Transcript
Speaker: Have you been so busy doing God's work that you forget to meet with the God that called you to the work? Yes, God had called me to the work, but the way I was doing the work was doing real damage to my soul.
Speaker: Hello friends and welcome back to Verity Podcast. In this week's episode, you're going to be watching another session from Verity Conference 2024.
Speaker: This is with Lisa Fields of the Jude 3 Project. I'm so excited to introduce you to Lisa and I was thrilled that we got to host her for our conference last year.
Speaker: Now, in this particular session, you're going to hear from Lisa on a theology of rest. And so she's going to be talking us through what what scripture says about that and what it means to truly rest in God, to participate in his rest so that we can do his work with the energy and the effort that we are designed to have.
Speaker: but We do that from a state of rest, not from a state of striving. I hope this episode encourages you.
Speaker: Thank you, Verity Conference, and thank you ah for the introduction. um Y'all got to learn a little bit more about me and interesting fact about my middle school career.
Speaker: as a basketball player, as you can see, it was short-lived.
Speaker: Well, thank you ah for the organizers of the Verity Conference. I'm so excited to be here. This is my first time in Northern Michigan and it is beautiful. So ah for all those who live here, you have a treat every time you go outside. So I'm kind of jealous.
Speaker: I live in DC and it's nice sometimes, but not all the time.
Speaker: Well, I won't be before you long, but I'll be before you long enough. And that's a quote from my father, who's a pastor. um
Speaker: But before we start, I want to start in the word of prayer. Lord, I thank you for this day. thank you for the women who have gathered here. um i thank you for just the opportunity to be with your people.
Speaker: thank you for the word that you've given me on rest. God, there are so many in this room that are anxious, struggling with the concept of rest are overworked, stretched beyond their limits, and they need to hear from you.
Speaker: God, I pray that you administer to our hearts. Take hearts that work are hardened in this room and make them soft again. Make cold hearts warm again and bring an inner healing like only you can.
Speaker: Refresh us. I don't know what these women need, but you do. So speak to us, oh God. Hide me behind your cross. So they not hear me, but hear you.
Speaker: Edit my notes. That it would be effective to those who hear. And that it would fall on good ground. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.
Speaker: I want to come to you today from Psalms 127. Psalm 127. Just two verses. It says, unless the Lord builds the house...
Speaker: The builder's labor is in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the guards stand watch in vain.
Speaker: In vain rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat. For he grants sleep. to those he loves.
Speaker: hed grants sweet to though He he loves.
Speaker: I want to talk to you from the subject, God can do more with your rest. God can do more with your rest.
Speaker: Now, it's interesting to me that I would be speaking on rest.
Speaker: As a former workaholic, if there was a Workaholics Anonymous, I've probably been through that process.
Speaker: I wouldn't have imagined that rest would be something that I would be able to stand in front of people and talk about. I've been leading the G3 project since 2014. twenty fourteen And as an apologist, we can look at the landscape, if any of you are familiar with apologetics in this room, and know that most of the ah leading apologists were older white men.
Speaker: And so for me, stepping into a field where, as one ah Christian leader told me, I was going to have an uphill battle because I was young, Black, and a woman. I always had a chip on my shoulder.
Speaker: always felt like I had to work harder than everyone else to prove that I belonged in the space. And so I was working and working and building and building and 2020, I hit what we like to call burnout.
Speaker: Not only were we in a global pandemic that I couldn't quite even wrap my mind around But my grandfather and my mentor died in the same week.
Speaker: I remember preparing for my grandfather's funeral, putting my clothes on and seeing the message that my mentor had passed away while i was getting ready for my grandfather's funeral.
Speaker: And remember falling back on my bed and weeping, not knowing if the pain was for my grandfather or for my mentor, because I was trying to process all at the same time.
Speaker: What made that even more worse for me was because I was a workaholic, I thought I didn't actually need to be as intentional about my devotional time because I was doing the Lord's work.
Speaker: Have you ever been there? Have you been so busy doing God's work that you forget to meet with the God that called you to the work?
Speaker: And that was my life that I had been in a pandemic. I was grieving and I was not connected to the power source.
Speaker: That I didn't have rest and I didn't have intimacy. And so I had to reevaluate what life needed to look like for me because the way I was going was not healthy for me.
Speaker: That yes, God had called me to the work, but the way I was doing the work was doing real damage to my soul.
Speaker: And I had to learn this key that God actually can do more with my rest.
Speaker: Now, as you think about rest in this room, many of us think about different things. Sleep, vacations. But really, when I understood that rest really comes as a result not of a vacation, not of a good night's sleep, but of complete trust in the God of the universe.
Speaker: We can rest because without the Lord's help, we will never get our desired outcome. What do I mean by that?
Speaker: When I hit burnout in 2020, I was having success.
Speaker: It didn't seem like the work I was doing was in vain. I was having the desired outcome that I thought in in a lot of different areas. People were patting me on the back, celebrating me. My work was featured in different places.
Speaker: So I was getting the desired outcome. So how can it be in vain? But I realize that if we don't let God, if we don't trust in God through the process of working, then yes, we may get some good outcomes, but we'll never get God's outcome.
Speaker: God outcome is not just about what you achieve. God's outcome is about who you become.
Speaker: It's not about if the conference was effective or the book I wrote was effective, but it's who I am being conformed into the image of God.
Speaker: Am I becoming who God wants me to be? You know, I watch a lot of TV sometimes.
Speaker: And every time I watch TV, there is a commercial for medicine.
Speaker: And they always are so happy. You know, you've seen the commercials. So happy on the drug commercials.
Speaker: And they have a pill that some, there was one I remember that solved restless leg syndrome. And I remember listening to that and they were like, this can help you.
Speaker: And then they have at the end, all of the side effects. And I'm like, blood clots, potential aneurysm. I'll just take the restless leg syndrome because the actual side effects seem to be worse than what it's trying to solve.
Speaker: And that is how striving within ourselves does to our lives. That we may get a good solution and help in the area, but we lose so many other things in the process.
Speaker: Our families are damaged from our overwork. Our relationship with Christ is not what it should be because of our overwork. We get the project done, but nobody on the project wants to work with us after the project is done because of our overwork.
Speaker: That yes, it solved one problem, but it created so many other problems.
Speaker: And God says, unless i build it,
Speaker: Your labor will be in vain. And the damage that you do to your soul and others will be a testament that you didn't let me build this house.
Speaker: That the work in your mind was on you, but the work actually should be on God. See, God doesn't need us to accomplish anything he calls us to.
Speaker: That's the thing I have to keep in mind. That's the thing we all have to keep in mind. God lets us contribute, but he doesn't need us to contribute. He is all sufficient.
Speaker: If he wanted something done, he could speak a word and it can happen. But he lets us us contribute. He uses us for his purposes. But if he doesn't have you, he could use someone else.
Speaker: And that should be a sobering reminder that God actually could do this on his own. It should put us in our rightful place and help us put him in his rightful place in how we view things.
Speaker: One of the reasons we overwork really has to do with the fact that we don't trust God.
Speaker: We don't like to say we don't trust God, but our lives testify to the fact that we don't trust him.
Speaker: We don't trust him to actually do what he says he's going to do because we've been disappointed with some of the things that he's allowed to happen in our lives.
Speaker: I wrote a new book that just came out called When Faith Disappoints, The Gap Between What We Believe and What We Experience. And their book, I have a chapter on power that sometimes we seek power or positions of power for control because we are disappointed with the things that God has allowed in our lives.
Speaker: And so we think control will help us actually heal when control is not an agent to healing. Only Jesus can heal us. And if we think that having control will be the solution for the pain that we experience or preventative measure for a preventative measure for pain, we will always seek to be in control.
Speaker: But really control or the idea of control is an illusion because we never really have it.
Speaker: You can control some things, but think about the things that are out of control. When does your child come to faith?
Speaker: Out of your hands.
Speaker: Will your marriage work?
Speaker: That's completely, it's, you have some effort into it, but only God knows the outcome in our culture where marriages are are failing. We cannot control, we cannot make other people do what we want them to do.
Speaker: We can only trust and do our part.
Speaker: And so there's so much that's out of time our control where we were born, our family dynamics, whether we were born in a two-parent home, where we were born in a single-parent home. There's so much that's out of our control that impacts our day-to-day.
Speaker: In addition to that, the traumas we experience also hinder our ability to fully trust God.
Speaker: I think about the challenge in a room full of women that some of you may have experienced severe abuse on any level. And always think about that when talking about trusting God, because I think that's something that we often miss when we're talking about the attributes of God, especially when people have been abused in their childhood.
Speaker: Because as I'm talking to young adults and young women across the country, there's this heartache that why didn't God protect me?
Speaker: I was a child.
Speaker: If the loving adult in my life knew what was going on, they would have stopped it. But you're telling me that God loves me more than them. And he didn't.
Speaker: And so because of that, I can't really trust God fully because I don't know if he's going to actually rescue me because he didn't rescue me back then.
Speaker: And so you find yourself unable to fully trust that God will protect you because of the pain that you're experiencing and grappling with.
Speaker: And so one of the ways that we learn to trust God is to allow God to heal us from the deep disappointment and the traumas that we experience that cause us to fear whether he will actually come through for us.
Speaker: whether he actually loves us. But what I love about God is he is not a God that has not experienced suffering himself.
Speaker: that we have a suffering Savior that can identify with the pains and abuses that we've experienced. We have a high priest that can be touched by everything that we experience, that we don't suffer alone, that he comes in and suffers alongside us.
Speaker: That should give us comfort in our suffering, knowing that God doesn't just sit on the sidelines of our lives. We don't have a distant deity. that's disconnected.
Speaker: We have a loving father that wants to do things for us so we don't have to do everything ourselves.
Speaker: I love my natural father. And what I love about him is that, especially when I'm home visiting, I don't have to do anything.
Speaker: I'm a daddy's girl. Any other daddy's girls in the room? And we take full advantage
Speaker: of their privilege. I remember when I moved to D.C. my mom helped me move to D.C. and I called my dad. I was like, Dad, I wish you here. He said, you just don't, you just calling because you want to use me.
Speaker: i I wanted to use him to put this stuff up because now I had to call a task rabbit because I'm not doing the manual labor.
Speaker: And the beautiful thing about that is there are some things that I could do, but he wants to do it for me because he loves me.
Speaker: And the same with God. God is like, there are some things I know you can do. And there some things you've been doing. But there are some things that I want to do for you.
Speaker: that I know you can try to have this meeting to work out this connection, but I want to actually bless you. I learned this through my work as I was recovering from workaholic behavior.
Speaker: i was trying to raise money for our organization. If you lead an organization, you know a lot of it is fundraising. and So I was trying to raise money. And this particular time I went to California on a trip I didn't want to go to. And the funny thing about God is all the trips I don't want to go to, that's the one he blesses the most.
Speaker: So I'm sitting, we needed a donor to give $65,000. And I didn't even go on this trip for that, actually. I just went because I had to go for a meeting that I didn't want to be it So as I'm there, I'm talking to the guy He was like, oh yeah, what do you need? I was like, yeah, we need to raise this money.
Speaker: But I'm saying and in passing, not thinking he actually could help me. Because this was a season of my life where I was like, God, I don't have it left to give. Like I'm all out. You're going to have to do it.
Speaker: And I remember within a month, the money that I needed was there just on one conversation. And God reminded me, I want to do some stuff for you.
Speaker: I don't want to send you to 50 meetings to try to figure out one donor. Not this time. You've done that for years. But in this season of your life, I want you to rest and trust in me and focus on developing your personal time with me and watch what I do in your career.
Speaker: And the more I started sitting with God and the more I started resting in him, I saw him providing things that I didn't have to work for. That this stuff he started doing for me was greater than anything I could have done on my own.
Speaker: And in that, I didn't have all the side effects of brokenness, brokenness within me, brokenness within my relationships, brokenness. I had wholeness in my relationships, wholeness with me, and he took care of the outcome as it related to my career because I chose to rest in him.
Speaker: So how did I learn to rest? Rest is a daily thing. I realized one of the reasons I knew I was burned out is because I was taking vacations and I would come back more exhausted than when I left.
Speaker: That I was laying on the beach, but I couldn't turn off my mind to actually focus on the rest. I was laying on the beach exhausted and stressed because I was still thinking about the money I needed to raise. I was still thinking about the book I needed to write. I was still thinking about the team I needed to manage.
Speaker: So my location changed, but my mind was not at rest.
Speaker: And so I realized that rest is not a vacation. Rest is actually ah posture of trust.
Speaker: And that it was a daily thing that I could have many vacations every day by sitting with the Lord. I started one of these things called this app called Centering Prayer.
Speaker: My friend gave it to me as a pastor because he saw me burnt out and he said, Lisa, you're not going last like this. So I want you to do three things for me. I want you to read Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer.
Speaker: I want you to get this app called Centering Prayer. And I want you to read Emotionally Healthy Spirituality Day-to-Day Devotional. And I started incorporating that 30 minutes of silence a day.
Speaker: Now this 30 minutes of silence a day was hard. I had to work my way up to it. Cause sitting in silence can bring up all kinds of things in your heart.
Speaker: Unsettling. Some of you all can't even ride in a car in silence. One of my friends refused to ride in silence cause he was like, I don't even want to be aware of some of the thoughts I'm avoiding.
Speaker: But sitting in silence has been so transformative to my life that I said started sitting in silence for 30 minutes a day and saying, God, show me my heart.
Speaker: I'm not asking you for anything. Show me what's in my heart. And I remember sitting there one time and he showed me a clear glass with layers of dead grass on top of each other. And at the very top, it was green grass.
Speaker: And he said, that's your heart. You've allowed stuff to be buried and die. And it looks good on the outside, but there's a lot of dead stuff underneath.
Speaker: And he began pulling those things out of my heart. And that stuff out of my heart was bitterness. It was resentment.
Speaker: It was pride. It was envy. It was jealousy. It was hatred in my heart. But I didn't know because I was moving so fast that I didn't even know what was going on within me.
Speaker: And those things that were going on in me prevented me from actually getting rest. And so I want to challenge you today to sit with God, to say, God, what is in me?
Speaker: Show me myself. Show me my heart. Show me the ugliness that's in me. And God, help me to do the work that needs to be done to live a life through a healed heart.
Speaker: I remember sitting in my quiet time because when you start doing this, God is going to tell you stuff about you that you don't like. Just a warning. I remember sitting in my quiet time and God said, go get it right.
Speaker: That the assignment was to go call people that had harmed me or that I had harmed and have a conversation.
Speaker: See, the key to rest is not just taking a nap. The key to rest is letting God heal your heart so you can actually sleep in peace. That actually you can do the work in trust.
Speaker: So, When we let God through our time with him through scripture, actually take out the things in us that shouldn't be there, we'll find a deeper level of rest and trust.
Speaker: When we start incorporating Sabbath, that taking a day off to do nothing is holy.
Speaker: It is commanded. If God take took a day off, why are you continuously working?
Speaker: One pastor said that he was constantly working and ah old woman in his church, one of the church mothers came to him and said, Pastor, why are you working this hard?
Speaker: And she he said, well, the devil don't sleep.
Speaker: She said, God doesn't either.
Speaker: You can go lay down.
Speaker: God got it. You can rest. So take some time off.
Speaker: The third is to lean into your community. One of the things the Lord told me when I was coming from burnout is that let your friends be your friends.
Speaker: I don't know if anybody in this room is like me, but I am the strong friend in my circle. Everybody comes to me for support because I have a lot of friends that aren't in ministry. It helps keep my life balanced.
Speaker: And so when they're going through a crisis, a lot of times they come to me. My friends say I could be a therapist if I picked the another career. And so, but because of that, I wouldn't dump on my friends because I thought they couldn't handle it.
Speaker: They got enough going on. I'll just take it and I'll carry it. And God reminded me, I didn't give you friends to carry things on your own.
Speaker: I gave you friends so they can help carry it with you. Let your friends be your friends.
Speaker: And so when I started letting my friends be my friends, something beautiful happened. Our relationships grew stronger and we were able to support each other. And I got off the pedestal.
Speaker: My therapist told me one time, she said, you you like to be the hero, don't you?
Speaker: Because it feeds something in your insecurity.
Speaker: That you complain about being the go-to person, but you get something from being the hero, don't you? And so sometimes we like to be the go-to person because it allows us to feel validated in certain ways.
Speaker: But God says, you're not the hero of your friend's story. You're not the hero of your family's story. Jesus is the hero. So you can get off the pedestal. You don't have to be the hero, take the cape off and y'all do this thing together and look to the hero.
Speaker: That I was able to get off the pedestal in my friendships and my relationships. And so they saw me not as the savior, but as a friend. to only we all are looking towards the Savior to help us.
Speaker: And because I got off the pedestal, my bonds with my friends grew deeper.
Speaker: So let your friends be your friends and watch God provide a deeper level of rest because overworking will put your whole life out of balance.
Speaker: Your relationships with your friends will be obsolete. Your relationships with your family will be broken.
Speaker: Your relationships with your children will be out of balance. Your relationship with your spouses will be out of balance as well. And so God, trusting in God puts your life actually in alignment so you can actually go to bed.
Speaker: The Bible says in verse 2, in vain you will rise early and stay up late toiling for food to eat.
Speaker: He grants rest and sleep to those he loves. That this sleep is not avoidance.
Speaker: See, we have different types of sleep in our lives. Some of us sleep to avoid. We can sleep for hours, but that sleep is not rest. It's avoidance. We sleep as escapism.
Speaker: But that's not the kind of rest and sleep the scripture is talking about. This sleep is about fully trusting in God. That you can actually sleep through the night and not wake up and want to go back to sleep.
Speaker: Because you were only sleeping to avoid your reality.
Speaker: This sleep is a sleep that is restful. that prepares me to face the reality.
Speaker: There's sometimes I'm anxious about some things and the answer is sleep. That I just need to take a nap. When I was writing my book,
Speaker: um When Faith Disappoints, I literally would have moments where God was just like, go to sleep. And once I woke up, I thought better in the morning. I was refreshed.
Speaker: Even doctors will tell you eight hours of sleep will help solve a lot of things. When you're doing too much work without sleep, it puts your like your body out of balance.
Speaker: That you actually burn more calories when you're asleep. well, not burn more calories, that you actually need sleep to help you burn the calories you need to burn to lose weight.
Speaker: So if you're just working out all the time in like, I'm not seeing any results, the doctor will ask you, have you been sleeping eight hours? Because that'll help you with your weight loss journey. That your body needs time to rest, to burn the calories you're trying to burn.
Speaker: That you can't just work. And in the same way in the spiritual, you can't just work and work. And like, why am I not seeing the desired outcome? Maybe you need to go to sleep.
Speaker: It is a sign of trust when we're able to rest, not as avoidance, but as trusting.
Speaker: May 16th this year, I had a fibroid surgery. It was a six-week recovery. And six weeks with a small organization seems like a lifetime when the CEO has to take a break.
Speaker: But I needed the surgery. And so I was in this tension ah should I take off or should I just push it off? Should I take off or push it off?
Speaker: Should I sacrifice my health for the organization or should I prioritize my health? for the long-time sustainability of the organization. So I was in this tug of war. So I finally had the surgery.
Speaker: Now, the interesting thing too, we were approached by a foundation before the surgery, said, hey, we need you to submit this grant. It's a good chance you'll get this. It'll be $300,000 grant.
Speaker: Now for a small organization, that is very significant. And so I'm in this tug of war again. Should I sacrifice my health for the organization?
Speaker: What should I do? So I told them, hey, let's revisit this when I get back. He said, hey, the board needs to grant this before the end of the fiscal year.
Speaker: Just try to do it as fast as you can.
Speaker: So I did the surgery. I started to rest. I got an email. two weeks into my recovery. Hey, can you fill out, can you send us the grant proposal?
Speaker: And I was thinking, should I rest or should I do this work? And i was just like, God, I'm just going trust you. Whatever you want to do, I'm just going to trust that you will do it.
Speaker: And I remember, i trust it. And I filled the grant proposal out after they asked me to do it. It was past the deadline.
Speaker: And guess what? We got the grant.
Speaker: God wanted to show me, you don't have to sacrifice your rest.
Speaker: I'll do it if you trust in me. And women in this room, I want you to know that if you trust God, if you lean into him, that he will give you more. He will do more in your rest than you could ever do in your work.
Speaker: If you trust in him, rest.
