We often wear exhaustion as evidence of commitment. What if it’s actually telling us something about our willingness to trust God?
In the world of church techs and creatives, few non-technical things get as much discussion as the idea of rest, Sabbath, and boundaries.
Here at Church Production, we have written several times recently about the idea of having healthy boundaries between our work and personal lives and the importance of finding rest and investing in ourselves.
What hasn’t been explored as much, though, is why we even struggle with the ideas of workaholism in the first place. Yes, many of us love productivity or working with our hands or creating or striving for the “perfect” fill-in-the-blank, but the root behind all of that may not be a healthy or innocent thing.
Maybe we think we’re a better god than God is.
What if we were in a position of striving so hard and being tempted to work so much because we struggle to trust God as our provider and equipper?
A few weeks ago, I re-initiated a chronological Bible reading plan, and I use “The Bible Recap” book by Tara Leigh Cobble as a companion piece. In the commentary for Exodus 16-18, which is the passage that includes the Israelites being sent manna and quail from heaven, Cobble’s insight hit me in a different way this time.
Pertaining to God’s instructions about when and how to gather manna (don’t gather too much or too little, none is available on the Sabbath, etc.) she said:
“God is testing for potential pitfalls in their thought life: Will I have a scarcity mentality
and try to hoard the manna, or will I trust it will be there again tomorrow? Am I willing to
work twice as hard gathering on Friday in order to rest on Saturday [the Sabbath]? Will
the food I gather on Friday be enough to carry me through Sunday morning? Will God
keep his promise to provide for me if I stop to rest as he has commanded? If they trust
that He controls the forces of nature, they’ll respond by obeying.”
The Sabbath is not just about rest. It reveals whether we trust God enough to stop.
I wonder whether any of these things have become subconscious reasons in our own minds why we find it easy to overwork ourselves and why we struggle to properly rest.
Do I feel I need to “hoard” or control my efforts because I’m worried that if I ever stop striving and pursuing, I’ll lose my rewards or my influence or my seat at the table? To have this approach is to forget that God is the one who opened the door for me to be here, and He has a history of equipping those He calls, none of whom are perfect or who have “earned” anything!
Am I working around the clock for a more practical reason, because I’m a procrastinator or regularly mismanage my time? Maybe i’s hard for me to get work done now if there’s always another day later (“Why do it now if I can do it tomorrow?”), and instead of stewarding and making wise use of my time, it’s easy for me to waste it because I take for granted that there will always be another day.
Perhaps I’m convinced that if I stop and rest, I’ll be perceived as lazy or indifferent, so I have to always be producing just to prove that I’m committed, available, and worth keeping around. Or maybe I think that if I give myself a day of rest, there will be too much piling up for when I return, which will then multiply my stress and anxiety, and I’ll regret not working harder to get it done ahead of time, as if taking a Sabbath ends up as a form of punishment for not working anyway.
In each of these potential scenarios of thought, Cobble may have hit it right on the nose. Maybe we keep working so much, late at night, early in the morning, seven days a week, because we don’t trust God to keep his end of the bargain. We don’t think we’ll actually be refreshed, but exhausted. We don’t think He’ll bless us and promote us, but that we’ll end up falling behind. We aren’t convinced that He will multiply six days of effort and energy and allow us to achieve more because we prioritized one of His commandments, and we need to work all week just to keep pace.
Ultimately, maybe we think we’re a better god than God is.
Later on in the commentary, Cobble adds, “He knows our human nature longs to earn things, to feel accomplished. But the very nature of His relationship with us is that we’re the recipients, not the earners, not the doers. He is the doer.”
And this is why the Sabbath is so important.
If we can’t receive the blessing of a Sabbath, then we can’t receive the full blessing of salvation.
Maybe rest is difficult because receiving is harder for us than doing.
If we have a working and producing mentality, then we see Heaven as something we earn.
Salvation, rest, joy, and all of the other amazing blessings of God then become something we work for and achieve through the right type of behavior instead of blessings bestowed upon us out of His overflowing grace and mercy.
God is a God who desires to bless me and see me prosper. And His Word outlines the path for that. When I follow that path, including prioritizing time to rest, His promises come true. When I convince myself that my way is best, I fall into a pattern of constantly striving and earning, and it’s a cycle that’s doomed to fail.
While manna was a blessing of provision of God’s children, it was also a test that revealed how they thought about themselves and Him. The Sabbath is the same.
Am I able to trust His plan?
