Work life balance is important to stay connected to God.

Video: 00:00 -- introductory video playing --

Pastor Tim: 00:22 What is up cornerstone? How are we doing? It's good to see you. I missed you. It's good to be back. Great to see you guys again. Welcome to Office. This is, right?. You don't know this but really Linn is a whole lot like Dwight. Um, don't tell him I said that. Not really. Um, hey, we're in this really cool series man, called The Office and this is .... I need to help with a couple of things on this upfront. I was supposed to end this series. So everything that you're about to hear today is the book end. Like everything I'm about to tell you is supposed to be told to you four weeks from now. So the conversation that we're about to have didn't happen, but it will four weeks from now. So if you can get your mind around that. Linn just got back from Israel and is like sick as a dog and so we were like, please don't throw up on everything and I'll give you what I was going to give you then. And I was like, Linn, that's a bad idea. He goes, I know. So I need you to do it. So this is so just as we're hearing this, as we're walking through this, just pretend that we've already been talking for four weeks and you've already heard all this really good stuff and all this really smart, logical stuff and now you got me for the next few minutes. So kind of get that in place.

Pastor Tim: 01:29 And then two, the other side of this, um, please understand this. Everything that we're about to say, that this entire conversation from start to finish, all of this, I have no clue how to do. Everything I'm going to tell you to do sounds really good on paper and I'm doing a terrible job of it in real life. And that's just being honest. I am horrible about the advice I'm about to give you, which is really smart and you should do it even though I'm not. So just kind of embrace that and I don't know if that means you're going to listen or not. I don't know where that takes us, but this is what we're doing. We're, we're in this series called The Office and it's this, this idea of us taking and maybe being better at how we do life in the office and do life in the workplace. It's helping us find purpose in our workspaces, so I mean if you're in Scottsdale or wherever you're at watching online, you get that this is something that covers all of us and tell me this isn't true in your workplaces. Every workplace has. I call it the curve killer. This was the dude in college that worked so hard that you didn't get the curve and got a bad grade because they did so well. Every workplace has that person and don't point at them if they're sitting beside you because they'll probably be your boss someday you're going to get fired. But they have that person that works so hard and they just never stop and it's... But they're there 45 minutes before the place opens and they're there six hours after the place closes and they work through their lunch and they work through their birthday and they work through Christmas and they worked through every day that they're not supposed to work and it's closed on Saturday, but they're there for 14 hours because they're so dedicated. We all have those people. Today I want to invite you to do something different with work because there's a part of work that's very important and it sounds contradictory. So as we walk through this, just know this, what we, what we're going to talk about today is going to sound like it contradicts a little bit and just stay with me because I don't think it does.

Pastor Tim: 03:14 It's going to sound like it does, but then too, I think if we could do this, it's going to make us better at what we do and we're going to find purpose in our workplace. So before we jump into this, take a breath. You never get told this at church, man, relax. Those seats are comfortable. Some of them will lean back because they're like little loose, you can almost recline, so just stretch out a little bit to do that thing that you do at the movies where you fight for the armrest, get the armrest close to you, whichever one you want, and if they give you a dirty look, it's church. They can't get mad. Get the good arm rest and just relax for a minute. Breathe. What we're going to talk about is "resting" today, 'cause resting is so important that there's a biblical term for resting and it's kind of a weird word and most of us don't use it in conversation. Um, the Bible calls resting Sabbath and it's the art of taking time out to reflect, to remember and to reconnect. It's the art of, of remembering what God is doing and it's the art of resting. And today I'm going to invite you to rest, which is weird, right? At church. Sleep if you want to, I don't care. Do it, rest, for just a minute. As we do this, let me tell you what resting and what the Sabbath means biblically. Resting is not you taking a nap, it's you reconnecting with God. Resting isn't you taking a nap. It's you reconnecting with God. If you've got your Bible, jump with me to exodus when we're going to do this two ways because we're going to talk about resting in our workplace and then we're also gonna talk about resting spiritually.

Pastor Tim: 04:46 Now resting in your workplace. You need to understand. I remember early on in life somebody told me the perfect way to take a nap at work and I want to share that with you because some of you might need this, that your jobs. If you sit backwards on a toilet facing the bowl, put your arms on the top. It's supposedly takes 15 minutes for the blood to run out of your arms and make your arms fall asleep, which will wake you up and that sensation, the tingling will wake you up, and it's a 15 minute perfect nap. It just looks really weird. So do that with what you will and let's go to Exodus. Some of you are like ... never mind. Let's jump Exodus 20. I want you to see where rest comes into play or where this word Sabbath, where we get it and kind of what it's supposed to mean, what it looks like, and this is resting in our work area.

Pastor Tim: 05:26 So exodus 20, starting in verse eight, it's in smack in the middle, and I love where this is located. It's right in the middle of this list of what we call the Ten Commandments. It's right in the middle of this list that, that God gave Moses to send down to the Israelites. I was like, hey, whatever you do, do these things. Don't do these things. Make sure that you do this. Make sure that you don't do this. Oh, and then right smack dab in the middle of it God says this, verse eight, "Remember the Sabbath Day by keeping it holy, six days you shall labor and do your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not work, neither you nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male, female servants, nor your animals, nor any foreigners residing in your towns for in six days. The Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath Day and made it holy." Let me ask you something about how, how is your rest? And before you send that text to your boss where you're like, hey, I was at church and the dude just told me I gotta rest, before you hit send on that, resting isn't napping, it's reconnecting. How is your rest at work right now?

Pastor Tim: 06:41 Many of us have trouble resting at work because we're distracted by things that aren't working. There's so much going on that we've got to get done and there's also things that we need to do. Um, that we try to find, you know, some fulfillment and we try to connect in different ways, but we have all these jobs that we have to get done. There's so much that we do here, but we can't do that because I hadn't, I don't even know what's happening on Facebook. Like I don't know what's happening back home, but I'm sure there's something. And I know this dude just got a dog or something that's going to be just like a hot dog, so I need to see that and we get sucked into that vortex of Facebook. Or maybe, I don't know, maybe it's not Facebook. Maybe you're like me and your four seasons behind on Walking Dead and you're so afraid of going to the workplace and somebody telling you who died and now you're stuck and you're like, no, how did he die? And then it just ruins it for you. So you've got to get caught up. And now I got 14 hours of television that I've got to a watch and that interferes with my work.

Pastor Tim: 07:31 I don't know, maybe you're a Gamer, maybe Fortnight is where you're at right now. And You keep the van, you're dying every single time at 15th place and you're like, dude, I got to at least get the top five and if I just do this, I just need more practice. And that's cutting into your work life. I think the problem with those resting at work sometimes is we're distracted by things that really aren't that important. So maybe there's some things in our work life that we should stop doing so that we can have time at the end of our work day to rest. Remember, resting isn't you taking a nap. Resting is you reconnecting with who god is and this is helping us find purpose in our workplace. And I hope you see this because resting and work really go hand in hand for you to work to the best of your ability, for you to do everything that God has built you to do. Mentally we have to have that moment where we recharge, where we stop and we allow our minds to calm and we we, we just slow down. We, we slow our and this is big -- we slow our pace. Too many of us I think are not only burning the candle at both ends, but dude, we got wicks in the middle and all along the way and that thing is just a bonfire and it's burning up so quick and I don't know if this is you but when I'm, my pace is too fast I don't have peace and I'm begin to worry and I begin to stress and I begin to work so hard. And then I try to work harder and it's just not working, so I try to work harder and I don't know if you've noticed this, but our mind is so powerful and there's things that we think about that, that are future that we haven't even done yet, but there's things that we think about and because of the power of our mind, we experience the pain and the anxiety of those things before they ever take place, you with me? You have a meeting on Wednesday that you're really scared about and you can already feel all the anxiety. Some of it's the anger. You already know what you're going to say in those conversations and you don't even know what they're going to say, but you already have your in conversation planned out and our mind has worked us through all of that and we're three days away from the conversation. Maybe we should just rest for a moment.

Pastor Tim: 09:32 What would your job look like if you just did these three things in resting and in the sabbath, if you rested, if you reflected and you reconnected? What, what would it look like if just in your workplace if you rested for a moment, if you took time, if you took space? Not on the job, I'm not saying that you take..., and remember resting isn't napping, it's reconnecting with God. If you took time from your job, you worked hard, and then at the end of the day you separated that from the rest of your life and you rested and during that rest you took time to reconnect with God. You remembered some of the things that God did. Maybe that day in the workplace. One of my favorite things here during staff meeting, I don't know if you know this, but the way that we kick our staff meetings off is we reconnect. We reflect on what God's done. We sit there around a circle of, I don't know, 60 or 70 of us and we talk about places that we've seen God work and it's all stories of you. It's stories of Scottsdale. It's stories of San Tan, stories of you and things that you did, things that God has done through you here and it reminds us and it gives us a chance to reflect and to remember who God is and we reconnect with God through that. What if, what if resting put purpose back into your work?

Pastor Tim: 10:55 Long time ago, and I know this is true because I found it on the Internet, in an insane asylum before a patient was allowed to leave, but this was before standardizing testing and this is way back in the day, before a patient was allowed to leave they would walk them down a long corridor and they would put him in a broom closet and they would go in the broom closet and they would go to a sink and they would turn the water up just as high as it would go and they would put a stopper in the sink and they would hand to the patient, they would hand the person a mop and then they would leave and they would shut them in the room and they would come back 15 minutes later and they would look. And when they open the door, if they opened it and the person inside the room is mopping the floor, then they know that the person isn't ready to go yet because at the end of 15 minutes, if they haven't had the common sense to go to the sink and unplug the drain so that the water runs out they know that when they let him ..., man, when the person gets back into society and gets back into the real world, that they're just going to spend their entire life mopping the floor and they're just going to constantly stay busy. I think there's too many of us mopping the floor and it feels like the sink is just never going to stop, man, because there's always water coming. There's always something to do. There's always one more thing and I don't know what your work, what your life looks like. But I know by the time I wake up from the alarm to shower to breakfast to the time I get to my car, there's like 30 things that have been added to my list of what I've got to get done in the day. I got a dog that threw up some kid that threw up somewhere, something broke, the microwave on fire. There's so many things that I've gotta fix by just the bed to my car. Man, it feels like I'm in this perpetual state of just mopping the floor. And when we do this, there's two things that happen. One we can just mop the floor forever and life becomes so burdensome and there's no rest in this because all you're doing is mopping the floor and you wake up and there's always more to do. And it doesn't matter how much you've done in the day. It doesn't matter if you pull the 16 hour day, 17 hour day, doesn't matter if you pull a 27 hour day, there are still things for you to do and you're stuck mopping the floor.

Pastor Tim: 12:57 Or you can just quit. You can just give up because mopping the floor, dude that's, that's too much work. It's just not worth it. You can just give up and stop and I'm not talking physical, I'm talking more spiritual. You can... So let let this soak in because I think this goes both ways. Spiritually are you mopping the floor? You see mopping the floor is dangerous because what it does is it leads to moralism and then moralism leads to legalism and then legalism it leads to self righteousness and before long you find yourself judging other people who aren't mopping as hard as you and the Bible is full of it. The Bible is full of constant stories about people who realize that they were just dripping, soaking wet in their sin and they went to God for help and instead of finding it, most of the time there were people in mopping the floor spiritually.

Pastor Tim: 14:03 How's your rest? Luckily Jesus spoke into this and it's almost, it's almost like a flare. It's almost like God knew that we were going to need this and that's why he throws up this flare gun of hope for it because there is something that we have to do to get past and he knew that, man, grab your bibles and go with me to Matthew. In Matthew Chapter 11 there's this moment that Matthew records for us in a conversation that Jesus is having with his friends were he encourages them to rest and think, think how powerful this is. God knows that his time here is limited. He knows that things are about to come up and it's about to get really hectic and instead of telling them to work more and to work harder, there's a moment where he encourages them to rest and he encourages them to change their pace, and we will never experience piece if we don't adjust our pace.

Pastor Tim: 14:59 In Matthew 11, starting in Verse 28, there's this, there's this amazing end to a conversation and Jesus has just talked to his friends about some things and he finishes the conversation in verse 28 where he says this. He says, "Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest." Now, this is a great invitation. This is Jesus saying, "Hey, I know that life is going to get hectic. I know that the pace is going to, it's going to pick up and there's going to be so many things that you have to do and there's so much that has to get done and I realize that work is important and you have to climb that next ladder because you've got to have that bigger house or you've got to have that nicer thing, and I know that all those things are important, but that's not a sustainable pace and it's just mopping the floor."

Pastor Tim: 15:41 So Jesus invites us into something and I love his invitation. He says, "Come to me, all of you who are weary and heavy burdened," and I love, I love that because what he's saying then is he's says, "I know that the burden is heavy. I know that the things in your life or heavy, I know that there's weight that's holding you down and I don't want you to pretend that that's not there. Instead, I want you to bring those with you and come to me. I'm inviting you on this invitation of coming to me and bring that with you and if you'll bring all the trash and if you'll bring all the mop and you'll bring it to me, you can find rest." Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden. I will give you rest. Verse 29, "Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light." Let me help with something on this because this is, this yoke stuff is a little bit weird for us. Some of you all think you're yoked because you'd been at the gym for a week and that's not the yoke he's talking about. He's it's different yoke. This is, this was a farm implement. This yoke would've been great if you were a farmer thousands of years ago. This having a yoke and knowing the importance of a yoke was crazy important because we didn't have tractors and so a yoke, man, brought so much value and it saved you so much money, so a yoke what it would do was it bound to animals together and it basically was a large piece of wood that you would put across a harness that would hold two animals together and the importance of it was was this, and it was so great if you were a farmer because it saved you a ton of money because if you had a yoke, all you had to purchase was one really strong, smart animal. You'd get one really strong, smart, strong bull joke that really smart, strong animal with a very young dumb animal and the smart, strong animal would control that pace because of the yoke. You see the small dumb animal, man, it gets this crazy pace. It's trying to go ahead and trying to do all this stuff and it's trying to mop the floor and you can mop the floor until the Cowboys win the... well never mind, it's never going to happen. You can, you can, you can mop the floor for awhile, or Jesus throws in a third option here. He throws in this, this loophole, he throws in a third conversation behind it. You can mop the floor or you can pull the plug. You can come to me all you who are weary and heavy burdened and let me give you rest and you can take my yoke. You see the yoke on the animal, the stronger animal would control the smaller animal. As the smaller animal will try to pull away the yolk and the stronger animal would be able to control that pace and it would be able to get the work of two big animals because of the one smart, strong animal. And God is saying, man, I get it, I get that your pace is hectic, I get that you have so much that you have to do that you can't take a break. And I know that feeling, man. Trust me. I know that feeling of thinking. I have all of these things that I have to do. How can I stop and take a break? How can I stop and rest? But remember, rest isn't, it's not napping, rest is you reflecting on who God is and as you reconnecting with God.

Pastor Tim: 18:44 I don't know if you've picked up on this, but God has, man, God's already done a ton this morning just to get your attention. He's at work around us in so many ways and he's doing so many things around us just to try to get your attention and there's so many things that he wants to show you so that you can trust him with this rest. But there's so many things that are happening around us. This morning, which I missed a ton of these because I, I hate morning. Um, but this morning, man, the sun's, the sunrise, holy cow that was beautiful. It didn't have to be. I think God did that just as a moment of just, hey, don't forget that I'm out here. Man, watching little kids running around. Little kids are funny. They do some really weird stuff and if you don't get angry with him, it's usually pretty funny and I think God allows stuff like that to happen. It's just a moment to re remember, remember who he is. Too many of us though, we get in this moment where we, we, we say we trust God and we say that we're trusting this joke and we say that we're going to control his pace, but we really haven't.

Pastor Tim: 19:55 Not catching it, let me see if this helps. Um, about six months ago, this is a horrible idea. About six months ago I decided to teach my son how to drive. He was turning 16 in January and I was trying to figure out, you know, I got to teach him how to drive because he's going to be a man and that's what we do and we got to figure that out. And so I'm trying to teach him how to drive and I've got to... I'm kind of a redneck, so I've got a truck that's a little bit bigger than it's supposed to be. Um, and really you don't, you don't drive it. You just kind of pointed the direction and hope that it goes there with you. Um, and that's what we were driving, which again, now I'm thinking back, that was another step to a really bad idea in this conversation. I tell him that we're going to go driving. I'll walk into our living room. My son's playing Mario Kart and I'm like, "Son, what are you doing? I thought we were going to go."

Pastor Tim: 20:42 And he's like, "Yeah, Dad, um, I'm practicing," which again, hindsight, I'm thinking that should have been the thing that told me this is a really bad idea.

Pastor Tim: 20:42 "Practicing for what?"

Pastor Tim: 20:42 "Well, we're going to go driving later."

Pastor Tim: 20:50 "Yeah, but what are you practicing?" And then I hit me once we were in the car together. The thing that's so crazy about teaching someone how to drive is you're in the other seat and you don't have any control and you can't really reach your leg over to hit the pedals. And there's moments as we were driving and we're driving through the residentials at my house, which again, saying that out loud, that was a horrible idea but was a little bit later at night so there wasn't any traffic, no cars or anything. We're driving through and dude, this was nuts. Were driving up to a 90 degree turn and I'm telling my son, I was like, dude, you gotta brake. And in his mind when I said brake he thought that was accelerate. So the gas goes a little bit more and I'm like, "No, you got to brake," and at this point I'm getting a little frantic with him cause we're about to make a drive in. And I'm like, "Son you, you have got to brake," and he's not slowing down. And we get closer to it, and I'm trying to figure out do I jump and bail? Stop, drop and roll, like what's next? And we're getting closer to the intersection. I'm like, "Son, you've got to brake!" And I'm yelling and my voice is getting louder because we all know if we just yell and make more noise that it helps the situation out. So I'm screaming at my son at this point, "Son, you've got to brake, you got break!" And this is no lie, my son hits the turn and all I hear is this [screech], OK? The boy hits the turn and luckily praise God, we didn't hit a house and I get him to stop the car and we begin to have this very important conversation as men, which was basically this: You never say "we" when we're driving ever again. I don't care. He was having a blast driving the car. I laid an egg siting in the passenger seat.

Pastor Tim: 22:33 I wonder if God is having fun driving the car. Stay with me, and we're sitting in the driver's seat going, "Hey, what are you doing? Can you slow down? God you got to slow down. What, what, what are you thinking right now? Do you not see what's coming up ahead? And we're sitting in the passenger seat trying to tell God who not only invented the car, but invented the road and invented everything in front of us and not only knows what's happening in this moment, but knows every step that we can't even see yet, and we're sitting in the passenger seat trying to control what he's doing and I don't know if this is you, but it's mopping the floor and it gets so tiring and it's so frustrating.

Pastor Tim: 23:16 How's your rest? Let me ask you this. When was the last time that, gee, you reflected on some things that God's done? You just stopped for a second and you remember some of the times that God showed up in your life and not just remembered it, but you verbalized that. You told people around you, you've got your family, your friends together, and you're just like, "Hey, do you remember this last year? Dude, that was nuts. Do you remember that moment that we baptized like 400 and something people on a Sunday? Just totally. That was crazy when God did that. Do you remember when this happened? Do you remember when and we..."

Pastor Tim: 23:56 Sabbath, we rest, we recharge who we are, and when we, when we rest and we reflect, it allows us an opportunity to reconnect to who God is, and when we, when we reconnect to who god is, it puts purpose back in our workplace. And I get some of this, some of this may seem sketchy to you because you're, "Tim, you don't understand. God wouldn't want to be yoked next to me because if I took all of my junk and I brought that to God and I set it down there, dude, he wouldn't want, he wouldn't want me..." I hope you see this. Man, it's beautifully in verse 29 when he says, take my yoke and learn from me, he says, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. He's basically saying, you don't have to pretend When you come to me, you can come to me with all your junk. You can come to me with all your doubts. You can come to me with all your anger, with all your pain, with all the trash that's in your life, you can bring that to me and you can give it to me and you're going to find rest. Cause this beautiful exchange happens when we give God our junk. He gives us back a piece and when we allow him to control our pace, we find rest. And some of you today need to find the rest because it's not found in the temporary things that we look for. There's no peace in that.

Pastor Tim: 25:24 When did they give you something tangible maybe to take home, I don't know, that would help you find rest this week? There's three of them and I don't know why there's three. That's when I was in school. They said they always had to be three. So, um, I'm sure there's more. I just went with three, three things to hopefully find rest and to make us better at having a Sabbath. When is this and how can you plan this week to make sure you rest one day? How can you plan this week to make sure that you rest? Well what I've learned about life is if you don't plan for things to happen, they really don't happen. You have to put, put action behind it. Um, many of us got gym memberships around January first. Y'all still ain't been and that's okay because I haven't either, but it's because we didn't plan in the day when it's going to happen. When could you plan inside of the day this week? When could you, when could you do that?

Pastor Tim: 26:14 The second one is this: what is the common argument that you use to talk yourself out of resting? When you try to come up with a moment to rest, what is the common excuse or the common argument that you battle mentally with us that this is why I can't rest. What is that? And then what do you need to do to remind yourself that you're just making an excuse in that moment? What can you do in that moment to remind yourself of, hey, no, this was just an excuse, and find peace and find rest?

Pastor Tim: 26:45 Third one is, is this, and this is, this is huge. What is one thing you need to start doing or stop doing to make room for a weekly Sabboth in your life? If you were to stop for just a second, and I want to give you space to do that because this is, this is a moment of Sabboth for us where we're resting together as a family and hopefully we're reflecting on some things that God's done and hopefully by the time our time here is finished, that we've reconnected with who God is and when we walk out of this place unfortunately the busy-ness and everything that's out there is still waiting on us. So what if we took just the moment right now? What if we had space in our life right now to just pause for a second and to think through what we're doing? What are some things that we're doing that we could probably stop doing that would give us freedom to rest? Remember, it's not napping, it's reconnecting. What are some things that we should start doing? Are there things that we should be putting into our life that would give us moments to rest? Can I say this from firsthand? if you're not resting spiritually right now because you're worried about God accepting you, you're just mopping the floor and life for you probably is burdensome and it's probably really tired because you're trying to show God that you're worthy of his rest and you don't have to show him that because he gave it to you free and you don't have to show him that you're worthy of his rest because he looks at you and he says, "Yeah, you know you're not so let me be worthy for you." And this beautiful exchange happens where he takes the things that you're holding onto that you think are too bad for him and he gives you peace and mercy and rest. What would your life look like if you saved out time to rest and found purpose in your work?

Pastor Tim: 28:53 Let me pray for us. God thank you, thank you for today. Jesus I thank you for grace. In this moment God would you just allow us just a second to rest, God, to let the anxiety and all the things that we're worried about just to slip back and then move away and God in this moment that we would just sit here and we would reflect on some of the things that you've done. God, would you, would you allow us and just remind us of some of the moments that you've showed up in our lives and maybe it's subtle God, maybe there's a parking spot in front of a store and maybe it was a, I don't know, a raise. Maybe it was, I don't know, There's so many different things. God, would you remind us of those moments where you showed up and would you help us to reconnect with who you are and God, when work starts back in place, would you help us find purpose in our work because we're walking into that fully rested because we've reconnected with you. And God as I'm saying these things, man, would you forgive me for not doing any of this? God, would you help me to trust you more? God, would you help us to walk out of this place today and find rest and in doing so, God help us to remember and reconnect to you and thank you God for this not being about me and for you putting rest in the cycle because you knew I would need it. God would you, would you do this because of who you are? Give us rest this week. Jesus, in your name. Amen.



Recorded in Chandler, Arizona.