“Taking Care of Yourself”
Note: The following sermon was preached on March 25, and was the third in a series about identity – who we are as individuals in God’s kingdom. It’s in semi-outline form, which means there are probably a few incomplete thoughts…
Introduction
Our last couple of sermons have built upon each other. First, we learned that God loves us – loves YOU – infinitely more than we can imagine. God created us in his image, made us unique and special, placed us where we are. He knows the number of hairs on our heads and the number of our days. God loves you – how can you not love yourself?
Next we saw that God’s love doesn’t stop at the good things about us. God even loves the parts of us that are difficult to love. And he loves us enough that he takes the bad parts of us – sins, weaknesses, failures and all – and uses those things to mold us and fashion us into a different kind of vessel: One that he can use in new and unimaginable ways.
So today’s message continues to build on those ideas. If God loves you so deeply – even with all your faults – how can you not love yourself? And if you are to love yourself as God loves you, how can you not care for yourself as God cares for you?
There are all kinds of cute images I could use to help you get this idea across, but the basic thing I want to say is this: TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF. It’s not just a thoughtful suggestion. It’s not just a good idea. As we’ll see, it’s a scriptural mandate.
I probably don’t need to tell you WHY taking care of yourself is so important. That’s common sense to most of us. But here are three very good reasons:
First LIFE IS BETTER WHEN WE DO.
Second, GOD HAS GIVE US A RESOURCE, and we are to take care of it.
Third, GOD HAS WORK FOR US TO DO, and we must be ready to do it.
Life is Better
First, let’s talk about how taking care of ourselves can increase our enjoyment and satisfaction in life.
Jesus tells us that he has come that we might have life, and might have it more abundantly. He wasn’t talking about eternal life then – he meant life here and now. Do we have abundant life? Jesus took good care of himself – he rested often when he could, and took frequent time away to pray and be with God. He didn’t have the junk food we have today, and he didn’t have much choice but to walk everywhere he went!
But it’s the abundant life thing that gets me. When we take care of ourselves, pace ourselves in life, we certainly enjoy it more. Our lives are more abundant, more free.
But this isn’t the only reason to take care of ourselves, and not the most important.
We Have Been Given Resources to Care For
It’s kind of strange to think of our lives as resources. We think of money, maybe, or of our talents. But there are so many biblical reasons to look at life this way.
We’ve been told to number our days – to make good use of the time we have.
We’ve been told that we are temples of the living God. A temple is a place where God is worshiped, glorified, and put first. A place where others can come to meet God face to face.
Our church building is like a temple. The church itself is the people, but this building is definitely an asset we have to use. So we care of it. We just replaced two heating units that were due to stop working any time now. We have someone clean the inside, replace light bulbs. We paint when we need it, change things around to fit the need of what’s going on.
And think about resources from a common sense point of view.
- A man has a car that is his livelihood – he’s going to take care of it!
- A computer that you need for work – you’re not going to let it get infested with viruses and crash the thing.
- Your house – when the roof leaks, we fix it. When the siding starts coming down, we put up more. When the paint is peeling, we scrape, prime and paint again.
So if all these things can be replaced, even if we were inclined to let them fall apart, how much more should we take care of ourselves – our body, spirit, mind and heart – that CAN’T be replaced?
And it’s not just a matter of “if it isn’t broke…”
- It’s practical to take care of these things before they break down instead of waiting for them to fall apart.
- We don’t wait for our car to start overheating before we change the oil and add water.
- We don’t wait until our computer makes funny noises and refuses to start before we buy the virus checker.
- We don’t wait for the entire floor to rot before we finally repair that hole in the roof.
- So why do we treat our bodies and souls this way?
Once again, it comes down to how we love ourselves. God loves us. We know he loves us because he cares for us. We love our children, or families, or friends. We love them by caring for them. Love means taking care.
So, is it indicative of the love we have for ourselves when we don’t bother to take care of ourselves?!
We Have Work to Do – a Race to Run
Paul uses the image of a runner in a race. This is an area I’m getting more comfortable with, since I’ve been running a good bit more lately. Up until now, I played some sports in school and did some running. But nothing serious – nothing like this. And now that I’m 30, I can’t just go out and run long distances anymore without thinking ahead of time. What am I going to eat this week to get ready? What kind of clothes am I going to wear? How should I schedule my activities this week so I can be ready?
I also have to think carefully when I’m running. How am I breathing? If I get out of a breathing rhythm, I’ll pay for it later… my body will begin to hurt and my lungs will burn. What about my pace? If I start out too fast, I’ll NEVER finish a long race. I have to pace myself, make sure I’m running in a way that I can finish.
This is the kind of care we need to give to life. God willing, most of us will live long and productive lives. But we can’t just fizzle ourselves out by not taking care of ourselves. If we stay plugged in, God can use us for eighty years, or for just a few. Jesus knew he had something to accomplish. And if he didn’t take care of himself, he might never have been able to do it.
A pastor or doctor, for instance. There’s a LOT to be done, and we could spend all our waking and sleeping hours attending to that need. But we’d kill ourselves.
Look at money resources. There’s a LOT of need in the world, but if we gave away literally every penny, would that really help? In today’s world, greater good can be done when we are good stewards. Bill Gates has given billions of dollars to several worthy causes. If he’d given up every penny he had when he was 30, he would never be where he is today.
Getting Down to Specifics
So here’s the bottom line: If you’re waiting for someone to take care of you, you’ll be the guy who shows up at the mechanic’s shop for an oil change after his engine’s already burned up. God will watch out for you, will provide for your needs. But that doesn’t mean you can run yourself into the ground in the meantime.
Self-care is an important part of life. It’s not that we should spend all our lives focused on ourselves. But I think that we cannot reach our full potential unless we do something to take care of ourselves.
So let’s get to some specifics. How do we need to take better care of ourselves? Some of these ways are just common sense. In fact, I bet I haven’t said and won’t say anything in this sermon that you didn’t already know. But if you put the REASONS together with the WAYS, maybe God can stir us to make a change for the positive.
Jesus says we should love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength – our emotions, our spirits, our brains, and our bodies. Let’s look at the four basic areas of health and see what we can do.
BODY – This is probably the area we think of most. Do you take good care of your body?
- Now some people go overboard with this – plastic surgery and all that. I’m not talking about cosmetic. A few wrinkles aren’t going to kill you.
- But there ARE some things that will kill you:
- What are you eating? Are you eating things that are good for you… at least some of the time?
- Are you exercising?
- Are you getting enough rest and giving your body time to heal itself? SABBATH.
- What kinds of habits do you need to stop?
SPIRIT – Our spirits are frail and fragile things, and our spirits spend most of our lives battling against our human nature. There are so many ways we can boost our spirits. But most of us, I’m afraid, allow our spirits to get into such awful shape that we can’t even think of the last time we did one of these things. We have been entrusted with their care. What kinds of things are we doing to care for our spirits?
- Bible study
- Frequent prayer – Speaking and…
- Listening – Silence and stillness
- Godly friendships and relationships
- “Mission” work – helping those in need, sharing our relationship with God to others.
MIND – This seems like such a silly thing, to take care of our minds. But our minds are so susceptible to all kinds of things in our world that too often we find them full of things that don’t matter. We may not always be able to control our minds, but we can GUARD them:
- What are you watching on TV and in movies? What kind of books are you reading? Are these things REALLY doing you any good?
- Do you allow yourself to dwell on things that aren’t healthy? That aren’t important?
All these things are signs that you need to start guarding and exercising your mind. Learn something new. Try something different for a change. Take a vacation and see if you can’t get a new perspective on things.
HEART – Finally, an area that we need to really think about seriously. Our hearts – our emotions – are the last uncharted and difficult area of the human being. Science has probed lots of these other areas, but the emotions are probably the most difficult for us to get a grip on.
And they’re they part that has the most grip on us. Our emotions can affect all the other parts of us. When you’re up and happy, you can FEEL it in your body. When you’re down and having a bad day, it drags your mind and spirit in directions they wouldn’t normally go.
And here’s the misconception that many people have: Emotions are a bad thing. And this simply isn’t true. If any of you ever watched Star Trek, you may remember that the character Spock was supposedly of a race that had no emotions, and that was a result of the time the show was created – when emotions were sometimes seen as bad things.
But emotions, in themselves, are NOT bad things. Emotions are God-given parts of who we are, and we should embrace our emotions as gifts from God – both the positive ones AND the negative ones.
There’s a popular concept among Christians that we should be happy all the time – we should never be worried, or angry, or sad or depressed, that we shouldn’t grieve. This simply isn’t true. I have not found a single idea in scripture that supports it, even though people will misread passages to make them say that.
And this idea has been one of the most damaging in our Christian age. Because when a Christian says we shouldn’t have these emotions, the only thing we can do is to ignore them… and THAT causes serious problems.
Grief, anger, worry, depression, frustration, jealousy… these are a part of our human condition. And to pretend we shouldn’t have them is like pretending we don’t have an arm. It cripples us, because we stop dealing with them and they take control of us.
If the Bible models anything about emotions, it’s being honest and open with them – before other human beings and before God. Look at the Psalms – an outpouring of every human emotion, both positive and negative. And they’re poured out to other people and to God. Job poured out his emotions to God, as did Moses (“I don’t want to go back to Egypt…”), Abraham (“Why haven’t I had a son yet?”), David (“My soul is downcast…”), Jesus (“Let this cup pass from me…”).
In other words: Every biblical character that had a proper relationship to God expresses his or her joy, sorrow, grief, frustration, separation, and anger. It’s a part of life, and no part of our life is invisible from God.
Instead, Paul points out in Ephesians 4:26: “Be angry, but do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger.”
What does this mean? It means BE ANGRY. Let yourself experience the emotions. But don’t let the emotions make you do something you shouldn’t (like beat someone up). Deal with it, express it and get it out of your heart, so that the “sun doesn’t go down on it.”
It’s so easy to preach and so hard to do. But we HAVE to learn to be open with our feelings. We have to learn to express them to God and to others.
How can we deal with emotions? First, try honesty. Tell what you feel, don’t hide it.
Second, seek help. There is such a stigma around counseling and medications these days, but I believe that these are God-given helps to our human condition – the condition that gets more complex and more dangerous with every passing year. 500 years ago, they didn’t have Tylenol and Advil and other pain medications, but there weren’t as many needs for them. Today’s world – with food additives and all kinds of new ways to hurt ourselves – is a place where pain is much more frequent.
In the same way, our complex world is a place where emotions are much more difficult to unravel than they used to be…
Conclusion
Finally, remember this: No one is going to make you take care of yourself. Don’t tell yourself you don’t have time. You have to MAKE the time.
What are you waiting for? The abundant life Jesus promised is at stake. God’s kingdom work is at stake. Start taking care of yourself, and let’s become the people God has intended us to be.
