January 30, 2011 Sermon

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WHEN YOUR WORK DOESN’T WORK FOR YOU ANY MORE!

From Burnout To Balance Series -Part 4 of 7

The last few weeks I have been teaching on how to bring margin and balance into overworked, overcrowded, overscheduled insane lives.  If you’re like I am, there seems to be more demand for my time than I have time.  You can relate, I think, to this item called “The Essence of Survival.”  Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up and knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it’ll be killed.  Every morning the lion wakes up and knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it’ll starve.  So whether you’re a lion or a gazelle, when the sun comes up you’d better be running. 

We feel that accelerated pace in our lives.  We feel it in the work place.  Some of you work very, very hard.  And you know the myth of a 40-hour workweek.  We have e-mail to answer, fax machines are humming, the phone is ringing.  You get in your car and your cell phone is ringing.  It’s just crazy.

And then we try to crush ourselves with a little more hyperactivity.  A round of golf, we have to get to the gym, we have to engage in all the social things in our lives.  We’re really involved in our church life.  Then we tighten it just a little bit more.  If you have kids you’re running to dance lessons and Little League and soccer, piano lessons and all that.  And if we can eek out a vacation we go to a national park called Rushmore.  What’s that about?

This morning I want us to spend a few minutes thinking about how you can bring sanity in your insane work world. 

I want to say right up front I am in favor of work.  I think a strong work ethic is noble.  I think God’s wired us up to work.  He gave us work to do as a component to help bring fulfillment and levels of satisfaction in our lives.  You read`the Bible and you’ll see work all through it.  The Bible says t(at God instilled that desire for work within you.  The Bible says God worked to create the world.  He worked for your salvation and redemption.  He works to meet your needs.  And He calls us to be coworkers with Him.  You go back to the time when the world was paradise there in the Garden of Eden and one of the first things God did was give man a work assignment.  “I want you to manage this Garden,” He said.  Work was good.  Work was noble.  It was pure.  It was satisfying.  It was only after men and women violated God’s standards for living that work became a pain and a drudgery and a source of irritation. 

A man in the Bible, in the Old Testament, was supposed to be pretty smart but he allowed his workload to get way out of whack.  He wrote in Ecclesiastes, “I hated life because the work that is done under the sun is grievous to me.  I hated the things I had toiled for under the sun because I must leave them to the one who comes after me so my heart began to despair over all my toils of labor under the sun.” 

Do you love your work?  A newspaper article about two families that cashed in on a 353 million-dollar lottery said, “It’s not a matter of if they’ll leave their jobs.  It’s a matter of if they’ll give a two week notice.”  I think many people here would just love the chance to walk away.  As a matter of fact statistics show that one out of six workers think about quitting every week.  What’s wrong?  How can we fix it?

1.  GET IN TOUCH WITH THE REAL REASONS FOR OVERWORK

I'm not suggesting we’re lying about why we tilt toward workaholism but I think many people if asked this would say, “I work because I'm a person of integrity.  I want to give a good day’s work for a good day’s pay.  If I have to go the second mile, that just proves my level of dedication.”  We’d like to think that’s the only thing driving us into a workaholic frenzy. 

But maybe there’s something a little bit underneath that’s adding to this as well.  How about a consumption lifestyle?  I just want more stuff.  The more stuff we get the more we have to work and the more we work the more we can afford to get more stuff.  Julia Shore contends in her book The Overworked American that we’re not spending our money so we can have more leisure time.  We’re spending our money on more and more stuff.  God even addresses this issue of selfishness and consumptive lifestyle in the Bible.  He says it’s the source of many of the problems we have in life. 

James 4 “What causes fights and quarrels among you?  Don’t they come from your selfish desires that battle within you?  You want something and you don’t get it.  You kill, you covet and you can’t have what you want.  You quarrel and fight.  You do not have because you do not ask God.  When you ask you do not receive because you ask for the wrong motives.  What are the wrong motives?  That you spend what you get on your pleasures.” 

It’s all about pleasure and it’s all about wanting more pleasure.  So our consumptive lifestyle leads to enormous debt.  Debt drives us to increase our workload.  Our workload has to stay high so that we can feed our consumer mentality.  That might be what’s driving us.

There’s another possibility.  Deep down there might be a sense of insecurity.  Fear.  I have to work harder.  I have to climb higher.  In this era of corporate downsizing if I'm not at the front of the pack when they start to lay people off…. I don’t want my name on that list.  Every junior executive feels if she will work hard – ten hours a day, every day – then she can be promoted to a secure position as senior executive.  Then she can work hard, fourteen hours a day. 

When are you going to be secure?  When do you know you’ve landed and you’ve done enough?  Here’s what insecurity does: It makes us work like we can control the future.  If I work hard enough my destiny remains in my control.  I can control the outcome if I just work hard enough.  I can secure my place in the market as long as I'm working.

You ought to just resign your job as God.  He’s the only one who can control the future.  I can’t control the future.  You can’t control the future.  Only God can.  We work when we can but there are just things we can’t stop. 

Let’s dig a little deeper.  There may be something a little more insidious, a little more cancerous that’s driving you toward workaholism.  Maybe you’re doing so much work because you’re trying to earn the love and approval of others.  I’ve met people like this.  They want to be impressive.  They want to be liked?  They try to build a level of affluence.  If I am affluent enough then people will accept me, include me, love me, like me.  If my net worth goes up then my self-worth will go up. 

Ted Turner, the man who owns more real estate than any other living American, talks about what drove him.  He said he chose the university his father disapproved of.  He ended up dropping out and that disappointed his dad.  He was already in his second marriage when his father committed suicide in 1963.  Almost 20 years later in 1982 in front of Georgetown University students, Ted Turner exposed deep heartbreak.  In the middle of a rip-roaring speech about entrepreneurship Ted Turner pulls out a well-worn copy of Success magazine, a journal his father used to read to him whenever they were traveling together and Ted Turner’s picture was on the cover of that particular issue.  His booming voice trickled to a whisper.  He looked up to the rafters of that university and he said, “Is this enough for you?  Is this enough for you, Dad?” 

As hard as it is for me to say, this is the truth.  Some people are working themselves to death trying to earn the approval from someone who will never give it. 

You know who will get hit hardest in wanting approval in today’s culture, wanting acceptance, wanting to be legitimized?  It’s women.   

A few years ago there was a stigma if you held a job outside the home.  Now you’re stigmatized if you don’t.  You can’t win for losing.  This has enormously added to the burden of women who are so overloaded, feeling so overwhelmed, feeling their self-worth at a new levels of low because they think, “I have to do it all, be it all, have it all!”  And their level of exhaustion is way off the roof. 

What are we chasing after all?  I think at some level, some people are trying to gain acceptance and love from God. 

Are you trying to impress God?  Trying to earn His acceptance and love?  Let me clear this up right now.  God decided before you were born that He was going to love you with every ounce of His being, and there’s nothing you can do that will make Him love you more.  And there’s nothing you can do that will make Him love you less.  There’s nothing I can do that will make Him love me more, nothing I can do that will make Him love me less.  God loves me as much as He’s going to love me because he loves me completely and unconditionally.

2.  BEWARE OF THE CONSEQUENCES OF OVERWORK.

I'm not going to belabor this point because we’ve talked about the consequences of marginless living for a couple of weeks now and we will in the weeks to come.  This is not rocket science.  We’re bright people here.  If we continue to live marginless lives something has to give.  We feel it in so many realms of our lives.  Our credit cards are maxed out, our relationships are stressed out, our schedules are blown out and our colons and our hearts are worn out.  Think about it.  We are paying a huge price for this insanity. 

Productivity suffers.  Quality control managers tell us that in a predictable way after about fifty hours the quality of someone’s work slides in an amazingly predictable pattern.  That means all the overtime, all the work you carry home in that bulging briefcase, all the time you spend working in the office when everyone else has gone home, you are not getting nearly as much done as you think.  In some ways you’re probably even going backwards a little bit. 

We also know that relationships fall victim to overwork.  Relationships matter to God.  I spoke on that last week.

One more word about relationships.  A former chairman of AT&T had a million employees.  Heads of government called this guy just to consult with him about communication issues.  He was very wealthy, very influential.  But he fell into a pattern of long illness and near the end of that he had his leg amputated.  Here’s what he said, “With millions of employees and lots of people I knew, no one except my wife visited me in the hospital.  I received no phone calls.  Not one person sent me a card.”  His wallet was full but his life was empty. 

A truly rich person is one whose friends run into his arms even when his hands are empty.  He has nothing to give but if your arms are full of relationships in God’s economy you have love.

Something else that would be a consequence of overwork, a victim of overwork, would be your health.  Years ago the Japanese culture so honored the habit of overwork that suddenly they had workers literally dying at their workstations.  This was happening to such a degree they had to invent a new word just to describe this phenomenon.  They called it death by overwork.  Here’s what’s sobering.  The Japanese do not lead the world in work hours.  The United States does. 

Let’s get on to the solution side to all of this…

3.  CREATE A LIFE WHERE YOUR WORK WORKS FOR YOU.

How do you do that?  First:  Avoid extremes in your work.  Here are the two extremes.  You could say, “All I'm going to have is leisure”, or “All I'm going to have is work”. 

Leisure without work is wrong, and it equals Burn Down.  You’re going to Burn Down if all you do is play.  It’s like an unattended house that’s on fire.  There’s nobody there to put water on the fire, nobody there to pay attention, so the house burns down from inattention and inactivity.  There’s nothing wrong with having leisure in your life.  I think you should. 

The Bible tells us about Jesus.  He went sailing.  He took long walks with His friends.  He spent the night at the home of friends.  He would get alone by Himself for prayer and rest.    But His life was also marked by purpose, doing God’s will.  Leisure is not laziness unless it gets out of balance.

The other extreme is equally damaging and dangerous.  That’s all work and no play.  All work without leisure.  That equals Burn Out.  I think most of us here have a clue about this one.  We know what it feels like to be a candle in the wind and the flame is about gone.  One guy said, “I would rather burn out than rust out!”  But, either way you’re out!”  That’s not smart.  Like I said earlier: there’s nothing wrong with working, nothing wrong with working hard.  As a matter of fact the Bible says in 1 Thessalonians 3 “If anyone will not work, neither let him eat.  We hear that some among you are leading an undisciplined life with no work at all.”  We ought to be working but our lives shouldn’t be only work. 

So what do we do?  We find a balance between these two extremes.  You have work and bring it into balance with other parts of your life.  That equals Burn On.  That way you continue to burn brightly over the long haul.  Stay away from the extremes and find that place of balance. 

There’s a second way to have your work work for you:  Define yourself differently.

Let me ask you a question.  Do you realize that your worth is more than your work?  You are more than what you do.  This is especially true among men, I can’t say how much this is true among women but I know it’s true among men.  A group of guys together that are just meeting each other for the first time.  The testosterone starts flowing, the pecking order is getting established, the competitive juices are abundant.  Then somewhere about five minutes into it,  the question is asked.  “So what do you do?”  Behind that is a sharp edge.  “Is your work big?  Is it profitable?  Is it prominent?  Is it significant?”  The central message, that seizes control of this confrontation between men like gunfighters on a dusty noonday street, says, “Mister, you are your work.” 

Is that who you are?  Let me ask it in another way.  If you lost your job, who would you be then?  Would you still be you?  In any sense or on any level?  What if your whole world was wrapped up in your work life and then the boss walked in and said, “You don't cut the mustard.  The financial picture around here necessitates your downsizing.  You’re out of here.”  Who would you be if you didn’t have a job? 

You say, “I’ve spent most of my adult years being defined by what I do.  If I'm not defined by what I do how should I be defined?”  That’s a great question.  You’re not defined by what you do.  You are defined by who you are.  You want a clue about who you are?  Take a look at what you want.  What you want will go a long way in telling you who you are.  What you desire most in life will tell you a lot about who you are. 

You know what the Bible says should define our existence?  A passionate and fully orbed love for God.  It is so easy to get sucked into the American dream that we put our affections, our desires in the wrong place.  We want the wrong things.  You know what God wants from you and me?  That we should seek Him first.  That we would desire Him most.  That He would be the object and the person of our greatest affections.  The discontent and evil of this world has not come because our desires are too strong.  The discontent and evil have come because our desires are too weak.  We will settle for fleeting pleasures that ultimately don’t satisfy.  The root of evil is we are the kind of people that will settle for the love of money or the love of work instead of love of God. 

We ought to seek God hedonistically the way a thirsty deer seeks water in a stream.  The thing that hinders us is not that we are pleasure-seeking people but that we’re willing to settle for such pitiful pleasures and halfheartedly fool ourselves with ambition at work while all the while infinite joy is being offered to us.  We have a longing in our souls that we try to satisfy with accomplishments, promotions and managerial excellence. 

As Christians, we remember our lives before Christ.  Sure we enjoyed food and friends and family and productivity and investments and vacations and hobbies and sports and art and travel. God was an idea.  He was even a good idea.  But He wasn’t our treasure.  He wasn’t our delight. 

Then faith came, the confidence came, that Christ made a way for someone like you and someone just like me to live in friendship with God forever.  The confidence came that if I come to God through Jesus Christ He will make me a new person from the inside out.  You remember that day when there welled up something within us like a cry to God.  “Make me new!” 

And when Christ came into our lives He brought with Him a new taste, a new desire.  It was no longer for health or wealth or prestige.  It was a hunger for God.  A genuine relationship with Jesus is the heartfelt knowledge that Jesus Christ is not only reliable, He’s desirable.  Can you imagine a child in the slum making mudpies in the street only because he has no idea that a short distance away, there’s the ocean and so he settles for a muddy street.  He’s too easily pleased and so are we.

We settle for a career with a corner office, a well-funded retirement plan, a company car, a salary that will allow us to own our own home, an occasional night out.  Because we’ve grown accustomed to such short-lived pleasures our capacity for joy has shriveled.  These are mudpies and God offers us the ocean.

Paul was a man in the Bible who had all the signs of success.  He had sterling credentials, a stellar education, community prominence, civic leadership.  He was even hot in his local religious organization.  But when he met Christ he was no longer defined by his resume.              “All the things I once thought were so important are gone from my life.  Compared to the high privilege of knowing Christ Jesus as my Master, everything I once thought I had going for me is insignificant.  I’ve dumped it all in the trash so that I could embrace Christ and be embraced by Him.”                               

Desire a relationship with God that grows increasingly deeper and be defined by that. 

How can you make your work work for you?  Here’s a third way…

Maybe some should consider a career change.  I know this is not an option for everyone here.  But I know that some thought it was not an option either, until you were laid off or the company was sold or your finances demanded a change.  All of a sudden you were looking at a blank space where once the future was so clear, then all of a sudden you discovered the most exhilarating time in your life.  Your creative juices started flowing once more.  You began to reshuffle the deck of cards called your priorities.  You started envisioning a life where work was fulfilling and exciting again but it was no longer going to consume you

Your next step does not have to be up another rung on the corporate ladder.  You may need to just change ladders.  We’ve been conditioned to believe, “I have to move up!”  Moving up is not always best.

I love the story about the Harvard MBA who was in Mexico for his company.  He saw a small Mexican fishing boat pulling up the dock and one solitary fisherman got out and held four huge fish on a stringer.  The Harvard guy was amazed at the quality of the fish.  He asked the fisherman, “How long did it take you to catch those?”  He said, “About three hours.”  “What are you going to do with them?”  The fisherman said,  “They’re going to feed my family.”  The Harvard guy was intrigued and said, “What do you do with the rest of your time?”  The fisherman said, “I sleep late.  I play with my children, I have a siesta with my wife.  I fish for a while then I go to bed.”  The business side of this Harvard grad kicked into high gear.  He said, “You could work nine hours a day and catch three times the number of fish!  Then you could buy a second boat.  Teach someone else to catch those fish.  You could buy a whole fleet of fishing boats.  You could ship your fish to restaurants all over the world.  You could move to New York, and put your fish catching business on the stock market.”  Before he even realized what he was saying the Harvard guy said, “If you work hard enough, and long enough you can eventually retire by the coast, sleep late every morning, play with your children.” 

Up is not always best.  Right now for some of you that kind of change isn’t possible.  But I would like to suggest with some careful spending patterns, systematic debt reduction, prayerful planning, you could find options you never dreamed would be yours.

I know that most of you are going to wake up in the morning and go back to the old job, back to the old grind.  What are you supposed to do?  A fourth way to have your work work for you is to…GO TO YOUR OLD JOB AS A NEW PERSON.

Here’s the deal.  Imagine your workplace as your ministry location.  Imagine the men and women around you as people needing a touch of God’s love.  Imagine that it’s God who placed you in that corner of the building, on that floor of the office, in that classroom at school and He wants you to be His representative, His minister right there.  Imagine how that could transform the experience you have at work even this week. 

Colossians 3 “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart as working for the Lord.”  I know what’s going to happen.  You say, “Frank, that would be great.”  But tomorrow morning you step back on the treadmill, the tasks of life jump on you, competition is demanded.  Push comes to shove.  You get dinged a little bit and the lure and temptation of nonstop action can be addictive and like all addictions it can be destructive. 

You think,  “I have invested so much to get where I am.  I have to lock in on that with laser-like focus.  I’ve invested in education.  I’ve invested years.  I’ve invested in sweat equity.” 

That may be so, but God has invested in you too.  1 Peter 1:18-19 reminds us what God says “It   was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed [“bought out of”.  That’s what the word “redeemed” means.  You were bought out of…] the empty way of life handed down to you by your forefathers.  You were redeemed, bought out of that futile way of life by the precious blood of Christ.”  If you’re a Christian you are a new person because Jesus Christ gave you forgiveness for your past, a purpose for your life, a promise of a home in heaven.  You can approach your old job as a new person, a representative of God at your work place.   

You might be saying, “Me?  A minister?  I don’t think so.”

A multi millionaire who said yes to Jesus wrote in a book:  “God, I want my life to really matter.  I want what I do to have significance and eternal impact in the lives of other people.”  Here’s a brief excerpt from his book.  “I used to think that if I ever said a complete yes to Christ I would become a completely different person.  I would have to wear polyester and drive used cars.  [I kind of resented that.]  I’d have to ride a donkey in a AIDS infested third world country doing things I’d never enjoy doing.  This is not to denigrate those who fit those descriptions but to point out they just weren’t me.  I couldn’t figure out why God would have put me as an entrepreneur, a conceiver, a starter, a team building, a manager and leader and then put me some place where those things are worthless.  I was relieved to discover that God does not waste what He’s built.  I'm the same me.  Now He’s just applying me in a different way.”  The guy goes on to write, “After God made you He stepped back and said, ‘That’s a good one!’  He planted in your soul a desire to connect with Him and then He provided a way for you to do it.  God’s desire is for you to serve Him by being who you are, by using what He gave you to work with and, I would add, to do that where you work.” 

So who’s taking the time in your work world to pray with a sad employee or listen to a hurting person.  Who’s taking the initiative where you work to befriend the lonely or encourage the weary or hug the neglected?  Who’s inviting people to church?  Who’s telling them about the free gift of forgiveness that God makes available?  Who’s working for eternal causes, not just for a paycheck?  It could be you.  You could start this week.

Some senior adults were asked one time what they would do differently if they could live their lives all over again.  I think that’s an important question to ask people nearing the sunset of life.  Among their many great answers here’s one thing they said.  “We’d do more things that lived on after we were gone.  We’d spend less time on the temporary stuff that’s going to pass and spend more time on those things that carry some sense of eternal significance.”

Let me ask you a question: are you replacing a relationship with Jesus Christ with your busyness?  Are you letting intimacy with God fade while you’re filling that spot with activity?  If so I’d ask you to stop.  Stop relating to God at a distance.  Stop running a race that is ultimately futile.  Stop living a life that has no meaning and come to grips with what matters. 

Slow down long enough to hear God say, “I want a relationship with you, not based on what you do but based on what you are.”  Slow down long enough to hear God say, “You matter to Me.”  Just be still long enough to listen.

Let us pray.    As I pray this prayer you may find yourself saying, “That’s my prayer, Frank.   That’s how I feel, that’s what I want.”  If this rings true in your heart, quietly whisper to God, “Me too.” 

God, let the work I do be more than just busyness.  Let it be the work of thoughtfulness.  Let the work I do last for eternity, not just to get a paycheck.  May I work hard enough to be diligent, and slow enough to be wise.  God, give me moments that I can be still and get to know You better.  God I want a relationship with You.”  If that's your prayer, why don’t you just whisper to God, “God, me too!”