Jonah 1:11 NIV
The sea was getting rougher and rougher. So
they asked him, "What should we do to you to make the sea calm down for
us?"
Have You Gone Too Far?
Recently I had to take a rental car back after a
trip to Los Angeles. I needed to return
it to the San Jose airport which is about a twenty minute drive from my
home. Before that though I discovered
from my son that my wife’s car needed to be taken to the mechanic so after
dropping it off, I headed to the airport.
No one in my family could drive my car because it is a manual
transmission and it was in the church parking lot. So it was up to my son to bring my wife to
the airport to come get me. For an hour
I waited for them to arrive. Growing
frustrated, I called my wife to find out what had happened to them, only to
discover that the hood of my son’s car had flown open while they were driving
on the freeway and because they could not figure out how to reattach the hood,
they were driving slowly back home, praying the hood would not bounce back up
onto the windshield again while they were in traffic. So what was I to do? It was easy, I would just call one of my
friends to come get me but I only had the numbers of three people in my phone
who I thought I could ask. One by one I
called each of them and every time, the person I called did not take the
call. So now what was I supposed to
do? The normal answer would be, “Just
solve the problem!”
What is your typical response to a difficult
problem? Do you just figure out what to
do? Do you make the best of things and not worry about the outcome? Are you a fretter? Do you try to find an expert and get
advice? Do you just quit when you aren’t
sure what to do? How do you respond
psychologically to the problems in life?
Are you most likely to take charge of the issue at hand or pretend as if
nothing is wrong? It is true that each
situation is different and sometimes we react one way and other times another
way. Yet we must admit that we probably
have a default setting when it comes to challenging situations; a way of
approaching them that is our usual pattern.
What is going to be suggested today is that we can go too far in how we
solve matters and when we do so we can be left psychologically exhausted.
What is meant by “psychologically exhausted”? This is the state when we find it nearly
impossible because of the lack of internal resources to cope emotionally in our
preferred manner. For example, rather
than feeling relaxed and peaceful, you can’t hold back your anger, depression
despair, anxiety and bitterness or even lust or moral limits. Like someone who is so tired from driving
that she cannot keep from falling asleep at the wheel, certain types of situations
become too big for you to handle the way you wish you could or would. You blow up at someone you really do
love. You develop a headache because of
anxiety levels you have reached. You lie
or act in ways morally incompatibly with your values or you give in to an
addiction you thought you were past or don’t show the sort of integrity you
think you should or believe you ought to maintain. There is a cause of psychological exhaustion
that is actually quite simple. We try to
do God’s work and it is too much for us to handle.
Here is a way of illustrating this that you may have
experienced personally or at least have known of happening. A person who is not a skilled swimmer wades
out into the ocean and suddenly a wave unexpectedly swells and sweeps that
person off his feet and he is caught in the undertow. Flailing wildly, the person tries desperately
to get his head above the water so he can get his breath. His heart is pounding, his mind is racing in
desperation and his eyes are frantically searching for the surface. If he does survive, he is left exhausted and
even traumatized. Spiritually it is like
that for you when you are not careful.
If you take away from God the work He alone is supposed to be doing, you
respond psychologically in similar ways to the panting and traumatized swimmer. We see examples of this mistake often in
scripture.
There is a strange detail in the account of Jesus’
crucifixion that although curious, rings true to human nature. Christ was hung on a cross and on either side
of him two criminals were also nailed to crosses. Two
other men, both criminals, were also led out with him to be executed. When they came to the place called the Skull,
there they crucified him, along with the criminals — one on his right, the
other on his left…One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him:
"Aren't you the Christ? Save yourself and us!" (Luke
23:32-33, 39 NIV) Isn’t this odd? One of the two men suffering the same fate as
Jesus, convulsing in terrible agony used that time to curse and mock
Jesus. His psychological pain was also
great and the way he managed it was by insulting Jesus. What had Jesus done to hurt this man? How had he earned the fellow’s wrath? Of course our Lord hadn’t done anything to
warrant the insults and rage. This was
the case of someone dealing with a circumstance much too big for him to
handle. The terrors of impending death,
the grief of a life wasted, the regrets of pain he caused others to suffer was
crashing down upon him and he was trying to cope with all this on his own. Unwilling to turn to God to carry him through
his pain, he was left, like a drowning man unable to swim, without the psychological
capacity to handle what he was facing and so the psychological reaction was to
become angry with someone who actually loved him.
We see something similar in the Old Testament. Unable to have children but determined to
figure out some way to provide a child for her husband, Sarah, without turning
to God for help and counsel, convinced her husband to take her servant girl and
try to father a child through her. We
know how well this went. Abraham was
successful and the slave Hagar eventually gave birth to his son. It was not quite as easy as Sarah imagined
seeing her servant pregnant with a child her husband fathered. When
she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress. Then Sarai said to Abram, "You are
responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my servant in your arms, and
now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between
you and me." "Your servant is
in your hands," Abram said. "Do with her whatever you think
best." Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her. (Genesis
16:4-6 NIV) Clearly Sarah’s jealousy was
egged on by Hagar but Sarah’s plan worked perfectly except that she was not
equipped psychologically to live with the consequences of her actions. Rather than turn to God for help regarding
her seeming infertility, she figured out things on her own and the result was
she became psychologically exhausted trying to do God’s work.
Jeremiah 2 gives us rich insight into the
difficulties we face solving all our problems without God. "My
people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living
water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”
(Jeremiah 2:13) The two sins are
clearly to God evil and deadly. The
people quit turning to God for help and then developed their own strategies for
solving their problems. We have come to
think as they did that getting along on your own is somehow noble and
courageous. But it is just the
opposite. It is foolish and
ruinous. On your own, all you have are
the psychological skills you have acquired in life. Some have quite a few and can manage well for
a while without God. Some have been so
damaged by the hardships they have faced that they have almost nothing in them
to keep their anger and depression and bitterness and jealousy at bay. Why do
we see suicide and drug abuse and violence and crippling depression? Without God carrying you through the troubles
of life, you may or may not have the psychological strength to protect you and
keep you at peace so you turn to your own brokenness to see you through. There is however another option to
independent living.
Consider the fascinating case study of Daniel who as
a believer in God, prayed three times a day.
When a law was instituted that demanded no one would be allowed to pray
to anyone other than the king for the next thirty days, Daniel coolly opened up
the shutters covering his windows and quite publically continued praying to the
Lord. When he was caught and brought
before the king, even though the king, who was desperate to try and save him
from his own law, fretted in despair, Daniel seemingly did not have a care in
the world and without comment bravely faced his sentence of being thrown into a
pit with ravenous lions. When the king heard this, he was greatly
distressed; he was determined to rescue Daniel and made every effort until
sundown to save him. Then the men went
as a group to the king and said to him, "Remember, O king, that according
to the law of the Medes and Persians no decree or edict that the king issues
can be changed." So the king gave
the order, and they brought Daniel and threw him into the lions' den. The king
said to Daniel, "May your God, whom you serve continually, rescue
you!" (Daniel 6:14-16 NIV)
Where did Daniel get his courage and peace to see him through his
trials? He went directly to God.
Jesus’ famous promise to give his people peace is
almost universally misunderstood in one important detail. Peace
I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives.
Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid. (John 14:27 NIV) Jesus is not offering to give you a reason to
have peace. He is pledging that the
peace He possesses Himself will be inserted into you when you accept it from
Him. Regardless of what you have learned or not learned in life, of however
many self-help books you have read or not read and however much confidence or
despair is in you, God’s peace will take over and put calmness in your
heart. Christ did not die on the cross
in order to give you strategies for having peace in your life. That would leave you with the same failure
rates of all other men or women who have tried to work out their problems on
their own. He died so that you might
have his own personality working inside you regardless of what you face each
and every day. Stop trying to figure everything
out on your own. Let God work out things
in you so that whatever challenges you face can be worked out through you.
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