Embracing The Kingdom V

EMBRACING THE KINGDOM V

Slowing Down

Psalm 23:1-6

1 The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.

2 He makes me to lie down in green pastures He leads me beside the still waters.

3 He restores my soul; He leads me in the paths of righteousness For His name’s sake.

4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; For You are

with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.

5 You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil;

My cup runs over.

6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me All the days of my life; And I will dwell in the house

of the LORD Forever.

There is a way God wants us to live that is radically different from the way most of us live.

I. HURRY SICKNESS

1. Hurry makes us sick

2. Hurry burns us out

3. Hurry kills relationships

4. Hurry and Love are incompatible

5. Hurry hinders spiritually

II. SYMPTOMS OF HURRY SICKNESS

1. Irritability – You get mad, frustrated or just annoyed way too easily. Little

normal things irk you. You have an ongoing low-grade negativity.

2. Hypersensitivity – All it takes is a minor comment to hurt your feelings. Minor

things quickly escalate to major emotional events. Depending on your

personality this may manifest in either (anger, nitpickiness, anxiety, depression,

or tiredness).

3. Restlessness – When you actually try to slow down and rest you cannot relax.

You cannot focus your mind. You go to bed and toss and turn with anxiety. You

watch TV but check phone, email, etc.

4. Workaholism (or just nonstop activity) – Either you do not know when to stop

or you cannot stop. Could be career or excessive house cleaning and errand

running. At the end of the day, very little to nothing left to give your family and

kids or God.

5. Emotional Numbness – You do not have the capacity to feel another’s pain or

your own pain. Empathy is a rare feeling.

6. Out-of-Order Priorities – Disconnected from your identity. Life is reactive not

proactive. You are trapped in the tyranny of the urgent.

7. Lack of care for your body – You do not have time for the basics: eight hours of

sleep, exercise, home cooked food, minimal stimulants etc. You do not sleep

well, wake up tired, live on carbs, caffeine, and sugar.

8. Escapist Behaviors - When too tired to do life giving stuff we turn to

distractions – overeating, overdrinking, binge-watching Netflix, browsing social

media, surfing the web, looking at porn, overdosing on candy crush etc.

9. Decreasing Spiritual Disciplines – Overtired and no energy for spiritual

disciplines.

10. Isolation – You feel disconnected from God, others, and your own soul. When

you try to get with God you are so distracted you cannot connect.

III. HOW DID WE GET HERE?

1. Artificial Time

2. Light Bulb in 1879 by Thomas Edison

3. Digital Age

4. Algorithms of Distraction

5. The Effect

A. We are more hurried than ever before

B. We are less healthy emotionally

C. We are stressed out far too often

D. We are more physically unhealthy than ever

E. Suicide rates have drastically increased

IV. SOLUTION

1. The Jesus Way

Matthew 11:28-30

28 Come to Me, all you 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.

YOKE

A yoke was a common idiom in the first century for a rabbi’s way of reading the

Torah. But it was also more: it was his set of teachings on how to be human. His

way to shoulder the weight of life—

V. LIVING THE JESUS WAY

1. Solitude

Jesus began His Ministry with 40 days alone

Matthew 4:1-3

1 Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the

devil. 2  And when He had fasted forty days and forty nights, afterward He was

hungry. 3  Now when the tempter came to Him, he said, “If You are the Son of

God, command that these stones become bread.

Wilderness - eremos, and it has a wide array of meanings. It can be translated

desert, deserted place, desolate place, solitary place, lonely place, quiet place, or

wilderness.

2. Silence

Psalm 46:10

10 “Be still and know that I am God.”

a. External Silence

No noise.

b. Internal Noise

True silence is when both are shut down

3. Sabbath (day)

Mark 2:27

27 And He said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the

Sabbath. 28  Therefore the Son of Man is also Lord of the Sabbath

The word Sabbath comes to us from the Hebrew Shabbat. The word literally

means “to stop.” The Sabbath is simply a day to stop: stop working, stop

wanting, stop worrying, just stop.

4. Sabbath (a way of Life)

Sabbath is more than just a day; it’s a way of being in the world. It s a spirit of

restfulness that comes from abiding, from living in the Father’s loving presence

all week long.

Sabbath is the primary discipline, or practice, by which we cultivate the spirit of

restfulness in our lives as a whole.

5. Tips for Slowing Down

1. Drive the speed limit

2. Get into the slow lane

3. Come to a full stop at stop signs

4. Don’t text and drive

There is a reason most of us text and drive even when we know it is illegal

and a life-and-death issue. We are so addicted to the dopamine hit that is

our phones that we literally can’t just sit in our cars and listen to music or the

news or pray or talk with our passengers. We have to reach for our phones

and risk our necks (and those of others) to get our fix. -John Comer

5. Show up ten minutes early for an appointment, without a phone

6. Get in the longest checkout line at the grocery store

7. Turn your smartphone into a dumbphone.

 Take email off your phone.

 Take all social media off your phone, transfer it to a desktop, and

schedule set times to check it each day or less.

 Delete all notifications, including those for texts.

 Set your phone so I have to unlock it, click on the text message box to

even see if I have any text messages.

 Limit or get rid of news alerts.

 Delete every single app you don’t need or that doesn’t make your life

easier. Set your phone to grayscale mode. This does something

neurobiologically that I’m not smart enough to explain, something to do

with decreasing dopamine addiction. Google it.

8. Get a flip phone, or ditch your cell phone all together.

9. Put your phone to bed before you and make it sleep in.

Put it in Airplane mode and in a drawer somewhere away from your room.

9:30 or some determined time

10. Keep your phone off until after your morning time with God.

75 percent of people sleep next to their phones, and 90 percent of us check

our phones immediately upon waking.

Meena Hart Duerson, “We’re Addicted to Our Phones: 84% Worldwide Say

They Couldn’t Go a Single Day Without Their Mobile Device in Their Hand,”

New York Daily News, August 16, 2012, www.nydailynews.com/life-

style/addicted-phones-84-worldwide-couldn-single-day-mobile-device-hand-

article-1.1137811; and Mary Gorges, “90 Percent of Young People Wake Up

with Their Smartphones,” Ragan, December 21, 2012, www.ragan.com/90-

percent-of-young-people-wake-up-with-their-smartphones.

11. Set times for emails

Pretty much every self-help writer, time-management guru, workplace-

efficiency expert, opinion blogger, etc. all say the same thing. Do not have email

on your phone. Do not glance at it when you get a free moment in the elevator

or in a boring meeting. Do not answer random emails throughout the day.

Instead: set a time to do email and stick to it.

Most experts recommend you do not check email more than twice a day, say

nine o’clock and four o’clock—at the beginning and near the end of your

workday. Each time, take your inbox to zero if you can. If there is a task, do not

leave it hanging in your email chain; get it onto a to-do list for later.

Certain apps can limit your time…

12. Set a time and a limit for social media (or just get off)

Same as email…

13. Kill your TV

TV and movies consume the lion’s share of our so-called free time. For the

average American, that is over five hours a day, or thirty-five hours a week.

(Note: it is lower for millennials, but that is only because we spend so much

time on social media. We are more addicted to entertainment, not less.)

It is the one addiction for which binging is still socially acceptable. People now

have “Netflix days,” where they blow an entire day (or weekend) on multiple

seasons of the latest streaming phenomenon.

Set a limit on your entertainment intake. You decide on your number. Two hours

a week? Four? Ten? Just set it well below the standard thirty-five.

14. Single Task

Only God is omnipresent, we inhabit a body. A body that can do only

one…thing…at…a…time. Multitasking is just sleight of hand for switching back

and forth between a lot of different tasks so I can do them all poorly instead of

doing one well.

Multitasking is the drive to be more than we are, to control more than we do,

to extend our power and our effectiveness. Such practice yields a divided self,

with full attention given to nothing. -John Comer

Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014), 67.

Learn to be present in the moment to God, other people, and your own soul.

15. Walk slower

One of the best ways to slow down your overall pace of life is to literally slow

down your body. Force yourself to move through the world at a relaxed pace.

16. Take a regular day alone for silence and solitude

17. Start Journaling

If you do not want to write keep a voice journal

18. Meditate

19. If you can, take long vacations

20. Cook your own food and eat in

21. Live Love and Laugh