He was coming around a corner on the mountain path, bleating sheep following, when he stopped short and stared. How could a plant be on fire, yet not be swallowed up by the blaze? God used the burning bush to get Moses’ attention, but it also shows us the cure for the great malady of our time.
In a culture addicted to busyness and an over-the-top work ethic, burn-out happens to far too many of us.
God sets our hearts on fire with a holy flame that does not consume us. But this paradox breaks down when it comes to false gods. They will eat us alive, one nibble at a time.
Anything and everything that takes God’s rightful place in our hearts is an idol. It doesn’t have to look nasty. It could your spouse. A creative hobby. A good habit like nutrition or exercise. As long as it gets more time and attention than Jesus, as long as we give our strength to it and get our strength from it, it will ultimately take us down.
Idolatry starts with seduction. It ends with tyranny. And many a sincere Christian falls prey to the most subtle trap of all – the idol of ministry. Here’s a self-check for your soul: are you exhausted, cynical, and irritable while carrying out tasks for God?
Maybe you started out with great passion and vision. You felt inspired, purposeful, alive. You woke up in the morning, thinking, Yes! Another day to be about the Lord’s work – I can’t wait!
But somewhere along the line, you got tired, cranky, apathetic. What you were so eager to put your hand to now feels like a dreaded chore you are sick of.
The very thing that brought life is now sucking it out of you.
If Satan can’t stop us from doing good things for God, his next best strategy is to push us too far. He is happy to use “good” things to distract us from devotion to Christ himself.
Pure and simple devotion to Christ results in joy and simplicity, childlike faith and rest for the soul. No burn-out here. So I’m in a training process to consciously lean on Jesus often throughout the day. I want to make sure I don’t run in the wrong direction or in my own strength. I want to serve the living God, not idols.
Paul writes in Colossians 2:29, “For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.” There’s a key here, a way to be a bush burning bright, yet never burning out.
Tapping into God’s strength daily, moment by moment. Letting his capability and resources flow through me instead of working them up on my own. Keeping Christ at the center of my thoughts and affections. Not letting what I do for him supersede his work in me and through me. Giving him thanks often.
The trick is to be the bush and let God supply the fuel. As long as we toil with his limitless strength, we will burn bright – and not burn out.
I feel like I have to express this, Leslie. I hope you will not take ofenfse.My reading of the Bible is that God is everything. I interpret the the heavenly father as that which art in heaven. In other words everything above the Earth is God in heaven . The Son of God is the that which God begets, the underlying creative movement in which we are united as we move through the heavens. This movement, across the dark waters actually creates the phenomena we know as light and our perception of the places where our souls are connected, the Sun and stars. In my view, the Earth is continuously (re)created in six movements and persists or rests in a seventh movement from which the process restarts. It is this seventh movement that we experience as the Earth plane. These movements bely our worldly perception but entangle our beings meta-physically. The first description I’ve found of this is in the i Ching it’s also in Plato’s Timaeus, the Vedas, and in Genesis. The word day in Genesis was translated from the Hebrew word Tsela which also means a quarter of the heavens. Tsela is also used to describe the ark of the covenant but in that book was translated to the english work arc instead. The king james translation to a solar day was an error in my view.And knowing this, the crucifixion is symbolic of something that defies simple physical explanation: The fact that we continuously cross through the Sun within these imperceptible movements. The early cross was within a circle, symbolizing the Sun. This challenging knowledge was understood by Fu Xi, Plato, Moses and Ezekiel and very few others. In Christianity this view was all but vanquished with the adoption of the Copernican model. This is what the big fight was about between Galileo and the Catholics. In truth, our spirits are united by the fact that the energy that creates the Sun touches, connects, and animates all of us as the spirit of God carries us across the dark waters .The cross represents a subtle truth about the underlying nature within our beings. This is an esoteric truth which has been for centuries secreted by a few mystery schools which branched off from Christianity. Sadly, when scientific observations contradicted the more subtle truth, lesser minds prevailed. The last 500 years will eventually be seen as The Darker Ages .Because of recent discoveries, this will not need to remain a secret much longer. In fact, it cannot be denied much longer. God’s will and all Jesus is another matter entirely. I find the Jesus torture stories offensive and problematic. I see them as apologies for inflicting and accepting suffering instead of combating it. I suspect if Moses was alive today he’d tell his followers to execute most of the modern sects just as he did those who worshiped the golden cow. I’m certain Moses would consider the wooden blocks with the man nailed to it just as much of an idol, and perhaps even more offensive considering what he was actually trying to relate in Genesis.Now I’m not Moses. But I definitely do not accept the suffering of Jesus in my heart.And I’d just as soon avenge the death of a good man killed by evil men. And in the spirt of justice and God’s truth, I would hope to be avenged if such an injustice was done to me.I feel like I had to express this. I believe Matt deserves this knowledge and see him as one of the precious few who may understand it as a vessel for the truth, of Christ.Blessings,-John