Busyness and Rest

Psalm 12:7. “It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep.

If you walk up to the average American, church goer or not, and ask the question: How are you doing? The main response you will receive is: “I’m busy man”. This response is given because we don’t want to really open-up to people and “I’m busy” is a true statement about us. We as Americans are addicted to busyness. Why is this?

Looking first externally, America is full of workaholics as much as 25% of the workforce. “Time is money,” is our favorite saying. We can’t possibly spend our most valuable resource on something that doesn’t drive profit, revenue, material value, right? In a 2016 study completed by the Harvard Business Review, researchers found that Americans perceived busy people as higher status than those who spent more time on leisure. This is a cultural thing because Italians are the opposite. Being able to spend time on leisure activities is a sign of wealth and success in Italy.

Secondly, we need to look internally at our hearts. Because of the culture in which we live, certain things are valued and emphasized. Deep in our bones we want to be seen as valuable and important, and, in America, being busy and “productive” is what makes you valuable and important. A John’s Hopkins researcher said, “In our rush to make more money and to have the American Dream as it's been defined to us, we ended up crowding out our opportunity to have more time.”

Where did this view come from? It came from the church. The Industrial Revolution—which brought about the beginning of the productivity revolution in America almost 200 years ago—was built on the bedrock of what’s known as the Protestant work ethic; a worldview shaped initially by seeing work as worship, as calling, and as service to others. People worked hard because they were working for the Lord & for others, surrounded by grace and exercising God’s energy and investing the talents he gave them. But as we’ve lost God’s place in our work, we end up working from nothing to nothing; we are hamsters in wheels. 

There’s another factor in this discussion: we are horrible estimators of our time. All of us believe we have far less free time than we do. In actuality, Americans spend more time with their kids now than they did 50 years ago, and the average American still watches up to 20 hours of TV per week. So, we have time, but we’re “simply frittering it away with mindless versions of passive leisure that don’t register as restorative.”

This means that in America at large, and in our church, many of us are experiencing a crisis of both work and rest. We don’t know how to work productively, because we’re approaching it as a status symbol, and we allow it to overrun the banks. But we also don’t know how to rest well, and so we waste it away on silly things. We have forgotten the fourth commandment. We have forgotten the sabbath and we have failed to make it holy. The sabbath was created for man by God to enjoy God. It was made so that the created would take time to remember the Glory of the creator, and to be refreshed and renewed in his presence. We have forgotten the sabbath. Which makes us forget God. We need God. We need his truth, cutting through to the core of our desires and reorienting our hearts. 

God says in Psalm 12:7. “It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep.” God doesn’t want us to run around like chickens with our heads cut off from morning to night, trying to get full on constant activity. And Jesus addressed this as well in John 6:27-29, where he said, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you…Then they said to him, ‘What must we do, to be doing the works of God?’  Jesus answered them, ‘This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.’” It’s not the activity of our hands and the slots in our schedules that matter most. It’s the state of our hearts and the object of our faith. 

You want to be truly productive, to change the world?  Believe in Jesus, receive his grace, worship him, and thus enter into the transcendent work of God. “Be still, and know that he is God,” and that you are not.