But what happens when you’re going through life and you think everything is really, really important? Well that’s what happens when you’re drained and running on empty. When you’re running on empty you don’t have the wisdom to be able to discern and decide what is really important. So, when everything seems really important that’s proof that you’re running on empty.

When this happens your perspective is off and your decision-making becomes blurry. You crumble under pressure and here’s what you do. You elevate things that aren’t really that important and you devalue things that are really, really important.

We have bought into the cultural lie that Busy is better. You often hear this when you greet someone. “How you doing? Keeping busy?” Why do we say that? As if busy is the ultimate value. “How you doing? Keeping busy? Good for you! So am I! I’ve got to run! See you later!”

Busy isn’t better. Choosing better is better.

I’m going to say something now that’s possibly going to hurt some of you. I know this first hand and I know it from working with people for over 40 years. Busy people tend to be empty people. They’re empty emotionally. They’re empty spiritually. They’re empty relationally. And the reason they are so busy is they’re trying to fill up their emptiness. Somehow, like activity and busyness will make them feel needed, significant, important, valuable and successful. They think they will now be accepted by the other busy empty successful people.

Some of you may receive this very defensively. I know I’m ticking people off on this one. “I’m busy but I’m not empty. I’m very, very healthy.” No, you’re not. When you get to heaven you’ll see I was right on this one. Anyway, “me think thou dost protest too much.”

Busy isn’t better. Choosing better is better. I’m convinced that until we learn to choose better then we’ll always be running on empty and complaining that we never have enough time.

I want to show you an example of this from the New Testament. In Luke 10 we have a conversation that Jesus has with two people. One who chooses better and one who doesn’t choose better. In Luke 10, starting with verse 38 it says this, “As Jesus and His disciples were on their way, He came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to Him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what He said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to Him and asked, ‘Lord, don’t You care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me.’ Jesus said, ‘Martha, Martha, Martha, the Lord answered, You are worried and upset about many things. But only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better and it will not be taken away from her.’”

The bottom line is that Mary chose better. One chose busy one chose better.

I am aware there is a right time for all things. At this particular time when Jesus was in their home sharing and fellowshipping it was a time for listening and learning. Notice Jesus does acknowledge that preparations had to be made, but Martha became distracted by premature preparations.

So here’s the pattern of busyness.

It begins with good intentions. This is where busyness usually begins. Martha wasn’t evil. Martha was being hospitable. She had the right heart. She opened her home to Jesus. I believe most have good intentions. We have good intentions for our kids. We have good intentions for our career. We have good intentions to provide for our family.

The good intentions got the ball of activity rolling and somewhere, somehow, something got lost and the second thing happened – distractions moved in. We were derailed by distractions. That’s what happened to Martha. Jesus said she was distracted.

Think about this. God in the flesh is in your living room having wine and cheese at your coffee table – tell me what is so important that it couldn’t wait until He left or suggested they enjoy a meal together. Martha was distracted by something she thought needed to be done.

When you’re derailed by distractions, distractions can appear as priorities and priorities can seem like distractions. Staying focused on what’s really important is very difficult to do.

Then after you’re derailed by distractions here’s what happens. Pressure and pity arrive. This is where you begin to have a little pity party for yourself. Martha says in verse 40 “Lord, don’t You care?” We’re not told in the text what was the boiling point for Martha. We don’t know what pushed her over the edge to make her say this.

Whatever it was, this was a sign that she was running on empty. When you have no margin in your life then you have no emotional reserves to pull from when things go wrong. You say and you do things that you regret.

So pressure enters and then pity comes. You’ve done this. You know what this is like. My spouse doesn’t understand the pressure I feel to get the house clean and take care of the kids. My spouse doesn’t feel the pressure I feel to provide. My parents don’t understand the pressure I feel in school. No one understands how hard it is to be me. That’s pity.

Then after pressure and pity show up guess what’s right around the corner?
Resentment. That’s where busyness leads to. Resentment follows. Verse 40. Martha has another classic line “Tell her to help me.” You can almost hear the resentment in her voice. Jesus, tell Mary to get a little more in sync with my agenda. “If Mary was more like me we would have already eaten cleaned the kitchen and could be kicking back watching Dancing with the Samaritans.” Resentment can also be a sign of busyness. So who wants a life of pity and resentment?

Next week we will conclude by looking at how to take action against busyness.

Now let me begin by telling you who may not know me, a few things about my past. I started going to bed early when I was young so I could dream about all the things I wanted to get done the next day. I’ve always like fast. When TiVo first came out I would TiVo programs so I could watch a sixty-minute show in forty-three point five minutes. I liked fast food and my day would begin with instant breakfast. I wouldn’t even eat minute rice because it took too long.

I can remember before we had kids I told my wife there’s no reason that if you concentrate that our children can’t be born prematurely. I won’t tell you exactly what she said to me. But she responded very quickly.

So by now you should have the picture of the kind of person I was and would still be if I hadn’t experienced a great awakening.

Let me start by saying that I can totally relate. There was a time in my life when I was busy…busy…busy. I was on the go doing so many good things for God, family and my community. Then one day it happened. I came to the realization that God didn’t expect me to change the whole world – just my world.

Several years ago I made some radical decisions. I made some life changing decisions. I realized His yoke was easy and His burden was light. So I began to make some changes in my life to help me choose what matters most.

I tell you all this because I really believe I can help you today.

First, let’s examine some things we find ourselves saying that are just not true.

First: There’s not enough time to do everything.

This is just not true. It also has another name. The name is “If there were only more hours in my day.” The truth is, there’s just enough hours in your day to do everything God wants you to do.

So when we come to this feeling “I wish there were more hours in my day… there’s never enough time to do everything.” Admit it, somebody mismanaged his or her time. You or God. What do you guess?
But since none of us like to take blame we don’t like to blame ourselves for mismanaging our time, our priorities, our values, we’ll take a shot at God. “If I just had more hours in my day!” Maybe you don’t want to blame God, the creator of time. So you drop it down to Jesus. Or possibly the Holy Spirit. “I don’t know which of You three to blame. All I know is this: If You could just give me another one of those daylight savings things where I could get one more extra hour, that would be great.”

At some point when you think there’s just so much to do, and not enough time to do it, that’s a lie that fuels our busyness.

A second is this: It’s just a busy season I’m in right now.

This was my default lie. This was one I used so much – in my marriage, with my kids – “It’s so busy right now. It’s just a season. But you know how seasons are. Seasons always come to an end. It’s right around the corner. I can see good times. But all these projects seem to be due. There’s a lot of stuff going on, travel and different things like that. But when this season is over we’re going to get back to life as it was.”

That is a lie. Busy people don’t have seasons. Busy people have one season – it’s called busy. That season lines up behind it. It’s like Arizona – it doesn’t have seasons, right? It’s always hot. Everything is hot in Arizona. It’s not the season that’s busy. It’s the person that’s busy. And busy addicts just don’t want to admit that we’re busy addicts.

If you believe this lie you’ll always be busy.

A third lie is: This is really important.

This task this person, this meeting, this opportunity… We line these things up in front of us that are really important and we’re constantly faced with busyness. Here’s the key. It’s not just what we think is really important. It’s what other people in our world also think is important – that we should think is really important. So what others do is others transfer their urgency to become our emergency. Their problem now becomes our problem because it gets on our To Do list and our calendar.

Next week I want to talk about our pattern of busyness. There are some things we can learn after recognizing the lies mentioned above, and that is recognizing the pattern of busyness. After this we will look at some solutions.

Someone told me that in China, the polite answer to “How are you?” is “I am very busy, thank you.”

So if you are busy you must be fine. And if you have more to do than you can do, and the list never gets done, but only longer, then you must be very fine.

Busyness has nothing to do with self-worth or productivity. God meant for us to work but all busyness is not productive work.

I find it interesting that on the sixth day God created man. On the seventh day I picture man rising early saying, “OK God let’s get busy. Let’s go to work.” God said, “Sorry we’re taking the day off.” This teaches me that God wants us to work from the priority and the position of rest. Not just running around staying busy till we drop so we can feel valuable, important and justified in taking a day off.

We’re going to talk about how you trust God in difficult times. How you trust God no matter what?

That’s really what the verse above talks about. “Trust in God at all times, my people. Tell him all your troubles for he is our refuge.”

We may later talk about trusting God when things are changing in our lives, as well as trusting Him in times of trouble.

But this week, we’re going to look at the fact that sometimes whatever the problem, whether it’s good times or bad times, the reason we don’t trust God is we just don’t feel like it. So how do you trust God when you don’t feel like trusting God?

I can talk about trusting God in this circumstance or that circumstance, the good and the bad. That’s great on a Sunday or on a Saturday. But what do you do on Monday or Tuesday when you know you should trust God, maybe for the first time or maybe for the thousandth time. But that particular day you just don’t feel like it. You feel too tired. You feel too worried or you feel too overwhelmed. It just feels too complicated I don’t feel like trusting God right now.

If you’re new to a life of faith or just trying to figure that out, this is something you’re going to face a thousand times. You who have been living a life of faith for a while you know what I’m talking about. Again and again and again you come up against this thing of faith and feeling. How do they come together? How do you trust when you don’t feel like it? We’re all going to feel this way sometimes. So what can you do?

1. You can remember that trust is not an emotion.

I don’t have to feel like trusting in order to trust, because trust is not an emotion. It’s not like I have to work up this feeling of feeling closer to God, feeling really spiritual, or feeling really sentimental in order to trust God. It’s not a feeling. It’s an action. So however you’re feeling you can still trust.

Jesus talked to his first followers about this the night before he died. He knew the next day he was going to be hanging on a cross and they would feel like everything had been lost. So the night before, he talked to them about the difference between trust and feeling, as well as action and feeling. John 14:1 “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God trust also in me.” Jesus said you’re going to feel this way but however you feel don’t let that overwhelm you. Decide to trust whatever the circumstance is.

If I’m going to trust God whatever the feeling, there’s a simple formula I just want to walk through. For many of us this might be the most important thing we hear today. How do you trust God in the midst of the ups and downs of life? When I don’t feel like trusting God, there’s a simple checklist you can go through that can be incredibly helpful.

First you check the physical, then you check the emotional, and then you check the spiritual. I can’t tell you how many people over the years that I’ve met that are trying to solve a spiritual problem with a spiritual answer. Trying to pray their way to an answer when really what they need is to go to the doctor and figure something out.

As an example, I pastored for over 30 years. I would speak every weekend two to three times, and I loved it. But on Monday after ministering to people and speaking that much, I usually felt drained and often emotionally very low. I could have said, what’s wrong with me? How come I’m feeling this way? How can I even be a Christian if I feel this way? Or I could recognize that’s just how you’re going to feel on some Monday’s after being with people all day long and talking about God. There’s something that emotionally goes out of you.

Or for instance, I’ve met people who have low blood sugar. They want to solve the feeling of discouragement that might go with that sometimes so they decide, “I’m going to come up with a spiritual answer. I’m going to fast in order to solve this low blood sugar problem.” It doesn’t work. That’s the wrong answer to that problem.

First you check the physical. Is there something going on with my body? Is there something going on with (dare I say it) with my hormones? Is there something going on in me that’s creating this feeling? Don’t try to solve this physical problem with some super spiritual answer. First you check the physical. Is there something going on there?

Then you check the emotional. What’s going on there? So you figure out emotionally, what you’re going through at the moment and realize it’s possibly created this kind of feeling.

There are all kinds of circumstances in life that effect our emotions. For instance, you could be sending our child off to college or the military. There’s a lot of sentiment, a lot of emotion in that. There’s a feeling of loss or loneliness.

You have to acknowledge what’s going on here is emotional. And you let God work in that area of your life.

Then you check the spiritual. Maybe you’re having a hard time trusting and you feel far away from God because you haven’t had any close fellowship with Him for sometime. Maybe He’s asked you to do something and you said no, or you haven’t yet got around to doing it. Therefore, you may resolve the problem is spiritual.

So let me encourage you to go through this simple little checklist; it can be incredibly helpful in trusting God. For sure helpful in discovering or pinpointing what area of your life you are having trouble in.

So you trust God first of all by remembering that trust is not an emotion. The second thing you do is…

Do you remember the Bobby McFerrin song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”? When it hit the top of the charts, it was criticized as being too simplistic and naive. But it expresses some very important sentiments.

Think about it for a minute. Of all the living things that God created, human beings are the only ones that worry. And we worry about everything – fuel prices, the stock market, our jobs, paying our bills, our marriages, our relationships; parents worry about children, children worry about parents. You name it; somebody is worrying about it right now. Maybe even you.

One guy, John, a ‘worrywart’, hired his laid-back friend Joe for a special job. Joe had to think about all of the troubles affecting John’s life, and any that might possibly affect him in the future, and worry about them. John paid Joe $1,000 a week to be his worrier. When John was asked, ‘Don’t you worry about having a $1,000 a week to pay Joe?’ he responded ‘No! That’s what I pay Joe for.’

The most basic New Testament word used for worry (merimnao) means ‘to be anxious, to be distracted, to have a divided mind.’ It’s the word in Matthew 6:25 where Jesus said, ‘Do not worry about your life’. And Paul used it when he wrote, ‘Be anxious for nothing’ (Philippians 4:6).

Worry also is a feeling of uneasiness, apprehension, or dread, usually about something that may happen in the future. Let’s be honest. Everyone worries: those who say they don’t are in a state of denial. Worriers live in the future. They spend a great amount of time speculating on what might occur, and then fearing the worst.

I remember as a boy my mother would often say that she was ‘worried sick’ about this or that thing. I saw how it effected her and drained her of a lot of emotional and physical energy.

I recently came across these figures from a recent survey. This survey said 40% of the things we worry about never happen; another 30% of our worries are in the past, and we can’t do anything about them. 12% concern other people, and are really none of our business anyway. 10% are about sickness that we can do very little to control. Only 8% of the things we worry about are worth worrying about. The Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans studied 500 consecutive admissions and found that 77 percent were there because of anxiety. Maybe that’s the reason my mother said she was ‘worried sick.’

So we need to learn that worry really is like a rocking chair, it doesn’t get us anywhere. Surely you’ve heard this little ditty:

Worry never climbed a hill.
Worry never paid a bill.
Worry never dried a tear.
Worry never calmed a fear.

So what are some remedies for worry?

1. YOU MUST TRUST GOD WHO IS THE HEAVENLY FATHER, AND WHO REALLY CARES ABOUT US!

If you are an atheist I can’t help you. You are on your own here.

But if you are not, you will have to see that you are more valuable than any of the other creatures, created by God (Matthew 6:26). Whatever you have done, whatever others think of you, or you may think of yourself, please realize and know that God loves you. You cannot earn his love: it is eternal and unconditional.

To be in the kingdom, Jesus said, is to be like a child. Children are more trustful and trusting than adults: they’re more willing to let others control their life. When we told our young children, and now our grandchildren certain things they need to do, they trust us and do it.

You see faith involves understanding how limited we are and how little control we have over certain things. Control is a real issue for many of us, especially we men. I have discovered that most women find it easier to trust God than men.

Someone said that worry is a mild form of atheism, living as if God doesn’t exist, doesn’t have any power, or doesn’t care to use his power on your behalf. You can trust Him to fulfill His promises, to care for you, to forgive your sins and cleanse you from all unrighteousness, if that’s what you’re worried about.

Or as Jesus pointed out, ‘Look at the birds of the air (those little insignificant sparrows); they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.’

The God who has provided life also provides the necessities to keep that life going. The point, of course, is NOT that the birds and animals are taken care of without work; that is obviously not true – it has been said that no one works harder than the average sparrow to make a living. The message is that they do not worry about that living.

I remember as a boy in Sunday School a half a century ago, we were taught this little poem:

Said the robin to the sparrow,
I should really like to know
Why these anxious human beings
Rush around and worry so.
Said the sparrow to the robin,
Friend, I think that it must be
That they have no heavenly Father
Such as cares for you and me.

As to the issue of the care and quality of life, Jesus talks about birds and flowers. ‘And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you?’ It seems that most in the world is clothed. Sure, it’s true that some have finer and even more clothes, but the issue is God clothes us. You can trust Him.

The Book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 3, tells us that, “To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under the sun…” So in the life of the believer there is a time to win and a time to lose.

In John 21:3 we have the poignant words, “That night they caught nothing.” What’s going on?

The background: This is just shortly after the resurrection. The tomb is empty. They have reported, “Christ is risen!” Some of the disciples have actually seen Jesus. Isn’t this a time of glorious victory, success, for the kingdom? Why is it then that we find these seven disciples in the dead of night, probably a cold night, sitting in a boat on the Sea of Galilee, fishing?

This was a season of failure in the life of these disciples. They were frightened at seeing Jesus put to death on the cross. Who knows? Maybe they were next. They were despairing, disappointed. What now? Peter is the one who comes up with the idea: “There’s one thing I know how to do. I know how to fish. I was a fisherman before Jesus called me. I’m going fishing.” So the other six disciples said, “OK, we’ll go with you.” That night they toiled all night, putting down their nets, pulling up their nets empty, down and up and empty every time. That night they caught nothing. This was a season of failure.

Why do failures have a way of devastating us? Two reasons:

**1. The first reason I believe failure often devastates us is that it points out our imperfections.** We lack the courage to be imperfect. We say we know that we are not perfect, but when failure comes we respond as if we thought we were. We think we have got to be perfect, always get it right, always appear strong, and always portray ourselves as successful. I think sometimes God has to remind us that we are not perfect by allowing us to fail.

The Apostle Paul in Philippians 3:12 “Not as though I had already attained I’m not successful yet nor already perfect but I follow on.” We are not perfect yet. We are in the process of being perfected. Failure is part of the refining process that moves us to completion.

**2. The second reason why failure devastates us is because irrationally we confuse failing with being a failure.** How many failings does it take to make a failure? I may fail a lot but that doesn’t make me a failure. The only time I become a failure is the day I give up. Then I’m a failure. As long as I keep trying, I’m not a failure.

When is failure really a failure? Don’t you love those stories of people when, early in their life, it seems that everything had gone wrong and they had failed at everything then suddenly they succeed?

There was a young Scottish man brought up in the highlands of Scotland, went to the seminary to become a pastor. When he completed seminary he was assigned to his first preaching appointment in a little church in the mountains of Scotland. He entered the pulpit trembling. For the first time, he was going to preach a sermon in the Church of Scotland. He got to the top, opened his Bible to get ready to preach and forgot his text. He was humiliated. He turned and fled from the pulpit, ran out of the door, and was heard to be screaming as he ran down the street, “I will never preach, ever. I will never preach again!”

About 20 years ago on a trip to Africa I stood on the banks of the great Zambezi River near Victoria Falls, the greatest falls in the world. There is a place if you position yourself along these great falls and turn around (do a full 180) and look up, you’ll see a statue of that man who fled the pulpit because he forgot his text. David Livingston.

When is a failure a failure?

So what should we do with failure? Three things we must do with failure:

**1. Allow God to be a part of it.** Make it part of your experience with God. When it does occurs it becomes part of your experience with God. This is the great mystery of God’s providence. But when we fail we are to allow Him in. He is there to help us. So make God a part of it. Let God love and embrace you even in your times of failure.

Philippians 3:8 “I count all things but loss… I think he’s saying I count everything as a failure, … for the exceeding, the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord.”

When we make God a part of it, then we can put it in proper perspective. We put it in the perspective of eternity, the whole of God’s plan for our life. So keep your failures in perspective by making God a part of them.

Maybe failure is really not failure after all. In God’s economy there is really no such thing as failure, only forced growth.

**2. The second thing we must do with failure is we must to learn to grow from it.** Failures are for growing. Philippians 3:10 “That I may know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his suffering.” Failure helps us understand the fellowship of suffering.

Someone has said, “Success is built upon a mountain of failure.” Erma Bombeck, the great humorist, received an invitation to come to a banquet of highly successful people. She was a bit taken back and then realized, “Successful? I guess I am.” She started to throw it away and then decided she would go. She wanted to know what highly successful people talked about. So she went to the banquet. She said, “Everywhere I went, there was only one topic of conversation: How I learned from my failures.”

Learn from it. Grow from it. God has lessons to teach us. Accept them as gifts of His grace.

One famous writer was once asked, “If you could do it over again, what would you do different?” He said, “I’d make more mistakes.”

**3. The third thing we must do with failure is forget it or let go of it.** The problem with this failure stuff is we seem unable to forget it. We lie awake at night. We punish ourselves with it. We begin to think something must be wrong with us. Look! Forget it! Philippians 3:13 “This one thing I do, literally he is saying he gives all his energy to forgetting those things which are behind, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling in God in Christ Jesus.”

The long and short of it is: Failure can cause you to get up or give up. You choose, you decide. But at least decide from the perspective of how God sees it.