Burned Out And Broken

Good morning church, it is so good to be with you all. My name is JJ and I’m the lead pastor over at Center Church. We are your closest sister church in the Zero Collective. As I’m sure you guys are starting to get familiar - Zero Collective is a network of churches sold out on the mission of making sure zero lives are unchanged by Jesus, and for a long time there have been four sister churches. Frontline is the biggest sister - over on plainfield, then Story with Pastor Kyle up in Comstock Park - that’s not too far either. New Life way down in Wayland and then Center Church - We are down in Byron Center. And I am just so excited to be with you this morning as we continue our series called White Noise. Jeremy did a great job getting us started last week - giving a little primer on Elijah, I love the use of technology, the ability to connect even when people are sick or out of town or whatever.  Now we don’t know one another very much, and so I thought I’d start by telling you a bit about myself. First thing to know, sort of the big news around my house is that my wife and I are expecting! Yes, we have a little bundle of joy coming in January. Yes, expecting for the 6th time. [Pause]. Not usually as much enthusiasm for that. No, but my wife and I have four beautiful boys, one little girl and we just found out that the new baby will be a [girl?]. They are ten, 8, 6, 4, 2 and zero years old - I think they have names too, but I forget. [throw up picture of the family]. Now, one of my children’s favorite things in the world is picking berries. And we hit them all. We do strawberries and then blueberries, we love picking cherries, and then in the fall we’ve just got to do some apple picking. We LOVE going out and picking things as a family event. We make a day of it - we do the U-pick, the older boys we give a bucket and challenge them, “hey, who can pick more blueberries?” And the little ones - well, they’re just going to eat everything. [picture of kid eating berries]. Now this past year, the picking wasn’t great. The season came really fast, and surprised some of the farmers - a lot of the U-Pick places were closed - but a few years ago my wife and kids went out and picked blueberries, while I was at work. I can’t remember what I was doing, but I missed out for some reason. And they picked an insane amount of blueberries - I can’t remember how much it was, like 10 pounds or 20 pounds or something crazy. All I remember was coming home and opening up the fridge and noticing that basically an entire shelf was dedicated to these blueberries. And so we put blueberries in everything. Blueberry muffins, blueberries in smoothies, blueberry pancakes, and then just eating them by the handful. But here’s the problem - after a week or two, even with 5 kids eating them at pretty much every meal - they start to get wrinkled, right? And a few years ago, when I came home to the wall of blueberries in my fridge - despite the valiant efforts of my children, we had a LOT of wrinkly blueberries. And while a fresh blueberry is a gift from God - delicious, smooth skin, burst of tart flavor when you bite into them - but is there ANYTHING nastier than a wrinkled blueberry? Ugh, it’s disgusting! Tastes like an afterthought, feels like a mistake. 

And there’s a great word for this process - we say the blueberry WITHERED. Isn’t that word brilliant? Withered. And I think for a lot of us - there are moments in life where that describes how WE feel. Have you ever felt withered? It’s that moment when you just had a whole summer of vacation, or labor day vacation - but for some reason you don’t feel refreshed. It’s almost like you needed a vacation for your vacation. Or it’s that moment when school has only just started and you already need a break. It’s when you look at the to do list - the dreams you want to accomplish and instead of filling you with joy, it fills you with exhaustion. Burnt out. Running on fumes, barely able to make it through another day. Withered like a blueberry. If you feel that way today, or if you’ve ever felt that way before - that is EXACTLY how we find Elijah in our scripture reading for today. If you want to grab your bibles, we’re going to be in 1 Kings, chapter 19. I’m using the New Living Translation - there’s lots of good ones, but if you’ve got it on your phone - you can toggle it to NLT and it will match the words exactly. 

Scripture

Now imagine this with me, this is in chapter 19, verse 3, [read v.3-4]. He’s terrified, exhausted, is literally praying to God that he would die, and then jumping down to verse 10, he climbs up Mount Sinai and starts shouting at God [read v.10-14]. And it’s such an intense scene. One of the greatest and most famous prophets of the old testament, burnt out, on the edge of exhaustion, standing on a mountain with his cloak wrapped around his head - shouting at God. But how did we get here? This scene of Elijah shouting into the wind and the earthquake and the fire and then finally coming into contact with God in the whisper - this is one of the most famous scenes of God coming close to a person in prayer, and we’re going to unpack this scene over the course of this series, but first, to get us started, we need to ask - How did we even get to this point? What led to Elijah’s breakdown? What caused his soul to wither? In order to understand the shouting we have to rewind a few chapters - and set the scene. 

So if we go back just a few pages - chapter 17, we’ve got this prophet Elijah. Now some people get a little mixed up and think that prophets are about predicting the future - but that’s not true. Prophets are the mouthpiece of God. Their job was very simple - when God had a message for his people, he would send a prophet to give that message. The problem is that almost ALWAYS the message is bad news! God warns his people that they are getting off track, and the prophet would try to get them back on track. And Israel, where Elijah was from, was WAY off track. They were worshipping this false God Baal, Jeremy touched on this a bit last week - they had this wicked king Ahab and his evil wife Jezebel - just a hot mess from the start. And so right at the start of Chapter 17, Elijah shows up with a message from God. Now I’m not going to read the whole thing, but you can sort of skim along with me with your finger if you like.There are five major miracles that Elijah accomplishes in two chapters. First, he prays for no rain. And not just no rain, but “no rain until I say so” - and a massive drought starts throughout the land. Then there’s this whole scene with a widow who is running out of food. She tells him, I don’t have any flour or cooking oil, and he says, “there will always be flour and olive oil in your containers until the rain comes back” - so it’s this miracle of unending food supply during the drought. Then her son dies, and Elijah performs the miracle of resurrecting the boy. So far, he’s knocking it out of the park - three for three with these incredible miracles. I’m not seeing a lot of withering just yet. What happened to that guy?

Then we get to chapter 18, this is the superbowl for Elijah. The showdown on Mount Carmel, and you guys dove into this part pretty in depth last week. This is a pretty famous story, so maybe you’ve heard of it before - Elijah straight up challenges the prophets of the false God Ba’al. You set up an altar, and I’ll set up an altar, and you call on your god for fire, and I’ll call on my god for fire - and we will see which God is real. It’s an epic moment, and Elijah goes BIG. He actually has people pour water all over his altar - drenches it in water. Which, if you remember there was a drought - can you imagine how mad the people watching would be if he was wasting water? Whew. But he does it - he calls on God and fire rains from the sky and engulfs the altar, proving which God is the true God of Israel. And Elijah captures all the other prophets and has them put to death, and it’s this epic victory. That’s the fourth miracle, and then the last one - at the end of chapter 18. Elijah prays and the rains come back. Chapter 18, verse 41, Elijah is talking to King Ahab, [read v.41-45]. Elijah takes home the gold, 5 for 5 miracles achieved - the king saw it, the whole country saw it - how do we go from the mountaintop, the literal mountaintop, to wishing he was dead three verses later? 

Let me answer that question with a question - did you know that Micahel Phelps, the greatest olympic swimmer in history, experienced deep periods of depression after every single olympic games? He hid it for a lot of years, thinking it was a sign of weakness - but there was this edge of the cliff moment when he would win it all, but after the victory tours and the glitter faded, a couple months later - his mental health would take a nose-dive. And because he won over and over, 2004, 2008, 2012 - he was able to notice this pattern and speak up about it. He called it the “post achievement crash” Even success in this life can leave us drifting. In the story of Elijah, when I see how broken he is in chapter 19, I sort of thought we’d have a couple of chapters of him getting beaten up, failing over and over - but he’s been crazy successful, and he still crashed. Now maybe we’re not some great prophet calling down fire from heaven, or an olympic athlete racking up the gold medals - but even in our lives, there are moments where success disappoints. Achieving our goals, finally getting everything we ever wanted - sometimes we don’t even know what to do with that. Like a dog chasing cars, we never actually thought we’d get it. It’s that moment when you’ve been praying and praying for God to send you the right spouse, the right relationship. And you find this amazing person, and you get married and are shocked to discover you accidentally married a real person with flaws! Ew! Or you pray for children - you’re so excited to become a mom or a dad, and everything is going to well. Healthy pregnancy, successful delivery - and then you realize even the best babies are a whole lot of work. Or you’ve been working for that next promotion. the corner office, the bigger paycheck that will finally allow you to start hitting your goals - and then you get the job and can’t figure out why it’s not as satisfying as you thought it would be. And it’s even harder to admit, because you just spent all this time praying for it, hoping for it, working towards it - and then it still wasn’t enough, you almost feel bad admitting that you’re unhappy. Elijah succeeded over and over and it didn’t change the hearts of the people of Israel and it just crushed him. 

So we get to chapter 19, and the King Ahab and his wife Jezebel, who is seriously bad news, she threatens Elijah. [read v.1-2]. And that leads us to what we read before, [read v.3-4]. But then watch what God does. [read v.5-9]. Elijah’s success, his victory led him to despair, led him to depression - and God’s response was “eat something, get some rest.” Do you guys remember that snickers campaign? You’re not you when you’re hungry. Have a snickers. That’s basically how God handles Elijah, Joy Clarkson put it like this, “"This is your gentle reminder that one time in the Bible Elijah was like 'God, I'm so mad! I want to die!' so God said 'Here's some food. Why don't you have a nap?' So Elijah slept, ate, & decided things weren't so bad. Never underestimate the spiritual power of a nap & a snack.” And it’s funny because it’s true! One of the best ways to take care of your spirit is to take care of your body. And so if you’re in here this morning and you are withering, or you’re feeling spiritually dysregulated, before we get to the spiritual needs, you might want to look at some healthy habits. Diet and exercise. Regular sleep patterns. Less screen time. You know, it’s funny - the worship leader at Center, her name is Katie, she’s a phenomenally talented musician- but I make fun of her sometimes, I call her a flower, because we will be in the middle of a staff meeting and she will say, “5 minute break, I’m going for a walk in the sunshine.” Sometimes the whole staff goes (psh, I say “whole staff” there’s three of us). We’ve moved our entire meeting outside, I think we have a picture of that, because there is something about soaking up that vitamin C that is good for the soul. Before we get to earthquakes and fires and whispers - God takes care of Elijah’s body. One of the best ways to take care of a withering spirit, is to take care of your body. 

Now here’s the coolest part - this rhythm that we see with Elijah: success, crash, have a nap - that’s exactly the rhythm we see in Jesus’ life when he was here on this earth. In the gospels, Jesus was always slipping off to pray - but that’s especially true after a big miracle, after some major success. There was one time when Jesus healed a man with leprosy and he told the guy, “don’t tell anyone” - but the guy told everyone anyways, and so massive crowds flock to Jesus. Luke 5, verse 15 [read v.15-16]. And it happens again in Capernaum, he spends a whole evening healing sick people, and then in Mark chapter 1, verse 35 [read v.35]. Or probably the most famous giant miracle of Jesus’ ministry - Feeding the 5,000, this is what it says right after. Matthew 14, [read v.21-23] Now I know I’m sort of throwing those at you rapid fire - but what I want you to see is that this is all over Jesus’ ministry. Jesus knew what Elijah didn’t - if we let the chaos of life (even success, even good things) if we let anything take away our time with God, our souls will wither. Maybe your life recently has been a series of failures, defeats, overwhelming and crushing blows - or maybe you just keep winning, maybe things are going great - either way, our need to stay connected to God never waivers. 

Jesus himself put it like this, [read John 15:4-5]. So whether you are Elijah or Michael Phelps or just regular ol’ you - the project is the same. And so I have two challenges for you to go after this week. Sort of a way to take what God has for us in his word and put it into practice this week. Number 1 - have a nap! The first thing God does for Elijah when he found himself withered and burnt out was prioritize his physical health. He brings him food and water and rest. So what is it for you? Maybe it’s an adjustment to the food you eat. Maybe it’s worth it to try and get less screen time, to go to bed earlier, to put more physical exercise in your life. To quote the brilliant philosopher Reese Witherspoon in her movie Legally Blonde, “Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people don’t shoot their husbands. They just don’t.” I can speak to this from personal experience. This past summer, I went on vacation - and I try to live a healthy life, get out and exercise a couple times a week, eat right, all that - but vacation is so good at ruining that rhythm for me. Maybe you can relate. And actually it messes with my devotional life AND it messes with my work out schedule. And I went on vacation, and I got all out of sync. I hadn’t spent time in prayer in days, and I hadn’t worked out in weeks. I was withering, body and soul. And I got back from vacation and we jumped right into Byron Days. If you don’t know, it’s like this festival thing we do in Byron Center, and our church was heavily involved. Kid’s ministry is a huge priority for our church - which is one of the reasons I was so drawn to Center when I showed up with my little army of kids. Depending on the week - we are often a full 20% kids, which we love. So our church, we run the Kid’s Zone at Byron Days, and we had an amazing weekend - hundreds of families came through the kid’s zone - it was a massive success. And THEN I had an opportunity to preach at the community worship service, which was 7 churches in town all coming together to worship outdoors. Our worship leader Katie led worship and I got to preach and present the gospel - it should have been my superbowl moment. My Mount Carmel. But because I was disconnected from the vine - all the wonderful success just didn’t mean anything. I never felt so insecure, so burnt out, so withered. And the solution I needed was not - get more success. No, what I actually needed was to get back in sync with God. Get back on a healthy rhythm - body and soul. So my first challenge for you - have a nap. 

Second - once you’ve had your nap, and your bread and water. Once you have taken care of the physical body God has given you, the second challenge is to carve out time for God. We have this promise from Jesus - he will remain in us if we can remain in him. And so if you spend no time with God, I want to challenge you to give it 10 minutes a day. I recommend starting your day - but it can be on your drive into work, turn off the radio and have a conversation with God, during your lunch break, in the evening before bed - just carve out the time for God every single day. If you already spend some time with God, expand it. I remember I was listening to this preacher from Africa. And his church was growing so incredibly fast, and everyone wanted to know - what is your secret to church growth. And he said, “Everyone on our team spends the first hour of work on their knees in prayer.” That’s his whole strategy - pray for an hour every morning. And then he said, “maybe you have a better strategy, if you can get your church to grow faster than mine with a better strategy, go ahead and email me - but until then, this is what we do.” And I listened to that, I thought, “that’s crazy. I can’t pray for an hour.” But at that time the Zero Collective network was entering a season of prayer and fasting - and so I gave myself a goal. I’m going to try and sit with God, to carve out this space, this time to draw close to Jesus. And as I sat there with my little prayer journal, and I had a whole hour, and I realized why Elijah climbed a mountain to get away from the noise, why Jesus was always slipping away to be by himself - there is SO MUCH White Noise in this world! I would get SO distracted. Even just inside my head - like, I’m not diagnosed with ADHD, but I’ve got friends who are diagnosed and let me just say there are some… similarities. [laugh]. It’s so hard to stay focused on something, to spend intentional time in silence. But can I just tell you - that was one of the most transformative seasons in my life. The value of carving out time for prayer in my life, turning down all the other noises, has been immeasurable. And I do mean CARVING, no one is going to hand it to you - you have to carve it out if you want intentional time with Jesus. It got to a point where the time I spent in prayer was the thing I most looked forward to in my day. And I hope you see that I don’t say any of this to brag. I don’t want you to walk out of here and think, “that Pastor JJ - he’s just really good at prayer” - no, the truth is I’m REALLY bad at this stuff. But if I can figure it out, I know you can too. And the gift that God has given to me through remaining in him, I want that for your life too. So those are my challenges for you today - have a nap and carve out some time for prayer. Let’s pray.