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I want to start by just saying a word of welcome to each and every one of you. You might have no idea who I am, and my computer does not, so hang on just a second because it doesn't recognize me. It's just like you. I have uh been a part of this church for four uh decades. My name is Cal Jernigan. I served as the lead pastor of this church from uh 1999 until 2025. I retired last uh April, and uh I still go to church here. I go on Thursday nights, my wife and I come and we uh serve in this church, we give to this church, we love this church. I love this church, and I look at my life and I look at the life of so many people, and I just realize what God has done. And so many of you have a testimony just like I have. Uh I've just been so riskily blessed, so I've gotten to know God so much better here. And I can't believe that all these years later I still get asked to preach in this place, and so uh I'm here to do that. And you know, it's interesting, it's been a year, uh a little over a year, a year and a couple months since I retired. And I just want to say, did I not tell you the truth about Sean? Yes. I'm telling you, you guys are in great hands, and he's my pastor now, and uh I love what this church is up to and what he's leading us into, and we're all in it together. I do need to answer the question. I get asked this all the time, and the times I come to preach, I just kind of uh the question is how you doing? Really in retirement? Are you are you going crazy? I don't know what's wrong with me, but I am loving being retired. I absolutely love it. I love this era of my life, this chapter of my life. And uh I'm not as busy as I used to be. I still feel very, very busy. I still feel like I have a purpose. I still feel like I know why I get up every morning and why I'm gonna go do what I'm gonna go do. And it's just good. And so uh again, I meet a lot of pastors that are retired now and they're not doing well. And I don't know why that is. So I probably am sinning by enjoying this time of my life so much. Uh, because it's just it's it's really been great. So, anyway, with all of that said, I'm glad you too are a part of the journey. I know what God does through this place. And many of you could stand up and already say, here, here's the difference God's made. If it's not you yet, it's gonna be you soon. And so it's so good to be here. All right, so let's get busy. Let's get to the point of why we're here. And uh we've had a chance to worship God by singing. Now let's worship God by kind of engaging in his word. Uh, we're gonna continue today a series that Sean started last week. It's the idea of healthy hustle. Uh, it's uh kind of the idea of why we work. This is what he talked about last week. Why we work, why work matters, what difference does it make, how you should work, all of that kind of stuff. He referenced a book last week. I want to draw your attention back to the book. It's by John Mark Comer. Uh it's it literally is Garden to City. You won't see that necessarily in the title. Here's did that pop up yet? Uh uh here it is. Okay. But that's the idea of garden to city, and you know, understand that work is what turns a garden into a city. And it's just a fascinating read. There's so much more in-depth than I could ever cover, or Sean could ever cover, or whoever in the few moments we have. Just I would put it on your reading list and go, you know what, I need to make a habit of looking at that. Now, here's what I would just say about work. Most of us do not need, you don't need me to convince you or Sean to convince you that you need to work and there's value to work. That's not, we get it, okay? There's value to work. That's not the issue. What we need to do is be motivated to work, to understand why we work, and and kind of put all of that into perspective. And so that's kind of the issue. Now we're living in very interesting times because we're living in times where we are trying to work less. And we would say, yeah, I kind of value the idea of working less. And now we're all into how do we shorten the work week? In other words, how can I put less sacrifice in and get more output? That's kind of the mentality that we have today. And we're looking for anything that could, you know, take our work and like how do we multitask our work so that we can get more work done in less time? We understand the value of work. It's just kind of wired into us. But we're living in an interesting time because we're living in a time where we got all these tools that are supposed to save us all kinds of time. Like every person here, every person there, you have a smartphone. You're carrying a smartphone, which gives you all the tools you could possibly need to just be able to function really, really efficiently. We have the ability to email people, we have the ability to text people, we have the ability through social media to stay in touch with one another. We got all these tools, these tools are phenomenal. And yet when you stop to think about it, the reality of it is it used to be that you would go to work and then you would go home. And when you went home, your work stayed at work and your home was your home. But now, because of smartphones and all those other things, we carry the work with us, it goes with us everywhere. It used to be that there was an escape from work, and now work is just it's just all it's just around us all the time. It's so easy now to be at work. And and uh hard to escape. It's also interesting. Uh, like you you used to have to write a letter every now and then. Remember writing a letter? We used to write memos every now and then. We've exchanged a few letters and a few memos for a ridiculous number of emails. In fact, as you know, I looked this up. Let me give you some numbers. The uh the average office worker receives 121 emails a day. And the average person, you and me, in our digital mailbox, we have 1,044 unanswered emails. Everywhere you go now, people can contact you, and it's really, really hard to leave. And so now we have this little work, work, work, everything's work. And that's the world we now live in. So that book and Sean's message last week was trying to let's put some of this in perspective so we see the value of it and not make it more than it was supposed to be. I'm gonna talk to you today about something that seems exactly opposite of work. I'm gonna talk to you about something that is just as hard as work. I'm gonna talk to you about something that I'm gonna challenge you in that when you walk out of here, there, wherever you are, you you go, I need to think differently about that. I want to talk to you about rest. Okay, now when I say rest, you're not like I don't come on, put them up, man. Let's fight about that. We love the idea of rest. You learned to love rest when you were just a little kid in school, and the bell rang, and it was recess. And recess, was it not the greatest time of the day? Yes? You you're wired for this. And so I don't need to convince you that you you you should like rest. If I ask you where are you going on vacation, man, you'll light up. Oh, we're gonna go to, we're gonna, we're gonna, if I talk about having a holiday, we have the holidays coming up. Oh man, I love the holidays. If I ask about your days off, uh if if if if I say, hey, um, when's the last time you slept in? Uh, sleeping in, that's kind of a positive thing. We love the idea of days off. We love the idea of lounging around a pool. We love the idea of just getting to do our thing, whatever that is, golfing or fishing or hiking or whatever. We love all of that. That stuff comes so easily to us. We absolutely love traveling. It's all taking it easy is just really kind of, it's we're wired in to do that. But here's the point I want to make. I want you to think about. While we love the idea of resting, I'm just gonna make a blanket statement that's true for most of us. We love the idea, but we're not really good at it. Now I'm gonna show you why we're not really good at it in the next few moments, but I just gotta tell you, I think we love the idea, but we're really not good at it. We don't rest nearly as much as we think we rest. So when I write a message, this is kind of the way my brain's wired, here's how I write a message. I I think about, okay, what is it that I want to say? And I try to boil the whole message that I want to write down to one line. I always call it the big idea. That's kind of my style. So I put a big idea, it's the first thing on the page, the big idea. Then I go figure, how do I make that point that that idea is about? And then somewhere in the message, I'll say the big idea or repeat it. I'm gonna say the big idea of this message right now. You want to know what I'm here to convince you of? It's this idea right here. Okay, so listen up. We need, and it's gone on my screen. Here it is. We need to work at as hard at resting as we're working at working. Do you understand that? We need to work as hard to learn how to rest as we need to work to learn how to work. As much effort as we put into working, we need to put into resting. And you might say, Well, we do. I'm gonna challenge that. I'm gonna challenge it. So let's um let's go back to the whole idea. My my phone just thought I fell. Let me uh this happens to me all the time. Uh cancel emergency. Yes, let's cancel that emergency. I I want to take you back to where Sean took you last week. I want to take you back to the very beginning. I want to take you back to the beginning of the Bible. So uh I'm I'm I'm gonna jump into chapter two. Uh, so this kind of the creation story is told in chapter one, chapter two, a little bit different perspective. I'm gonna take you to chapter two, and I just want you to understand rest started with God. So, first off, let's get out of our head that rest is a bad idea. Rest started with God, and this is what it says in Genesis chapter two, verses one to three. Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all of their vast array. By the seventh day, God had finished the work that he had been doing, and so on the seventh day he rested from all of his work, and God blessed the seventh day and made it holy. Uh uh because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done. Now you gotta understand, God rested. Now, here's why he didn't rest. He wasn't exhausted, he wasn't worn out, he wasn't just wiped out, he wasn't like that's not why he rested. Why he rested is because he wants to teach us something about him and about us and about creation. He's trying to set an example for you and me that this is how it works. And so, what God did when he created the world, he created a world that he put in motion, he it was made to run in rhythms. And so he created a world that he created a day, and then he said, Every day I'm gonna follow by a thing we're gonna call night. So there's gonna be a day and then there's gonna be a night, and tomorrow we're gonna repeat that. We're gonna do a day and then we're gonna do a night, and then the day after, we're gonna rinse and repeat the formula. It's a rhythm. And just as sure, if he doesn't return, just as sure as we're we're here today, tomorrow the sun's gonna be out just like it is today. It's the rhythm of creation. Now, he created us on a planet, and we're a certain distance from the sun, so we have this thing called season. So guess what? It's now summer, technically not, but it's summer, and then it's going to be good. It's gonna be fall, and then it's gonna be winter, and then it's gonna be, and then it's gonna be, and then it's a rhythm. That's the way God created it. It's made to work like that, and it works like that every single year. Now, here's here's how we live: we plant, and then we harvest. And as soon as we get the harvest in, we rinse and repeat. We plant and then we harvest and we plant. We we put effort in and then we reflect on what that did, and then we put effort in and we work and then we rest, and then we work, and then see, so God set up this pattern and he modeled it for us, and this is he didn't, it's not it's not like he was wiped out. That's what you need to understand. He wasn't like, I can't do one more, I can't do one more day of creating. He got his work done, and then he said, Okay, now it's time to chill. Now, I want you to understand something. He wants us to learn to acclimate to his rhythms. This is what it's all about. So if you know anything uh about uh anything about God, one thing I know you know is there's this thing called the Ten Commandments. And the Ten Commandments, you know, if you've ever read them, which I'm sure you have, there's ten things God says, hey, let's take real seriously, these ten things. And so he lays them out. You know, it's interesting. The fourth of those ten things is this command that he gave us that I'm talking to you about right now. He commanded us to rest. And he said, I want you to learn this, and I want you to do this. That doing what he said here is as important as doing when he said, Don't kill people. Okay? It's really important. In fact, let me read to you the commandment as first told in the Ten Commandments. When it was first told, it was Exodus chapter 20. And let me just read to you Exodus chapter 20, and this is verses 8 to 11. This is the command, all right? Then I want to tell you something about this command, all right? Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all of your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, and it gets real specific, your nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. Now look, look, look. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath and made it holy. Now here's what's interesting about this. If you just go into Exodus 20 and just read the Ten Commandments, most of them are just one line. Thou shalt not, thou shalt, thou shalt not. This one's got like most real estate right here. Uh he was the most clear. He was the most it's as if he was saying, okay, now listen to me, people. I need you to hear me crystal clear on this. I need you to get this. Listen carefully. And so he spells it out in more words than he spelled any of the other commandments out. I don't know. I just find that kind of intriguing. Um, you want to be like God? You need to pay attention to what he said. What he said is, you work and then you rest. Now, let me explain something to you that I think people get wrong. The word Sabbath has been associated with Saturday in many people's minds. The word Sabbath does not mean Saturday. The word Sabbath means cease or to stop working. That's what it's the Hebrew word Shabbat. It is the emphasis on stopping something, not a day in which you're supposed to stop it. Now, the Jewish world has forever in their calendar, which all different, you know, cultures have different calendars. Uh obviously many use the same, but they create a way to keep time. And the first day in the Jewish mind was Sunday. The church, when Jesus rose up on Sunday, said that's going to be the day. And so we went from a Saturday celebration for the Jewish culture to the Sunday celebration, which is what this is. This is the Sabbath for Christians, generally speaking. Now, here's what I need you to understand. The point is not the day, the point is the practice. That is what he was trying to emphasize. Not the day you do it. When I was a pastor, I did it on Friday. I work in most Saturdays and Sundays. So Friday was my day. It doesn't matter what day, it's the emphasis on what you're actually supposed to be doing. Now, if I were to try to sum up everything I'm trying to say so far, I would say this. After we learn to work hard, we need to learn to rest easy. You need to back off. You need to get away from it. Now, God rested, and so it comes to Jesus. Well, he's gonna work, he's gonna work seven days a week. I mean, he's just gonna work, he's just never gonna stop. Let me read to you something about Jesus. This is Mark chapter 6, verses 30 on down. The apostles gathered around Jesus and reported to him all that they had done and taught. Then, because so many people were coming and going, they did not even have a chance to eat. So he said to them, Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest. So they went away by themselves in a boat to a solitary place. Now I need you to understand that's not a one-off. That happened a lot. Jesus would just get up early, he would get away, he would basically say, Enough's enough. But if people need to be healed, then all this stuff has to happen. Yeah, later. He would take time to rest. He hung out in a garden called the Garden of Gethsemane. He hung out there, he would chill in this garden so much so that when Judas wanted to betray him, he knew exactly where he'd find him, where he hangs out and just kind of gets away from it all. It's gonna be in that garden spot, and that's where they found him. Jesus was so committed to resting. Do you understand there's a story in the Bible about Jesus falling asleep in a boat during a storm? How much more do you have to emphasize? Look, it's okay to go to sleep, it's okay to get some rest. So God rested, and Jesus rested, and then I gotta ask you a question. Are we picking up a theme here? Is there a theme? The theme is you were made for rest, just like you were made for work. You were made for rest. Which begs the question. How are we doing? I want to ask you a question. How are you doing? Get ready to get elbowed by your spouse, by the way. How are you doing at getting rest? Are you are we rested? And here's the answer: no, we're not rested. How do I know we're not rested? Let me give you some background. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, these kind of organizations, they have unequivocally, you need at least seven hours of sleep a night, as I do. But we have the same, well, no, I I can operate on less. I'm good. I I don't need that amount. Seven hours. Uh Apple Watch recently uh released a study that they had done on people who wear Apple Watches, and uh they discovered that the average person of us, we get six hours and 40 minutes on average. Most all of us, on average, and all of us are not even getting seven hours of sleep on average. Which which takes us further as they've studied this stuff. 40% of adults report to unintentionally falling asleep during the day, at least once a month. Unintentionally falling asleep. I just crashed. I just fell asleep. Uh, up to 20% of adults experience excessive daytime sleepiness. And get this one, ready? About one in 20 adults reported falling asleep while driving within the previous month. Folks, that's just dangerous. We're we're literally crashing before we crash. We're exhausted. They they estimate that in our GDP, the loss to GDP is about $640 billion because we come to work exhausted and we got nothing left. And personally, you pay a price for that. They've studied it. Uh, when we're tired, our judgment declines, our emotions become unstable, our performance deteriorates, and physical illness in our life increases. It's just you weren't made to not take a rest. So why don't we know we should rest? Why don't we rest? Let me just throw four fast ideas out as to maybe why. Number one, because of denial. No, I'm good. No, seriously, I don't need any, I don't need to rest. I'm good. I know God had to rest, and I know Jesus had to rest, but no, I'm good. That is the the the the most incredible statement of pride you could ever say. I I don't need to do what God did, I don't need to do what Jesus did. I'm fine. So we'll just say denial. The second one would be drive. Drive is see, we we work so hard and we we resist rest because we live in a culture that values success, that values accomplishment, that it values being busy. You want to show somebody how important you are, just tell them how busy you are. And we're just driven and driven and driven. And when you have to rest, you have to say, you know what? Listen, um, apparently I'm not the center of the universe. Apparently, the world will go on without me if I'm not doing the thing I think I'm so important at doing. That apparently God's got it, whether I got it or not. Again, it's pride. Pride is all through this. Here's uh another way of saying this. Why is rest so hard? Because we confuse rest with being unproductive and being unproductive with being unworthy and not valuable. Okay, all right, so drive and and then denial and fear would be a third reason. Why? We don't should rest. Why don't I rest? Because I'm afraid to rest. Why are you afraid to rest? Because I will fall behind. Because I will get surpassed, because someone's gonna get an advantage over me while I'm resting, they're gonna move forward. Which leads to the fourth one: guilt. We don't rest because of guilt. I don't, I'm I don't want to appear lazy. I don't want to appear like I have no ambition. I don't want to give the impression that I'm vulnerable. And so if I were, yeah, I would feel guilty if I took a day off. I would feel guilty if I took a nap. Keeps us awake. Now, I want to show you something. I'm gonna, I'm just real quickly, I want to move through something. I want to explain something about the Sabbath that I think most of us have no understanding. And I just beg you, follow me on this, alright? So if you read the Bible, the first time the Ten Commandments are listed are in Exodus chapter 20. If you know your Bible, there's a fifth book called Deuteronomy, which is a repetition. Deuteros second giving of the law, gnomos. Okay? It's the second giving of the law. And there you're going to get the Ten Commandments again. But in Deuteronomy, it changes on the Sabbath. It changes what it says. And I want to show it to you. Now the first part's going to sound very similar. So this is Deuteronomy 5. Now listen carefully. This will all sound familiar. Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy as the Lord God has commanded you. Now, six days, okay. All of this, we can just, it's just to repeat, all right? You know, don't work your son, your daughter, you know, your man's all of that's in there, okay? But as you get down, it says this. Remember, now listen, remember that you were slaves in Egypt, and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore, the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath. Wait a minute, that wasn't in the original one I read to you. That was rooted in the creation story. God rested. In this version of it, it's changed it and it said, you know what? You need to rest because there was a day when you couldn't rest. You were slaves in Egypt. And when you're a slave, they have a whip at your back and they're cracking the whip and they're telling you, work, work, work. You don't matter. You're not important. The work is important. And then God says, I set you free from that. So you know what this version is saying, in this giving of the law? Because you can rest, because you're not a slave, and because labor is not what you were made for, only to work. You can rest because you're now set free. And your job should not have that much power over your life. You were not created to work and work and work. Now you can rest. So the intention of the Sabbath is simply this it's not to take one day and make it like this one day of the seven days of a week. It's the idea of God wants you to go on recess. God wants you to take a break. You were made to work and then take a breather. What am I supposed to do on that day? Stop doing what you do every other day and make it holy. Make it about God. That's why we do this. That's why we gather. This is why we open the word. We gotta, okay, I need to refocus on other priorities. Tomorrow, I've got, you know, your brain goes crazy. But take today and uh take a break. Now, I want to explain something that I think most of us have never thought about. Please listen carefully. Because we have a tendency when it comes to, okay, we're supposed to take a day and we're supposed to keep it set apart, to cease, to stop working, and we have a tendency, and the tendency has always been there. The tendency is to start deciding what you can and can't do on that day, and try to make everybody else follow the same rhythm you're following because you just believe that that's the right thing to do. Now, again, don't have time to explain this, just take me at my word on this. One of the reasons God allowed Israel to be taken captive by Babylon is because it says very clearly they were unfaithful to honoring the Sabbath for them lives, for themselves and their land. They just worked it and worked it and worked, worked and worked and worked and worked. And God said, that is not the command I gave you. So he basically said, I'm gonna put you in time out. I'm gonna take you away from here, and you're gonna sit in the corner over there in Babylon until you figure out that I'm in business when I told you work, then rest, work, then rest. Daytime followed by nighttime. Summer, fall, there's a rhythm, and you're breaking the rhythm. Now, why this matters and why this is worth understanding is they're over there, they're going, so this is why this happened, this catastrophe happened to our nation because we blew God off. So the religious leaders, when they were set free and allowed to come back, said we're never gonna let that happen again. We were guilty of not honoring the Sabbath, so now we're gonna do something. We're gonna make it so crystal clear what the Sabbath is all about, we'll never break it again. And so the religious leaders started going, you know what we need to do? We need to make sure that nobody's working on the Sabbath. Okay, everybody got that? Hey, uh, what is uh what does it mean to work? Somebody raised a question. It wasn't mean to work. Okay, the religious, okay, look, let's just explain it this way. We know it means this. You it certainly means you shall not carry a burden on your day. In other words, you should not carry stuff that would be considered. So they began to create rules and laws and lists and dogma that everyone had to follow. And somebody would go, okay, um I'm not supposed to carry a burden. Okay, I got that. Well, what constitutes carrying a burden? Like, how do how do I know if I'm actually carrying a burden? So the religious leader said, Well, okay, we'll define that. And they got together and they said, Okay, here's what we think it means. Uh, if you're carrying enough ink to write two letters of the alphabet, you broke the law. This is history. What? Yeah, you got enough ink. If you have a small cup of wine that you carry somewhere, you broke the law. If you have a tiny piece of paper in which you can write a note, you carried it, you broke the law. If you have a pen in your garment, you you worked. They made all these rules. And folks, I'm telling you, they they it got absurd. Um, you should not work on the Sabbath, which means you shall not plow. So then they said, okay, you can't spit. There's no spitting on the Sabbath. What does spitting have to do with the Sabbath? Oh, because if you spit, your spittle could actually form a furrow. I am not making this up. You created a furrow, you're farming. You're now. Well, what what about what about if my house is on fire? Okay, you can't put the fire out, you cannot put the fire out, but you can go get enough food for one day and these garments out of your what about if somebody's dying? Okay, if someone's dying, you can almost see a Money Python sketch, right? This is comical. Okay, if someone's dying, you can apply enough help to keep them alive until the next day, but there'll be no giving of medicine, there'll be no setting of fractures, there'll be no. You understand this? This is what ruined a perfectly good thing called recess. Now you can have fun, but don't have fun. Now you can have a good time, but don't have a good time. Now you can really get away, but don't get away. And it became so in fact, let me give you a free insight, all right? Just lock this away. If the practice of your faith causes you to work and worry yourself to death between you and your God, you got it wrong. You got it wrong. And this is what the so now in Christian circles, there are people who go, No, you can't do anything on Sunday. Which again, have a day in which you make it different than all the other days, but don't be giving everybody else rules. Can't go to a movie on a Sunday, can't play cards on a Sunday, you can't go to a dance on a Sunday. All these rules come in as if God said, That's what I meant. Which brings us to the fourth thing I want to tell you about the Sabbath, and that's Jesus' redirection of it. Jesus comes in so much of, I think the life of Jesus was literally, if you want to understand Jesus, Jesus is simply God saying, This is what I meant. Not all the stuff you've come up, this, Jesus was what God meant. So send the life of Jesus because then you'll understand God's heart. But Jesus comes, and here's what I need you to understand. Please don't miss this. It'll fill in huge spaces of blanks in your mind. I don't get it. You want to know why Jesus got crucified? Because he wouldn't play a long with these stupid rules that these religious leaders came up with. He said, No, that is not the point of the Sabbath. And they said, Yes, it is. And they kept crossing the swords over the stuff that Jesus goes, that's in fact, Jesus summed it up and he said it this way: They tie heavy, they tie up heavy loads and put them on men's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them. They love burdening people with all these rules. And Jesus broke the Sabbath so many times in their mind that finally he just said, Look, you have got this so backwards. In fact, this is how it says it in Mark 2. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. In other words, Jesus go and look. You've taken this and you've made it something God never intended, and I am not submitting myself to that. Folks, this has huge implications for you and me. Huge implications. Because you know what people absolutely love to do is tell you what you can and can't do. They love to come up with all the laws, and the church is not free from that. Jesus reclaimed the Sabbath. Sabbath is about health and holiness and healing, restoration. It's about giving life, it's about realizing that you were set free. And by the way, when I said Jesus got crucified because he broke the Sabbath so many times, you ready for this? I don't have time to show you this. I'm just telling you, you look this up. Not all, but a great number of the healings that you know about in the Bible, the man with the withered hand, the woman that had been bent over, you know, with a crippling disease for 18 years, the man with dropsy, the blind man, the those took place on a Sabbath. And the religious people spun out. And they said, We're gonna put this away. So let me finish this message that I hope you've been thinking, okay, I gotta learn how to rest better than I'm doing, by just kind of putting a couple of things. Okay, we we need to work as hard at resting as we work at working, all right? Because God created rhythms, and when you don't rest, you're breaking the rhythm of life. Worship is supposed to happen in the break. That that you focus and just take a day and uh cease doing what you do the other days and um let your soul uh be healed. Okay, we got all that. Here's the problem that I want to close to challenge you to think about. Most of us here and most of us there, and if you're hearing me online, you too, most of us just go, no, I'm good. I'm good. I got, no, I'm taking I'm getting plenty of rest. Remember those four things we talked about? Denial, drive, fear, guilt, remember? We just go, no, we're good. This is called a self-serving bias, and we all have it. Yeah, you might struggle with this, but I don't. Yeah, I know you have a problem, but I don't. We always give ourselves the benefit of the doubt. Let me tell you something about being the lead pastor of this church for 26 years. I loved the job, truly loved the job. But you know what I didn't love? How this job sometimes would cause me to become a person I never wanted to be. You understand what I'm saying here? This job would make me uh, it would do stuff to me. It would stress me in ways I was not able to handle at times. And I started realizing I don't want to keep doing that job if I become somebody that I'd loathe becoming. So I thought I got to do something about that. Now, I'm gonna close this message by sho by by telling you a story. I've told you this story before, but it means a lot to me. I want to tell you a story about a guy named Samuel Plimsoul. Never heard of him. You you Samuel Plimstone, Plimsoul, Plimsoul was a British parliamentarian back in the 18th century, 19th century, 1800s. And um, he passed a piece of legislation that is still in effect to this very day. And I want to explain to you what was happening. So back at that time, uh, British merchants were realizing the way to make a bunch of money is every shipment we make of cargo, load the ships, load the ships, load the, put as much on that ship, and uh send them off. So many ships were sinking at sea, they called them coffin ships. This is the ship's gonna kill these seamen. They just don't know it yet, and sure enough. Well, at the same time, all that's going on, there's this new concept that gets kind of started called insurance. And the insurance world said, you know what? Well, we can't guarantee you that you, you know, your ship's not gonna sink, but we can insure the value that you have on that ship. Those two things collided, and merchants started going, okay, look, here's the deal. We'll buy insurance and we'll overload the ship if it sinks. We lose nothing. If it makes it, we make a huge fortune. So they were overloading the ships, which was causing them to sink. So this guy, Samuel Plimso, comes along and introduces a law which gets passed, and it says, no more. And they started something that this very day they continue, but most of us have no idea why it's even there. The law said, from this point forward, all ships have to have what we're gonna call the Plimso line. And you go, I've never heard Noah, you're gonna see one right here. You've seen him before. This is a Plimsoul line. Every ship you see that's at sea has this on it now. What is it? It's a a gauge that takes away the subjective to make it objective. In other words, oh no, we're fine, we're not overloaded. Um, no, you are overloaded because you cross that line right there, and that's the plymsole line that says that if this ship goes down, listen, you will be held accountable for the deaths that happen, and you will get no insurance money. So before it could sail, it had to be above the plymsel line. So here's what I did in my life, and here's what I want to close by challenging you to do in your life. I said, I can't make this as a subjective as, oh, I'm fine, I'm good, I don't feel tired. I need to have some kind of warning system, a shot across the bow, that when I see that shot go across the bow, I need to wake up. And so I came up with four things that I'm gonna close this message by challenging you to think about. Four indicators, lines. If I cross that line, I know I'm in danger of sinking, of going under, I'm overloaded. And I just want to close this message by telling you what they were. Number one, if I find myself skipping. What? Yeah, if I find myself skipping, not skipping like you did when you were a kid, skipping the things that matter to me. You find yourself skipping? You know, what are you talking about? I don't know, you just don't show up at the things you say are important. You're missing this family thing, you're missing that game, you're missing this commitment. You said you would, but you didn't. You skip. You you say you love to fish, Cal, but you never have any time to go fishing. You're skipping the you say you love golf, but you don't have time to golf. You see, when I find myself skipping, I realize the shot's gone across the bow, and I'm overloaded, I'm overburdened, and I need to lighten up. That was one. Here's a second one. Skimming. When I find myself skimming, what's skimming? Skimming is when you're going through the motions, but you're not there. You're just across the surface, you're skipping like a rock. Oh yeah, I was there, I was there, I was there, I was there, but I went there anywhere. Because I was only from there to there on my way to something else. Skimming is when your body's there, but your mind is, you're mailing it in, you're showing up, but you're not really there. And here's what I can tell you about skimming. Number one, it's no fun. And number two, everyone who knows you knows what you're doing. You're just going through the motions. Your kids know that, your spouse knows that, your coworkers know that. By the way, this happens a lot when it comes to God. Yeah, I'm coming, but I'm just are you almost done? Because I gotta get out of here. You're just skimming across, you're just checking a box. When I find myself skimming, I know a shot went across the bow and I am overloaded and I need to lighten up. Here's the third one. Whenever I find myself sprinting, whenever I find myself sprinting, and what does sprinting mean? My family had a thing, and they and I I say this shamefully. They would go, don't talk to dad. He's in mission mode. That was her phrase. Mission mode. Which means I have no time for anything, and I am just getting from here to there, and I am like literally oblivious because I'm so concentrating on I've got to hurry. Here's what happens when you start sprinting. You start you start missing everything that's going by. You don't see anything. There's a shot across the bow. You're going way too deep into the water. You're overloaded, lighten up. And the fourth and last one, and this one's almost self-explanatory, when I find myself snapping, snapping. Now, snapping, there's kind of two ways I could take that. Number one is when you you mentally snap when you start thinking ideas that are so inconsistent with who you are and who you want to be. You have ideations about things that are just wrong as they can be, and they're not for you, and they're not in your values, but you're having, you're you're snapping mentally, you're snapping. Snapping also is what you say to people when you're so short, you're so impatient, you're so quick to judge, you're so, you know, you're snapping. You're living life with a low-grade anger over everything. And here's here's the point: you're below the line, you're overburdened. You need to lighten up. So I challenge you to when you walk out of here or there, wherever you are, measure yourself against those four things. Put them somewhere where you see them and you think about them, going, am I doing that? Am I doing that? It helped me immeasurably. It was a way to get objective about, hey, I'm good, I'm rested. When I look back on my life, I think if I have to be honest with you, I have to admit I was not rested nearly as much as God wanted me to be. And I paid a price for it. As you will. But you want? You know what the words of Jesus were? Let me remind you, come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. So here's my challenge. Go home and think some stuff out. Go home and take a nap. A guilt-free nap. Just take a breath. Hey, when you get home, you have a recess coming. Go do something fun. Go have a great time. We need to learn to work at heart at resting as we work at working. Bless you. Let me pray. So, God, it set us free from this. Set us free like you set the Israelites free in Egypt. God, you have a life you want us to live, and so many of us just sacrifice that life for something less, but we think it's more. And God, we need to do less. So may we be objective and may we be honest, and may we just evaluate. And uh a lot of elbows probably flying in this uh message. Uh Lord, help us have conversations about where we may be, yeah, we're below the line. So bless us, Father. I pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you guys very much.