Well, we’re in the midst of the
baseball World Series, so I thought I’d give you a baseball story today. My grandpa
on my mom’s side, before he passed away, was a die-hard Indians fan, and he
used to tell me, “The only thing that is as much fun as watching the Indians
win, is watching the Yankees lose.” Man, he hated the Yankees. But I think even
he would have felt bad for poor Chuck Knoblauch. Does anyone know who that is?
Chuck Knoblauch? He played for the Yankees from 1998-2001. Before his time with
the Yankees, Chuck had played in
Like I’ve said before, I’m a baseball
fan, and even though I’m not a Yankee fan, I felt bad for poor Chuck Knoblauch.
There was obviously something mentally going wrong for him. It wasn’t that he
didn’t have the physical ability to throw the ball from second base to first
base. Something just wasn’t clicking. Things just weren’t going his way.
I think we all feel like our lives go
that way sometimes, don’t they? Do you ever get stuck in a rut? It’s weird,
because often times when you get stuck in a rut, there’s really no good
explanation for it, just like there was no explanation for why Chuck couldn’t
get the ball to first base. He wasn’t hurt. He just couldn’t do it. And that
happens with us. We wake up one morning, nothing is really different, but we
just have a rotten day, we’re in a rotten mood, we’re depressed, we’re in a
rut. There’s no good reason for it, nothing has really gone wrong.
Sometimes I wake up like that. I’m
just cranky. No good reason for it, I’m just cranky. And I go downstairs and
I’m making coffee, Holly says, “Good morning!” I say, “EHhh.” Adelyn says,
“Daddy, I help you make coffee?” I say, “No. Go play.” I’m banging things
around making my coffee and I get my mug and go plop down in the chair and
start flipping through the news. Adelyn runs up and jumps on my lap and I spill
my coffee on myself. I say, “For cryin’ out loud!” Holly comes in the room,
“What’s wrong?” I start to get upset. “What’s it look like? Your daughter
jumped on me and I spilled my coffee.” And she always says the same thing,
“Maybe you should just go back to bed.” Which is her polite way of saying, “Go
upstairs and don’t come down until you are the man I married.”
There’s no reason for me to be in a
mood like that, but it happens, doesn’t it? We get all cranky and mean for no
good reason and we lash out at those we love. Sometimes we are just stuck in a
rut.
And it’s sometimes more than just
waking up on the wrong side of the bed. Sometimes it feels like your job is in
a rut. Or your marriage. Or maybe it’s things like housework. Sometimes the
simplest things to do seem nearly impossible. Have you ever had this happen to
you. You’re sitting in your chair, thinking, “man there’s nothing on tv. I’m
bored. I need something to do.” And your wife comes in and says, “Honey, the
garage really needs cleaned.” And all of the sudden it’s as if you are
physically strapped down to your chair and you can’t get up. You think, I’m not
doing anything. The garage really need cleaned. But I just don’t feel like it.
But you know it’s one thing when you
are in a rut in your personal life. The garage can always been cleaned later.
It’s another thing when you get in a rut in your spiritual life. Have you ever
been in a spiritual rut? Are you in one now? Has your spiritual life been one
continual rut?
Let me give you an example. The last
couple of months our Sunday School class was reading “The Purpose Driven Life.”
It’s a really good book, I’ve read it before. And Holly and I were reading it
before bed every night. But then we got to a point where some nights it seemed
like the hardest thing to do in the entire world was to reach over to the
nightstand and pick up that book.
Nothing had really changed. We didn’t
love God any less. We weren’t less committed to growing in our faith. But for
some reason it seemed like that book weighted 5,000 pounds and we just couldn’t
pick it up. It was a real struggle.
So what do you do when your spiritual
life gets in a rut? How do you get out of a spiritual funk and back on track again?
If you are going through something like this I want you to really listen
carefully, because I truly believe this can have a huge impact on your life.
And I want to remind all of you that if you ever need to go back and look for
something that we have talked about in a sermon, you can find it on our
website. Yes, that was a shameless plug for our website. Vbumc.com. OK.
Look, the first thing you have to do
if you are in a spiritual funk is to search the rest of your life. Search the
rest of your life. Chuck Knoblauch never recovered from his throwing problems
because he never searched the rest of his life until after he retired. It was
right there on the surface. In an interview he gave during the midst of his
throwing problems, he compared trying to understand his throwing problems to
trying to understand Alzheimer’s disease. It just didn’t make sense. What he
didn’t say, is that his during this time his dad was diagnosed with
Alzheimer’s. His dad was his baseball coach all through his childhood and high
school. Chuck later admitted that during this time, he really dealt with his
fathers disease through the way he played, and that he knew it was affecting
his game. His life had been thrown off balance.
Often times when we get in a spiritual
funk, it is the result of a life that has lost it’s balance. Sometimes I get in
a spiritual funk. And I have to step back and ask myself, is my life in
balance? During the time when it was so hard for me to pick up that book and
read at night, my life was out of balance, in a small, but obviously important
way. I had stopped working out. For some of you, that may not be a big deal,
but I’m a pretty active guy. I had gotten myself busy to the point where I
didn’t have either the time or energy to work out. I threw my life out of
balance. And it caused a chain reaction that led to a spiritual funk.
Sometimes it’s something bigger than
not working out that causes the chain reaction to begin. The death of a loved
one might throw our lives off balance. A change at work. Change is inevitable,
but it’s when we forget and fail to adapt to that change that our lives lose
their balance. So if you are in a spiritual rut, step back and search the rest
of your life.
The second thing you need if you are
in a spiritual funk is accountability. Accountability. This has become an
increasingly popular word in Christian circles, and for good reason.
Accountability is the idea of having another Christian brother or sister help
you keep tabs on yourself. They check up on you. They ask how your prayer time
is. They ask how your church attendance has been. They ask how your
relationship with Christ is going. Then they pray with you and they walk with
you through whatever it is you are going through in your life. They help you
see when your life is getting out of balance. They push you to grow stronger
and more in love with Christ.
We have this idea that our
Christianity should be really private and no one else needs to know about our
relationship with God. But folks, that’s simply not the case. We are the body
of Christ and we need to take care of one another. Listen to Ecclesiastes
4:9-12 – “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their
toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone
and falls and does not have another to help. Again, if tow lie together, they
can keep warm; but how can one keep warm alone? And though one might prevail
against another, two will withstand one. A cord of three strands is not easily
broken.” We need accountability. We need others to watch out for us.
If you are interested in having an
accountability partner, and you’d like to be paired up with someone, give me a
call and we’ll get that set up. I have come across very few things as rewarding
and vital to a strong relationship with Christ than an accountability partner.
I actually have several, all pastors from the area, and we get together every
other Wednesday. It has done wonders for my relationship with Christ. So
accountability is the second thing you need to get out of a rut.
The third thing you need is to set
your mind on Christ and power through. Now, hear this correctly. This probably
won’t work on its own without searching the rest of your life to regain balance
and accountability. If you power through, but your life is still out of
balance, you probably won’t regain balance for long. But after you have
accountability and have searched the rest of your life, it may be necessary to
just power through to get back on track. Colossians 3:2 was read for us earlier.
It says, “Set your mind on things above.” And verse 16 and 17 say, “Let the
word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all
wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual
songs to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name
of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”
You know, now and then when I’m in a
rut, and I’m out driving by myself, I just turn off the radio and I pray. And I
say things like, “God, I don’t feel like praying today.” I say it just like
that. You don’t have to talk all fancy when you pray. Just tell it like it is.
I say, “God, I don’t feel like praying, but I’m going to. Because I want to
feel like praying. I know I should be praising you, and even though I don’t
necessarily feel like it, I’m going to, because you deserve it even when I
don’t feel like doing it.” Then I sing at the top of my lungs. The best is when
I pull up to a stop light right next to somebody and they’re staring at me as
I’m singing “How Great Thou Art” as loudly as I can. I’m sure they think I’m
really cool.
But that’s what Paul is talking about.
He says look, everything we do should be as if we are doing it for Jesus. And
that includes the times when we don’t want to. So pray for one another, and
start singing and praising God, because God sent Jesus to die for us, so we had
better show our appreciation.
Folks, look, living a Christian life
is like walking on a balance beam. There are constantly things that could push
us off one side or the other and it is so hard to get back on. So we’ve got to
do everything in our power to stay on that beam. That means maintaining our
balance in life, that means letting others keep us steady, and that means doing
our best to concentrate on completing the goal and reaching the end
victoriously.
I think there are quite a few people
here today that either are in, or have been in, or will be in a spiritual rut
at some point in time. And I have confidence that there is no spiritual rut
that cannot be climbed out of. But we must achieve balance in our lives, we
must hold one another accountable, and we must power through the hard times.
As we sing our final song today, maybe
you need to tell God, “I’m ready to get out of this rut. I need you to help me
balance my life, be humble enough to be accountable, and I need help to power
through. Because more than anything I want a relationship with you.”
Van Buren United
Pastor Dan Metzger