Avoiding Burn Out

Avoiding Burn Out

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men. Matthew 5:13 (KJV)

      Imagine with me going out to the highway where the road crews have just salted the roads to make them safer for driving in the snow and picking up salt to use for cooking. I can’t think of anyone that would find road salt good for cooking or preserving food. It has been cast out and is trodden under foot. Jesus lays this out as He calls us to be the salt of the earth. He tells us salt that is not salty is good for nothing but to be cast out and trodden under foot by men.

      As we are pressed into this wicked world we must maintain our saltiness. We cannot be of use to the Master if we have become bland and lost the power that is in us. Natural salt is formed and develops its flavor in the process of creation but once it has lost its savor there is no way to make it salty again. I am glad that is not true with the Child of God.

      While we were bound in sin and far from Jesus, we were not salty. We might have believed the lies of the world and thought that we were exciting and dynamic but really we were poor, and wretched, and blind. We were bland! But when Jesus called us and we received His grace by faith something happened and we were changed. The old things passed away and the new thing began. The mourning, humble, meek, hungry, thirsty, merciful, pure, peacemaker that suffers persecution was born. Christ begin to live through us and His light shined brightly from our hearts. We became salt.

      This is the source of our saltiness! Jesus! The more of His life that is lived through us the saltier we become. When this world begins to wear us down and the savor begins to lack in our lives we have a source that is eternal and can sustain us in the darkest of times. Jesus would leave His disciples and go off to pray. We find Him in the wilderness, in the desert, on the mountain side, by the seaside, and on the river bank but He always had a place where He could be refreshed by the Spirit. He carried the message of God to a world in need. He was rejected and abused. He worked the works of God and delivered those in bondage. Miracles followed Him everywhere He went. He showed us how to be salt and how to stay salty.

      There is not one place where it is recorded that Jesus “burned out”. He remained faithful to the call of God and finished the course. How? He was tempted as we are. He got tired like we do. He became frustrated like us. Why didn’t He burn out? Jesus always had a place to pray. He stayed in the Spirit and the Spirit stayed in Him. He showed us what the fullness of the Spirit looks like in a man or woman that is willing to stay salty.

      I have a salt water softener at my house. It does its job efficiently and effectively never requiring much attention until the salt level gets too low. At first a blinking red light warns of the impending low level. If I am too busy and ignore the warning the softener continues to work. Nothing changes. I still receive the benefit of its labors. Then as the salt continues to dissipate the level reaches a critically low level, alarms begin to go off demanding attention. I would be foolish if I were to take that warning sign as “burn out” and decide to throw the softener away. What I really need to do is just add salt. If we are suffering “burn out” and getting tired of the call that God has placed on our lives it is time to check our salt level. We need to “just add salt”. Get into that “secret place” and allow the Lord to restore your soul.

With All My Heart

Matthew 5:8 (KJV) Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

We often speak of the heart as the center of our love. “I love you with all my heart”, is spoken to those that we cherish greatly. I recall the story of the mother that would pull each of her children aside and tell them “I love you the most. You are my favorite but don’t tell the others they will be upset.” She told each of her five children this and throughout their lives each child believed that they were her favorite and kept the secret faithfully. When the Mother passed away the children were making plans for her funeral service when the youngest told the others that she was her Mother’s favorite, each sibling then shared the many times that they had been told the exact same thing. What a shock! I am sure that in the Mother’s mind she did love every one of her children “with all her heart”. But deep down inside of this loving mother was the knowledge that she could not give all her heart to more than one child. Thus she had them all keep the secret.

We are like that with God. We love Him deeply and want to walk the path’s of this life hand in hand with our Heavenly Father. We want God to love us and abide with us. But there are others, those things that demand our time and become the object of our affection. We bring them into our lives and allow them to possess a part of our heart. When we come to Jesus we compartmentalize our lives placing each “love” into its own secret place. Life has a way of allowing us to accept what we know we shouldn’t and soon those secret places and loves seem normal, just a part of life. Like a man who has two wives, two families, two homes and orders his life so that each doesn’t know about the other. To the rest of us that seems burdensome and peculiar but he has lived with the secret for so long that it seems right. That is until the two families meet.

To have a pure heart, a single eye, requires to be honest about the secret places in our lives. We know that when our two loves meet only one can survive as the “one true love”. Perhaps the road to being pure in heart must start with an abundant dose of honesty. There is an old song that states, “Is your all on the altar of sacrifice laid. Your heart does the Spirit control…” The altar is a good place to start in our search for a pure heart but only if we are honest about the things we have kept in our secret place.