, totally, totally blows my mind but why did He rest? Did He have to rest? Was He exhausted somehow like Berni digging that little trench, moving a few barrows of soil from his backyard? Well, no, God wasn’t exhausted. Not one little bit, because He’s God.
Now that’s not just me saying that. I say that because that’s exactly what God’s word says about Him. Have a listen to Psalm 121. A tired man looking up for God’s help says:
I lift up my eyes to the hills, from where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord who made the heaven and the earth. He will not let your foot be moved, He who keeps you will not slumber. He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. (Psalm 121:1-4)
So there it is. God doesn’t get tired, He doesn’t need a cap nap in the afternoon, He doesn’t need to go to bed at night. He is on the job 24×7. So back to the question, why did He rest? Well the answers actually in the text that we read before, Genesis chapter 1:
God saw everything He’d made and it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day and so the heavens and the earth were finished in all their multitude and on that seventh day God finished the work He’d done and He rested from it.
See God sat back to enjoy what He’d made. He looked at it, it wasn’t just good, it was very good. In fact if I were to give you a more explicit translation to English it would say, ‘exceedingly, mightily, abundantly good’. We might say these days fantastic, utterly awesome. And God sat back and rested from doing and He enjoyed.
Now you and I, when we dig a trench, we need to rest our body. But there’s the other dimension of rest which is just about enjoying our lives, enjoying the fruits of our labour, enjoying our relationships. Rest is when we recharge our batteries; not just by stopping exerting ourselves but by enjoying what we have and who we are and taking it in the way that God did. And so important was this day of rest that He called it the ‘Sabbath’ and He instructed His people, Israel, about the Sabbath, saying to them in Exodus chapter 20, verse 10:
But the seventh day is the Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien residents in your towns.
The fourth commandment of the Ten Commandments, God wants His people, not just to rest, to completely desist from their work and their labours but He wants them to set that day aside to spend with Him – it’s a Sabbath onto God. Six days work shall be done but the seventh day is a Sabbath of solemn rest, holy to the Lord, whoever does any work on the Sabbath day shall be put to death.
You know what? I actually don’t think we are that good at resting anymore and enjoying what we have and setting a day aside for God – too many things to do, too many places to go, too many people to see …
LOOK UP AND SEE
It’s an interesting question: why do we do the things we do? I suspect that we have all experienced the sudden realisation that we are on a treadmill in life, slaving hard at this or that and then all of a sudden, one day, having a reality check and asking ourselves, ‘Man, why do we do the things we do?’ Maybe it’s been a while between reality checks; maybe we’ve had our head down and been pedalling so hard at life that we haven’t looked up to see what’s really going on.
There’s a spot in the Old Testament where, through the prophet Isaiah, God explains how Israel has gone off the tracks. They’re in exile in Babylon, simply because they disobeyed God and rebelled against Him and evidently, some of them still didn’t get that. That’s what the whole of chapter 42 of the Book of Isaiah is about but there’s one verse that really leaps out at me. Have a listen – Isaiah chapter 42, verse 18:
Listen, you that are deaf; and you that are blind, look up and see!
I wonder whether there aren’t a few of us today who need to look up and see. I wonder whether there aren’t a few of us today who need a reality check. God doesn’t mean for us to be exhausted 24/7; He doesn’t mean for us to be tired all the time. His peace and His rest are available to us when we put our trust in Jesus – not just in the good times but in the tough times too – in fact, particularly in those difficult times.
Jesus is about to be arrested and crucified. His disciples are afraid; they’re petrified, not just at what is happening to Him but of what might happen to them. Would they be crucified with Him? And He says to them, right in the middle of that fear, John chapter 14, verse 27:
Peace I leave with you – my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world does. Do not let your hearts be troubled, do not let them be afraid.
My friend, enough is enough! At some point, we need to say to ourselves, ‘I just can’t live like this anymore,’ And as well as perhaps uttering those words, ‘Oh God, I need a rest.’ As well as saying that and thinking that, I truly believe that it’s time for a few of us to believe … to believe that God actually means for us to have a rest. His Word says that:
It is in vain that you rise up early and you go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil for He gives sleep to those whom He loves.
Don’t you love those words ‘anxious toil’? Isn’t that what we do a lot of the time? We don’t just toil away, we do it anxiously. And His word says – Matthew chapter 11, verse 28 to 30:
Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.
His Word also says, in Hebrews chapter 4, verses 9 and 10:
So then, a Sabbath rest remains for the people of God; for those who enter God’s rest also cease from their labors as God did from his.
I believe that it is time that we actually believe the Word of God – that we take God at His literal Word.
Now, tiredness and exhaustion happen at a number of different levels. They happen at a spiritual level. There’s a clear spiritual reason for tiredness and that’s what we are going to unpack next week on the programme, in a message that I’ve called, “Exhaustion – The Spiritual Dimension.”
There’s the emotional element as well and of course, there’s a physical element. We are after all, spirit, soul and body and just as the problems – the diseases that cause our tiredness – may lie at different levels, so God’s solutions lie at different levels too.
With so many people tired and exhausted I believe we need some teaching from God’s Word about how to deal with this pandemic – both in our own lives and in the lives of other people. We need to go beyond identifying the symptoms. I mean, people know they are tired; they know they’re exhausted – that much we can figure out for ourselves, right? We need to go beyond that and go to the solution, so over the coming three weeks on the programme, we are going to do exactly that – and not through the realm of pop psychology but through the incredible wisdom and the insight and the truth and the power and the glory and the grace that come from God’s Word.
Today I am just going to ask one thing of you. If you remember just one thing from this message, I ask that it would be this – God doesn’t want you to be tired; He doesn’t want you to be exhausted all the time.
“Come to me,” said Jesus, “all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest.”
That is the promise of God’s own Son – that is the promise that comes from God’s Word. Open the Bible; go to Matthew chapter 11 – read it for yourself. Go to Hebrews chapter 4 – read it for yourself. Go to John chapter 14 – read it for yourself.
Over and over again, God says to you and to me, ‘I don’t want you to be tired and I’ve got an answer – His name is Jesus.’
Comments
Roger Pearson
Dear Berni Dymet and beloved Family and Staff especially Berni. Thank you. so mch for persevering with me in my times of sin and rebellion against God intil now. Praise the Lord I have entered Gods rest through obedience and being sanctified. It’s been hard but praise God that Bernie persevered with me until I made the necessary breakthroughs. I cant thank this great man of God enough for what a beautiful saint he is.
Please pass this message on to Bernie if you would.
God bless you all at Christianity works
Your brother in Christ.
Roger