I’m Exhausted — How Do I Recharge My Body Without Neglecting My Soul?
00:00:00.000 | Today we have a question from someone who is drained, a listener who is exhausted.
00:00:05.600 | So how do we recharge without neglecting our souls?
00:00:09.080 | Here's the question.
00:00:10.080 | "Hello Pastor John, I'm 41 years old and have been a pastor for 9 years, leading a small
00:00:14.920 | but growing church of 120 people in Wales.
00:00:18.480 | As I have served as a pastor and a leader over this time, I've found that due to the
00:00:21.920 | spiritually, emotionally, and mentally draining nature of the work, whenever I have spare
00:00:26.760 | time (an evening off or a Saturday free) all I want to do is switch off and do trivial
00:00:31.440 | stuff like watch sports.
00:00:32.920 | I feel like I should be doing more personal reading or devotional God-pursuing stuff,
00:00:37.600 | but I can't find the energy or the desire.
00:00:40.600 | Ministry is hard work, so when I have opportunity I want to escape from things connected to
00:00:44.680 | it.
00:00:45.680 | How do you handle this tension between ministry as part of your work that you give your time
00:00:48.920 | and attention to for much of the day, and then the need to have energy to pursue God
00:00:53.280 | personally outside of your formal ministry activities?
00:00:57.280 | Have you felt this tension, and do you have any advice for a young and already tired pastor?"
00:01:03.120 | Yes, I have felt that tension.
00:01:07.560 | I doubt that you or I will ever escape it.
00:01:11.000 | As I've tried to examine and study my own heart in regard to its inclinations when I'm
00:01:20.360 | tired, I am fairly suspicious of how self-justifying I can be in the defense of my inclination
00:01:29.360 | to compromise my mind and my conscience and what I do with my so-called "downtime."
00:01:37.160 | I say that just to wave a yellow flag, lest we assume that weariness after the Lord's
00:01:46.440 | work can justify almost anything.
00:01:50.000 | I think such subtle self-justifications of worldliness are the beginnings of many pastoral
00:01:59.640 | downfalls.
00:02:02.020 | You might say worldly downtimes lead to wicked downfalls.
00:02:10.120 | So here are a few things I have found and would suggest.
00:02:17.000 | I would begin by making it my daily prayer that God would keep me back from ministry
00:02:25.240 | ruining, marriage ruining, soul ruining sin in my leisure.
00:02:33.120 | Jesus did not teach us to pray, "Lead us not into temptation," for nothing.
00:02:39.800 | God keeps—he keeps—the hearts and marriages and ministries of those who cry out daily
00:02:47.960 | to be kept.
00:02:50.400 | Second, I would say put your own personal Bible reading and meditation and memory work
00:03:01.040 | and your own soul feeding with Bible-saturated literature—put that first in the day, not
00:03:11.640 | at the end of the day when you're tired.
00:03:15.560 | Take your best times of the day with your best energy and feed your soul.
00:03:24.500 | Keep the Lord over his Word with your best energy, not the dregs at the end of the day.
00:03:32.880 | Any pastor who says, "I work so hard at the demands of the church ministry that I
00:03:39.520 | don't have energy for feeding my own soul through Scripture and Scripture-saturated
00:03:44.600 | books," has got his day backward.
00:03:48.440 | If there are parts of the day with much energy and parts with little energy, then let the
00:03:55.960 | one of the parts with much energy be given to what is absolutely indispensable—communion
00:04:04.280 | with God in his Word for the sake of seeing and savoring the King of heaven.
00:04:12.580 | Because if this personal joy, personal fellowship, personal hope languishes, everything languishes,
00:04:23.220 | and worse than languishes usually.
00:04:26.060 | What our people need from us more than anything is the aroma of Christ.
00:04:33.560 | The world is filled with managerial experts in ministry.
00:04:40.220 | They create seasons of excitement in the life of the church, but they are shallow.
00:04:47.980 | And sooner or later, the human soul grows weary of such technical expertise.
00:04:54.220 | You have to keep propping it up with more smoke and mirrors and sound and light and
00:05:02.020 | everything external.
00:05:03.020 | You have to keep propping it up.
00:05:05.180 | It's so superficial.
00:05:08.340 | And the soul longs for a deep man of God.
00:05:11.940 | This is what people long for, a deep man of God.
00:05:15.340 | Have you been with God?
00:05:16.820 | Come show me that you've been with God, a man of the Word, a man of substance who has
00:05:22.480 | gone deep with eternal things and come up out of the valley laden with nourishing fruit
00:05:30.500 | for his people.
00:05:32.260 | This is only possible if we give the first priority to knowing God, not working for God.
00:05:42.000 | So that's my second suggestion.
00:05:44.420 | Reverse the order of your days.
00:05:47.900 | Give your best energy to going deep with God.
00:05:53.140 | Your people will not begrudge being in second place.
00:05:57.020 | Oh, they will love it.
00:05:59.980 | And the third thing I would say is this.
00:06:04.420 | In the evening, when your work is done or on your day off, it is no sin to leave your
00:06:13.060 | Bible on the table, provided you leave your Bible for the sake of your Bible.
00:06:21.200 | The Bible itself calls us to do many things besides read the Bible.
00:06:27.860 | Therefore, to obey the Bible, we have to leave the Bible on the desk.
00:06:34.700 | Now here's the challenge.
00:06:37.180 | If we leave the Bible for the sake of the Bible, we must do things that don't undermine
00:06:45.620 | our capacities to revel in what we find in the Bible.
00:06:49.540 | Let me say that again.
00:06:51.540 | When we leave the Bible for the sake of the Bible, we must not do things that have effects
00:07:01.340 | on our heart and mind, which unfit us for deeper, sweeter reveling in the glories of
00:07:08.460 | what we find in the Bible.
00:07:11.300 | We must be absolutely honest with our hearts here.
00:07:14.960 | Come on, pastors.
00:07:15.960 | We must be honest with our hearts here.
00:07:19.740 | Does this video, does this TV show, which everybody's watching—of course they are—does
00:07:27.180 | this video game leave us refined and intensified in our capacities to revel in the unsearchable
00:07:38.180 | riches of Christ in the Scriptures?
00:07:41.140 | I fear that for many pastors, the answer would be no, and he just doesn't care.
00:07:49.340 | He's tired.
00:07:51.260 | I believe we live in a day where immersion in popular culture, with all of its God-ignoring,
00:07:59.980 | sin-enjoying, pride-exalting assumptions, is not only assumed to be harmless, but assumed
00:08:08.380 | to be necessary.
00:08:10.540 | Both of those assumptions are wrong, deadly wrong.
00:08:16.040 | So let me see if I can give a few pointers for the kinds of things a pastor, or for that
00:08:24.100 | matter, anybody, might do when they feel mentally spent.
00:08:30.100 | Number one, when the mind feels too weary to read, it is probably not too weary to listen.
00:08:41.220 | Therefore, audiobooks are an amazing way to feed the mind when the mind is too tired to
00:08:49.820 | pick up the spoon to feed itself.
00:08:52.560 | And this feeding can be enormously enjoyable and refreshing and informative and upbuilding.
00:09:02.220 | All of us know that there are great books, both fiction and nonfiction, that are a hundred
00:09:08.300 | times superior to what's on TV or the trending movies, which we have always wanted to read
00:09:14.540 | anyway.
00:09:17.420 | Listening to a great book may not provide the same exactness as reading it, but we're
00:09:26.180 | not comparing listening to reading.
00:09:30.580 | We're comparing listening to a great book, on the one hand, to groveling in the world's
00:09:35.420 | sensual entertainment, on the other hand.
00:09:37.780 | So that's number one.
00:09:39.660 | Consider audiobooks that are great and edifying.
00:09:45.940 | Number two, if you're married, think about things you can do with your spouse.
00:09:51.860 | There are games, like Scrabble, that you can play together that require different levels
00:09:58.820 | of mental energy.
00:10:00.260 | Scrabble may not be your cup of tea, but they provide a peaceful, pleasant, relaxing way
00:10:10.820 | to be in the same room and provide natural occasion for conversation from time to time.
00:10:16.580 | And the last thing I would say is go to Spurgeon and get this.
00:10:20.860 | I love this.
00:10:22.540 | Don't neglect the soul-refreshing world outside your house that God has given you precisely
00:10:32.460 | to touch your soul with new vision, new energy, refreshment.
00:10:37.140 | I'm talking about the sky and the trees and streams and the fields and birds and the animals,
00:10:44.100 | even the beautiful cityscapes like I have outside my house, as well as landscapes, which
00:10:50.780 | you have to drive away to see.
00:10:53.380 | The soul needs God's beauty taken in directly from nature.
00:11:00.940 | And here's the way Spurgeon put it.
00:11:03.900 | He who forgets the humming of the bees among the heather, the cooing of the wood pigeons
00:11:09.900 | in the forest, the song of birds in the woods, the rippling of rills among the rushes, and
00:11:16.500 | the sighing of the wind among the pines, needs not wonder if his heart forgets to sing and
00:11:23.940 | his soul grows heavy.
00:11:26.860 | A day's breathing of fresh air upon the hills or a few hours ramble in the beechwoods calm
00:11:34.740 | would sweep the cobwebs out of the brain of scores of toiling ministers who are now but
00:11:40.420 | half alive.
00:11:42.500 | A mouthful of sea air or a stiff walk in the wind's face would not give grace to the soul,
00:11:50.100 | but it would yield oxygen to the body, which is the next best thing.
00:11:56.500 | For lack of opportunity or inclination, these great remedies are neglected, and the student
00:12:02.140 | becomes a self-immolated victim.
00:12:06.620 | So let me summarize.
00:12:08.740 | First, ask God to protect you from wasted leisure.
00:12:12.620 | Second, reverse the order of your days and give your best energies to feeding your soul
00:12:18.820 | on the sweetness of Christ.
00:12:20.700 | Third, leave your Bible for the sake of your Bible, and that means when you leave, don't
00:12:27.900 | do anything that would diminish your capacities to revel in the riches of the Bible.
00:12:33.340 | So good.
00:12:34.340 | So good.
00:12:35.340 | Man, how I wish everyone could see this soul-refreshing cityscape that you and Noel enjoy outside
00:12:40.540 | the front of your house.
00:12:41.820 | On days like this, it is simply astonishing.
00:12:45.980 | The difference between looking at Los Angeles through the smog and looking at what I look
00:12:49.540 | at on a crisp day like this is the difference between being half blind and seeing.
00:12:55.140 | It really is an amazing view.
00:12:56.380 | Thank you, Pastor Jen, for thinking through this question, for sharing your thoughts on
00:12:59.220 | how we can recharge ourselves without neglecting our souls.
00:13:02.500 | We love hearing from leaders and questions that you face and the perplexities and challenges
00:13:06.580 | of leadership.
00:13:07.580 | Please send those into us.
00:13:09.220 | You can do that by emailing us at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.
00:13:13.980 | On Friday, we're going to close out the week with a common question about complementarity,
00:13:17.340 | especially the question about whether in our stress to say that men and women work together
00:13:21.640 | in different ways that are dissimilar in order to complement one another, it leads to the
00:13:27.420 | question over whether that means that men are more competent than women and are women
00:13:32.780 | less valuable than men.
00:13:34.980 | We've got to keep asking these questions and we will on Friday.
00:13:38.660 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:13:39.900 | Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast with longtime author and Pastor John
00:13:45.020 | Piper.
00:13:46.020 | We'll see you on Friday.
00:13:46.660 | [END]
00:13:48.160 | Ask Pastor John Podcast with longtime author and Pastor John Piper.
00:13:53.160 | [BLANK_AUDIO]