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HOW TO SIMPLIFY
From Burnout to Balance
Part 7 of 7 02-20-11 Sermon
“How to Simplify.” We need this, don’t we, in a complicated world, in a world where the pace is increasing all the time. It’s very evident that simplifying is in. Advertisers have found that one of the top five reasons today that you and I buy things is because it’s simple. People want simple.
You just start looking at the bookstores, the number of books that have been printed on “The Simple Life” in the last few years. It is absolutely incredible. There is one book on the simple life that is 872 pages long. Does this sound simple? Only in America can we take the simple life and make a complex multi-billion dollar industry out of it.
What if Jesus wrote a book like this? He’s the one who knows us the best, He understands us the most. He created us. He knows (better than any other person - as good as some of that advice might be) a lot more about me and what I need to simplify in my life. What if He’d written a book like this? Then I realized I don’t have to wonder about that. He talks a lot about the simple life. He said a lot of things about how to slow things down and simplify things and change things. He lived this kind of a life. So this morning we’re going to look not at 2000 things Jesus said about the simple life, that wouldn’t be simple, but just four things that He said.
Another title you could put on this sermon would be “You Don’t Have to Become Amish”. For many of us we think to simplify life I’ve got to escape from all of it, go somewhere, disconnect my electricity, never drive a car again, that’s the only way for me. At least the Amish have done something about it. Many of us year after year have thought about simplifying, thought about slowing down, but it’s just a thought. We respect them because they’ve done something.
Jesus Christ shows us how to do something. Right here, where you live. Right now. He can change things, simplify things, start to work from the inside out. Four simple things.
1. Simplify the way You Speak
That’s true in a couple of areas:
1. The way you speak to people. The way you talk to people. Jesus had something to say about this in Matthew 5:37. “Simply let your ‘Yes” be ‘Yes’ and your ‘No’, ‘No’.” We let our “yes” be “yes” but our “no” be “maybe”, don’t we? And because of that, things get complicated because we say “yes” to so many things in life.
One business journal wrote, “What separates the peak performers from the weak performers is the first group says “No” to anything that’s not important while the second group says “Yes” to everything.”
While that may be a part of what Jesus is talking about here there’s something else. There’s something deeper that’s at the center of what He’s saying when He says “Let your ‘yes’ be ‘yes’ and your ‘no’ be ‘no’.” He’s talking about being honest with our words. He’s talking about having integrity with our words. He’s talking about not being sneaky with our words.
Do you realize how complicated life gets just because of a single lie? Have you seen that happen? Covering it up? The situation comedies that we grew up watching as kids, a lot of them were based on somebody telling a lie … Lucy told Ricky a lie at the beginning of the show and the entire show was about how complicated things got trying to cover that over. It was funny in black and white but it’s not nearly so funny in our lives when we have to live with the fact of what our words have done to us.
So Jesus says, “You want to make things more simple? Be honest with people. Don’t call it a white lie or stretching the truth or you’re doing this for their own good. Be honest with people. It’s amazing how much more simple things become when we tell the truth. Start with people. Jesus says simplify the way you speak. Be honest in your words to people. Even though that’s tough some times it will simplify things
2. It also says be honest in the way you speak to God. We have a hard time being ourselves when we’re talking to God. We have lots of strategies for not being ourselves.
Some people try to be cool with God, like they’re trying to be funny because they’re afraid of being themselves so they talk to God as the Big Guy in the sky and say things like that and sort of snicker at Him. They just have a hard time being themselves.
Other people try this false humility. “O God, I'm just a worm. I know You don’t want to talk to me.” That kind of talking to God.
Many of us try formality. We have a hard time being ourselves so we’re very formal when we talk to God. The “thee’s” and “thou’s”. It’s not an IRS form, folks. You don’t have to get all the things on the right line. It’s talking to God.
Jesus said, Let’s make it simple.” Matthew 6:6 “When you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father who is unseen. Then your Father who sees what’s done in secret will reward you.” “Make it simple”, Jesus said. Just talk to God.
One translation says, “When you pray, go into your closet and talk to God.” We want to simplify things by organizing our closet. Jesus says simplify it by going into your closet and talking to God. That’s where it really starts.
Jesus says, “Do you want to make things simpler?” Don’t start on the outside. Start on the inside. Think about how you talk to God. Do you talk to Him honestly? Are you able to just be yourself? I like the way Matthew 6:6 reads in The Message translation. Jesus said, “Here’s what I want you to do. Find a quiet secluded place so you won’t be tempted to role-play before God. Just be there as simply and honestly as you can manage. The focus will shift from you to God and you will begin to sense His grace.” I need that. We all need this in our lives.
So, Jesus says learn to talk to God while being yourself. Everything will be simple if we talk to God just being ourselves in prayer. Not just prayer will be simpler. Everything will be simpler. If I can talk to God honestly in prayer, if I don't have to put on masks there, I can see more honestly what’s happening in life. If I don't have to put on a mask in front of God and fake it, I don’t have to fake it in front of you anymore. That’s how life gets simpler.
How do you talk to God honestly? You talk to Him about what you’re thinking. You don’t talk to Him about what you think you should be thinking when you’re talking to God. You talk to Him about what you’re really thinking. I know what some of you are thinking right now: “God doesn’t want to know what I am thinking!” God already knows what you’re thinking and He just wants you to talk to Him honestly, as ugly as it may seem to you. That's how life begins to change.
How do you talk to God honestly? You go to God and just talk to Him like you would to anybody else. You don’t put on fancy words that you don’t use any other time. You don’t use a tone of voice that you don’t use any other time. “O most gracious holy heavenly Father…” You don’t pray in that kind of a way. Sometimes I think we pray so we’ll impress God with that, that He’s going to look down from heaven thinking, “Wow! That’s the greatest prayer I’ve ever heard.
What God wants is for you and I to just learn to be ourselves when we talk to him. Jesus says that is one of the things that starts on the inside and works its way out and makes life simpler. Be honest when you talk to God. Be simple in the way that you speak.
Jesus also gave us the advice, the command and direction to…
ii. Simplify the way YOU act.
Simplify the way you act in relationships with other people. Relationships can get so complicated. What do I do, and how do I do it, and I don’t know what to do next.
Have you ever sat down at one of the very complicated place settings at a formal dinner or fancy restaurant with all the plates and like a hundred utensils. I’ve always been utensil challenged all my life. I forget where the fork goes! And you’ve got all these things and you’re thinking, “I’ve got to use the right thing to eat the shrimp or they’re going to look at me like I'm really a goofball. This is not going to work!” Finally somebody gave me a simple rule to help me understand how the whole thing works. You work from the outside in. Simple rules can help.
Jesus gave us a simple rule for relationships. He said, “You want to figure out how relationships work, how to act? You work from the inside out.” You might recognize what He said in the book of Mathew 7:12 “Here is a simple rule of thumb guide of behavior. Ask yourself what you want people to do for you – that’s the inside. What am I feeling on the inside I’d like others to do for me? Then grab the initiative and do it for them – that’s the outside.” You work from the inside out. This is what’s been called the Golden Rule.
We often play by different rules in this world. The golden rule says you treat others the way you want to be treated yourself. We sometimes live by a different rule. Often we live by the rule that we treat others the way they have treated us. Not the way I want to be treated but the way they have treated me. This is the reciprocal rule: If you’re nice to me, I’ll be nice to you. If you snub me, I'm going to snub you. If you’re rotten to me, I'm going to be rotten to you. Often this is how we run our relationships and things get very complicated. We’re all going back and forth and reciprocating to each other – who was nice to me, who was bad to me. You just don’t know what to do to who sometimes. It’s very complicated.
And we often live by another rule: We treat others the way someone else has treated us. Not the way they treated me but the way somebody else has treated me. This gets very complicated. In your family - your husband, wife, your kids - you’re treating somebody in a way that’s really something from when you were growing up. So the way your parents treated you comes into your family today. The way that somebody treated you in a former marriage. Or maybe something as simple as something that happened at the office that day and you bring that anger home and start treating everybody else that way. It’s very complicated, the way others have treated me.
Then there’s another way we try to live out this rule sometimes. We treat them in the way we think they’re going to treat us before they treat us that way. I’ll get them before they get me. That’s what this rule is all about. A kid was memorizing this rule “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” But he got it wrong and said, “Do one to others before they do one to you.”
Jesus says I'm supposed to think how I’d like other people to treat me and I’d like to be treated then treat other people that way. There’s an honest human question that comes into our minds about this. Every one of us think, “What’s in it for me? Who is the Golden Rule really golden for? If I start treating other people this way I'm going to get taken advantage of. If I start treating other people this way, I'm going to get plowed under. Is this really going to work?”
Jesus knew that we would feel this way. He said to us in Matthew 23 “Here’s the truth about life. Do you want to stand out? Then step down. Be a servant. If you puff yourself up you’ll get the wind knocked out of you. But if you’re content to simply be yourself then your life will count for plenty.” Want your life to really count? Jesus said, “Think of what you’d like people to do for you and do it for them.” Life gets much less complicated when we stop thinking of positioning ourselves in any and every circumstance for the best benefit to us. And we just start thinking about giving to other people, doing for others what we’d like to have done for us.
And by the way, Jesus said there’s no better way to stand out in this world, there’s no better way to make an impact in this world than doing that. That uncomplicates life when you simplify the way that you act.
The third thing that Jesus talked to us about…3. SIMPLIFY the way you live
The pace of life, the hurriedness of life, the hectic lives that we live, sometimes things just get so busy we don't know where to turn next. We live in a world where things are very complicated. There’s so much information to process. There’s so many ways that are interconnected. You have a lot of lines going into you, don’t you? So we all want to know, “How am I going to make it through this life?” There are sentences in our society like “I couldn’t answer your page about the message on my answering machine discussing the call to my cell phone concerning the email I haven’t returned.” That’s what’s happening in the world we live in.
You’ve all been in the elevator or the office or the room and a cell phone or pager goes off and fifteen people dive to see if it’s theirs. This is a complicated world. Then you have the people who want to make sure they know it’s their cell phone and so they put the entire “1812 Overture” as their ringer. They don’t answer it until the fourth movement. Very complicated, very connected world.
Many of you are discovering in this world where you’re connected all the time, that timesaving devices can become time slaving devices. That those very things that were supposed to help you are now enslaving you. These things connect us all the time to anything and everything.
Is it really that important to be connected every second of the day? It is a sign of our time that you can’t even rest in the restroom anymore. Something is terribly wrong. We’ve got to find a way sometimes in our life to disconnect. It’s important to connect to others. No problem with that. But it’s also important sometimes to disconnect, that you have some time to get some breathing space in your life. Just a little bit of breathing space.
Jesus understood the need for this. He was on this earth for only 33 years, and only three years of ministry. He was changing the world, changing eternity in only three years. Yet He knew there was a time to get away, disconnect and get some breathing space. Mark 6:31. The Bible says about Jesus and His followers, “Then because so many people were coming and going that they didn’t even have a chance to eat, He said to them, ‘Come with Me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.’” Come with me. I need a time to be with Jesus Christ, the one who loves me the most, who made me, who understands me better than anybody. By yourselves. Time to be alone. That’s part of this disconnecting. A quiet place. A place where it’s quiet, with Jesus, by myself.
Let me give you a place to start. How do you make this work? Millions of believers for thousands of years have had this habit of spending ten or fifteen minutes a day doing this. A few minutes each day. Some people call it a “quiet time”.
What do you do? Maybe read a verse or two of the Bible with the Upper Room devotional guide. You talk to God about what you’re thinking about. I'm not talking about half an hour, an hour, two hours. Just a few moments each day of connecting with Him, thinking about what’s really important.
Philippians 4:8 talks about the importance. “Fix your thoughts on what is true and honorable and right. Think about things that are pure and lovely and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.” When do you have time to think about those things in your life?
You know, you’ve got time to worry! We’ve got time to stress over our jobs or other things going on in our lives. When do you have time to think about things that are good and pure and lovely and admirable? If you don’t make time to do that it will never happen. It’s amazing what a few minutes a day with Jesus by yourself in a quiet place can do.
This is so important I want to help you get started in this. Philippians is a book all about joy. Who couldn’t use more joy? There are only 4 chapters, just a few pages in your bible. Read a chapter each day. What I encourage you to do the next four days is read a chapter in Philippians each day. That’s the best part of it anyway. Spend a few minutes – ten, fifteen minutes – just by yourself in a quiet place and watch the difference, the incredible difference it makes when you disconnect and you spend some time with Him, when you simplify the way that you live.
4. SIMPLIFY THE WAY YOU BELIEVE
We make belief a complicated thing sometimes. Do this. Don’t do that. Be there. Don’t be there. Call this person ‘this’. Call that person ‘that’. We don’t know what to do. We don’t even know the times or the places or the seasons and how it all works out. So Jesus says you’ve got to simplify the way you believe. If you’re confused by all this, if this whole idea of faith is very complicated to you, don’t despair. You’re not alone in this. There have been many, many people who have felt that this is complicated. The first followers of Jesus Christ felt like it was complicated and tried to complicate it even more.
Matthew 18. They came to Jesus one day and said, “Jesus who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” They were trying to set up a complicated hierarchy. “Jesus, this is too simple. We need a pope. We need a rabbi. We need a high priest. We need a guru. Somebody to make this more complicated.” Jesus Christ was not about to let that happen. So instead of talking about all these things they wanted to talk about the Bible says He called a little child into the middle of the meeting.
Here’s what happened. Matthew 18. “Jesus called a little child to Him and He stood the child before His followers and then He said, ‘I tell you the truth. You must change and become like little children. Otherwise you’ll never enter the kingdom of heaven.’” Don’t worry about who’s greatest! You’re not even getting in unless you do this. Jesus went on to say, “The greatest person in the kingdom of heaven is the one who makes himself humble like this child.”
You want to uncomplicate faith? Jesus said become like a little child.
How do you do that? How does that work? Who’s He talking about? Does it mean I become more innocent in some way? Does it mean I become less materialistic? Does it mean I become more accepting or less jaded? What’s He talking about?
He says in the last sentence. “You become humble like this child.” There’s something about kids. There’s something about a little child. They know they’re not the greatest in the world. They’re not trying to put on airs. You’re sitting in a restaurant with a bunch of people. A four-year-old never says, “I’ll pick up the tab on this one.” It doesn’t happen. They never worry about that. They’re sitting at the table and they know someone else is going to pick up the tab. It’s fine with them. They don’t worry about it.
But something happens to us as we grow older and there comes a day in all of our lives when we begin to say, “I’ve got to do this on my own now. I can’t depend on anyone else.” In that moment, Jesus says, life starts to get very complicated. You need to go back to that place where you can say to God, “God, I depend on You. God, I need You. I need Your help.”
You know when it’s most difficult to be humble? It’s most difficult when it comes to the wrong things we’ve done. For the sins that we’ve committed. The Bible talks about this in Romans 3:22 when it says “We are made right in God’s sight when we trust in Jesus Christ to take away our sins. [Not trust in ourselves, but trust in Him to take away our sins.] And we all can be saved in the same way no matter who we are or what we’ve done.”
It takes humility to admit I’ve sinned. I’ve done the wrong thing, sinful things in life. It takes even greater humility to admit that those sinful things I’ve done have hurt me, they’ve hurt the people I love, they’ve hurt God, the heart of God. But I think it takes the greatest humility to admit there is nothing I can do to make up for those sins. I can’t do enough. You know when religion gets really complicated? When we try to build a religion that tries to do enough to make up for the wrong things that we’ve done. There are all kinds of religions out there that try to do that, almost all the other world religions besides Christianity. And it gets very complicated.
Jesus says, “That’s not the way it works. I’ll do it for you. Depend on Me.” Jesus Christ went to a cross, died on that cross to give us the gift of forgiveness. It doesn’t come through what I do. I’ve got to depend on Him. He went to a cross, He died on a cross and He said about our sins, “I’ll pick up the tab. I give my life so that you can have forgiveness.
Do you want to simplify faith? Jesus said “Become like a child. Depend on Me.”
A man named Jairus in the Bible went to Jesus one day to ask for some help. He knew he needed Jesus’ help because his daughter was sick and they’d tried everything else and he was afraid she was going to die. So he asked Jesus to come and heal her. Jesus said He would. Then life got very confusing for Jairus. On the way to his daughter, other people started to come and ask for help from Jesus and He actually stopped and helped some of these people on the way there. Jairus must have been confused about this: “Jesus, we’ve got to get going! This is an emergency. We have to get there quickly or she will die.” He was hurried. He was worried. Then when they were almost there some people from his house came and said, “Tell Jesus not to come. Your daughter’s dead anyway. It’s not going to work. You were foolish to even hope that there could be any help here.” So here is this guy and he doesn’t know what to do. The press of the crowd and all these things are happening, hurried, worried, voices saying it’s not going to work anyway.
Then something cuts through all that. Jesus looks him in the eye. He says, “Don’t be afraid, just trust Me.”
A lot of us are like that guy. Life gets pretty confusing, pretty hurried, pretty worried. Then there are the voices around us that are saying, “This won’t work and that won’t work and why even depend on Him. Why even hope?” We need today, right here, right now to hear… we need to see Jesus looking you right in the eye and saying, “Don’t be afraid. Just trust Me.” That’s where it starts. Simple, childlike depending upon Him.
Prayer:
You can pray in your heart, “Jesus, I come to you today, as simply and honestly as I can. I’ve put my trust in You. I trust You to forgive me. I trust You to show me how to live. I'm tired of hoping to organize my life to make it better. I trust You to begin to revolutionize my life from the inside out. Jesus, as best as I know how, I'm going to depend on You today to forgive me and to guide me.”
Father, as we pray together I pray that You would help us all learn this week to trust You in a greater way. Help us learn how to simplify our lives by simplifying the way that we speak, that we learn to speak honestly with others as scary as that may be, and to talk honestly with You because that’s what you want from us.
Father, I pray that You’d help us too in the way that we act, to treat others the way we want to be treated and have the courage to do that. Lord, help us learn how to disconnect in life, to realize how important that relationship with You is. Everything else seems more important but there’s nothing really more important than You.
Then Lord help us to grasp what this thing of simple faith means, depending on You in circumstances and situations and worries and struggles of life. In fact, right now we bring them to You as best we can. We want to trust You – just trust You – with our hurts, just trust You with that problem that we’re facing, just trust You for that decision. Lord – just trust You with our lives. We want to do this. We ask that this would happen in the name of Jesus. Amen.
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