Hurry sickness is the great enemy of spiritual life. Hurry prevents us from receiving God’s love or giving it to others. That’s why Jesus never hurried.

TRANSCRIPTION

Have you ever skipped rocks at a lake? What makes the rock skip

across the surface of the water? The shape of the rock. The angle of the

throw. The velocity or speed of the throw. It takes speed to skip or skim

across the surface. Throw it slow and it won’t skip; it just sinks. It goes

deep.

The same is true of life. If you go too fast, you just skim across the surface. If you

want to go deep, you have to slow down. Today I want to talk with you about “The

unhurried life,” and share three practical steps you can take to slow down and go

deeper.

These steps are often called “spiritual disciplines” and have been practiced

by Christians for 2000 years as a means to growth and transformation. Don’t be

freaked out by the “d-word”—disciplines. Here’s the basic idea: each of these

disciplines or practices will help you get closer to God, which in turn will help you

change and grow.

ILL: Think of it this way. Let’s say you want to run a marathon—26.2

miles. How many of you could go out right now and run a marathon? Not

many! What would happen if you went out and tried today? Pain! You

wouldn’t be walking tomorrow.

If you want to run a marathon, what do you have to do? Train. You

start by getting out of your chair. Then you start walking, then you run a

couple blocks, and gradually build up to a mile. Then 2, then 3, and so on.

It takes most people months of training to be able to run a marathon. You

may not be able to run a marathon today, but if you train, you could. This is

the difference between trying and training.

Paul wrote to Timothy:

1 Timothy 4:7-8 (p. 1024) …train yourself to be godly. 8 For physical

training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding

promise for both the present life and the life to come.

Train yourself to be godly. If you’ve tried to be godly and failed, maybe you

should train to be godly. It’s like running the marathon; training works better than

just trying. To live The Deeper Life, you don’t just try harder, you train. You take

specific steps that will bring you closer to God and change you from the inside out.

We’re going to talk about some of those steps.

At the top of your outline it says: “To go deeper, you can’t be in a hurry.”

John Ortburg says, “Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. Hurry can

destroy our souls. Hurry can keep us from living well. We will just skim our lives

instead of actually living them.” Many of us suffer from “hurry sickness”. What is

hurry sickness? Faster, faster, more, more, go, go, go, faster, faster. We’re

skimming through life. Rather than a definition, maybe a description will help.

Here are a few symptoms of hurry sickness.

Constantly speeding up daily activities. We read faster, talk faster, and

when listening nod faster to encourage the other person to hurry. We eat faster.

Down on 3 rd Avenue, on Maalox Mile, you’ll find Arby’s, McDonald’s, Wendy’s,

and many other restaurants which are known not for “good food” or “cheap food”

but for “fast food.” And when we realized all the time we were wasting eating at a

table, they installed the drive-through so that we could eat our food in the car, as

God intended. Faster, faster! Do everything faster! I catch myself in the morning

showering fast, shaving fast, dressing fast—and I have to tell myself, “Slow down.

Take a deep breath. Relax.”

At the grocery store check-out, do you find yourself counting how many

people are in each line, and checking how many items are in each cart, so you can

pick the fastest line? Then after you choose a line, you keep track of the person in

the other line who would have been you had you had you chosen that line. You’re

sick!

Multi-tasking. Psychologists call this “polyphasic activity”. Hurry-sick

people while they’re driving, eat, drink coffee, listen to the radio, shave or a