The Problem of Hurry

Introduction

You’re making your way to Luke chapter 10, Luke 10. We’re going to be again reading in verse 38. Luke 10 in verse 38. You may notice I’m nursing a little bit of a weak voice this morning, so I’ll just make note of that now so you’re not disturbed through the whole thing. I think I’ll be okay. I was actually able to reach low notes that I normally can’t get to this morning. So that was fun. Let’s begin reading in Luke 10 in verse 38. I want you to keep the whole context in mind. We’re going to reference the story here, the parable of the good Samaritan. You’re probably pretty familiar with that, but I want to just refresh your memory on this second story that comes after it, one that you’re probably somewhat familiar with too, but I want to catch some of the wording here.

It says, Now as they went on their way, Jesus entered a village. And a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving. And she went up to him and said, Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me. But the Lord answered her.

And so this morning I want to talk for a few minutes about the idea of being hurried in life, being so caught up in the things around us that we actually can’t focus on what actually matters most. Have you heard of the Princeton Good Samaritan experiment? I think maybe someone recently, maybe Ed or somebody else did an invitation recently, it might have been like two or three years ago, where they mentioned this. And the whole principle was they took seminary students and they had them study and prepare to teach on the Good Samaritan. So they were by themselves, I think it was in the library somewhere, and there were three scenarios. Someone came to them and said, hey, you’ve got plenty of time, but you should probably make your way over, so you’re ready.

That was the kind of the less hurried scenario. In the middle, they said, Hey, they’re ready for you. You need to be getting over there. And then the last one is they say, Hey, we got the time wrong, you’re late. They’ve been waiting for you for a few minutes. Now, unbeknownst to them, the whole thing was staged. And in a spot along their path that was isolated, only they would go by, was placed a victim who was clearly in need, coughing, seizing, having all sorts of problems, and they were the only one there. And the results were interesting. Sixty-three percent of the less hurried students stopped to help. So the ones who were told, you might want to get over there, you have some time, but go ahead and make your way.

Right, they’re ready for you. Go ahead and head over. The interesting thing was that only 10% of the students who were in the high hurry situation stopped. Well, it just goes to show that most believers, at least in this scenario, have a very large disconnect between beliefs and actions when placed under pressure. And as I’m going to get to here in just a minute, I want to kind of take a circuitous route to get there because of something I just pointed out. The idea of hurry is extremely important in our society, and understanding the dangers and the temptations of it. And this story with Martha is actually an illustration of this very thing. Have you considered Martha and who she is? I mean, she is a close friend of Jesus.

She’s a believer. She’s so significant to the gospel story that Peter, three times in the Gospels, he is the one who’s given the place of making the great confession. You are the Christ, the Son of God. Right? Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And the gospel of John, the one who proclaims this great confession of Jesus being the Christ, the Son of God, is Martha. She’s not a weak person. She’s someone who has people into her home and she takes care of others and she’s spiritually minded and all of that. And yet in this moment, not only is she distracted and too busy to focus on what actually mattered, she’s also trying to hinder her sister, who’s sitting at Jesus’ feet trying to learn from him. This is the devastating nature of hurry, of busyness, of what it does to us in our life.

1. The Foundational Problem: Separate Body and Mind

Originally, I called the sermon, I reserve the right to change things midstream. That’s I do that sometimes. Originally I called it two obstacles to discipleship. We’re going to do a lot on discipleship over the next year. I thought Daniel Broadwell’s work at Youth Weekend was exceptional and pointed out some great things that really require some more digging into as a group. And so I want to do some of that over time. But we gotta kind of set the stage and do some foundational work because I think it’s such a problem in our religious culture. And so the first part of this, before we can even get to hurry, is just understanding one of the nature, the foundational problems, the nature of this foundational problem which separate body and mind.

There’s some influences that get us there, which I’ll talk about here in just a moment. This is not really what I want to focus everything on this morning, so I’m gonna go through it really kind of quickly and we’ll maybe do it more depth some other time. But in the modern religious world, we actually very often neglect the positive role of the body when it comes to discipleship and Christ-likeness. So two major influences, there probably are more, but two major ones I can point out is the heresy of Gnosticism carrying over even to modern times, in which their concept was that the material world, the body itself is evil and wicked, that the mind can believe in things that are good, and in fact, their idea of salvation was special knowledge.

You reach a point where you have some sort of special knowledge that others don’t have. They’re very influenced by mysticism, by paganism, by Judaism, and Christianity. It all kind of melded together with some very strange ideas. And so the second century heresy aspects of it really just kind of carried on even into modern times. The second one is much more recent, and that is Calvinism, which has really forced this concept to a false dichotomy or separation between faith and works. Now, there’s errors in this on multiple levels. First, it kind of incorrectly places importance just on getting saved, right? That’s the thing. You just get saved. And so that the whole debate is about faith and works and what gets you saved. And there’s actually very little attention put on discipleship, on what it means to walk with God, what it means to grow and to have spiritual formation and what that looks like.

All it is, well, that’s a work, and you’re trying to earn your salvation. Because the only focus is on getting saved. Do you see where I’m going here? And how modern religion has really warped this concept. And so if you do something, the reaction in the dominant part of the religious world is to say, well, you’re just trying to earn your salvation. What about trying to form myself after Christ? What about doing things that help me, body and mind and spirit, to be more like him? Isn’t that also important? Obviously, it is, and we see that through scripture. And then there are even secular movements like the enlightenment or the age of reason that only accentuates these ideas. Those are all tied up in the idea that we can find truth.

We can find all truth. We just dissect and parse everything, and we can find answers, and it’s all about what we do as humans. And really no focus on the spiritual.

And so there’s all these influences that have created this sort of distance between the body and the spirit. So, very quickly, I just want to point out a few passages that are worth mentioning. We can go all the way back to the very beginning in Genesis chapter 1. Just notice some of the wording here. He said, Let us make man in our image, verse 26, after our likeness. He says, So God, this is verse 27. So God created man in his own image, and the image of God he created him, male and female, he created them. Now we could go off on this for a pretty lengthy period of time, but if there’s ever a time in human history where we need to make the point about the importance of body and spirit together in spirituality, it’s probably right now.

He gave them gender, he gave them a body. And that body was to be used to serve God in very specific ways. He blessed them, verse 28, and God said, Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, and have dominion. Not only did he give them a body, he told them to make more bodies to fill the earth. And this is the means by which God works in the world. It’s by filling the world with human bodies to then serve him with their body. And then the very end of that, God saw everything that he made, and behold, it was very good. God created the body, he created it for a purpose, and the body is good. Also, worship is embodied. We’ve talked some about that not long ago in Romans chapter 12.

In Romans chapter 12, he says, I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship or service. In fact, everything that we do, it would be very hard to talk about anything that we do in real life in this life that is not in a very real way involve the body. It’s a fundamental part of who we are. Alexander Lowen, who was a psychoanalyst, he explains what schizophrenia actually is. Schizophrenia is a mental disorder in which there is a disconnection between body and spirit. The point here, which we don’t need to go in depth on, is just the idea that your identity is caught up with your body.

Your body and your spirit, it all works together to make up who you are. And if we try to deny part of that’s schizophrenia. We have spiritual schizophrenia when we think our body doesn’t matter, like a Gnostic, and that all that matters is the spirit and the things that we think. And we have to understand that discipleship is about what we think and it is about what we believe, but it is also very much about what we do. And there’s no denying that reality.

2. We Love Hurry

But we love hurry.

We love it so much that everything is built around it. It’s easy to give examples. I found this, I thought it was interesting. That little line, that’s when I was born. Okay, 1982. Right around then.

I mean, if we move that back, think about what that would look like as I make this point. But in 1982, less than 20,000 fast food locations. McDonald, I think in eight McDonald’s in 85, I think had its 5,000th restaurant somewhere in there. Okay. really disturbing is that Subway had like 300 and somehow now has 37,000. What is wrong with the world? I don’t even understand people. I would rather fast than need at Subway. But notice this jump. I mean, from 1980-ish, 20,000 or so, and now there are over 200,000 fast food locations. We don’t even need any more points. I mean, that is a demonstration of the reality of how important everything fast is. That’s not even dealing with fast casual. Now we’ve removed all the sit-down restaurants, we don’t even want to do that.

Don’t want to cook at home, but we don’t even want to go sit down somewhere else. We’ll just go through line, make food and keep going. And that’s not even fast food. So how many more? This is the culture that we are a part of. What about waiting for a response on a text message? You ever do that? By the way, I’m guilty on a lot of these things I’m talking about, so I’m not different than anybody else. You sit you text somebody and you sit there and you wait, look at your phone. Are they gonna answer me? I mean, what could they possibly be doing of any more value than responding to this test messages immediately? And then some of us, I’m guilty of this for sure.

I want to answer right away. I have to actually make myself wait a lot of times on emails or text, or because it’s wise, which we’ll get to here in just a few moments. But we’re so much in this culture and in the society pushed towards speed, and we value that and we praise it, and we think it’s this great thing, that it just becomes part of our daily routine in a very bad way. What about Amazon? You know, Amazon, amazing. Two day shipping. But that’s not good enough. Have you ever paid for one-day shipping or overnight? I mean, when I was a kid, we got that Sears catalog thing, and we flipped through that to see all the things we weren’t actually going to get, probably anyway.

And then they would show up like three months later. If you did get something, just think about how culture has changed over the last 40 years. And now, if you spend enough, you can get your delivery overnight. What genius marketing Amazon has.

3. Speed Kills: Hurry Sickness

Everything is about speed. But interestingly, speed kills.

A cardiologist, Meyer Friedman, coined the phrase, you may have heard this before, hurry sickness. He began noticing that, especially type A people who carried a kind of undercurrent of anger and frustration and urgency were his high-risk patients. They were the ones who had heart attacks most often. They were always in a hurry. Everything was urgent in their life, and he began to see that in his practice and even study it in more detail. Depending on the personality, it could be expressed through depression or just being unhappy, or always feeling chronically short on time. And this led to physical illness, but also just poor behavior and actions. All of this points to something that is very much not Christ like. It is not what it looks like to be a disciple, to follow Jesus.

4. What the Proverbs Say About Hurry

The Proverbs have some things to say about hurry. There’s other parts of scripture that talk about this as well. But these are interesting, I think. The wise man trying to give guidance to his sons. And saying, here’s a way to think about some things in life. And you’ll notice some connections to things in the New Testament, I hope, as we read through some of this. Whoever is slow to anger, it says in Proverbs 14, has great understanding, but he who has a hasty temper exalts follow. A tranquil heart gives life to the flesh, but envy makes the bones rot. I particularly want you to notice how spirit and body are connected here. That when things are not right in our heart, when we are not at peace, when our spirit is not good, the wise man says, this actually harms your flesh.

And when things are good and you do have tranquility and peace, it actually gives life to your flesh. There is an inevitable connection and an inseparable nature between body and mind and spirit, that in this life, at least we cannot separate. And they affect one another, and even the wise man in Proverbs says it. Proverbs 16 and 17 says, Whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty. He who rules his spirit than he who takes a city. He who has a cool spirit is a man of understanding. Interesting phraseology used here fits with how we even talk about things today, right? Someone with a cool spirit. We know what that means. Someone who rules or has control over himself is someone who’s slow. Right?

They aren’t quick tempered. They don’t jump to assumptions and to conclusions, but they control themselves. And the wise man’s saying this is a very good thing. Slow down, think carefully about things that you’re doing. Proverbs 19, verse 2. Desire without knowledge is not good. That sounds a lot like Romans. And whoever makes haste with his feet misses his way. Hurried actions lead to missteps. I mean, we’ve all seen that before. We’re doing something quickly and we hurt ourselves or we make a mistake, and it has consequences.

How often have we said this to our kids? Or even just that phrase right there, slow down. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve said that as a parent. But when I first started preaching, on the margins of my outline, that maybe you’ve experienced this. I’m actually way better now, so just realize that. I would write slow down over and over and over and over again. Right? So I’m not immune to this problem as well. It’s easy to just get going quickly and want to do things fast and not understand that sometimes it’s really helpful to just slow everything down and to take time, especially for things that matter. To understand what is truly of 20,000 Christians identified busyness as the major distraction from spiritual life.

Do you ever feel this way? It comes out in phrases, right? Like, I just have so much to do. Or in behaviors, like the things we skip out on or we don’t do because of whatever else we’re involved in. Or what about this conversation? If you’ve had this today, don’t feel bad. I’m not trying to guilt people. I just want us to understand this. How are you today? I’m fine. I’m just busy. Now, busyness can be good. It’s not always bad if we’re busy with the right things. But a lot of times that’s not necessarily what we mean, is it? And we’ll sort of justify it. Well, you know, it’s good to be busy, right? That’s like the last part of that conversation. And yet, everyone is recognizing that busyness is this huge distraction.

Look at the story of Martha herself, a person who seems to be a person of great faith, and yet her hurried life is standing in the way of sitting at the feet of Jesus and learning, like her sister. And she’s actually bitter. That her sister’s doing the thing that’s more important. That’s what being hurried and busy does.

5. The Symptoms of Hurry Sickness

Let me run through some of the symptoms. I have a feeling most of you feel this already, but I want to dig down a little bit deeper and talk about some of the symptoms of what a hurried sickness looks like. This comes from John Mark Comer, who does extensive work on the idea of discipleship. And he listed these. Most of them I kept pretty true to what he said, but I adapted a few. Here are the various ways that this kind of bears it out in your life. And there’s a lot of overlap in some of these. Irritability. You get angry quickly over small, normal things. Everyone has to tiptoe around your very regular negativity. Because at any moment it could erupt based on your mood.

That’s a sign that your life is hurried. That you’re not at peace. There’s something wrong. There’s something deeply wrong, and you know it, and it just is bothering you. It’s irritating you. It’s coming out in that behavior. Body and spirit, they’re connected. Right? So irritability, hypersensitivity, kind of like an offset of that a little bit. The smallest things hurt your feelings or ruin your day or cause emotional distress. It may cause anger or anxiety or depression or lethargy, depending on your personality type. But everything is taken very personally, even the smallest comments. Restlessness. This is an interesting one. You may try disciplines, you may try various practices or schedules, but you give up fast and you believe that nothing really works for you. You’re just too busy.

You can’t relax even when you try. You may not be doing much, but you always think about how much you have to do. You never let your mind settle or rest. Things like reading scripture or praying are boring and time consuming because you’re thinking about your to-do list. You have laundry and emails, work meetings, grocery lists that you’re actually trying to do all at the same time, and sometimes you don’t finish any of them. The distractions are constant. And there’s never really any real peace.

Followed by nonstat activity, which is sort of connected to this, or being a workaholic is another way to say this. It can be in your career, but it could also be in your home, obsessively cleaning or obsessively doing your work. Everything is connected to you having to move and be distracted at all times, mostly because it’s hard to wrestle with the thoughts that you’re going to have. We’ll talk about that in a later sermon. But you run errands, you’re obsessed about the things around you being in perfect order. By the end of the day, you’re exhausted, you’re grouchy, you have nothing left for anything or anybody. If you feel like that, your life is too hurried. It’s time to slow down and think about what really matters.

Emotional numbness. You are so overbusy, you don’t even have the capacity to feel your own emotions or anyone else’s. You don’t even want to think about it. Life is just about survival, nothing more. Out of order priorities. You’re always getting sucked into the tyranny of the urgent. That’s a comer phrase. You’re sucked into what matters in your mind right now, not what’s actually important. You realize, so it’s not that you don’t know, right? You understand on a spiritual level or intellectual level, but on a bodily level, and what we actually do, the struggle is you realize you never get around to the most important things in life. And if I haven’t got you yet it carries on like normal.

Escapist behavior, turning to distractions to escape from reality, overeating, scrolling social media, been watching TV shows and movies, video games, pornography. Rather than feeding your soul with nourishment and things that are actually good, we’re looking for something to take away the pain, take away the thought of what life really is handing us, and rather than dealing with it, we escape to something else that at least in the moment feels better, although often later it makes us feel guilty. And so it creates a negative feedback loop that just continues where we then want to escape again and again and again. Then there is no or just slipping spiritual discipline. No real effort and training. By the end of the day, you’ve done nothing spiritually beneficial except hurried prayers, maybe at a meal, maybe.

You’re too physically or emotionally tired to do anything meaningful. Have you ever been there? I mean, I have. I’ll just be honest. There’s times we’re doing all sorts of things, and by the end of the day, I realize the things that actually are important, I haven’t even touched or thought about. And here’s the thing it’s it’s gonna happen. It’s not that these things don’t happen, but it’s the recognition, the reality of what this is, and being able to make changes in the midst of it. And then the last is probably the most depressing, and that is isolation. You just feel disconnected from God, from others, even yourself. Your to-do list runs your life, and you simply cannot be around people until you’re in a better place.

Listen, this is soul rot. You will never better yourself through isolation, through disonnection, through waiting until you’re in a better place. That’ll never produce more spirituality. It’ll never make anything better. All it’s doing is feeding the negativity, the hurried and busy life, and separating us from the things that actually really matter that can help us get out of that kind of mentality. So, how’d you do? Again, the goal is not really to make us feel a bunch of guilt here. That’s not even going to help all that much. The goal is to help us all understand how badly we need a disciplined life. Learning from Jesus and finding rest for our souls.

He says, Come to me, learn from me. I will give you rest. Isn’t that what we want? Like every single marketing thing out there is pictured on like a beach in Mexico or some other place that in our minds it’s all about rest and peace. It’s so desperately what we want, and yet the hurried life that Americans live does nothing to point us in that direction. And so the admonition is to reject the idolization of hurry. It’s changing a little. I mean, even secularly, it’s beginning to change with big corporations. It used to be that working 70, 80 hours was kind of this hero sort of thing. You know, working on very little sleep. I mean, that’s what really productive people do until we realize that’s actually not true, and studies show it that people actually aren’t productive when they do that.

And so aspects of that are changing, but there’s still sort of this macho sort of mentality that still exists to some degree in our culture that still praises and exalts that sort of thing. But all it is spiritual rot and toxicity. It does nothing to actually help us with anything that actually matters. Comer in his book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry concludes this by saying it this way. Hurry kills relationships. Love takes time, hurry kills joy, gratitude, appreciation. It kills wisdom. Wisdom is born in the quiet. This is what I was saying earlier. Wisdom is born in the quiet, the slow. That’s where we find wisdom. Hurry kills all that we hold dear. Spirituality, health, marriage, family, thoughtful work, creativity, generosity. Hurry and a life of hurry destroys it all.

6. Training, Not Just Trying Really Hard

Even though we think that’s what we’re trying to win at and be successful at. That’s the irony. So, what’s the solution? It’s really what I’ve been getting at in the intro sermon a couple weeks ago following Youth Weekend. And what it’s pointed to in scripture repeatedly. What if training and not just trying really hard is the actual path to Christ likeness? Let me explain the difference.

And so every two months or so you get up early on a Saturday and you try really hard to run 26 miles. How does that work? And you do this over and over again. Like, I want to run this marathon. I’ve been thinking about this for years. And so, you know, every once in a while I go out there and I try super hard. It just doesn’t work for me. Or what about something like learning an instrument? You know, occasionally you pick up a guitar or violin or whatever it is, and you spend like hours. I’m trying to figure this thing out, and just I’m just not good. I’m just not good at it. You try really hard though. Or maybe something we’ve all done at some point, preparing for a test.

You ever done this? Don’t really pay attention, take notes all semester, and then that night before you’re gonna master this. You’re gonna try really hard. We all know the result. We all know how hopeless all of those are. And so you hear a sermon about joy or peace or holiness or whatever it might be that day, and you say, This week, I’m going to really try hard to be joyful. But the baby wakes you up three times the next night. The kids leave a mess in the kitchen. I know y’all wouldn’t normally do that. Sometimes it happens. And now they can’t find their shoes, and you’re gonna be late. It just doesn’t work. You tried so hard.

So that’s because trying hard is not the path to Christ’s likeness. It doesn’t really accept this invitation correctly. He invites us to learn. To train. That’s what discipleship is. Come to me. He said, all who labor and are heavy laden, I will give you rest. Sit at his feet, walk with him, see the things he says, listen to them, see the things he does, do them. This is what learning is. This is what a disciple does with the master. We talked about that a couple weeks ago. For I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. This is the promise he’s making. If you will do this, if you will be a disciple and you’ll follow me and you’ll listen to me, and you’ll see my example and you’ll do that, my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

The problem in our religious culture is the focus often is simply on trying hard and justifying the imperfect, which we all know to be true, but that’s sort of the idea. Well, I’ll never be perfect like Jesus. And so there’s really no expectation or effort or the idea that’s really the goal. And if it is the goal, what am I doing in my training? What does it look like? Do I have some daily things that I do, weekly, monthly, yearly? What does that training actually look like to get me to a place where I look and I walk like Jesus? If it’s just trying hard, you’re that marathon runner that’s never going to make it to the end. And we’re not talking about getting saved here.

That’s not my focus here. The focus is the true goal, which is to look like Jesus.

If that’s the way I envision it, if occasionally I decide I’m going to make this change or I’m going to make that change, but there’s no process by which to do that. Those goals and those efforts are going to continue to fail and make us feel like we can’t. And if we’re too busy to train as disciples, what is the likelihood that we will ever be prepared to act properly when the moments of decision present themselves. Just like those seminary students. They knew the story. I mean, they just studied it. It’s in their brain. They’re about to go teach it. It’s not that they know it’s they know it well enough to teach it. And under pressure, what happens? There may be a lot of reasons for that.

But one thing I would have proposed to you this morning is that one way to help not be that way is for us to engage like we would anything else, if we’re truly going to run a marathon or learn an instrument, or whatever it is, to go on a path of training, to see what actually needs to happen, to make decisions day to day, a process that leads to that end. Not thinking that somehow we’re going to be perfect, because we know that’s not going to be the case. But realizing the process is part of the goal. We’re trying to become like Jesus. We are his disciples. And that is actually the easy yoke. The hard joke is to believe all this and to keep acting like the world and keep living in depression and guilt and anxiety and all the pressure that comes when we make a decision we know doesn’t actually align with Jesus because we haven’t trained ourselves to do it.

Conclusion

And so I encourage you, and I encourage myself this morning. I think we’re probably all many of us in the same place to begin thinking about processes and goals along the way to get us to where we really want to be.

That’s processing the information that’s given us, the plan of God, and saying, this is what’s offered to you. This is where hope is found. This is where you’ll find rest, and saying, I believe that and I want to do it. And so you give your life to Jesus Christ and you begin this process of being reshaped after the image of his son. Sacrificing your body as a living sacrifice, beginning to transform yourself through the renewing of the mind to become more and more like his son. Can we help you do that this morning? Why don’t you come now as we stand and we sing?