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Hendersonville Seventh-day Adventist Church, NC

David Wright

Marginless Living

Maybe it's the job you're currently in I know when we go to ministers meetings Often I can see pastors that are experiencing burnout.

There are times in my ministry I feel burned out, used up, consumed.

And sometimes they'll say things like, I'm overly fatigued.

The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor did something that was new and innovative in their library which is open 24-7.

They have a piling nap station, 6 vinyl cots, and disposable pillowcases, and you can only stay for 30 minutes at a time, and get that power nap and continue on.

Another chief executive from a multi-billion dollar corporation said this, I just felt no matter what I was doing I was always getting pulled somewhere else.

It seemed like I was always cheating someone, either my company or my family or myself.

Our title for this sermon is marginless living.

In case you're wondering, marginless is not in the dictionary, but you get the idea.

All of us have books and Bibles and those types of things, but if you don't have any margin it can be challenging for your eyes.

Have you ever gotten a letter where they didn't use any margin?

They used every scrap of that piece of paper to write you something.

Margin is defined here, the part of a page or sheet outside the main body of printed or written matter, a border or limit.

And so we all are accustomed to having some type of margin that makes it easy on the eye and friendly.

And sometimes our lives don't have any margin.

Every single piece of the page is crammed with something.

Richard Swenson says this, marginless is fatigue, Margin is energy.

Marginless is the disease of the new millennium, yet margin is its cure according to Richard Swenson.

Is there margin in your life or is your life packed so full that when another phone call comes in you say I don't have another crack to squeeze it into.

Here in this graph, I don't know if you can read all of the ways that stress impacts the mind and behavior, emotions, and body, everything from headaches, to being accident prone, to being less confident, to worrying, and the list goes on and on and on.

It suffers when we are in a place of burnout.

And all of this driving, all of these things that are affecting our body.

I wonder, in fact, how many of the things that our doctors are seeing on a day-to-day, regular basis are based on burnout, are based on no margin in their lives, are based on what's behind all of this, stress.

Swenson says the symptom is pain, the diagnosis is overload, the prescription is margin and the prognosis is health.

How do we find that balance between staying busy, being productive, and not taking on too much to where our health and our family and our marriage and our relationship with God and our impact in the community, all of that can suffer, and the devil knows this, and so he does everything he can to get us stressed out, To be living a marginless life.

Charles Swindoll says this in his book Intimacy with the Almighty.

Noise and words, frenzy, hectic schedules, dull our senses.

They Close our ears to his still small voice and make us numb to his touch.

Hectic schedules make us numb to the touch of God.

Busyness, Lack of margin, dull our spiritual senses.

And the problem is not getting any easier to manage.

You are connected, you are available, people have access to you 24-7 by a multiple variety of mediums.

Someone said this, superficiality is the curse of our age.

Our greatest need is not for more intelligent people or more gifted people, but for more deep people.

I believe superficiality is the curse of our age.

That busyness crowds out that still small voice, And individuals who have a deep spiritual experience that really know God and have let him fully transform their lives are very few and far between.

And the world will never, I believe, be changed by superficial Christian experiences.

They're not going to be changed by people that have a superficial surface experience with God.

If you brought your Bibles, I want to turn to Revelation chapter 2 where we have the 7 churches and this is the first of the 7 churches spoken of here in Revelation chapter 2 and while you're turning there I'll remind you that Ephesus represents the first 70 years of the church.

The Greek word Ephesus itself means desirable.

And 1 of the best preserved ancient cities of the Bible is Ephesus.

Maybe some of you have been there and seen some of the ruins.

Population is thought to be about 150 to 20, 000 living in it.

The way that they calculate that is they take a look at the stadium and they say that the stadium can hold somewhere between 50 and 20, 000.

You multiply that by 10 and you have the population of the city.

There were large mansions on the hillsides, and in these mansions, archeologists tell us that they had heated floors, hot water pipes running through the floors and the walls.

And some of these homes were 10, 000 square feet, some were even 20, 000 square feet.

And it was homes for the educated and the elite, mansion-like, even palatial type homes.

There was a reason the word meant desirable.

And so we read there in Revelation chapter 2 verse 1, to the angel of the church of Ephesus write, these things says he who holds the 7 stars in his right hand, who walks in the midst of the 7 golden lampstands.

Verse 2, I know your works, your labor, your patience, that you cannot bear those who are evil, and you have tested those who say they are apostles and are not, and have found them to be liars.

Now in Greek, labor there is mean to labor, to extend yourself to the point of exhaustion.

So the Church of Ephesus, or represented here in Ephesus, worked to the point of exhaustion.

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Marginless Living

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