This is saturday night's sermon, and the passage is all over the place. but mainly Pastor Dave talked about some reasons why we have a spiritual burnout. I agree that we should not blame God for the things that are going wrong, but really look into our hearts to see what's going on there. He talked about four falures in ourselves that causes the burnout--intimacy fail, perspective fail, integrety fail, and Capacity fail.
First of all, the intimacy fail, a lot of times, we start doing things excitedly, but after a while it becomes draining. We cannot even stand thinking about it. How come? to put in Pastor Dave's works: "we are so good for doing stuff for stuff's sake that we forget the person we are doing it for." Basically we got too caught up in the deeds. a lot of time I really need to check my heart before serving, or else it just becomes routinely smile, shake hands, lead people to their seat.... I forgot that I am providing service for God's people or future children of God. I forget that I am doing all these for him, not for me to earn any glory. At least it should be the case. If my heart is not right, then there's no meaning in serving God.
Second, the perspective fail. "We think what we have is awesome until someone else comes over." I tend to compare and judge a lot, which gives me a lot of insecurities. However, knowing God should be already a blessing instead of comparing the worldly things--who's car is the best, who has the prettiest wife.... When we have the right perspective, we won't have a burn out, we would just keep wanting to do it. I really like the glasses analygy that he gave: when my eyes starts to go bad, i won't immediately realize this, but someday when someone tells me to get glasses, and when I put on that glasses, I would suddenly realize that "the world has texture." like in Psalm 73, where Asaph was complaining how God does care how the iraelites acted toward him, they could do whatever they wanted to, but Asaph as a follower of God had to obey so many rules. He was bitter, until one day he entered into the tabernacle, and there he found God. There, he put on his glasses, and saw the texture of the world. The same with me, but God is really patient with me, and he provides me glasses to see the world and myself clearly. and I pray that I will not lose my sight again.
Third, Integrity fail. this is what I always do. I am in God's fan club but forgot to personally spend time with him, to talk to him. I am like a gypocrite who was good at acting, being others, but fail to recognize who I really am. and in matthew 6:24: no one can serve two masters.... This is really true and I like the brutal example he gave where a man betrays his wife and has affair witha nother woman. the man might still love his wife, but after time, the wife that he promised to commit to starts to look differently, and this is exactly how we are with God, that we have affairs with the worldly idols and when we fall deep enough, we forget about the God we once knew. So we get burnt out. because we no longer have the interest in doing something for the one we stopped loving.
the fourth one is Capacity fail, we always linger on the former glory we had and forgot that we stopped practicing and stopped growing that we could not reach the level we once were, and if we still try to do the same things, or carry the same burden, we would just fail. Even though we don't believe ourselves, and we always say: "I used to be able to do it!" yes, I USED to. that's because we used to have the capacity to do it. When we stop growing, time will get us hard. though our memory was in the past, the reality goes on. same thing, if we want to grow spiritually, we need to first keep the capacity, and then expand it. We cannot do the adult work with the faith like child. and Jean you fail at this all the time as well. and if you want more challenges from God, and if you want to see him work more powerfully, you gotta challenge yourself, and be faithful!
the things you learned at this retreat will count as nothing unless you start carrying them out after learning about them.
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