Start the day in relaxed dependence. This is merely a new description for “quiet time.” This description focuses on the state of being (relaxed dependence) rather than the activity (reading, praying, or journaling), but both are essential. For those struggling with burnout the temptation can be to make your time with God one more thing you’re trying to do to get better, rather than a place of refuge and time of rest.

Steward your finite body. Eat healthy, exercise, and sleep. We have a responsibility before God to care for our body so that we are in the best position to face life’s struggles. Whenever possible, we want to avoid situations where our spirit is willing but our flesh is weak (Matthew 16:41).

Live within your 168-hour week. This concept helps us remember that when we say “yes” to a new thing, we must say “no” to something we are currently doing.

Practice Stillness. Have some time each day when you are still—not doing a task, watching a television, or listening to music. Use this as a tangible reminder that you can stop moving and the world won’t.

Learn how to manage stress and conflict. Two of the leading predictors of burnout are stress and conflict. If these are areas that you feel ill-prepared to face, then study in these areas during your personal reading time.

Have non-functional friendships. When all your friendships know you because you are their teacher, parent, boss, colleague, etc., then you are setting yourself up for burnout.

Pay attention to when pleasures lose their pleasure. When things that you once enjoyed begin to lose their appeal, this should be considered a red flag.

Listen to your body. As embodied souls, if something depletes you emotionally it will show up physically. Pay attention if you begin to feel tired often, get sick frequently, have more frequent headaches or muscle pain, notice changes in your appetite or sleep habits, clenched jaw when trying to relax, or digestive problems.

Listen to your emotions. If you begin to experience a loss of motivation, an increase in procrastination, callousness towards problems, or cynicism about life, then treat these as probable signs of burnout.

Listen to your family. Your family will probably notice the early warning signs of burnout first. If they are saying you don’t seem like yourself, don’t respond to this as criticism calling for you to “do more” but as a concern about unhealthy changes in your life.

Don’t use food or substance to escape. Using food or alcohol to escape stress is like drinking saltwater to quench thirst. There is short term relief but the problem is actually made much worse.

Connect your work to serving your loving Heavenly Father. When work loses purpose, the potential for burnout increases. Connecting your work with God’s service and viewing God as a caring Father is an important balance in burnout prevention.

Multiply yourself in your most demanding responsibilities. If you have areas of your life where there is high demand and few qualified people to which to delegate, then a wise line item in your time budget should be equipping others to come alongside you.

Listen to how you read your Bible and pray. If you find yourself bracing against hearing from God because you can’t add “one more thing” to your life, then you are probably on the brink of burnout and your wrong view of God is building your momentum towards collapse.

If you are in the helping role with someone who you fear is on the brink of burnout, then here are several questions you can ask to discern if your concern is valid.

Are you “all there” when you are with your family?

Do you use your schedule as an excuse for bad eating habits?

Does your devotional time feel rushed, like a check-list item, or get neglected?

What are your most restorative activities and when do you engage in them?

When I ask “how” you’re doing why do you tell me “what” you’re doing?

What is your prevailing mood, feeling, or disposition?

Burnout is simply the result of living beyond our means with the time God has provided. It is common to say that someone is “living beyond their means” financially, meaning they owe more than they earn. Here we use the phrase to help us refer to time management.

The first step for those moving towards burnout is to rest in the fact that everything fits in a 168-hour week. If there are 200 hours worth of excellent things for you to accomplish in a week, at least 32 hours of your agenda is outside the will of God. If God wants it done, He will do it through someone else.

Budgeting Rest, Work, and Family

You must have an intentional plan for how you use your time. Like a financial budget, it must be detailed enough to be useful, flexible enough to be practical, and looked at enough to alter your life (here is a model that I’ve made that you are welcome to use). Here are some general parameters:

First, you should allocate at least 50 hours per week to sleep. This is a bare minimum of honoring the Sabbath command to express faith in God by resting a significant portion of each week.

Second, you should budget around 50 hours per week for work. Even before the fall, God called every person to productively use their lives for the betterment of others and stewardship of creation (Genesis 1:28). Allocating these hours may be easier for hourly workers than for, say, business owners or full-time parents. But some limit must be put on this sector of life or it will expand until it destroys the others. When the rest of life is destroyed, productivity loses its purpose.

Third, you should budget at least 17 hours per week for marriage and family. This is a little arbitrary, but represents a tithe (10%) of your time. Being part of a family strongly influences your usage of the rest of your time. If you are married with children, it is difficult to have quality time with your family if this quantity of time is not being met. And “family time” does not merely mean “in the same physical location.” It means investing your full attention to reinforce and strengthen the sense of knowing and being known within your family.

Budgeting “The Rest of Life”

Fourth, if you follow the recommendations above, that leaves 51 hours for “the rest of life.” In the first 117 hours you are merely looking for the wisest and most enjoyable way to accomplish rest, family time, and productivity. But in these last 51 hours we have an additional degree of freedom.

For those of us who are Christians, the lordship of Christ necessarily places a limit upon our freedom. Within these last 51 hours God calls us to do maintenance, service, and recreation.

Maintenance: This involves cleaning your house, going to the store, paying bills, and the other mundane activities necessary for life. In this area, a grandmother’s advice on home cleanliness provides sound guidance for all areas of life maintenance: “A home should be clean enough to be healthy and messy enough to be happy.”

Recreation: This involves the kind of activities that you find rewarding and replenishing. Life requires more than just 50 hours of sleep in order to be healthily sustained. Here the advice is to know yourself—what restores you, gives you energy, or relaxes you?

Service: This involves service through your church to the congregation and community for the purpose of spreading the gospel to the ends of the earth and deeper into the lives of those around you.

No recommended time allotments can be given for these three areas. But all three are essential to healthy living and should be given time. Healthy relationships are those that actively help you guard and honor balance in all three of these areas of involvement.

Generosity vs. Sacrifice

In order to properly allocate these last 51 hours you need to understand the difference between generosity and sacrifice.

Generosity: Planning to give more of the last 51 hours to serving God and others than we are comfortable doing and learning to find our joy in this service.

I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc., is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities [giving habits] do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say that they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charities [giving] excludes them.

~C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity

Sacrifice: Cutting into the first 117 hours for crisis needs. This type of activity should be relatively rare because it is unsustainable.

Sacrifice is good only when it is not a way of life. Generosity is as close as sacrifice can get to a way of life and remain healthy. The financial parallel is again helpful. It is foolish to give the money for your house payment to pay someone else’s mortgage. You are simply trading foreclosures. When sacrifice is made, it should be done (1) in consultation with a community of trusted Christian friends, (2) in concert with the efforts of one’s church, and (3) only on a defined, short-term basis.

This is written from the vantage point of a pastor, but it really could apply to anyone in a high pressure environment.

Stage One: Caring

Pastor Jeff truly cares, or at least he used to. He cared about his family—he spent time with his children and regularly took his wife out on dates. Pastor Jeff cared about people—the homeless, the orphans, and the lost. Pastor Jeff cared about his work—he was excited to see what God was doing through his church. Everyone liked Pastor Jeff and wanted to be like him.

Stage Two: Unfocused or Unrealistic Expectations

“Caring” is a fire that burns, and burning requires fuel. The problem was that the better Pastor Jeff did at anything, the more “great opportunities” came his way. Pastor Jeff cared, so he tried to honor every “open door” God brought into his life. Soon there were more care-fires than there was Pastor Jeff to burn, and he started to be consistently tired–physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

Stage Three: Fatigue

Pastor Jeff began to find that he didn’t have “it” to give to his family, church, or friends. His talent and likeability covered things well enough that few people noticed, except his wife. Instead of taking this as a warning to slow down, Pastor Jeff felt guilty that he wasn’t able to give his best anymore. At first this guilt provided a great energy boost and got him “back in the game.” This happened several times over the course of a couple years. He thought it might be a mild bout of depression or fatigue, so he started taking some vitamin supplements and working out. That helped… for a while.

Stage Four: Motivation by Guilt or Shame

But the fatigue kept coming back. Pastor Jeff tried not to notice, but he could tell he was becoming more cynical. His once tender heart was growing callous. Pastor Jeff was a caring guy who was starting not to care. He would help when needs arose, but it felt like a burden. Now even the guilt he felt about not caring wasn’t enough to wake him up. A sense of duty was about all Pastor Jeff had left.  His friends wanted him to be “Pastor Jeff” again, and he noticed that he had begun to resent them and avoid them. “They don’t understand me anymore,” he began to tell himself. For now, Pastor Jeff was going to take care of Pastor Jeff; everyone else would just take from Pastor Jeff.

Stage Five: Callousness or Cynicism

While Pastor Jeff was going through the motions of work and family, he was making sense of life in a whole new way. Since life was a black and white movie with a theme of duty, anything that introduced color with freedom and excitement was deemed “good.” Pastor Jeff was torn, knowing that he used to call these things “bad”—the attention from his secretary who seemed to genuinely care, the couple of drinks at night that took the edge off, the impulse purchases that proved his independence. Pastor Jeff’s wife and “old friends” (as he now thought of them) raised concerns. But this only reinforced his now firmly held cynicism that they were judgmental and didn’t care. He sank further into isolation.

Stage Six: Failure or Crisis

Predictably, Pastor Jeff’s work performance fell, he starting having an affair with his secretary, and the drinking grew beyond “a couple.” Everything started to come to light—his wife noticed some “questionable” e-mails with his secretary and started to piece together the truth. With the separation that followed, the affair became public knowledge. Pastor Jeff was fired, living in an apartment with his secretary, and only saw his kids for about an hour a week at McDonalds. He was shocked and sickened. When he permitted himself to ask, “What happened?” his emotions fluctuated from intense guilt to cold bitterness, then retreating back into numb callousness.

Stage Seven: Realization

How could he have gotten here? How could he have been as mean to his wife and friends as he was when his sin came to light? How could his conscience have missed that he was slipping into such dangerous patterns? While he was still a pastor, he had taught on the dangers of everything he had done. Why was he just now starting to care again? Now caring hurt so bad that he almost didn’t want to come out of his cynical stupor, and when Pastor Jeff talked to any of his “old friends” he found himself quickly getting defensive and retreating within his calloused conscience.

“We would bring men to Christ, and not to our own peculiar views of Christianity. Our first care must be that the sheep should be gathered to the great Shepherd; there will be time enough afterward to secure them for our various folds. To make proselytes is a suitable labor for Pharisees; to beget men unto God is the honorable aim of ministers of Christ… There is such a thing as selfishness in our eagerness for the aggrandizement of our own party and from this evil spirit may grace deliver us!” (14–15)

“Do not, therefore, consider that soul winning is or can be secured by the multiplication of baptisms and the swelling of the size of your church. What mean these dispatches from the battlefield? ‘Last night… fifteen souls were justified…’ I am weary of this public bragging, this counting of unhatched chickens, this exhibition of doubtful spoils. Lay aside such numberings of the people, such idle pretense of certifying in half a minute that which will need the testing of a lifetime. Hope for the best, but in your highest excitements be reasonable… if [a harvesting of responses] leads to idle boastings they will grieve the Holy Spirit, and work abounding evil.” (16)

(About the passion that comes from emotional, hyped services) “Give me the godliness which flourishes upon Calvary rather than upon Vesuvius.” (16)

“To win a soul, it is necessary not only to instruct our hearer and to make him know the truth, but to impress him so that he may feel it.” (19)

“The unequal legs of some ministries cripple them.” (19)

“It is a horrible thing for a man to be so doctrinal that he can speak coolly of the doom of the wicked, so that, if he does not actually praise God for it, it costs him no anguish of heart to think of the ruin of millions of our race.” (19)

“No minister living can save a soul; nor can all of us together, nor all the saints on earth or in heaven, work regeneration in a single person. The whole business on our part is the height of absurdity unless we regard ourselves as used by the Holy Ghost and filled with His power.” (22)

(About repentance) “Instead of saying, ‘It is only a change of mind,’ it seems to me more truthful to say it is a great and deep change—even a change of the mind itself.” (23)

“If the professed convert distinctly and deliberately declares that he knows his Lord’s will but does not mean to attend to it, you are not to pamper his presumption, but it is your duty to assure him that he is not saved. Has the Lord said, ‘And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and cometh after me, cannot be my disciple?’ Mistakes as to what the Lord’s will may be are to be tenderly corrected, but anything like willful disobedience is fatal; to tolerate it would be treason to Him that sent us.” (24)

“Remember our Saviour’s words, ‘The kingdom of heaven is like unto a net, that was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind: which, when it was full, they drew to shore, and sat down, and gathered the good into vessels, but cast the bad away.’ Do not number your fishes before they are broiled, nor count your converts before you have tested and tried them. This process may make your work somewhat slow, but then, brethren, it will be sure. Do your work steadily and well, so that those who come after you may not have to say that it was far more trouble to them to clear the church of those who ought never to have been admitted than it was to you to admit them.” (25)

“In all companies, on other days, on whatever occasions persons met together, Christ was to be heard of, and seen in the midst of them. Our young people, when they met, were wont to spend the time in talking of the excellency and dying love of JESUS CHRIST, the glory of the way of salvation, the wonderful, free, and sovereign grace of God, his glorious work in the conversion of a soul, the truth and certainty of the great things of God’s word, the sweetness of the views of his perfections, &c.”
– Jonathan Edwards, A Narrative of Surprising Conversions

The Spirit is often called the “shy” Person of the Trinity because He is content—strike that, zealous—to turn the attention entirely onto Jesus. One question dominates the minds of leaders in a true revival: Is Jesus exalted? A false revival is built around the exaltation of a particular figure. Christ is named, of course, and often presented as the “answer,” but the greater focus is on the leader, the worship, or even the worship experience itself. Emotions may run high in such an encounter, but sadly this is not the work of the Spirit of God, but the spirit of antichrist. His goal is to redirect attention, slightly at first, away from Christ and onto another.

Imagine that you had asked your best friend to serve as the best man at your wedding. This honored position is given to a trusted friend who will selflessly serve you on that great day, and make sure your wedding is everything it could be. But imagine that at the moment the doors at the back of the church open, and your bride appears for you and begins to walk down the aisle, you notice that your friend is making eyes at her, flirting with her, and trying to redirect her attention from you to himself. This is the pastor or worship leader who is more concerned with what people are thinking about him than they are what the people are thinking about Jesus. The church is His bride, not yours. Hands off. If you think the bride, for whatever reason, might be starting to focus on you, do everything you can to get her attention back on the groom.

Edwards writes elsewhere:

“When the operation is such as to raise their esteem of that Jesus who was born of the Virgin, and was crucified without the gates of Jerusalem; and seems more to confirm and establish their minds in the truth of what the gospel declares to us of his being the Son of God, and the Saviour of men; is a sure sign that it is from the Spirit of God.”

(Inspired by blog by Jared Wilson at http://gospeldrivenchurch.blogspot.com/2012/01/revival-is-always-christ-centered.html)

If any of those questions pique your interest, you’ll be sure to find an upcoming dialogue intriguing. Drs. Bart Ehrman and Daniel Wallace will be discussing the origins, transmission, and reliability of the New Testament in an event called Is the original New Testament Lost? Dr. Ehrman is a prolific writer and professor of religion right here at UNC-Chapel Hill, and has often publicly questioned the trustworthiness of the New Testament. Dr. Wallace is a professor at Dallas Theological Seminary, and has traveled the world preserving manuscripts of the Greek New Testament. Both men are top-tier scholars with excellent minds.

After Dr. Ehrman and Dr. Wallace present their respective positions, the audience will be invited to engage in a time of Q&A. This is great chance for you to hear from two renowned scholars about the origins of the New Testament, and to even have some specific questions answered. I get questions about this sort of thing a lot, so I know a lot of you are interested!

You can get tickets for the event here for $10. If you happen to be a UNC student or faculty, for you the event is free! The dialogue will be held on February 1^st  at 7:00 PM, at UNC Memorial Hall.

I tried to emphasize this past weekend that it’s very simple to share your faith with others. Seriously–anyone can do it. Some of the most effective “evangelists” in Scripture had known Christ for about 10 minutes (John 1:40-41; 4:39-41; 9:25).

I think one of the best things to do is invite people to study the Bible, on their own, and then offer to get together with them to talk about what they are reading. Martin Luther once likened the Bible to a caged lion. When the lion is challenged, there really is no need to defend it. Just let it out of the cage!

In much the same way, when people read the Scriptures, the Spirit of God will work in their own hearts. There is nothing as powerful as the Bible itself.

Each file linked below has a set of thirty-one passages to be read for each day of the month. Along with each passage are questions that help bring clarity to the verses. Print these out and give them to a friend, ask them to reflect on them; to write out (as instructed in the documents) in a few sentences what they see as the main thought, and then, in a sentence or two, what it means to them; then arrange to get back together in a week or so to discusswhat they are learning. It’s good stuff!

Just the other day one of our pastoral team members had a friend who received Christ after only three weeks of reading through these passages.

- See For Yourself

- Getting Connected

- Taste and See

Here are a few resources I referenced this morning. One of the great achievements of the Protestant Reformation was the tearing down of the artificial wall between clergy and laity. The following can help you to that end, showing how God has designed and equipped you for business or other so-called ‘secular’ vocation for His purposes:

Determining Your Calling: (mp3), (Transcript PDF) (I gave this talk this past Tuesday at our Equip Leadership Forum)

Blog article: “What Makes Business Christian?“

Blog article: “The Next Wave of Missions“

These articles from past issues of Christianity Today (Note: I wouldn’t agree, necessarily, with every word of these articles, but there is some valuable stuff in there)

- Working on Eternity

- The Mission of Business

- Work Is Our Mission

- Scripture and The Wall Street Journal 

“ ‘Linus’ was one of the first guys that I met here.  He came highly recommended as an auto driver, and we struck up a quick friendship.  We talked about our religious beliefs from day one—Linus, like most of the people in this city, was Hindu.  One day in the chai (tea) shop, I began asking Linus if he could remember any stories that he had been told from the Bible.  He vaguely fumbled through the creation story.  I had him tell the whole story and I prompted him for aspects he had forgotten, or helped him out when was wrong.  Then I retold the story to him and asked him what he thought.  He said he liked the story a lot.

Now, the whole time I was talking with Linus, I noticed there was another man next to him listening to my every word.  When I was finished with the story the other man, ‘Usha’, asked me if I was a missionary. After being caught off-guard, Usha and I talked for a few minutes and I learned that he was a believer, but he felt like he wasn’t following the Lord “very good.”  I encouraged him for a minute and then we both left the chai shop.  We will come back to Usha in a minute.

From that point on, each conversation I had with Linus got better and better.  He began to believe more and more of the good news from the Bible that I was sharing with Him. I asked him one night if he would read a Bible if I got one for him in his language. He promised that he would.  For three days he reminded me—multiple times!—about my promise to get him, as he called it, “Da Book.”  A few days later, when I was finally able to find one, I called Linus to arrange a time to drop it off.  While I was on the phone with him, a 17-year-old boy was in his car and overhearing the conversation, asked, “Why do you want a Bible? You aren’t going to convert, are you?” Linus responded, “No, I didn’t say anything about converting, but Jesus died so that we could be forgiven of our sins.  None of our gods has done anything like this.  Don’t you want to know more about Jesus?”  What I love about this is that Linus was witnessing even before he ever believed!

As soon as Linus got the book, he began reading. I soon discovered that his wife ‘Anita’ was reading “Da Book” too.  A few days later he approached me and said, “This book tells me about Jesus. But I want to know why Jesus had to die.” You can imagine my mixture of excitement and hesitancy to approach such a deep subject with my limited Hindi and his limited English. I took him back to the creation story and reminded him of man’s biggest problem—sin.  I then took him through the promise of one who would remedy our sin problem coming through the lineage of David (Family heritage is everything here).  Once he resolved that all men are sinful and rightfully deserved death and eternal separation from God, I asked him, “Who is the only man on earth that has never sinned?”  He said, “Jesus.”  I then asked him who Jesus was. He said, “God.”  After this I explained to him that God was so kind to send his Son Jesus, who is God, in the form of man, who would live a sinless life and would die for the sins of the whole world so we could be reunited with God.  I used the imagery of God restoring us back to our position in the Garden of Eden before the fall—and this is where he really got it.  It all clicked for him.  After we talked that night, he told me he believed that Jesus was the true God, and that the Hindu gods were not true gods. He said he did not believe he was a follower of Jesus, but that he wanted to be.

It was a few days later that Linus professed faith that Jesus is the only way for his sins to be covered and expressed genuine desire to follow Him. A few nights after he believed, Linus and Anita came to our home for dinner.  We were talking about Jesus and church when Usha, the Christian guy from the chai shop, came up in our conversation.  Linus said, “You are telling me that I should go to the same church that Usha goes to?  I know Usha.  Many times Usha and I have had conversations in the chai shop. Never once has he told me about Jesus.  I don’t think Usha knows what I know about Jesus.  If he does, how could he have never once brought Jesus up in our conversations?” Linus spoke this with a little bit of anger.  I couldn’t help but grin in excitement that he has tasted something so good about Jesus that he couldn’t imagine not sharing this news with others.  But my heart was also broken for Usha. I know many times I have had multiple conversations with people and never once brought up Jesus.  How many more “Linuses” would there be in my life if I was more bold to share about Jesus?  Here is a guy that has known Jesus for less than a week and can’t imagine NOT bringing up the Good News he now knows about Jesus.

 Since then, Linus has been sharing everything he learns about Jesus with his wife and his in-laws.  On Christmas day he called me. I had shared with him a few days earlier the story of the prodigal son from Luke 15.  We discussed the story and I challenged him to tell it to 10 people.  When he called me he was with his wife’s cousins and in-laws.  He said, “Sir, can you tell me where the story about the two sons is again in Da Book? I am with my wife’s family and I want to share it with them.”  I told him and he quickly got off the phone.  Love it!”