Restoring Balance to Our Doing for God

The sermon text reading for today is Luke chapter 10, verses 38 through 42.

Luke 10:38–42

You can find this passage in the Sanctuary Bible on page 1582.

Please listen as I read God's word.

As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him.

She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet listening to what he said.

But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made.

She came to him and asked, Lord, don't you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself?

Tell her to help me.

Martha, Martha, the Lord answered.

You are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed.

Or indeed only one.

Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.

Here ends the reading.

And if you are newer with us, whether someone in your life invited you or whether you just found us randomly online and decided to show up here today, we want to say that uh we're grateful that you're here with us today.

And uh we know there's lots of different ways you could spend a Sunday morning, and you have chosen to be with us, and we don't want to take that for granted.

So we're grateful to be together with you this morning.

Before we get into the message, I have uh some very cute, very cute news for you.

I need to introduce you to the newest member of our Elmwood Church community.

So Ava Louise Wicks was born on uh just this past Friday, and she is her parents are Simon and Aaron.

Erin had a really rough pregnancy, and so she was uh they were not here as much as they would have liked to have been over this past year.

They started coming, they got pregnant right away, and they've been sort of in and out, and so it's been really difficult for them.

Uh, but this is uh they're excited about bringing her and being able to introduce her to the rest of our church community.

Mom and baby are uh at home with dad, and everyone's doing great, is the report that I hear.

One of the ways that we like to bless, especially uh young parents who are first-time parents, is by doing a meal train for them because they have no idea what they have just gotten themselves into.

You don't know that until you experience it, until you're a parent for the first time.

And so let's let's take the having to coordinate food and feeding yourself off the off the table for them.

So we're going to uh be coordinating a meal train for them.

We're gonna be sending out an email early this week with information about that.

So uh please be looking for that uh either later this afternoon or Monday, because we want to start this week getting them some food.

Uh so please uh keep uh keep an eye on your email for ways you can get connected in that way.

Over the course of this summer, we have been in a series called On the Heart, and I have missed basically all of it because my family was on sabbatical, and I thought that since I'm coming back from sabbatical, there's a lot of things that are on my heart and things that I've been thinking about and processing and learning.

So, what I want to do is take these next few weeks and just continue that series of messages that we have been in.

And uh even though these things that I'm gonna be sharing are deeply personal to me and to our family, these are not things that are specific in application to those who are in vocational ministry.

Okay, these things that uh I'm gonna be sharing with you are things that are appropriate and are essential for all followers of Jesus to be thinking about.

And so my hope and my expectation is that the results of these next few weeks is going to be more than you just looking at me saying, Wow, I'm so glad you learned that stuff.

Congratulations.

Uh I think this is something that can be for our church family, something that we can learn together as we step into uh looking at these things.

So let me give you just a brief roadmap of where we are headed in the next couple weeks here.

Today we're going to be, as you heard read, looking at the account of Mary and Martha and thinking about the balance between doing for Jesus and serving him and being with him.

Next week we're going to be looking at Hebrews chapter 12, the first opening verses of that chapter, and we're going to be thinking about the question: how can we experience longevity in the Christian race of faith?

Hebrews 12 · chapter mention

How can we experience longevity and not flame out or not burn out or not give from resources that we don't possess?

How do we do that?

And then the week after, we'll be looking at 1 Corinthians chapter 9 and looking at the disciplined investment that it takes to live a life of faithfulness to God and to finish the race of faith well.

1 Corinthians 9 · chapter mention

So that's what we're going to be looking at over these next couple weeks.

But for this morning, we're going to be looking at Mary and Martha.

And each of these women in this account here gives us an example.

One of them gives us an example that we should really not follow, and one of them gives us an example that we should follow.

So I want to spend our time looking at them today and seeing what it is that we can learn from them.

So, first, as we look at Martha, the example that we see from her is an example of well-intentioned overactivity.

She's an example of well-intentioned overactivity.

So at the beginning of these verses you heard read, we see that Jesus and his disciples, the twelve, his inner circle of disciples, are traveling, and they come to the home of Mary and Martha, which we find out in the book of John, is Mary and Martha are the sisters of Lazarus, and they live in the town of Bethany.

And so Jesus shows up at their house, and immediately Martha whips herself into a frenzy of hospitality.

My guess is that many of us can somewhat empathize with what Martha is feeling or experiencing in these verses.

Maybe there's been a time in your life where someone has showed up at your house, maybe to surprise you, and it was not a good surprise for you.

Someone showed up without any warning, and you're like, man, the condition of my home, I feel kind of embarrassed about this, I don't really have things ready, I'm not prepared for this.

So maybe you've experienced that, or maybe you've not experienced that, but thinking about that happening to you fills you with a kind of existential dread.

In this particular case, in Luke chapter 10, there are 13 people who show up at their house unannounced.

Luke 10 · chapter mention

It's Jesus and it's the 12 of his inner circle of disciples, and they've been traveling, so they are hot and they are tired and they're probably dirty and they're hungry and they're thirsty.

And as soon as they show up, Martha just goes into overdrive, trying to do everything she can to make any of the accommodations that she can for them.

Now, I think it's important that we recognize that what Martha does here in these verses by getting up and serving Jesus, I think it's important we recognize that this was the cultural expectation in the first century world.

This was a hospitality-oriented culture, and Martha did exactly what Martha would have been expected to do in that culture.

And I think what we can, uh I think that's important for us to see because I don't think this is showing us a picture of Martha as some sort of high-strung perfectionist who's heaped all these expectations on herself of my house has to be clean and I have to have all this stuff ready.

No, this was expected of her and even demanded of her by her cultural environment was to provide this kind of hospitality to Jesus and the rest of the disciples.

And you can see in these verses, you can see what this flurry of activity has done to her inner person.

It says that she's distracted by all the preparations that had to be made.

Verse 41, Jesus says, You are worried and you are upset about many things.

So she's anxious and she's agitated and she's distracted and she's flustered.

And meanwhile, her sister is sitting there doing absolutely nothing.

It says she's sitting there at Jesus' feet, which is a which is a figure of speech, which means to put yourself in the position of a learner or a disciple or someone's apprentice.

So she's sitting at Jesus' feet doing nothing other than just intentively, attentively listening to Jesus and receiving what he is saying.

She's with Jesus.

And in that cultural environment, she would have been expected to be helping her sister Martha.

So Martha's really upset because her sister's not helping her.

And so she goes to Jesus.

And I love you, Deb.

I think you you Deb didn't, I didn't think, put the sharpness on this.

She made it sound so kind when she goes to Jesus and says, you know, Lord, why don't you care?

She's accusing Jesus here.

She goes to Jesus and she says, Why don't you do something?

Don't you care that I'm drowning in all this work?

Don't you care that my sister's sitting there doing nothing and I'm expected to do all this stuff?

Tell her to help me and do something.

In this specific moment, okay, this is a snapshot of Martha's life.

In this exact moment of her life, she is a picture and a model of well-intentioned overactivity.

And I do think it's important for us to recognize and to give her the credit that what she's doing here is well-intentioned.

So in that way, there's something that's worth emulating in her, her impulse and her desire to serve Jesus.

But what she shows us is not just the good side of that impulse.

She shows us the shadow side of the impulse to serve and the impulse to serve Jesus.

And the shadow side is that we can be so busy serving Jesus that we miss out on him in all of it.

We can be so busy with doing things for God that we miss out on God in all of it.

What she's doing here, the way that she's acting in this specific moment, her behavior is choking out the word of God in her life.

Her doing for Jesus is choking out her ability to simply be with him.

Just a few chapters earlier in Luke chapter 8, Jesus tells a parable.

Luke 8 · chapter mention

It's a parable of the soils, and he talks about how a farmer went out and spread all sorts of seed, and some of that seed fell on soils that were incapable or not able to produce fruit.

One of those kinds of soil was thorny soil, and this is how Jesus interprets this parable for his disciples.

He says, The seed that fell among thorns stands for those who hear, that is, who hear the word, but as they go on their way, they are choked out by life's worries, riches, and pleasures, and they do not mature.

Now listen to what Jesus says to Martha in verse 41 of this passage.

He says, Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things.

Jesus says, Worries.

The worries of life are what choke out the ability for the seed to bear fruit.

And he uses the same word when he talks about Martha and says, You're worried about all these things.

There's a scholar named David Garland who helped make this connection for me, where he pointed out that Martha is an example of what Jesus talked about in that parable when he says that the worries of life have the ability to choke out the word in your life.

The point is this the word can be choked out in our lives even by well-intentioned overactivity.

There's Mary sitting in front of Jesus.

It says God Himself, who's sitting in the room and he's teaching, and Mary's listening to Jesus.

She's an example of receiving the word.

She's an example of that good soil.

And Martha is given to us as an example of someone who's the word in her life is being choked out by all this activity and all these worries and cares of life.

The word of God can be choked out in our lives too, even by things like well-intentioned overactivity.

So that's that's the example.

That's the model that Martha provides for us here is one of well-intentioned overactivity.

But there's a second example in these verses, and it is Mary.

Mary is an example of time-discerning apprenticeship to Jesus.

Mary possesses the kind of apprenticeship and the kind of discipleship to Jesus that allows her to discern what time it is.

She's got time-discerning apprenticeship to Jesus.

Again, what Martha does here to serve Jesus is good.

Her impulse to serve Jesus is good.

So you'll notice here that Jesus does not criticize her impulse to want to serve him.

In fact, there's other places in the New Testament that talk about serving and helps and hospitality as gifts given to the people of God by God the Spirit.

So hospitality and serving and all these things that Martha seems to be so consumed by are spiritual gifts given to us by God for the building up of the body and for the glory of God.

So Jesus doesn't criticize her for that desire.

And it actually pleases God when people like Martha have a desire and an impulse to serve God and love others.

So this passage, in other words, is not saying, it's not saying, okay, look at Mary and Martha and see that being with Jesus like Mary is good, while doing for Jesus like Martha is bad.

It's not pitting those two things against one another at all.

In fact, listen to how Jesus talks to Martha.

He says, Martha, Martha, you're worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed.

Indeed, only one.

Mary has chosen what is better.

She chose the better thing to do in this moment.

Jesus does not say to her, Mary chose what's good and you chose what's wrong.

He says, in this moment, she was able to discern the right thing to do, which was to sit and to stop.

This, I think, is what Jesus is commending in her.

He's praising Mary because she had the discernment to recognize that now is not the time to be running around like my hair's on fire.

She had the ability to discern.

Now is not the time to be rushing around like a chicken with its head cut off.

Now is the time to sit and to be with Jesus and to listen and to learn and simply to be with him.

She could discern that this is not a time for all the scurrying about and all the things that she, even in that culture, thought that she should be doing.

Mary is a model for us of someone who could figure out that right now, this is not a time to run around, this is a time to sit and be with Jesus.

Martha didn't have that discernment, at least in this snapshot of her life.

This account of Mary and Martha is one of the passages that is sort of sits behind our core value here at Elmud of being with God over doing for God.

And if you have been around Elmwood, you know that we don't, again, these are these are not either or, these are not pitted against one another.

We believe, simply put, that an an external life of doing things for God must be rooted in and sustained by an inner life of being with him.

All the things we do for God have to come out of and should flow out of a life of being with him.

And this question this passage that we see here, Mary and Martha, it it forces us to face some questions, doesn't it?

Questions like, do we know when it's time to work hard and to pour ourselves out?

And and sometimes, at seasons, burn the candle at both ends.

Do we know when it is appropriate and wise to do that?

And when it's time to stop and to rest, and to receive and to be with him?

Do we have the discernment to know?

It forces us to answer questions like, okay, do we have rhythms in our own lives of being with God and doing for him?

Do we have both of those rhythms in our lives?

Do the rhythms of being with him, are they robust enough that it can sustain us for a lifetime of serving God and others without burning out, without constantly giving from resources that we don't ourselves possess.

Being on sabbatical this summer forced me to think about some of those same questions.

One of the things that I came to realize that I had already known before, but I think I just sort of realized in a fresh way, is that my doing for God and being with him had become out of balance.

Especially in the last few years, the season leading up to my sabbatical, my life has been more characterized by this well-intentioned overactivity than it has been characterized by time-discerning apprenticeship related to Jesus.

Now you may be surprised.

You may be surprised to learn that ministry, that vocational ministry, being a pastor, can be a spiritually dry place.

As one pastor put it, Sundays come with shocking regularity.

Every seven days, I'm supposed to stand up and have something thoughtful and helpful and articulate and accurate and winsome and probably funny and culturally relevant and applicable.

And I'm supposed to have all those things to say every seven days.

Which means that someone who's in my position, it it's just sort of in the water of my job that I have to spend lots of time in scripture and in prayer for other people.

For you all, because I love you, because I want to serve you in this way.

Being able to do what I'm doing right now is, to be clear, without question, one of the greatest joys of my life.

And one of the occupational hazards, as it were, to being in vocational ministry is that while you feed your s feed others, you may find yourself spiritually starving.

You constantly give and give and give for other people.

And and your doing for God and being with him can be out of balance.

And that's what I came to see in a fresh way in my life.

I was not prioritizing the slow work of being with Jesus.

And and maybe the thing that one of the biggest things I learned is that like by definition, it has to be slow.

Like by nature, being with Jesus is a slow thing.

We live in a microwave culture where we want everything fast and everything now, and and every video we see is capped at three minutes, or else we won't watch it.

Because there's too much time to waste on it.

We want everything fast and now, and living as a follower of Jesus, being with Jesus is by nature and by definition a slow thing.

It's not gonna happen if we live our lives at warp speed.

And for the last season I had not been prioritizing the slow work of being with Jesus.

Now, uh to be really clear with you, I spent a lot of time in scripture.

Spent a lot of time in prayer.

Okay, so it's not like I'm over here nodding the Bible and not praying.

It's just that that had become out of balance so that I was doing so much of that for everyone else that I wasn't doing it for myself in the way that I should have been.

So on sabbatical, I had eight weeks where I I I didn't touch a microphone, right?

I had eight weeks where I didn't have a a sermon to write.

And the question that I was sort of faced with every time I opened the Bible was, what do I do now?

Because you you know, my my brain is trained to read scripture and to think about it through the lens of sermons, and how would I communicate this to others and how does how does this apply to others?

And the muscle, the spiritual muscle of reading scripture for my own benefit, simply to be with Jesus, was a muscle in my life that had atrophied.

In the season of leading up to sabbatical, I was living too fast at too fast of a pace to do that slow work of being with Jesus.

And like Martha, I I couldn't discern when it was time to stop.

I couldn't or wouldn't discern.

This thing can happen slower than maybe you think it should.

This can be done to less high quality than you would maybe like this to be done, and by someone else.

I hadn't wasn't able to discern that this is a time to stop and simply to rest and to be with Jesus and to have space for my ministry to be the overflow of a life of being with Jesus.

And one of the things that I hope you take away from this is that even pastors wrestle with this kind of thing.

Okay, I hope this is not a surprise to you that like this same thing that we all wrestle with, like these rhythms of being with God, doing for God, this is stuff that pastors wrestle with as well.

And in fact, I think pastors uh I think are uniquely susceptible to having this out of balance because we get paid to work for God.

Okay?

So like because it's a part of our job, it's so easy for it to become just a part of our job.

And to miss that, no, yes, this is a part of my job, and I love this.

Love that I get to do this, and this ministry has to be rooted in I have to lead the way in being with Jesus before I do for him.

And I wasn't doing that.

Even though this is uniquely applicable to pastors, I know for a fact that this is something that is applicable broadly to all of you who are here today as well.

Every one of us wrestles with this.

I want to offer you two ways of responding or offer two invitations to you.

As we think about being with God and doing for him.

The first is this commit to a lifetime of honest assessment.

And that honest assessment comes along with this question to what degree is my external life of doing for God sustained by an inner life of being with him?

This is not a set it and forget it activity.

You know, you don't do this once, and then it just runs in the background the rest of your life.

And the reason is because seasons change, stages of life change, our capacity changes, maybe the size and the age of the people in our family changes, our bodies change, our health changes.

It's all sorts of ebbs and flows and ups and downs in life.

And so you can't just do this once and then ride it out for the next, you know, Lord willing, 70 years.

This is a question that we have to continually come back to.

And as we come back to this question, there will be times in your life where you will sit with Jesus and do this discerning work, and God will say, you need to do more.

Probably didn't expect me to say that, did you?

There will be times where where maybe you you recognize, like, I've been really inward focused.

I've been spending lots of time with Jesus.

I I that's been that's been wonderful for me.

And now it's time to see that overflow into a life of serving God and others and to be engaged and involved in the local church and in my neighborhood and community.

Now is a time for me to do more.

Sometimes the opposite happens, where you recognize in order for me to sustain the doing for God that I'm doing, I need to have rhythms that better support all the things that I am doing for God.

And I need to just be aware that, like, okay, it's my, it's my default and my temptation to do all these things.

I need to be really careful and really purposeful about how are the ways that I am communing with Jesus on a regular basis.

And so this is a this is a lifetime commitment of thinking about and wrestling with the question to what degree is my external doing for God sustained by an inner life of being with him?

Are we balanced?

Are we thoughtful?

Are we careful?

Are we even thinking about these kinds of things, or do we just do because that's what we do?

Secondly, receive the same grace given to Martha.

Commit to a lifetime of honest assessment and receive the same grace given to Martha.

Martha in these verses, she rebukes God and tells him what to do.

But that's precisely what she did.

And Jesus' response to her is, let's just say, not like his response to Peter when Peter rebuked Jesus, and Jesus said, Get behind me, Satan.

You're thinking in a demonic kind of way.

He doesn't treat Martha that way.

He says, Martha, Martha.

Saying someone's name twice in a row like that, that's a sign of affection, not a sign of rebuke.

He's not laying into her.

Can't you figure out this is what you're supposed to do?

What's wrong with you, Martha?

He doesn't lay into her.

He speaks to her with tenderness and with compassion, and like, yeah, this is kind of a rebuke, but it's so like kind.

What Jesus does here is he points, he points Martha to Mary and says, Look at what your sister's done.

She's chosen what is better.

Right now, in this moment, this is the right thing to do.

And in pointing to her sister Mary, what Jesus is doing is he's inviting Martha to choose a better way.

He doesn't lay into her.

He says, Martha, will you receive the invitation to recognize that now is not the time to run around?

Now is the time simply to be with me.

And he invites her to simply be with him.

And of course, we don't know how the story ends.

It just cuts off there, and we don't know.

Did Mary stop?

Did Martha rather stop?

We don't know.

But that's kind of the point.

And that's the point is it forces us to ask the question will we choose the way of Mary or will we choose the way of Martha?

Because that invitation is open to all of us as well.

He points to how Mary has chosen what is better.

And in doing so, Jesus extends grace and invites her into a better way.

So, friends, can I just say that if you are here today and you realize that you are far more like Martha than you want to be, there's grace for you.

If you're here today and you're like, man, I am floundering with this balance, and I feel totally disoriented with this, and maybe I feel like a total just straight up, I failed at this.

I haven't ever even thought about this, let alone been careful or you know, thoughtful about it.

If that's you, there's grace for you too.

What we remember as we come to the communion table today is that God doesn't love you because of your performance.

As is true with Mary and Martha, Jesus does not love Mary because she did the right thing.

And he doesn't not love Martha because she messed up.

God doesn't love you because of your performance.

He doesn't love you only when you get it right.

And if you're like me, that's not very often.

The good news that we remember as we come to the communion table is that Jesus is the one who perfectly lived out this balance that we talked about today of being with God and doing for God.

He was the one who lived in perfect union and communion with God the Father and God the Spirit all the time.

And he lived his life out of that place of communion within the Godhead, and he served his neighbors and he lived for the glory of God.

He did all of those things.

He perfectly embodied everything that Mary and Martha, if you could put their lives together, would show us.

And the good news is that when we trust Jesus by faith, his life of righteousness then becomes ours.

And so we are not loved or accepted by God when we get it right or when we get it closer than we've gotten it now.

He loves us because of what Christ has done for us, and he sees us in his son, and this frees us from a life of feeling guilty and ashamed about the ways that we can't live up and the ways that we failed.

It frees us to a life where we can serve him and love him freely.

And we do it simply because we love him and we know that he's loved us.

And that's demonstrated for us as we look at the communion table and see the broken body and shed blood of Jesus given for us, who so often are more like Martha than we want to admit.

As we come to the communion table today, I invite you to remember, remember that truth that God loves you because of what Christ has done, not because you get it right.

It frees us to pursue a life of time discerning apprenticeship to Jesus, like we see modeled here in the life of Mary.

As we come to the table, let me invite you to take just a few moments for.