Every so often I stumble across a book or a chapter of a book that I wish everyone could read and Your God Is Too Safe by Mark Buchanan is one of those books for me. This week I was reading Chapter Ten, Holding On To A Holy Must, and it not only had profound significance for my life but I also thought it very relevant to the lives of my church members and many of my friends and associates so I wrote it up into a sermon which I will preach at Chatswood Seventh-day Adventist Church tomorrow.
If you’re someone who finds yourself too busy or anxiously rushing about. If you already feel like you need a holiday and you’ve only just returned to work! 
Might I encourage you to Read More (as below) or watch the sermon on video when it’s uploaded, and discover the difference between a vacation and much needed holy days/a Jesus Christlike sense of time and timeliness and timelessness!
Sue Redman – January 10, 2009
Well I have to say it is very nice to be back with Chatswood Church. Are you all doing okay? How about our visitors? I’m not sure where you were the last three Sabbaths but I was with Macksville Church for the first two which was lovely; and then I was with Manly Beach last Sabbath which was also lovely; but nothing compares to coming home to Chatswood Church and in case you’ve forgotten church, I think you’re awesome and I praise God that we have yet another year together!
As for my being back at work, how many of you, like me, returned to work this week? And how many of you already feel like you need another holiday? I have to say I fit into that category – but not because of work. I came back to Sydney Thursday week back to help Kristie J with her wedding plans, and when she left for home on Wednesday morning, she was legitimately concerned I might collapse in a heap. That girl has so much energy and as much as my spirit was willing, I have to admit I had five seriously exhausting days going between bridal registries and bridal shops and fabric stores and dressmakers and in between times surfing the net so we were ready to shop once the stores reopened every morning. Sabbath was my only reprieve.
All this busyness reminded me of my vow at the end of last year to make 2009 different. At the end of last year I was reflecting on 2008 and I decided I wanted to spend my time and energy differently this year. I wanted even more room for God and others and my guess is that some of you would want the same. Life in Sydney, in Australia, it can be so busy, and just to make sure we’re all on the same page, I want to share a description of this kind of life that I found this week. It’s from Mark Buchanan’s book, Your God Is Too Safe, and although it’s written in an American context, see if you can relate . . .
Typical day: awaken after a rough sleep. Siren wails and cat yowls, hot entangling sheets, a dull ache in the bones, a sharp pain in the back, tumult in the belly, angst in the heart – all were a riptide keeping you, exhausted, from reaching the solid ground of sleep. It’s earlier than you want to get up. It’s later than you should have. The kids need to be roused, fed, dressed, sent off to school. Everyone is tired. Everyone is irritable. There’s not enough hot water for showers. Someone forgot to turn on the dishwasher last night. Lipstick-stained cups, smudged glasses, food-encrusted bowls – all need to be swished out beneath the tap, set on the table where they leave rings and puddles of wetness. Arguments erupt. Angry words are shouted. Things are hastily patched over and everyone scatters – the daily diaspora.
Driving to work, you notice your husband didn’t put gas in the car yesterday like you asked him to. You have to do it. At the gas station, you remember that you forgot to turn on the dishwasher again. You make a mental note to phone home after school and get one of the kids to do it. There’s a road crew slowing traffic on the route you drive, and you miss a light because you have to halt for a fire truck. You are running late, and your nerves, like string caught on the hub of a spinning wheel, wind to a choking tightness. Your muscles, like wet cloth wrung by strong hands, twist into heavy knots. And it’s not yet nine o’clock.
At work, you have three phone calls to return (two of them urgent), five emails requiring a response, a stack of paper you’ve been intending to get to all week, and a woman outside your office waiting to see you. You don’t recognise her but think you should, and you’re unsure if she made an appointment and you forgot it, or if she just arrived unannounced. Both possibilities annoy you. You get most of that sorted away, plus handle several other phone calls and emails and interruptions, and it’s almost lunch, and you still haven’t touched that stack of paper.
At lunch, mustard comes out the wrong seam of the little plastic packet and spatters over the front of your shirt. You rush into a clothing store and buy a new one. You put it on your VISA card because you’re low on cash and doubt a debit card will clear. You return to the office. The afternoon is like the morning, except you have even less strength and enthusiasm for it.
You arrive home weary. The only mail is a pizza flyer and a VISA bill. Opening the bill, you are deflated: You had forgotten about the $350 brake job you charged last month. You order a pizza from the flyer because you’re too tired to cook. You put it on VISA. Only when you go to set the table for dinner do you realise that you forgot to make your phone call: The dishwasher has still not been run. More swishing of plates, glasses, forks.
You eat quickly because your son has soccer practice and your older daughter has youth group and you have to drive them both. You have a meeting at seven. You hope, against reason, that it will end by eight-thirty so that you can pick up your daughter at church without making her wait and the youth pastor wait with her. At the meeting, you are so obsessed with watching the clock that you can’t focus on the business at hand. You get more and more irritated at Sally’s shambling, mawkish stories and George’s bulldog fierceness and Harry’s slippery persuasion and Betty’s “I think we shoulds” and Larry’s pretentious otherworldliness and his monomaniacal question, “Have we prayed enough about this?” Inside you feel the fruits of the Spirit, one by one, shrivel and drop off the branch, pushed out by their oppositeness: loathing, sourness, worry, impatience, rudeness, rottenness, faithlessness, gruffness, wildness.
The meeting goes to nearly nine. You rush out, gravel flying scattershot beneath your spinning wheels (did you just hear the ping of rocks hitting Larry’s car?) and arrive at 9.08 to pick up your daughter. Neither she nor the youth pastor are pleased. You drive home in silence because your daughter refuses to speak to you, and you are too angry and prideful and weary to apologise. You had planned to read a bit before bed, but you’re too spent for that. You get into bed, and though your body has a corpselike stiffness and heaviness to it, some angst in you, along with the cup of coffee you had at the meeting, keeps plucking you from sleep. Twice you have to get up, once to check for a file you need to take to work tomorrow, once to let the cat out. When morning comes, you can’t remember ever getting sleep, though the alarm wakes you with an abruptness like a coronary. You begin all over again. (1)
Typical day. Did anyone relate? If you didn’t feel like a holiday before, do you feel like one now?!
What I find most interesting about where Buchanan goes with his description of a typical day, is he says that holidays or holy days, not vacations are the answer. The answer to our busyness is not in evacuating, vacating, a vacancy, a vacuity, an interval to flee, escape, avoid real life for a while. “Mere vacations are just that,” he says, “an emptying that often leaves us empty, a reprieve that brings short-term relief but no lasting refreshment.” Our need is much deeper. We need more holidays or holy days; “a Christlike sense of time and timeliness and timelessness.” (2)
When we stop to think about all that Jesus set out to achieve in His three short years of ministry, it is seriously overwhelming. Announce the arrival of the new Kingdom. Restore and redefine the hope of Israel. Enact salvation for the whole world. Cast out demons. Heal the sick. Raise the dead. Gather and train people to carry on His work once He had returned to heaven. (3) If ever there was urgency, it was in the work of Jesus Christ, and yet Jesus carried out His work with calm. You might like to open your Bibles with me to see what I’m talking about. We are going to start with Matthew 9:18-26. Matthew 9:18-26,
“While he was saying these things to them, suddenly a leader of the synagogue came in and knelt before him, saying, ‘My daughter has just died; but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.’ And Jesus got up and followed him, with his disciples. Then suddenly a woman who had been suffering from haemorrhages for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, for she said to herself, ‘If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.’ Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, ‘Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.’ And instantly the woman was made well. When Jesus came to the leader’s house and saw the flute players and the crowd making a commotion, he said, ‘Go away; for the girl is not dead but sleeping.’ And they laughed at him. But when the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took her by the hand, and the girl got up.”
Are you seeing calm? Jesus responded to the needs of others but He didn’t get caught up in their anxiety. (4) He even stopped to heal the bleeding woman on the way to raising Jairus’ daughter from the dead. Let’s turn now to Mark 1:35-39. Mark 1:35-39,
“In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’ He answered, ‘Let us go on to the neighbouring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came to do.’ And He went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting our demons.”
Again, are you seeing calm? The disciples thought Jesus would want to respond to the crowds but because Jesus knew He needed to be somewhere else, He literally walked away from their demands and expectations guilt free. (5) What about Matthew 8:23-27? Let’s read Matthew 8:23-27,
“And when he got into the boat, his disciples followed him. A windstorm arose on the sea, so great that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but he was asleep. And they went and woke him up, saying, ‘Lord, save us! We are perishing!’ And he said to them, ‘Why are you afraid, you of little faith?’ Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a dead calm. They were amazed, saying, ‘What sort of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?’”
The sort of man this is is the Saviour of the world. Sure He could get tired but He could also sleep anywhere. (6) Jesus Christ, the man of ultimate destiny, the One who came to this earth pursuing a cosmic goal, had anything but the anxious rushing about kind of life that we often have. Jesus Christ, the One in whose likeness we are born and in whose likeness we have been restored, lived life as if it was completely His own; as if He was free to give to whomever He pleased, however He pleased, whenever He pleased. Or not to. Can you imagine your boss asking you to do something by lunch time and you saying, “The right time for me has not yet come.”? (John 7:6) What about if someone asked me to take a funeral and I said, “Let the dead bury the dead.”? (Matthew 8:22) (7)
That was Jesus, Buchanan says, “vigorous yet relaxed, clear-eyed yet dream-filled, purposeful but not driven. He was active, productive, and diligent, but never busy. A blind man hollering at the roadside could receive His compassion and provision. But John the Baptist – the “greatest in the kingdom of heaven” – could languish in prison, listening to the scrape of the axe being sharpened in the next room, and receive barely a greeting card from Him. Jesus’ life was His own to take up and lay down as He chose . . . And He accomplished a work that forever changed heaven, hell and earth. And you.” (8)
“At the heart of Jesus ministry,” Buchanan says, “was a holy must. He must go through Samaria. He must go to Jerusalem. He must suffer. Everything [Jesus Christ] did or refused to do centred around that,” and this is the thought that I bring to you today. Knowing what we must do is what will save us from mindless busyness. Knowing what we must do is what will free us from anxiously rushing about. People are not too busy today because they know what they must do; they are too busy because they don’t know what they must do. (9)
The irony is that it’s easier to stay that way. It’s actually easier to continue with mindless busyness and anxious rushing about than it is to ask the big questions; to surrender to Jesus Christ Himself and allow Him to tell us what we must do. But if we do continue as is; if we continue to fill our lives with things we don’t know we must do, then sooner or later a gnawing emptiness is going to raise its ugly head. Sooner or later we will be forced to acknowledge that we have nothing at our core. Our life has no centre. There is no pleasure or depth of meaning in our busyness. (10)
I don’t know if any of you have already experienced this. I don’t know if you, like me, got to the end of last year and decided that even seemingly selfless busyness can prevent you from living the life to which you have been called, but I want to challenge everyone with the apostle Paul’s holy must this morning, a single sentence recorded in Philippians 1:21. “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain,” Paul says. And he goes on to say, “. . . forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:13b-14) “I take hold of that for which I was taken hold of by Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:12b). (11)
I take hold of that for which I was taken hold of by Christ Jesus. What is that for which you were taken hold of by Christ Jesus? Why did Jesus take hold of you? If you can answer that question you will be able to discern what it is that you must and must not do in 2009. (12) If you can answer that question you will be freed from the mindless busyness and anxious rushing about that so many people are slaves to and you will live as Christ lived; with the freedom to give to whomever He pleases, however He pleases, whenever He pleases.
Need a holiday? Make every day a holy day I say! Surrender to Jesus Christ every day this year and you will come to live out His sense of time and timeliness and timelessness, and you will achieve everything that He has called you to achieve.
Endnotes
(1) Mark Buchanan, Your God Is Too Safe (Multnomah Publishers, 2001): pp 98-100
(2) Ibid, pp 100-101
(3) Ibid, p 101
(4) Ibid
(5) Ibid
(6) Ibid
(7) Ibid, pp 102-103
(8) Ibid, p 103
(9) Ibid, p 104
(10) Ibid, p 105
(11) Ibid, p 106
(12) Ibid, p 106
