Keith Battle - Margin - Part 4

I’m in a series called «Margin: How to Balance Resources and Responsibilities.» To let you know how valuable this message is, musically, we assign music to hit him with that theme music. Come on, Russ, look at me because I’m close to the edge. I’m trying not to lose my head; sometimes it makes me feel like I’m going under, like sometimes it makes me want to give up. Yeah, so by definition, margin— for those of you who are new to this series— is the space that we’re supposed to create between our load and our limits. We all have loads, we all have responsibilities, and we also have limitations in our resources. The goal is to create space between the two so that we’re never overloaded, so we want to make sure that our responsibilities don’t override our abilities. We have a limited amount of abilities spiritually, financially, and otherwise. However, we have all these bills and obligations, work and deadlines, parenting and expectations, all of which can be overwhelming. Often, we say yes to more things than we should. To create margin, we must learn how to say no—to say no enough so that we can say yes to the things we’re supposed to say yes to. God wants us to have margin in our lives. This is important because last week we talked about finding margin in your internal space, in your soul. We discussed a plethora of ways to achieve that and the things that rob us of margin. This week, I want to talk about how to create margin in the area of your physical energy. Physical energy is crucial because whatever you need to accomplish in this life, you have to use your body to do it. That’s right! Some of our bodies are tired—like me; I have to get surgery on my knee on Tuesday, and I ask you to pray for me. Hopefully, I’ll be able to move around better afterward, but I need to get it done. Our bodies are the vehicles through which we serve God and accomplish our purposes, and so how do we find margin in our physical energy space? Even though His yoke is easy and His burden is light, His yoke feels heavy when you’re tired. His burden is hard and heavy when you’re exhausted, sick, and fatigued. Today, I want to focus on how we can regain physical energy, using Mark 6:30–32 as our Biblical framework for this. I’m going to read to you; you don’t have to stand because I know we’re over time, but listen to these words in Mark chapter 6, starting at verse 30, where it says, «The apostles returned to Jesus from their ministry tour and told him all that they had done and taught.» They said, «Hey Jesus, we just got back; we just finished our tour, and we want to tell you, man, like we were doing that thing out there! We were saving souls, Lord; people were coming to you, and we were serving you.» Then Jesus responds in verse 31, saying, «Let’s go off by ourselves to a quiet place and rest.» Somebody say «rest.» We need it! He said this because there were so many people coming and going that Jesus and His apostles didn’t even have time to eat. Wow! So, they left by boat for a quiet place to be alone. This is a small and brief passage, but what it shows us is that Jesus and His apostles were actually operating without margin. How do you know that? Anytime you are so busy that you don’t have time to eat, you’re doing too much! Jesus’s solution to this was, «Hey, we have to get away. Let’s get away and rest.» We must step away from these people. Here’s the problem: when we have a lot of guests, customers, or clients, we try to strategize about how we can serve the people more effectively instead of saying, «Let’s protect our wellness by stepping away and getting some rest.» Jesus wasn’t mad at them, saying, «You should never help people.» He wasn’t saying, «You shouldn’t help a lot of people, ” but He was saying, „My first concern is your wellness. We need to get away.“ Jesus never said, „Way to go, fellas! Way to burn out for the kingdom! Way to just neglect your well-being!“ No, He said, „We need two things: quiet, rest, and we need to step away from all these people we don’t know how to say no to.“ Verse 31 states, „People were coming and going.“ What happened was they would have one group come in and be ministered to, then that group would leave while another crowd would come in. They ministered to them, and then another crowd would arrive. They were overwhelmed like, „Wow, look at them coming in!“ Jesus says, „I don’t think this is wise. Let’s get away.“