ENERGY TO ENDURE

The following video transcript has been lightly edited

 Hi. I bet there was a time this week in which you felt tired. Maybe it's because of some long-term challenge you're dealing with. Maybe there was just a short-term moment, a one-time thing that felt like it drained all of your energy. And there's a part of you that wonders, well, why? Why do I feel tired?

I bet if you considered it, it's probably one of these three reasons. One of them just might be uncertainty. Uncertainty, SAPs our energy because we aren't sure what to do next. And within that uncertainty, our brain sort of rumbles around and we go through all the different options. And so that level of uncertainty or the lack of clarity prevents us from moving forward and it steals our energy.

Maybe for you it's because you are keeping a really frantic pace. You know, as Americans often we wear busyness as some sort of badge of honor, and so we move through life with this frantic sense of is there enough time? Can I get enough done? What more do I need to do? And each time we live in that space, I think it steals our energy and we feel tired and we want to have a sense of like, Hey, where can I get some power?

And then finally, I think the thing that steals our energy is fear. Whether it's a difficult health diagnosis or a broken relationship, or a challenge at work, or something's going on with our kids, we're afraid. We're afraid of the future. We're afraid of what's coming. And in that fear, we feel drained.

We've been in the midst of this series called Easter Reverb, and it's looking at how the good news of the resurrection of celebrating Easter reverberates in our life. And one of the things that it does is it offers us energy to endure. Paul, while he's writing in Ephesians says that he prays. He prays that the church would have a spirit of wisdom. That the church would know the hope that it's been called to, and that ultimately he would experience and know the power. The power that's been displayed in the power of resurrection.

Now, each of these is a wonderful counter to the things that steal energy. And so I want to share them with you a little bit today. So first we talk about how the uncertainty of the future drains our energy. And here Paul's advice would be that we would seek a spirit of wisdom. Of course, the spirit of wisdom in the scriptures is our ability to discern what the path of love looks like.

Jesus, of course, is a personification of wisdom, and Paul talks about how love is the thing that we'll endure above all things. It will be the thing that lasts forever and therefore when we're in a difficult situation, we feel uncertain and it's stealing our energy. But we want to do is we wanna discern the path of love because if we can walk down that path, it will be so helpful.

Last Friday, Tim Keller passed away. What I appreciate about Tim Keller's ministry in the heart of New York City, often at times, maybe sharing ideas that other people didn't agree with. It was remarkable because he always carried himself with a sense of wisdom, seeking a path of love, so that even those who perhaps did not agree with Tim would say that when they were with him, they felt loved by him.

And that's great advice for us too. So we want to use this idea of seeking the path of love as a rule of life. When you feel uncertain and you feel your energy being sapped from you, take a moment and consider what does the path of love look like for this situation? You might not be able to plot it all out, but if you take three actions and you say, this is what it looks like to love my child.

This is what it looks like to love at work. This is what it looks like to love in my family, in my neighborhood. And here's three ways I'm gonna go about that. And you commit to it. What you'll find is that your attention will go from the uncertainty of the future to the present. And as you engage the present and as you choose this path of love, you'll find yourself gaining energy.

So where might you need to choose to seek this path of love? Choose to be wise. So that you can fight against the uncertainty in the way that it steals your energy. The second way we talk about a lack of energy is this franticness the do more, be more, get more done. I gotta go and see all the people. And yet what Paul says is that he wants the people to see and to know the hope to which they're called, and the beauty of the hope.

That we are called to as God's people, is that it is a promise that God is love, and that the good in the world will be triumphant, that the evil and the bad will be condemned, and that the world as a whole will be restored. Now, one of the disciplines that I think that gets tied to this is that it offers us a chance to live with an unhurried pace.

By unhurried, I mean this. When we're living with a sense of franticness, we're living in a way that says that there's not enough. Think of it this way. It's like when your favorite pizza, or your favorite cookie, or your favorite donut is on a table and there's 30 people in the room and there's only 12 slices or 12 cookies or 12 donuts, you're worried that there's not going to be enough.

And sometimes in our world, we worry that there's not enough. But what this hope tells us is that there's abundance for all that the future is one of goodness and abundance. And so it lets us live at a different pace. It lets us live with a way of being unhurried. When I was a kid, we used to take trips to New Hampshire, and it was back before you had digital devices, and so you had to entertain yourself in the car.

My mom would buy us these different little different car games, and one of them that I can remember was this board that looked a little bit like a Rubik's cube and you had to slide the squares around in order to make it all work, to have all the colors line up. But the only reason this game worked is cuz there was one space missing and that space created enough margin that you could move and slide things.

I think for us to counter the franticness, we wanna look at our week, we wanna look at our life and say, Hey, do I have enough empty squares so that I can slide the other things around so that I can recognize that sometimes the interruptions are actually the gifts of grace in the midst of my week.

Because if we're able to keep that pace, that unhurried pace, because of the hope we have in the future. It'll help us gain energy instead of lose energy to the franticness. The last thing, fear. Fear steals our energy because we're afraid of what is to come. We're afraid of loss. We're afraid of death.

Paul says that he wants his readers to know the power of God and the power of God has been put on display in the resurrection of Christ. And what that reminds us of is that death and all fragments of it are not the final word. That there is something greater that will restore good. And so what this does is it allows us to engage with power.

We can feel empowered versus having our energy sapped because what we know and we believe to be true is that there's a future. And that future lies out ahead of us, but not just out ahead of us in chronological time. But it's a whole different reality. And that same reality breaks into our lives.

Perhaps you're very familiar with it. Maybe personally, you've experienced a moment of resurrection. You've experienced that power where you've thought all was lost, but somehow life came. And met you. Maybe it happened in your family and you thought, my family could never stay together through this, and yet somehow it did.

Maybe your career, whatever it might be for you, remind yourself how you've experienced the power of the resurrection so that you can continue to live into it. So in that moment, maybe this coming week, when you feel fear pressing in on you. To fight that fear and to regain some energy. Remember the power of the resurrection.

No doubt life will steal energy from us. We will feel tired and we, we will feel weary. But the good news of Easter, the power of the resurrection is that it offers us energy to endure is what we want to be, is we wanna be a people who are wise, that seek and find the path of love. That choose to live an unhurried life opposed to a frantic life.

And ultimately we remember the power of the resurrection, the ways that it met us, and the ways it will meet us into the future. I hope this helps and I hope you have a great week. It's always good to be with you. Take care.