A Godly Response to Exhaustion, Pt. 1 — A ‘Time With God’ Devotion

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Transcript

Good morning. I’m here to help you start your day right as we spend some time with God together.

As we start this day and this week, our theme for the week is a Godly response to exhaustion.

Physical Rest

You may be at that point in your life, certainly our society, works us to the level of exhaustion quite regularly and when we add the pressures and demands of our job or our family to the other issues of life and pressures of involvement at church and other organizations that we’re involved in, we can very easily come to the point of exhaustion. And how do we respond to that in a Godly way?

In the book of 1 Kings chapters 18 and 19 in the Bible, it tells the story of the prophet Elijah, who was a great prophet of God whose job was to maintain the spiritual life of the nation of Israel by bringing God’s message, particularly to the leaders of Israel.

And he was there at a time when the king of Israel was an ungodly man, and there was a very powerful queen, also his wife Jezebel, who had set up a whole system of idolatry and prophets of the idols of Baal and Ashara.

And Elijah stood against them and led what was really a spiritual revival in the nation of Israel that led to the people of Israel actually rising up and killing all 950 prophets that Jezebel had put in place, false prophets to the idols she had created.

And so it says in 1 Kings 19, King Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. And Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, So may the gods do to me and even more if I do not make your life as the life of one of them by tomorrow about this time.

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And Elijah was afraid and arose and ran for his life and came to Beersheba, which belongs to Judah, and left his servant there, but he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness and came and sat down under a juniper tree, and he requested for himself that he might die and said, It is enough now, O Lord, take my life, for I am not better than my father’s. He was really at a place of total exhaustion and despair.

And it says that he lay down and slept under a juniper tree, and behold, there was an angel touching him.

And the angel said to him, Arise and eat. Then he looked, and behold, there was at his head a bread cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water. So he ate and drank and lay down again.

And the angel of the Lord came again a second time and touched him and said, Arise, eat, because the journey is too great for you. So he arose and ate and drank and went in the strength of that food 40 days and 40 nights to Horeb, the mountain of God.

I want to suggest to you that one of the first things that is a godly response to exhaustion is physical rest, rebuilding, stopping the pace you’re in. Take some holiday time if you need to. If you’re involved in a ministry that’s pressuring you, let them know the level of exhaustion you’re at and say, I have got to get some rest.

Even just to sleep, and very often when you do that you might sleep 12-14 hours the first few days when you’re just allowed to stop and unwind and rebuild.

When God set life in motion in the first place, he told us, 6 days you may work, but there’s to be 1 day each week that is 4 – and the words he uses are complete rest.

I wonder if you’re following the principle that God has laid down in His Word. In order to do that, you might have to let go of something that you’re doing in your life or say no to something that somebody’s asking you to do.

You may need to reassess your values and why you’re doing all the things you’re doing and to stop and rest for a while.

I’m John North.

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