The Great Enemy of Your Spiritual Life.
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The great enemy of the spiritual life: Hurry.
I just finished reading a book called ‘Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools’ by Tyler Staton where he wrote that hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life.
‘Why hurry?’ You might ask…well, because hurry kills love and intimacy, which is what our spiritual lives are all about. They’re all about intimacy in our relationship with Jesus. They’re about growing in our understanding of His love for us and thus growing in our love for Him. And the reason hurry kills love and intimacy with God is because it takes time away from Him. Hurry causes you to merely acknowledge your relationship with God instead of abiding in and enjoying your relationship with Him.
The hurriedness I’m alluding to is the kind you have when you’re late for something, like work or school or an event, and you haven’t eaten yet, so you quickly munch something down on your way to your intended destination. You’re eating because you know your body needs the nutrients, but you aren’t enjoying it. You’re including it in your schedule instead of building your schedule around it.
See what I’m trying to say? That may not be the best example, but we do this often with Jesus…we become so hurried in our lives that we spend very little, hastened time with Him…we wake up and rush through prayer or reading Scripture because we have such a crazy day ahead…and we do so because we know we need Him, but by doing that we’re falling into a hurried nature that eats at and removes the love and intimacy we get from our relationship with God.
By doing that we’re not enjoying God, rather we’re making Him a checklist item.
Simply put, the more hurried we are in our lives, the more we kill the intimacy and love we could come to understand and experience with the Lord.
That’s huge!
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Now reading Staton’s book had me wondering what causes us to be so hurried in our lives. It would not be too big of a stretch for me to say we all struggle with being hurried at times…but why? I think the answer to why, the answer to what causes us to be so hurried in our lives lies in our schedules, is busyness.
Everyone is busy nowadays. We all have endless things to do. For most of us, there’s always something to do and get done to the point where if we never wanted to take a break we could do that. We’re busy with our jobs, with our families, with our kids, with to-do lists, with sports, hobbies, with scrolling through social media…you name it. We are ‘busy busy busy’ (S/O Frosty the Snowman, great movie).
Anyways, busyness itself is not a bad thing, nobody was more busy than Jesus. But busyness becomes a bad thing when it takes time away from the Lord - when it causes you to become hurried. And for most if not all of us, our busy schedule can easily lead to a hurried nature. One that causes us to move at such a fast pace because there is so much to do and get done. To jump from meeting to meeting, thing to thing, person to person.
Because we’re hurried, time with God becomes part of our to-do list instead of what we build our to-do list around.
Because we’re hurried, we try to fit time with God around our schedule rather than fitting our schedule around our time with God.
But here’s what we need to realize:
If we want to be more like Jesus and truly abide in Him, we’re told in 1 John 2:6 to walk in the same way in which he walked.
And guess what? Jesus was unhurried.
On the surface that may be a little confusing. You might be wondering how we can be busy but live unhurried? Well let's look at Jesus. I loved how Staton defined His unhurried nature in his book. He defined it as both ‘intentional and interruptible’. Now see for most if not all of us, we’re good in just one of these areas. We’re either really intentional with God but not willing to be interrupted when He wants us to be with people and to attend to circumstance (which would be me), or we’re so willingly interrupted by people and circumstance that we go our whole day without being intentional to be with God.
But Jesus was equally both.
In Mark 1, Jesus stayed up late while in Capernaum healing the sick and those who were demon possessed. Yet, despite His busy day, He intentionally woke up early the next morning to go and spend time with God. Then, while He was alone, the disciples came and interrupted Him and told Him that the people were looking for Him, so He went.
We see this unhurried behavior from Jesus all throughout the gospels, but I believe this example in Mark 1 shows His unhurried nature best. Jesus was very busy, again he was busier than all of us, yet He was intentional to be alone with God. And, though He was intentional, Jesus allowed Himself to be interrupted in order to go attend to people and circumstance.
THAT is unhurried.
I think it’s kinda funny that there isn’t a verse in Scripture that alludes to Jesus running. He walked everywhere. Yes, He lived with urgency, but he was never in a rush. He was unhurried. Jesus was on a mission to save the whole world, to save you, to save me, but He wasn’t hurried to do it. What if you lived similarly? What if you weren't hurried to complete your to-do list for the day? What if you, just like Jesus, took time to withdraw from the busyness of life to be alone and spend time with God?
Maybe that’s for 10 minutes during a lunch break, maybe it's an hour before bed, or maybe it's early in the morning just like Jesus in Mark 1…what would seeking to resemble Jesus’ unhurried nature look like in your life?
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You can tell you’re living in a hurry when you can’t draw away for a few minutes to be with God. When that’s the case, you are living a life too busy for Him. And when you’re too busy for God, that’s when you are being under Satan’s yoke. ‘
B.U.S.Y. Being under Satan’s yoke.
I’m not sure who came up with that acronym, but it’s great. The enemy loves to make us too busy for Jesus. To speed us up. To disrupt our ability to be intentional and interruptible. To make us hurried. Because, the enemy knows that by doing that, he is killing our love and intimacy with God. And we’ve all been here. It’s almost impossible to be a Christian in the US and not struggle, at some point, with the hurry that kills our love and intimacy with Jesus.
This means that we’ve all experienced the detrimental effects a hurried life can lead to in our relationship with Him..
We’ve all experienced a lack of motivation. We’ve experienced the depletion. We’ve all been in a position where we feel like we have nothing left to give. We all, at some point, have felt like our lives are too busy to spend time with Jesus.
In other words, we’ve all allowed hurry in our lives to cause us to stop living out of the overflow of our walk with God; we’ve allowed it to kill our love and intimacy with Him.
And some of us have struggled with this in the past…most if not all of us will struggle with this at some point in the future, but also I’m sure some of you listening may be struggling with this right now. You may be reading and realizing how much you've allowed the busy nature of your life to cause you to become hurried and begin to kill your intimacy and love with God. You’ve been wondering why something felt off and why you felt depleted and now you know why. You may be realizing that you are too busy for God, and that you try to weave Jesus into your schedule instead of building your schedule around Him.
In other words, you may feel like your spiritual life is currently unhealthy.
And to that person, and to everyone else listening, I want to encourage you to be motivated by love and strengthened by grace. And that statement has nothing to do with you and your actions and everything to do with Jesus and His actions on the cross. There’s power in being motivated not by your love for God but by His love for you. And there’s also power in being strengthened by a grace that you cannot earn yourself, one that is freely and abundantly given to those who believe in Christ.
It is a natural tendency of ours to earn love, and that’s because in this world we’re groomed to work for and earn everything. But you can’t earn God’s love. And luckily you don’t have to. John tells us in 1 John 4:19 that we love because Jesus first loved us.
You know what that implies? That implies that it is really hard to love Jesus and to love others when you don’t first have an understanding of His love for you.
But when you do, when you begin to comprehend the blood shed for you on calvary, and you start to realize that God loved you so much that He sent His only Son to die for you, then a strong desire forms in you to love Him back. A desire forms to slow down and to be with Him.
To withdraw from your busy day to be with Jesus.
To take in His immense love and be strengthened by His sufficient grace for you.
To become unhurried.
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Hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life, but coming to a greater understanding of the love God has for you is the perfect weapon for it.
I love you all.
God bless.
