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Holy Rhythms
Dr. Eric J. Gilchrest, Pastor
Morning. It's great to be with you. So if you've been with us a while, you know what we're doing here, which is we're talking about the ways in which Jesus teaches us to live a life. But if you're new, then what we're also talking about is there's like a good way to live a life. And Jesus says this is the way that leads to abundant life in this life, eternal life in the next. And then there are ways in which we can live a life that leads to death, and death in this life and into the next. And so we are alternating back and forth between these two paths, and this morning we are on the good path, the good way, the way that teaches us how to live the good life. This series for me has actually been eye-opening. I think sometimes We take Jesus' teaching to be something otherworldly, as if it's maybe just like spiritual things you do at some part in your life and getting the connection into the real world. It doesn't always happen. My hope and goal through all of this is to find real ways in which Jesus right here and right now is teaching you and trying to convince you to submit to the kinds of ways in which he lived and do the things that he taught because this is how to live a life and this is the way that leads to abundant life. Before we get started, let us begin with prayer. Heavenly Father, we come this morning and we are so grateful to be in your house. We give you thanks for South Rum Baptist Church and for the many decades of ministry that has been done here. Lord, we thank you for this nation, 250 years. What a gift you have given to us who have the privilege to live in it. And what a gift you have given to the world that when we are doing what is right, Lord, we have been a power for tremendous good. Lord, we ask for your presence here in this house today, but also in the United States of America. Lord, as we wrestle through some really hard times, we ask, Lord, though, that you prevail, that your will be done, and that we participate in that will. In Christ's holy name we pray, amen. So this morning we read from Mark chapter 6, and in Mark 6, Jesus is telling his disciples, head on out into the wilderness, get to the lonely place, to the desert place, to the desolate place, and take some time away. Just to read the scripture again, it was Mark chapter 6, 30 and 31. The apostles, they had returned to Jesus and they told him all that they had done and all that they taught. They were very busy and hard at work. And then he said to them, come away by yourselves to a desolate place or a lonely place or a place where you can get alone and rest for a while. For many were coming and going and they had no leisure even to eat. And here Jesus is teaching us something deeply important about the rhythms of life. That there are times, really important times, where we should be hard at work and we should be teaching and we should be going to our places of employment or to school, and we should really be pushing ourselves as much as we can. And then there are times where we need to pull away and where we need to rest. As I was preparing for the sermon, I tried to find a good example of this in the sports world. And I came across the story of a little known basketball player named Steph Curry. And he did not always start well. His career in the NBA was off to a pretty rocky start. And he kept having these ankle injuries. And it wasn't clear that he was actually going to become the superstar that he became. And he was plagued by a twisted ankle after twisted ankle, was constantly sidelined. And then he began to do a little bit of research into how his body works and began to realize, there are ways in which I need to take care of myself if I'm going to be extra healthy and if I'm going to be a better teammate to this team that is counting on me. At this point, he was not the player. He was just one of the players on the team. And then through a couple years of more or less rehab, What he did was revitalize his own body so that he was as strong as possible. But how he did this was not through just push, push, push, pain, pain, pain. He did it by resting and knowing when to stop and recovering and eating right and knowing when to push and knowing when to pull back. I think there is a real lesson here for the soul, because there are times in life, there are actually many times in life where we should be pushing ourselves, maybe to the limit, maybe beyond what we think the limits are of our own very selves. But then if that is not countered with or that is not met with a pullback that allows you to rest and to recuperate, well then we find there's things like burnout and there are ways in which you break down. Nature is filled with examples of this, and so is our scriptures. Every night, you being human requires you to do what? To sleep. If you were to push yourself every day, day in, day out, I'm just not going to sleep. Sleep is for the week. You'll have eternity to sleep, like now is the time to. And I would just say to you, no, your body is trying to tell you that there are proper rhythms of life, a daily rhythm. And then the week, right? The week tells us, in fact, the scriptures even command us, and they say, well, you're supposed to work for six days, but then on that 7th day, you're supposed to do what? Recuperate and rest. and be with the Lord. And so there's this rhythm that is inherent in a week, or there should be anyway. And what God is doing there, he's not like forcing you to do something. The Sabbath is made for you, not you for the Sabbath. This is what Jesus teaches, right? The Sabbath is for you. It is for your benefit. And just like the athlete or the trainer who goes to the gym and is pumping weights and pushing himself to the limit, in order to actually grow, that athlete has to stop. Because believe it or not, it's not actually the lifting of weights that causes you to get strong. That's like one part of it. But when you are doing the lifting, it's actually tearing down your muscles. It's putting little tears in the fibers of your muscles. And then unless you stop, unless you slow down and you recuperate as necessary, all that training that you're doing actually might lead to injury and not to something that leads to muscle development. I think our lives are much the same, including our spiritual lives. that we are intended to push hard. And some of you need that message this morning. I should just stop and say, every time I preach a message, I'm always worried like the wrong person's gonna hear the wrong thing here. And somebody's gonna say, oh no, pastor told me I get to be lazy. And just kind of, that is not the message this morning. It is a both and. In fact, there's six days for the one and there's one day for the other, right? But the one day for the other in our workaday world where we go, go, go, go, go, that's the thing that often gets lost. And so we need to learn to slow down and like the athlete who pushes and then allows the body to recuperate and then pushes and allows the body to recuperate. So also your life is this way. But it's not just the days where you sleep, and it's not just the weeks where you take a day of Sabbath, right? It's what? It's the year. The year is filled with holy days. Now we call that a holiday, right? And that is where this word comes from. But they are intentionally there as well. Days like yesterday, July 4th, we did what? As a nation, we stopped. and we enjoyed and we rested. And if we had a grill, I would have used it. But it broke. It rusted out. If someone has one for me, call me up. But no, we rested as a nation and we celebrated, right? And our lives are to be this too. And so there are these rhythms to life, to a good life. And Jesus teaches us that to live the good life, requires, yes, the work and the teaching and the feeding and the ministering and the going to the Pentagon and whatever you guys do there, right? And then the days where you just breathe and you let all of those little tears that were made in the fiber of your being heal back up and grow you back stronger. This is a life well lived. Now I'll warn you that our world is waging war against this way of living. The world does not have healthy rhythms to it, certainly anymore. I don't know if it ever did. It was at least healthier than it currently is right now. It goes like this. When I was a kid, there was a movie that came out called Hook with Robin Williams playing the role of Peter Pan, who had grown up, right? And if you've seen the movie, what happens is the grown-up Peter Pan carries around with him those cell phones that were like brick-sized, right? And he's on the phone talking to his his business, and he's so important that on his vacation, he has to constantly be checking in. And all of his family is doing what, saying, dad, come play with us. Be present with us, right? Just take a sec. The world in that time period, this was probably what, late 90s? I probably should have looked this up, 1990s. The world knew that what Peter Pan, the grown-up one, was doing in that moment was killing him. That this was bad rhythms to life. But the truth of 2026 is that we are all the grown-up Peter Pan now. And we all have the cell phones in our pockets. And we're all connected to work at all times, but we're also connected to family at all times. And we're connected to the soccer team that you're supposed to be keeping up with at all times. And you're connected with this person who lives out in Washington at all times. And it's this constant drip of being pulled here and there. And the only place you're not really fully there is here, in the present moment. And we have all grown up just like Peter Pan grew up and became the businessman who was too important for the people who are in front of him. And the world that we live in is this kind of world. A world where we are constantly distracted. We're pulled away from healthy rhythms. Rhythms where we are with someone and we are totally with that person. And then we leave that and then we go somewhere else. I don't know if you remember this, but there was a day and age in which there were beepers, right? And the people who wore the beepers complained about them all the time, unless you were a youngster like me who it was cool to have the beeper. But the adults didn't think so because they were constantly leashed to it and constantly called. Here again, like the beeper was child's play. as compared to the phones that are now in our pockets, constantly pinging us and asking for our attention. The world has lost its rhythm. And what we can do about it, we've got to set some boundaries. We've got to set a life in which we intentionally create holy rhythms. I'm not doing this very well, but I try. And if there's one kind of rule that I've got, it goes like this. If somebody emails me, well then I will get to your e-mail in due time. It's not urgent. Now if somebody texts me, it's definitely more urgent and I'm more likely to get to it. But if you call me, if you really want my attention, you pick up the phone just like the old school and you give me a phone call. I know that, well, something's really happening here. This is, you know, like, I feel like this is just like communications 101. And yet we're all so connected to these things that are phones. And so they pull us out of normal rhythms of life and they break down the barriers that were necessary in creating a good life. The other thing that happens is it's not just the phones, it's all of our technologies. All of our technology, if me, is something that I actually quite enjoy. I love technology. I think it's fascinating and fun and wonderful. And yet I think it's incredibly dangerous. Technology, especially as it has advanced to this point, has made us think that we are God-like. This is what it's trying to, if you don't know this, is what it is trying to do for you. It's trying to make you like a god. And what do I mean? It goes like this. When the loom was invented, right, now you didn't just sit there with the needle and very slowly put one fabric together. Now you could do like a lot of work at once. And then when electricity was harnessed, What happened? Well, now you've got lights on all time of the day. And so what do you do? Well, now you can work at night. Now you can work in the middle of the night. Now there are no rhythms to the day because we have conquered the day and the night and we can make nighttime look like daytime. And so we can just go, go, go. And then we created computers. the internet, and now AI, and information is everywhere. And you, much like the gods, should know everything. And so you can put that information in your head at all times. And there's lots of different ways you can do it. You can put your AirPods in and listen to podcasts all day long, like I do, right? And it's a real problem. Or you can read the news constantly or whatever it is, however you get your information. And some of it's good or some of it's okay and some of it's just wrong. And so we've got this information overload. And so what are technologies, they're trying to make us like gods in that we are now expected to be omnipresent, right? Everywhere, all at once. so that instead of me having to physically meet you somewhere like we used to in 1850, now through the miracle of the phone, I am present with you at all times. We are expected to be omniscient, knowing all things. And why? Well, because especially with the dawn of AI, now we have access to the knowing of all things. And pretty soon we are expected to be omnipotent, able to do whatever we want to do in this world. Once the robots come alive and the AI brains have inhabited the robots, now we can tell them to do whatever we want them to do. And pretty soon we will have harnessed the power of God. But I come this morning warning you, you're not a god. You're a human being. And human beings are slow, intentionally so. We are biological creatures, not technological creatures. If you look out and you see the trees and the way the earth grows and it takes time and it's slow, that is you and me. We are not the internet. in which you can snap a finger and upload all the information you might want. That's just not how we work. We are finite and God is infinite. So I come warning you this morning, you might think because the technologies that we have that you are godlike. And indeed our technologies give us tremendous amounts of power that we have never had before and that at least at present I don't want to be taken from us. But if you fail to think that you as a human being need holy rhythms in your life, well then it's just a matter of time before you break down. Because we were not meant to be gods. We were meant to be humans. We were meant to rest. and to work. We were meant to play. We were meant to have joy. But all of this requires us understanding the limits of who we are. And so God gives us sleep. God gives us the Sabbath. God gives us holy days so that we can slow down and be with one another and allow the healing that needs to happen for the sake of growing stronger. All year long, we've been talking about transformation. We started day one of 2026 with a year of transformation, Romans 12, 2. What's happening? Well, we are supposed to be renewed by the transforming of our minds into the mind of Christ. And you might hope That if you just plug the right thing into your brain, you could do it real quick and we'll be done by May. And that's not how this works. It takes time because we're human and we're slow. We learn slowly and we grow slowly. We transform slowly. I would encourage you, in order to really, really be a transformed being, it requires holy rhythms. where we work hard and then we rest, and we work hard and then we rest. This is how growth, this is how transformation happens, and it happens to be exactly how Jesus himself lives his life. Multiple times we see Jesus living into the rhythm. We already read Mark 6, but in Mark 1, 35, it says, rising very early in the morning, it's still dark, he departs and went to a desolate place by himself and he prays. Or in Luke 5, but he would withdraw to desolate places to pray. Matthew 14, and after he had dismissed the crowd, he went on the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there all alone. Luke 6, in these days he went to the mountain to pray and all night he continued in prayer to God. Jesus models what it is to live a life with holy rhythms. If it's necessary for Jesus, the Son of God, to pull away, what does that say about you and about me? I do wanna remind us of an important clarification. Some of us need to hear the message that actually what you need in life is to probably push a little harder, is to not take the day off, but actually to begin to do some more discipline in your life and to add the intentional other side of the rhythm. And so if the rhythm has two beats to it, the first beat is the six days of labor and the discipline that is required in those days. And maybe the message you need to hear this morning is that message. And then some of you work really hard, and you don't know how to take a break, and you don't know how to rest and to allow the muscles to heal. And for you this morning, I want you to hear this very clearly. It is okay to stop. The world will go on without you, whether you want to know that or not. Life continues, and it is okay. And it is good. The invitation this morning is to put some guardrails up in your life as to how you create the holy rhythms. On what days will you stop? And some guardrails around your technology so that you're not constantly sitting on it waiting for it to control you, but you have control over it. And so this morning, I encourage you to think through what these guardrails look like. Maybe families, it means no phones at dinner time. You just put them away. Or when 9:00 hits, you put all the phones downstairs and you don't touch them anymore. They're not in your room with you. They're sitting somewhere else. so that you're not constantly being bugged by these devices. Maybe it really does mean taking an actual Sabbath and picking the day of the week, Saturday, maybe it's on Sundays, where you are intentional about not doing the work, not showing up and checking in on the e-mail from your office, but you just stop and you enjoy the life around you, your family, your friends. and you pray that you connect with God on that day. To conclude, if you haven't picked up on it, I am heading on a sabbatical. So all of this is on my mind. I want to say to you that I appreciate the gift that you have given me in letting me go on this. Tomorrow it starts and I am so grateful to all of you. Please know that the sabbatical is what the church does for pastors because it holds a theology of scripture that says that recovery and rest is necessary for growth and for the renewed life. I believe that Jesus knows how to live a human life better than I do. And this is why I take a sabbatical. The same Lord who said, come to me, all who are weary also said, come away by yourselves and rest a while. And so if muscles grow, not during the stress time, but during the recovery, well perhaps our souls do too. That is my prayer for the next few weeks for me. Prayerfully I will return with a larger soul ready for the next training period. God knows that transformation requires both the faithful effort and faithful rest. And my prayer for you isn't simply that you'll work harder for Jesus in all you do, but that you'll learn the holy rhythms by which Jesus himself lived. Training with purpose, resting with trust, saying no to certain things, so that you can say yes to deeper things and remembering every week you are a human being. You are not God. Let us let God be God. Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, we are so grateful that in your hands sits this world and all things, all time. God, we give you back our lives. And we trust that when we are not in charge of them and we are not running them constantly and we are not overseeing every last detail, we know that you still are and that the world will continue to turn and that you will still be on your throne and that your will be done. So God, today, may we learn to have holy rhythms of hard work and training mixed with rest and recovery. God, I give you thanks for Southrun Baptist, for the gift they have given me. And I would ask God that you bless them, that you pour out your Holy Spirit upon them, that you would fill them in this time, and that you would give abundantly out of the faith and trust that is required to offer a gift like this. All this and so much more. We give you thanks. We give you praise. In Christ's holy name we pray. Amen.