Long before we had a name for it, it existed.  Everyone who cares for others feels it keenly.  It grows in proportion to growing responsibilities, especially responsibilities for others.  No one is immune.  ‘Burnout’ describes a fire that burns itself out as it consumes all its fuel. 

While not a medical condition, it often leads to medical complications.  According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, burnout is defined as “physical, emotional or mental exhaustion, accompanied by decreased motivation, lowered performance and negative attitudes towards oneself and others.”  Burnout often manifests as overwhelming physical, emotional, and spiritual exhaustion as well as compassion fatigue, a creeping callousness toward suffering due to an overload of caregiving.  Those suffering compassion fatigue may struggle to care about those they care for.

The Bible reveals that the great heroes of the faith struggled with it.  Moses struggled in the wilderness as the people relentlessly complained.  He cried out to the Lord,

“Why have you dealt ill with your servant? And why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? Did I conceive all this people? Did I give them birth, that you should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a nursing child,’ to the land that you swore to give their fathers? Where am I to get meat to give to all this people? For they weep before me and say, ‘Give us meat, that we may eat.’ I am not able to carry all this people alone; the burden is too heavy for me. If you will treat me like this, kill me at once, if I find favor in your sight, that I may not see my wretchedness.”  Numbers 11:11-15

Elijah struggled with it following the contest on Mount Carmel with the prophets of Baal.  Jezebel puts a price on his head.  And he runs for his life, crying out to God.

“It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers… I have been very jealous for the Lord, the God of hosts. For the people of Israel have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword, and I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life, to take it away.” 1 Kings 19:4, 9-11

And the list continues.  Jeremiah wept.  Isaiah’s preaching only made Israel’s hearts more callous.  And John the Baptist, who once declared “behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” asks from Herod’s prison, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?”

Christians are not exempt from burnout.  Calvin and Spurgeon experienced deep depression.  Luther was accused of being neurotic.  And even today over 1,700 American pastors leave the ministry every year.  70% report suffering chronic depression and 80% believe that pastoral ministry has adversely affected their families.  Burnout is epidemic and extreme loneliness often characteristic.

But burnout is not an unexpected temptation. In the midst of controversy with the religious leaders, Jesus quoted Isaiah, “a bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not quench.”  Jesus was tempted in every way as we are, “touched with the feeling of our infirmities,” and yet without sin.  No doubt he was tempted with compassion fatigue and burnout.  Especially when he attempted to find time for quiet rest and respite with his disciples from a hectic season of ministry.  And to grieve the death of John the Baptist.  Yet even in what should have been a remote, lonely place of rest, the crowds pressed upon him and his disciples with their endless afflictions, demon possessions, and spiritual ignorance.

Mark 6:30-34 records this picture for us.

The apostles returned to Jesus and told him all that they had done and taught. And he said to them, “Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in the boat to a desolate place by themselves. Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they ran there on foot from all the towns and got there ahead of them. When he went ashore he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. And he began to teach them many things.

Jesus had brought the Twelve apostles into the wilderness for rest.  But perhaps it was not the rest they had expected.  For what we read next is shocking.

And when it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, “This is a desolate place, and the hour is now late. Send them away to go into the surrounding countryside and villages and buy themselves something to eat.” But he answered them, “You give them something to eat.”  Mark 6:35-36

Jesus’ compassion for his disciples is no less than for the crowds.  And here we see him offer a deeper rest than the absence of labor.  A rest that no privation or pressure can deprive.  In the older translations, the language of Jesus call to the disciples here is, “Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while.”  An old preacher once quipped, “if you don’t come apart, you’ll come apart.”  But how do we find rest when “many are coming and going and we have no leisure to even eat” or rest or recharge?  Just what does it mean to come apart with Jesus?  For indeed, if we do not learn to come apart, we will come apart.

Join us as we examine Mark 6:30-44 and consider the invitation of Jesus to find a rest that heals bruised reeds and fans smoldering wicks. We meet Sundays at 10:30 am on the square in Pottsville, Arkansas right next to historic Potts’ Inn for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join our livestream on YouTube. 

There are no shortcuts to mushrooms.  While amateur mycology is a blooming hobby, it carries severe penalties for a mistaken identity.  Consult twice, sauté once, lest wretched illness or even death lurk in the pot.

Foraging for mushrooms in the Ozarks has the same intrigue and reward as truffle hunting in France.  Itinerant mycologists are secretive about their finds.  They love to share their harvest but never their source.  They are a tight-lipped crowd. 

The addition of foraged wild mushrooms to our cuisine adds zest.  But it also adds adrenaline.  They are tasty to be sure, but are they toxic?   Only time will tell.   According to a recent study, approximately 7,500 Americans are poisoned by mushrooms each year.  Of those, on average 39 experienced major harm.  And 3 people die each year in the US from ingesting poison mushrooms.  The report concludes, “Misidentification of edible mushroom species appears to be the most common cause and may be preventable through education.”

Arkansas has a robust ecology of edible mushrooms, but it also includes some silent killers posing as edibles.   Some of our poison mushrooms such as Yellow Patches, Violet-toothed Polypore, and Lilac Bonnet have distinctive colors and odors that warn novice foragers.  But the highly toxic Jack-O’-Lanterns are often misidentified as edible Chanterelles.  While the non-descript, but extremely poisonous, Destroying Angel resembles common edible Meadow Mushrooms.   A mistaken identification is at best sickening, at worst fatal

But more deadly than serving Jack-O’-Lanterns in a soup or putting the Destroying Angel on your pizza is failing to grasp the truth of Jesus’ identity.   A mistaken identity where he is concerned has consequences that last forever.   But the struggle is real.  While the Gospel of Mark paints a dramatic picture of Jesus, the King, the Son of God, the only redeemer of God’s elect, fully God and fully man, we see his family, his childhood acquaintances, his admirers, his enemies, and even his disciples struggle with the question, “Who is this?”

In story after story, Mark shows us the consequences of a mistaken identity where Jesus is concerned.  Herod Antipas made this fatal mistake.  Of all the tragic mistakes made by this son of Herod the Great none was more damning.  The sad history of Herod’s public and private life as revealed in the Gospels and in the writings of the ancient Jewish historian, Josephus, form a litany of one mistake after another. 

His marriage was both incestuous and adulterous.  He made rash vows and caved into the social pressure, ignoring the voice of conscience.  He imprisoned and murdered the only righteous man he respected, John the Baptist.  And was compliant in the unjust murder of Jesus.  He was a weak, petty, scheming, cruel man, ultimately exiled by the Roman Emperor Caligula to France. 

But of all Herod’s mistakes, none proved more tragic or deadly, than mistakenly identifying Jesus as an avenging apparition sent from the dead to punish his murderous guilt rather than the Savior of guilty sinners, able to provide forgiveness and mercy.  Later, Jesus would become for Herod, no longer an object of fear, but of entertainment and then ridicule.  Sadly, the Bible traces for us the hardening of this man’s heart who repeatedly rejected Christ and the gospel.

Who is Jesus to you?  Is he merely a teller of iconic stories?  Is he a constant reminder of your failure? A vengeful agent of God’s displeasure and implacability?  A well-meaning, but failed revolutionary? An idealistic laughingstock?  Or perhaps a respected, moral example?  But is he your King?  Your only Redeemer?  The eternal Son of God and great High Priest?  The Savior of Sinners?  Who is this?  No question is more important.  And no mistaken identity more fatal.

Join us as we examine Mark 6:14-29 to consider the tragic consequences of unbelief regarding who Jesus is and why he has come.  We meet Sundays at 10:30 am on the square in Pottsville, Arkansas right next to historic Potts’ Inn for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join our livestream on YouTube. 

Galileo was imprisoned for challenging it.  Edwin Hubble’s observations seemed to corroborate it.  Contemporary scientists deny that it is even a legitimate question.  While the citizens of Tulsa declare it to be clearly true.  Are we the center of the universe?  Does everything revolve around us? 

In the 1630s, Galileo publicly agreed with the theories of Copernicus that the universe, or more particularly the solar system, was heliocentric, not geocentric.  That the earth revolved around the Sun and that the Sun, not the earth stood at the center.  In response, The Inquisition condemned him as a heretic and sentenced him to house arrest until his death. 

Now every schoolchild knows that the earth revolves around the sun. But in the 1920s, Edwin Hubble observed that every distant galaxy appeared to be moving farther away from us.  On the surface Hubble’s discovery seems to corroborate the idea that our galaxy, solar system, and planet might, indeed, stand at the center of the universe.

Enter modern physics into the discussion.  Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicted a universe that is either expanding or contracting.  A universe with no edges.  A universe in which the vacuum of space is not merely the backdrop for general relativity, but itself is expanding and contracting.   Contemporary astronomers and astrophysicists, following Einstein’s theory, have theorized that the universe has no center, but is expanding and contracting only from a point in time, not a place in space.  These modern cosmologists have declared all questions about the center of the universe moot.

Meanwhile, the City of Tulsa, Oklahoma has declared itself to be the Center of the Universe.  A pedestrian bridge, rebuilt after a fire in the 1980s, exhibits a remarkable acoustic anomaly.  If you stand inside a thirty-inch concrete circle surrounded by a concentric circle of planters and benches and speak, your voice echoes back and is amplified.  Noises from outside the circle are distorted.  And anyone outside the circle cannot hear what is said inside the circle.  The spot, dubbed by city fathers as “The Center of the Universe,” attracts tens of thousands of visitors each year.

And so, the debate continues.  Are we the center of the universe?  Does everything revolve around us?  No matter where we stand cosmologically, we often act as though we are the center of the universe.  That everything should revolve around us.  Our sinful take on God’s creative purpose to give man dominion over the cosmos tempts us to confuse stewardship with kingship.  And we lose sight of who is at the center and fail to remember that the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

This failure is often true in our worship.  This is why our service always begins with a “call to worship.”  We need to be called into worship because we are prone to think we are already at the center of all things. So, God takes the initiative and calls us to come and worship Christ who is the center. We also struggle with who is the center as we read the Scriptures, thinking surely, they are principally about us.  And while they are certainly “breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work,” we must acknowledge that while for us, they are not about us.  Jesus, not us, is at the center of every passage.  Even those that seem purely instructional.  

Mark 6:7-13 is a good example of the temptation to forget who is the “main thing.”  Jesus is beginning his third preaching tour of Galilee.  In the first he called fishers of men.  In the second, he called out the Twelve.  And in the third, he sends the Twelve on their first training sortie for the Great Commission.  But they would face real sickness, real provisional need, real rejection, and real demons.  And while we might be tempted to view this is a paradigm for our own gospel ministry, the focus should be on what Jesus does.  What he gives, commands, and expects. 

Of course, discipleship involves disciplines.  But the essence of discipleship is not in honing disciplines, but “fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfector of our faith.”  Disciplines are means of grace, but never its ends.  Reading Jesus’ instructions in Mark 6:7-13 we might be tempted to look for procedures, preparation, and paradigms.  But let us look instead to Jesus who calls, sends, provides, empowers, and receives again his beloved disciples.

Join us as we examine Mark 6:7-13, and Mark 6:30 to consider what Jesus does, gives, commands, and expects when he calls us to follow him.  We meet Sundays at 10:30 am on the square in Pottsville, Arkansas right next to historic Potts’ Inn for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join our livestream on YouTube. 

Fake news, AI-generated content, shock-jocks and click-bait.  Twenty-four-by-seven news from around the globe.  Streaming news feeds on every media platform, curated and calculated to incense us and provoke an extreme reaction.  Our bombardment with the sensational anesthetizes us to feelings of true amazement.  The greater the shock value, the less we are capable of being shocked.

The astonishment that used to require a lifetime of hard earned experience and exposure to curb, is now numbed by media mega doses delivered with each chiming notification on our screens.  Over-exposed to all things bright and beautiful and many things grim and horrific, nothing shocks us anymore.

Social critic, Sy Safransky, wrote.

Nothing shocks us anymore. The line between social truth and social fiction has been erased …Assassinations, race riots, peasant huts burned to the ground — the litany is familiar, terrible, and [yet] boring. We are beyond shock, and thus in peril, because our acceptance of whatever comes next is . . . painful and resigned.  — “An American Dream,” Sy Safransky,

While communication critic, Neil Postman, warned that “news-as-entertainment” would destroy empathy, communication, and culture.

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility. – “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Neil Postman

Nothing shocks us anymore.  We have seen it all, heard it all, and are becoming callous to it all.  Amazement is hard to come by.  The province of small children alone.   And so, it is remarkable to read in the Gospels that there are things that shocked Jesus. The one who saw it all, heard it all, knew it all, yet never became at all callous to our brokenness. 

Jesus was touched by the feeling of our infirmity.  Wept at the tomb of Lazarus.  And marveled at a centurion’s faith.  Friends asked Jesus to heal the centurion’s beloved servant, and we read.

When he was not far from the house, the centurion sent friends, saying to him, “Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof. Therefore I did not presume to come to you. But say the word, and let my servant be healed. For I too am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me: and I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes; and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.” When Jesus heard these things, he marveled at him, and turning to the crowd that followed him, said, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.”  — Luke 7:6-9

But regrettably, in Mark’s Gospel we read of Jesus’ amazement at the lack of faith.

He went away from there and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him. And on the Sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astonished… And they took offense at him. And Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household.” And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them. And he marveled because of their unbelief.  – Mark 6:1-6

The lack of faith in Jesus’ hometown, among his childhood friends, and even within his family was so shocking that Jesus marveled at it.  Those who knew Jesus longest and thought they knew him best, did not really know him at all.   Their lack of faith in the person and work of Jesus the Christ was all the more shocking because of their familiarity with him.  

How well do you know Jesus? Is it your faith or your lack of faith that is more shocking? Join us as we examine Mark 6:1-6 and consider the amazing unbelief of Jesus neighbors and his family and ask whether it is our faith or lack of it that is more shocking.  We meet Sundays at 10:30 am on the square in Pottsville, Arkansas right next to historic Potts’ Inn for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join our livestream on YouTube. 

Trust the science! Suspend disbelief.  Stop asking hard questions.  Dismiss critical thinking.  Believe what non-scientists tell you is “The Science.”  Just do what the unscientific tell you “The Science” is telling you to do.  Our modern compliance mantra is a study in paradox.  The word ‘science’ is Latin for ‘knowledge,’ but we’ve all been taught that science is more verb than noun. A pursuit, more than a thing.  A process of discovery more than settled knowledge.

We know the scientific method.  Observe, hypothesize, test, theorize.   Only when a theory is unassailable does it become scientific law.  The bar is high.  And at any time, the scientific method may unravel the science we are supposed to trust.  Furthermore, to view ‘The Science’ as a unified knowledge of everything is the pinnacle of hubris.  If someone says, “trust the science” a good question might be, “which science?”  “Whose science?”  Just who is to speak authoritatively on behalf of science?  To command this new faith?

‘Science’ is the science of well-organized skepticism, of never-ending evidentialism.  Hardly the proper object of anything we might call ‘faith.’  For faith is not a quality or quantity of belief resident in the believer.  It is not sincerity.  It is not ardent zeal.  It is not an intellectual assent.  It is neither blind nor unqualified.  No, the reality and depth of faith does not reside in our natural capacity for belief, but in the faithworthiness of faith’s object, revealed and demonstrated to be ‘faithable.’

To command faith is to commend the object of that faith. And faith must go beyond mere evidentialism.  As Jesus noted, it is a “wicked and perverse generation that always demands a sign.”  Faith is a divine gift, ordinarily given through the means of divine revelation.  And that revelation reveals the proper object of our faith.  

In Mark 4 and 5 we encounter four remarkable miracle stories.  Nature is stilled.  A legion of demons cowed.  Incurable disease cured.  And death overturned by resurrection.  Miracles, impossible for any mere healer, charlatan, or magician to conjure.  And the hanging question in each is not, “how did he do it?” but “where is your faith?” 

The last two of these stories, the healing of a woman with an incurable, chronic hemorrhage and raising Jairus’ daughter from the dead, are intertwined and juxtaposed.  Their relationship is no mere literary device.  Their twelve-year timeline is a clue that we are to compare and contrast them.  To wrestle with the many challenges to faith they present.  And to learn that faith is not in methods, merit or overcoming misgivings, but must rest wholly upon the person and works of the Lord Jesus Christ.  When a delegation of Jairus’ friends arrives saying, “your daughter is dead. Why trouble the Teacher any further?” Jesus ignores the report and commands Jairus, and us, “Do not fear, only believe.” 

What are you afraid of?  What waves threaten to capsize your life?  What ravaging demons refuse to leave?  What chronic pain has exhausted all your resources?  What comfortless grief has gripped your heart?  No method, no merit, no change in circumstances, no mere optimism that ‘things will be ok’ will move these mountains.   But there is one who rebukes winds and demons, who stops the bleeding and wakes the dead.  He is the object of our stories.  He is the only object of our faith.  “Do not fear, only believe” is not just for Jairus, but for you as well.

Join us this week as we examine Mark 5:21-43 and consider a faith that can save.  We meet Sundays at 10:30 am on the square in Pottsville, Arkansas right next to historic Potts’ Inn for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join our livestream on YouTube.