Are You Weary?

Welcome to all our visitors. Liz and Ella, thank you so much for that special music. I love the way your voices blend on that, and a beautiful song, and a beautiful message to it as well. This question is specifically not directed to our couple celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. Are you weary? I did not plan that. Everyone else in the room.

Are you weary? Might be a bit of an odd question, but let's dig into that a little bit more here as we spend a little bit of time looking at God's Word today. You know, there's more to weariness than just being tired, and it's probably not a word that we've used very much. I don't know the last time I've actually used it, but it's one that we see written in the Bible, certainly an older English word.

And it carries a little bit more with it just than the idea of being tired. Certainly being tired, being sleepy can lead to the phenomenon of weariness. But words that we might use today instead of weary might be things like just feeling done, overwhelmed, drained, lacking motivation. Do we feel weary? Why is that something we should think of at this time of year? You know, we'll be celebrating the feast in just over a month's time. And as I think many of us are aware, traditionally in the Jewish tradition, Ecclesiastes is a book that's read during the time of the Feast of Tabernacles.

And it's always an interesting read at first glance because what is the theme that we see written all across of Ecclesiastes? Weariness is probably one of the words that you could think of. You get a lot of toil, tribulation, futility, vanity, what's it all worth kind of a vibe coming out of Ecclesiastes, don't you? So this is a time that it makes sense for us to think a little bit about weariness.

Weariness is a real thing. Probably some of us have felt it at some point in time here over the course of the last days, weeks, or months. It impacts how we treat our loved ones. For those of us who are working, it can impact the way that we work and the way that we approach our work. It can impact how we care for ourselves and how we care for our surroundings. I'd like to read an interesting brief article that speaks to this in terms of what some of the implications of weariness can be.

This is from the Guardian newspaper and there are other articles on this study that came out. This is back in 2011, so it is an older study. I guess I'll also make the comment that since the time this study came out, there have been some rebuttals that have come to this study in the last year or so, just for sake of full disclosure. But reading from the Guardian, April 11, 2011, The adage that justice depends on what the judge ate for breakfast may not be far from the truth, according to a study of more than a thousand court decisions.

The research, which examined judicial rulings by Israeli judges who presided over parole hearings in criminal cases, found that judges gave more lenient decisions at the start of the day and immediately after a scheduled break in court proceedings such as lunch. This is written by Jonathan LeVove, Associate Professor of Business at Columbia University. He co-authored the paper and said, you are anywhere between two and six times as likely to be released if you're one of the first three prisoners considered versus the last three considered.

The authors of the peer-reviewed paper looked at more than 1,000 rulings made in 2009 by eight judges. They found that the likelihood of a favorable ruling peaked at the beginning of the day, steadily declining over time from a probability of about 65% to nearly zero, before spiking back up to about 65% after a break for a meal or for a snack. LeVove said the paper had implications for British judgments. He said, what we're finding here is a basic psychological effect, and there's nothing different between the psychological effect on a British judge or an Israeli one.

The exact reason for the shift from parole approval to a default outcome of denial is not clear, but the paper speculates that breaks may replenish mental resources by providing rest, improving mood, or by increasing glucose levels in the body. LeVove said, I don't measure the judge's mood, I don't measure the judge's glucose level, it's just a very consistent empirical regularity. It's quite a robust effect, and it doesn't really matter how you cut the data you get to reproduce it.

He added. So, weariness. If you summarize the way that effect works and the impacts that it has on decisions that people make, how they think about things, how they approach things. And you can find all kinds of articles around the internet. I was browsing a little bit yesterday, and there's all kinds of articles about optimal times to make or not make important decisions, to hold business meetings, one article claims that Tuesday is at 2.30 is the optimal time for a business meeting. Reasonable minds can differ. But the fact is that this topic of weariness, this phenomenon of weariness, is important. It impacts us as human beings. So let's talk a bit about weariness today and consider it through the lens of God's Word.

And first of all, I think it's important to go to the Bible and to see a few of the things that it says about this phenomenon of weariness. And as we look through a few of these things, the thing I'd like to underscore is, weariness is a human phenomenon impact that can happen as a result of a lot of different things. Not necessarily as a result of something bad, sometimes even as a result of something good.

A few references, and by no means the only ones in the Bible, but a few references. First one in Psalm 69, verses 1-3. David, of course, writes a lot about his woes, his difficulties, his struggles. He talks about being weary of waiting in Psalm 69, where he says, So he describes the weariness that he feels in waiting for an answer from God almost as though he's being inundated by water.

And it's coming up, and he feels it coming up to his neck, he feels it cutting off his breath, and as he's sinking, that feeling that he has of weariness as he waits. We can be weary of studying. Now those of us who are students, or have been students, can identify with that very quickly. It doesn't take long for studying to make you weary. Ecclesiastes 12, verse 12.

Ecclesiastes, of course, again, lots of talk about this type of a topic. Ecclesiastes 12, 12. Further, my son, be admonished by these. Of making many books, there is no end, and much study is wearisome to the flesh. Many of us have probably experienced that, probably some very recently, if we're in classes right now. So studying can make us weary. We can be weary of fighting. We've heard about David. Well, let's turn to 2 Samuel 23, chapter 4, what we read just a few minutes ago, 2 Samuel 23, verse 10. Reading here about David and his mighty men. He arose and attacked the Philistines until his hand was weary, and his hand stuck to the sword, describing, you know, just being so cramped up with his muscles after this fight that he was in that he couldn't even let loose of that sword. Perhaps he'd been out doing yard work or doing other hard labor where you're just going at it and going at it and going at it, and after a while it's like you can't even open your hand up. You're just so weary and so muscle-tired from that. And here it talks about the Lord bringing about a great victory. Of course, it's not just the physical battles like David fought, but spiritual battles that can bring a lot of weariness with them. You know, we can even become weary from doing good things, can't we? Turn with me to 2 Thessalonians 3, verse 13. We'll see a passage that talks about that. They're Paul writing to the Thessalonians, admonishes them. In 2 Thessalonians 3, verse 13, there's a tongue twister. But as for you, brethren, do not grow weary in well-doing. There's all kinds of different circumstances that can cause weariness. Now, there are other examples as well. If we think about things that happened in the Bible, different accounts that we see written up. We're not going to read through the details, but let me just call a few of them to remembrance here as we're going through. Elijah, in 1 Kings 19, if you want to look there at another point in time, we probably recall the story about how Elijah fought this great epic battle against the prophets of Baal, called fire down from heaven, God came down, burned up the sacrifice that had been doused with water multiple times after the prophets of Baal couldn't produce fire from heaven. David, after winning that incredible victory, runs off, and he's weary.

He's just worn out, even depressed, and God ministers to him, puts him back on his feet, and sends him off to continue doing his work. Moses in Numbers 11, if you want to look there at some point in time, of course, the accounts of the children of Israel and the way that they acted after coming out of Egypt, and the complaints and all the things that they loaded on to Moses as they were going through the difficulties in the desert.

Moses, at that point in time, was weary from the complaints of the people. The burden of leadership was heavy on him, as he was trying to figure out how in the world to keep these people motivated and focused and moving forward. Even Jesus Christ himself, we read accounts of him being tired, he often removed himself from the crowds. He never hit a point like Moses did, where he just said, you know, God just strike me down, where Elijah was, where he thought he was good for nothing and really didn't want to go on. Jesus dealt with it in more of a productive manner. We see a number of accounts where he removes himself to be recharged, to commune with God and spend time with him. Mark 1, verses 35 through 37 is one example. Mark, as a writer in the Gospels, he's an action guy. The whole book just starts with things happening. It's just kinetic in terms of what's going on. And in this section, it talks about all these things that are happening around Jesus Christ and the crowds are pressing on him. People are listening to him. People are coming to him. And what does he do? He goes off for a little while. He needs to be refreshed. He needs to spend time with God. It was a way that he could deal with a very human phenomenon of weariness, of this overload that can happen when there's a lot going on and when we don't get a chance to take a break and recharge from it. So, in a word, weariness is part of the human condition. It can happen from all kinds of different trigger points for all kinds of good reasons. It can follow good experiences, incredibly positive experiences, even experiences of God's direct intervention, and it can follow difficult or stressful times. There's not one predictive route of how weariness comes on. At the same time that weariness is a natural, physical response, it's also not a condition we can afford to stay in.

A couple of scriptures to talk about that. Certainly, we see the clues in the way that Jesus Christ dealt with things. A number of different passages where he talks about himself removing himself, again, as I spoke about. Spending time with God, getting away from the crowds, getting away from the stressors that he had, even in his life.

What we find, especially when we contrast that with Moses or Elijah and the way that they reacted, is that we want to avoid being so overcome with weariness that we have, let's call it, an episode, as we saw both Moses and Elijah having in those accounts. Turn with me, if you will, to Galatians 6, verse 9. Here Paul, writing to the Galatians, uses a similar term in terms of losing heart.

Galatians 6, verse 9, Paul writes to the Galatians, and he says, So standing for the proposition that we can't let weariness get to the point where it just saps us of our hope. We no longer have that heart, that motivation, that desire to go on, to continue to go forward.

James echoes this thought. He states it in the positive rather than the negative. If we read in James 5, we'll read verses 7 through 8.

James writes, So Paul writes about not losing heart. James talks about establishing our heart. A lot of commonality in these two passages. Both of them use the same analogy, analogy of farming. Talking about a harvest, talking about early and latter rains, which implies a passage of time. Talking about patience. And really pointing out the fact that just like a farmer who's working the land, the outcomes of our spiritual lives take time to happen. And just like winds move across and rains move across, perhaps droughts move across, there are good conditions and bad conditions that happen over that growing season. And one of the things we need to do is establish our hearts to not grow weary and continue forward through all of those things.

Both of these passages address the need to tend to that inner self, the heart, that inner reservoir of strength and hope. And the condition of that heart is the ultimate outcome. It determines the ultimate outcome, which is why we have to guard it, why we have to establish it. And so that leads us then to the inescapable question. How do we do it?

How is it that we establish our hearts? How do we keep from letting weariness overcome us? And there's a key underlying truth that we have to understand. It's actually one that comes from the natural world. So let's take maybe a bit of a side bar and consider that for a minute. I don't know if you've ever really thought about it, but there's a phenomenon that's gone on really throughout history that man has searched for and never found. And that is the endless supply of energy. The endless supply of energy. Maybe you've heard of the term entropy. We've got an engineer or two in the audience visiting us today. They can probably tell you more than you want to hear about entropy if you ask them after services. But at a high level, what entropy talks about is the fact that in the physical world, things naturally descend from order towards disorder.

The room of a teenager might be a good example after it's been cleaned. Anything else you might own, a car, a house, anything else, what is it that we find? You know, we put our work into it, we take the car to the car wash, we vacuum it out, everything's looking great, spotless, clean. What is it that we just know is going to happen over the course of days, weeks, maybe hours afterwards? It's going to get dirty again, isn't it? It's just the natural state of physical things. And in order to get it back to that place of being clean again, energy has to be put into it.

And it's that way in any physical system. And human beings throughout all of history have searched for a way to get around that. They never have. You know, we found animals to do the work early on. I remember when I was a kid, I'd read these stories about the Pony Express and how they would dash across the wilderness, delivering the mail.

And I always wondered, because horses to me just seemed so big and powerful. And as a little kid, I could never really fathom why a horse would have to rest. You know, you've got this big, huge, powerful beast, and especially looked at through the eyes of a little child, and I thought, why in the world would you need to let a horse rest?

This thing is so incredibly strong and powerful. But we know that's just not... a horse is flesh and blood. Just like we are. It tires. It has to be fed. Energy has to be put back into that system, whether through rest, through food, through water. So from there, what did we do? We've gone on, we built machinery. What does machinery need? It needs fuel. Some sort of fuel. It also needs repairs, right? Because gears wear out, belts break, hoses crack.

Entropy catches up with everything, and there is no endless supply of fuel. Even nuclear power, probably one of the closest that we've gotten to, needs more fuel. You have nuclear waste that has to be tended to. You have new nuclear fuel rods that have to be put in. Actually, I just heard an interesting story yesterday. That Three Mile Island is going to fire back up. The nuclear power plant there, they're going to sell their power to Microsoft to power AI.

Even AI, our computers, need energy. It's one of the other phenomena going on right now, which is data centers being built all over the place, and all these computers needed to power artificial intelligence and other automated processes. What are they doing? They're sucking up energy. Energy costs are going up. The ability to produce electricity, to fuel all of these things, is beginning to be an issue. Even renewable energies, wind, hydro, solar, those are probably the closest we have to a renewable source, but still, you have to be close to the source, or you have to have enough battery backup to deal with times when the sun isn't shining, times when the wind isn't blowing.

Probably a hydroelectric dam is the best thing, but if you're not within a certain distance of it, even then it's difficult to take the power from it. At the risk of beating this to death, I'm going to read from Britannica about something called perpetual motion. This is one of the things that the old-timey scientists were after as they were looking for sources of energy, and we've still never gotten there.

Perpetual motion, according to Britannica, is the action of a device that once set in motion would continue in motion forever, with no additional energy required to maintain it. Such devices are impossible on grounds stated by the first and second laws of thermodynamics. Perpetual motion, although impossible to produce, has fascinated both inventors and the general public for hundreds of years. The enormous appeal of perpetual motion resides in the promise of a virtually free and limitless source of power. The fact that perpetual motion machines cannot work because they violate the laws of thermodynamics is not discouraged inventors and hucksters from attempting to break, circumvent, or ignore those laws.

So there's that holy grail out there still of trying to find a free, never-exhaustible reservoir of energy. And physically, it just plain doesn't exist. Now, we can apply the same concept to our human lives as well, can't we? You know, for those of you who can think back to it, have any of you heard the myth of the—I'm missing the term here, I'm not finding it in my notes—but the spring of eternal life.

Ponce de Leon. The Fountain of Youth, thank you. Something eluding me as my memory starts to fail. The Fountain of Youth. So the Fountain of Youth, that myth dates back to the 5th century BC. And all the way through until Spanish explorers started coming through in the area of Florida and the Caribbean, looking for this mythical fountain, same sort of thing.

It's just the individual human level of this same idea, the fact that there could be some way to continue to get endless supplies of energy in order, in this case, to fuel the human body so it wouldn't age, and so we wouldn't die. And it continues even today, if you look at some of the experiments being done, Neuralink, that Elon Musk is behind, different ways that potentially you could back up the human brain to an electronic device and replicate it in a different body. All of these things are searching for some theme that ties back to the same thing.

Endless sources of energy, endless source of life, something humanly and physically we're just not able to achieve. But there is inexhaustible energy available, and that comes from God. And that, to me, makes God's greatness even more meaningful when we think about it. You know, even the term exhaustion is an interesting term, isn't it? Because it carries with it this idea of utilizing resources.

And at the point that those resources are used up, they are exhausted. Just like when we use up our physical resources, our strength, we become hungry, we become exhausted because that energy is gone. God, however, has inexhaustible energy. You cannot sap all of the energy from God. It continually regenerates. It is truly otherworldly. It's not tied and bound by the laws of physics or anything physical. Turn with me, if you will, to Isaiah 40. We think about it in this context and really spend some time thinking about how difficult it is for mankind to maintain energy, to generate inexhaustible energy, and then we look at these words.

Isaiah 40. We'll start in verse 28. Have you not known, have you not heard, the everlasting God, the Lord, the creator of the ends of earth, neither faints nor is weary?

God's not like us. That inescapable peace of being physical, of being exhausted, of becoming weary, of using up reservoirs of strength is not something that God is subject to. His understanding is unsearchable.

And here's the greatness of the promise that comes with it in verse 29. He gives power to the weak, to those who have no might. He increases strength. Even the youth shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall. That reminds me of when my son was younger. He was probably 15 or so. We were living overseas at the time and he was playing soccer. And we had what the Brits there called a dads and lads game. And we played soccer against these 15-year-olds. And here were all of us, as probably in our mid-40s, running around this soccer field trying to keep up with these kids. And we got done playing, and I will say we won. Thank you very much. And we were glad we didn't wait and do it another year, the year after, because that was probably the end of it. But we got done playing the game, and we all sat down at picnic tables, and all of us dads were basically exhausted and half-slumped over. And what did the kids do? They grabbed the basketball and went and started playing basketball. The energy of youth. Even the youth shall faint and be weary, and young men shall utterly fall, but those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength. They'll mount up with wings like eagles. They'll run and not be weary. They'll walk and not faint. How incredible is that? Promise of inescapable energy, inexhaustible reservoirs of energy that God promises. We see this further in Matthew 11, talking maybe less on the physical side of it, and talking more about the emotional weariness and the emotional energy that we need. In Matthew 11, verse 28, one of the famous verses where Jesus Christ speaks about Himself and what He does for us. Matthew 11, verse 28, where He says, "'Come to Me, all of you who labor, and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.'" Not using the word weariness, but certainly implying it in terms of labor and being burdened down. "'Take My yoke upon you, and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light.'" So there's the contrast that gets laid out for us in terms of weariness. Humanity, anything physical, does not have an unending reservoir of strength. There's only one place that that comes from, and that's from God Himself. So how do we tie all this together, especially as we think about where we are in this period of our cycle of the Holy Days, we look forward to the Fall Holy Days and the Feast of Tabernacles. So we recognize, as we've already talked about, that weariness is a natural human condition. It can result from all kinds of different factors, some positive, some negative. Definitely not all of them bad, though. In a spiritual sense, as we read both in Paul's writings and in James, if we want to reap the harvest, that harvest that we picture at the time of the Feast of Tabernacles, we have to not become weary, not lose heart. And as a result, we have to be connected to that infinite source of power and of energy, which is God Himself. Thankfully, He provides that willingly whenever we turn to Him, and is always ready to share that power and that energy with us through His Spirit that dwells in us.

So as we wrap up, let me take maybe a little bit of a left turn here, and we'll turn in a moment to a scripture that might seem a little incongruous to all of this, but hopefully it'll all make sense when we think about it for a moment. But if we go back to the analogy that Paul and James use when talking about the importance of not losing heart, it is one of reaping the harvest. And again, that's what season we're moving into. You might recall that back in the Holy Land in ancient Israel, when these feasts were first put together, the Feast of Tabernacles coincided with the time right after the major fall harvest. Everything would have been gathered in from the land. All of that time, you know, again, when you think of what James wrote and what Paul wrote, you think of all that time that was spent by the people living in a society that was tied to the land. They went through the good weather and bad weather. They went through the long days of gathering in the harvest, caring for the crops before that, and they had gathered all that in. They were surrounded by that plenty. They were probably also somewhat physically weary from doing all that work. Turn with me, if you will, Deuteronomy 14. Those of you doing the Bible reading program would have read this passage within the last couple of weeks. We'll read verses 22 and 23. There's an interesting sort of juxtaposition that happens here, which might not make sense at first. Verse 22, You shall truly tithe all the increase of your grain that the field produces year by year. So as they brought in their harvest, they were to set aside a tenth of that. And you'll eat it before the Lord your God in the place where he chooses to make his name abide, the tithe of your grain and your new wine and your oil of the firstborn of your herds and flocks. That you may learn to fear the Lord your God always. Now, the first part of that kind of makes sense in terms of a harvest. Harvest has just come in. You set aside a part of it. We understand as the festival tithe. And you take it with you and you rejoice. And many cultures around the world have some level of a harvest festival that takes place, even Thanksgiving in our culture here in the U.S. You could understand in that context. But I want to focus on this last section of the verse for a moment that you may learn to fear the Lord your God always. It seems sort of strange to have that wrapped in there in some ways. And I think we understand that fear in this case means something more than you need to look at God and be just scared of God. But there is a deeper reverence. There's an understanding of His holiness, of everything that He is that comes along with this. And it comes along at that same time as all of this plenty is there. It points, among other things, to this underlying reality that we've been talking about all along. You know, if you're sitting there and you've just gathered in the harvest, what is it that you know with certainty when you reflect?

When you go home after that feast, that cycle is going to start all over again. That's the nature of the physical world, isn't it? Though you might have plenty today, you've pulled in the harvest, you're enjoying everything that you have, you know that in a few days' time that's going to be over. You go back to your land, probably have a little bit of time off in the winter, and you've got to launch right into that cycle again.

Because if you don't put the energy into the land, you won't get the crops back out of it. But what is it that lies in the background behind that? Everything that we just read about God's energy, God's not subject to the cycles of the land. God has that inexhaustible reservoir of energy. There's something else underlying, everything else that's going on. And even in that point in time where you can sit back and say, I've got a lot, everything is good, there's a reminder, no matter how much you have, no matter how good things might be at a point in time, you're part of this physical cycle. And there's something that's not subject to that physical cycle. That's the deep reality that we all have to have. Something that we have to grasp from the inner part of our beings in order to not lose heart.

I think that's what's tied up in this idea, even at this time of plenty, that we have to fear God. And we have to learn that. Not only that the good physical things come from Him, but that He transcends them. He's not subject to those cycles. He is that endless supply of energy that can cause us to never be weary and never lose heart.

So we'll go likewise in about a month's time to keep the feast, and we'll be there to have a great time as we should. But as we do that, there's another reality that we have to keep in mind. Something deeper that's taking place. It's more than just a vacation that we're going on. It's more than just enjoying the great things that we have. All of those are a part of it. But there's that underlying reality and understanding that goes along with it. That there's a God there that's not subject to everything that we deal with physically. Who has something greater for us as a plan. Who also requires things of us in terms of understanding His Holiness, understanding His way of life, and submitting ourselves to it. Have you ever been weary? There's a solution.