Is Your Check Engine Light On?

Burnout Warning Signs

Our cars have warning lights that we can look up in our owner’s manual. But what do the “warning lights” look like for men? What are the danger signs that our present pace may prematurely end our race?

Here’s a checklist arranged in categories. Whereas the physical category had the most ticks for me, for you it might be the emotional, mental, or another category. God has designed us all differently and knows which warning lights will best get our attention. But as some of us can’t (or won’t) see warning lights, even when all of them are flashing red and blue right in front of our eyes, why not ask your wife or a friend to go through these lights with you and give you a more objective outsider’s viewpoint? 

Physical Warning Lights

• You are suffering health issues one after another. Seventy-seven percent of Americans regularly experience physical symptoms caused by stress, including headaches, stomach cramps, achy joints, back pain, ulcers, breathlessness, bad skin, an irritable bowel, tremors, chest pains, or palpitations.¹
• You feel exhausted and lethargic all the time, lacking energy or stamina for sports or playing with your kids.
• You find it difficult to sleep, you wake up frequently, or you wake up early and can’t get back to sleep. Maybe you can identify with my friend Paul’s nightmare: “Then came the insomnia. Killer insomnia. Like all night. Then another night. I was panicking. What on earth was going on with me? I went to my doctor. He gave me some heavy-dose, prescription sleep aids. It worked like a peashooter on a tank.”
• You are following the example of a young entrepreneur who admitted to me, “I used my lack of sleep to justify sleeping in later, which only perpetuated that poor sleep cycle.”
• You are like one pastor who confessed to me that “my excessive sleeping was simply an escape.”
• You are putting on weight through lack of exercise or eating too much junk food, or you are drinking too much alcohol or coffee.

Mental Warning Lights

• Concentration is hard; distraction is easy.
• You think obsessively about certain difficulties in your life. Jim described it to me like this: “Even little things began to fall on me with great weight. I would try to put them out of my mind, but it was like my brain was stuck. The thoughts kept spinning over and over. Nothing new was added to the process, no new solutions, no new information. Just the same cycle.” Another man said it was like “trying to swat mental flies.”
• You forget things you used to remember easily: appointments, birthdays, anniversaries, phone numbers, names, deadlines, etc.
• You find your attention drawn to negative subjects, and you are developing a hypercritical and cynical spirit.
• Your brain feels fried.

Emotional Warning Lights

• You feel sad, maybe so sad that you have bouts of weeping or feel you are on the verge of tears.
• It’s been a long time since you had a good laugh or made someone laugh. Instead, there’s emotional numbness.
• You feel pessimistic and hopeless about your marriage, children, church, job, nation, etc.
• Worry stalks your waking hours and anxiety climbs into bed with you every night.
• As soon as you wake and think about the day ahead, your heart starts pounding and your stomach starts churning over the decisions you face and people’s expectations.
• You find it difficult to rejoice in others’ joy, often forcing yourself to fake it.
• At times, you feel so hopeless and worthless that you think it would be better if you were not here.

Relational Warning Lights

• Your marriage is not what it once was. You don’t delight in your wife as you once did.
• Your sex drive is erratic, as you often feel too tired to have anything but perfunctory, and mainly selfish, sex.
• You are irritable and snappy at your wife and children. They view you as angry, impatient, frustrated, and critical (ask them!).
• You spend limited time with your children, and any time you do spend is interrupted by smartphone use or poisoned by thinking about all the other things you could be doing. A Christian friend admitted that he once started sobbing uncontrollably: “My startled wife asked what was wrong. I was watching my father-in-law play with my children and said to her, ‘I wish I could enjoy them the way he does.’ My own children had become a source of irritation. I envied him. I couldn’t enjoy my own kids. I couldn’t enjoy anything.”
• You avoid social occasions, neglect important relationships, and withdraw from friendships, even with people you care deeply about.
• You frequently lose your temper and are in conflict with various people. One businessman told me that although he had rarely suffered through overwork, “as I have looked back over my life, the times that I have struggled with extended periods of depression have most often had in common that I was really struggling with a relationship. One time it was with my brother, twice it was a romantic relationship, twice it was struggles with my spouse.”

Vocational Warning Lights

• You work more than fifty hours per week, although not very efficiently, productively, or satisfyingly. As Greg McKeown puts it, “We have the unfulfilling experience of making a millimeter of progress in a million directions.”²
• Your work regularly spills over into evenings and weekends, or whatever days make up your “weekend.”
• You have little joy in your work, you dread it, and you are so miserable that you would consider doing anything else but your present job. “I was confused,” one pastor wrote to me, “and soon my confusion turned into bitterness toward God. ‘What do you want from me? I work all the time. I have no hobbies, no down time, no joy, no life.’ I began to hate the ministry.”
• You are falling behind, feel constantly overwhelmed, and have begun to cut corners, take shortcuts, and drop your standards.
• Procrastination and indecision dominate as you flit from one thing to another to another with little sense of accomplishment. When you do make decisions, they are often the wrong ones.
• Motivation and drive have been replaced with avoidance, passivity, and apathy as you drag yourself through the day.
• You find it difficult to say no and feel like every woodpecker’s favorite tree. One pastor admitted to me that he had reached the point where he hated being needed by so many people. He just wanted a regular job that he could leave behind after eight hours.
• You feel guilty or anxious when you are not working and regard yourself as lazy or weak for taking time off.

Moral Warning Lights

• You view risqué material on the Internet or have even “graduated” to using porn.
• You watch movies with language and images you’d never have tolerated in the past.
• Your expense account and tax return have some halftruths in them.
• You cultivate close relationships with women who are not your wife (or you think about it).
• You shade the truth in conversations, exaggerating or editing as appropriate.
• You medicate yourself (and your conscience) by overspending, overdrinking, or overeating.

Spiritual Warning Lights

• Your personal devotions have decreased in length and increased in distraction, with little time or ability for meditation and reflection.
• You check email and social media before you meet with God each day.
• You don’t have the same ongoing conversation with God that you used to have.
• You skip church.
• Listening to sermons sends you to sleep. One burnt-out businessman wrote to me, “One of the things that has been a great concern to me is the fact that I haven’t been ‘moved’ by a sermon in years in spite of listening to some great sermons.”
• You don’t enjoy fellowship with other Christians or serving God’s church.
• You believe all the truths of the Bible but you don’t believe them for yourself.

Pastoral Warning Lights

• You are bored with the small stuff of ministry, thinking yourself above ministering to the seniors, the sick, and the time-wasters.
• After church, you don’t hang around to fellowship with or minister to others.
• You are more taken up with the advancement of your own name than God’s.
• You find it difficult to confess sin and even to admit weakness to God and others you are accountable to.
• You draw only on past knowledge and experience rather than present. As Aaron Armstrong put it: “We can rely on the backlog of information in our heads from years of reading, and not notice that something’s wrong—that our metaphorical tanks are getting low— until we stop in the middle of traffic.”³
• You base your acceptance by God on your hard work, your success, or your faithfulness. This painful story is too many pastors’ experience: “When I felt like I was failing as a husband, father, pastor, Christian, even a human being, all I could do was work more, try harder. After all, there’s no time for lollygagging when there’s so much ground to regain. I made it impossible to rest. This made me a worse husband, father, pastor, Christian, and human being. That left me feeling more guilty.”

So What Now?

So you have your checklist and have analyzed it. It has a worrying number of ticks on problems that are sufficiently serious and that have been going on long enough for you to be concerned. What now?

First, you need to realize the danger you are in and the potential consequences if you don’t slow down. As one of the men I’ve counseled put it: “One of the most important lessons I have had to learn is that if I don’t slow down God will slow me down. And it’s usually much more painful when he does it!”

Second, be grateful that God has alerted you to your danger before it is too late. The good news is that there is a way back, a way to reset your life, get all of these dimensions back on track, and start enjoying a grace-paced life.

As you evaluate your own life, remember: God knows where you are. Although we don’t know where God is and we may not even know where we are, God knows our exact location, direction, and destination. Just like a child on a long car journey, we don’t need to know where we are as long as Dad knows.

God also knows what he’s doing. He’s not just proving us but improving us. With his hand on the thermostat and his eye on the timer, he knows exactly how hot the furnace needs to be and how long to leave us in it to make our gold purer and brighter.

God knows where we are and he knows what he’s doing! The end product is gold, especially the gold of a closer relationship with God and of greater usefulness to others. Hold on to these priceless answers as you look for warning signs in your life and seek wisdom from God.

Notes:
1. “Stress Statistics,” Statistic Brain website, October 19, 2015, http://www.statisticbrain.com/stress-statistics/.
2. Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (New York: The Crown Publishing Group, 2014), 7.
3. Aaron Armstrong, “I’ve been running on empty—and what I’m doing to change that,” Blogging Theologically, December 30, 2015, http://www.bloggingtheologically.com/2015/12/30/running-on-empty/.

Be sure to take a look at Crossway's burnout infographic for more statistics related to this important (yet neglected) issue.

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David Murray (DMin, Reformation International Theological Seminary) is professor of Old Testament and practical theology at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary and the pastor of Grand Rapids Free Reformed Church. He is also a counselor, a regular speaker at conferences, and the author of Reset: Living a Grace-Paced Life in a Burnout Culture.

It’s a Wonderful Time to Be Christian: Five Reasons for Optimism in America

[Previously published in Desiring God]

Garrett Kell, Pastor Del Ray Baptist
Alexandria Va

America is facing turbulent times. Political unrest is unceasing. The racial divide is deepening. Fear and frustration swirl frantically. 

This leads to only one logical conclusion: It’s a wonderful time to be a Christian.

Christians are uniquely equipped to thrive in tumultuous times, not because we are great, but because our God is. As we consider the darkness of our days, I’d like to share five reasons I think it is a wonderful time to be a Christian in America.

1. People are intrigued by real Christians.

Whether it be through media stories, political reports, or comedy sets, “evangelical Christians” are characterized as whiny, entitled children. We are perceived as bigoted hate-mongers looking down on others while blinded to our own shortcomings. We are seen as outdated, overrated, and irrelevant. 

Yet, when someone meets an actual Christian these days, they often are intrigued. 

Our convictions are peculiar, but the gentleness and respect with which we hold them is refreshing (1 Peter 3:15). We don’t demonize those we disagree with, but treat them with charity, as we want them to treat us (Matthew 7:12). We engage with humility because we know that we too are imperfect and need God to change us as well.

“The peace Jesus provides is strong enough to hold back the gates of hell, and weather the storm we face today.” 

Our community is also peculiar. When they observe the church, they find a people who are not naturally united. We come from different cultures, vote for different candidates, march for different causes, and often have little in common — except Jesus. When people spend time with us, they perceive a love marked by patience, charity, and heavenly-mindedness. 

Now, not everyone will like real Christians when they meet them. But God’s word promises that he will use our love to change people’s opinion of us and (more importantly) of our God:

Keep your conduct among [non-believers], so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation. (1 Peter 2:12)

If Christians will engage their neighbors with courageous, humble, honest, servant-hearted love, people will be pleasantly surprised. 

2. Christians have the answer for racial reconciliation.

The rock of racial unrest has been rolled over in our country. Out from the darkness have crawled sorrowful reminders that our progress is incomplete. The anger and apathy that swirls around our brokenness tempts many to despair. 

Yet Christians know Jesus provides a better way. On the one hand, we cannot simply say Jesus is enough and expect peace. The issues are far too complex and wounds too deep for a superficial balm. The hard work of praying, fasting, listening, learning, confessing, repenting, forgiving, and changing is required.   

White brothers and sisters ought to show love by learning about the deep roots of social, institutional, and communal injustices that affect many today. Read the Scriptures alongside historical books that recount the black experience in America. Talk about what you are reading with African-American friends and include other minority friends in the discussion. Don’t be defensive or quick to make excuses. Listen. Learn. Repent of sin that is exposed. Empathy is developed when education occurs in the context of relationships. 

Black brothers and sisters, I encourage you toward a resilient faith. Many of your forefathers endured oppression, were denied membership in white churches, and grew despite a lack of access to theological education. We need to see that resilience now. Systems of injustice will not be corrected overnight, which means that testing will continue. But as tests come, please ensure that your hearts are being purified and not petrified. White Christians are not your enemy. Jesus says they are family. The Lord calls us to “hope” all things, including the best in fellow believers, even when we hurt, confuse, or disappoint each other.

On the other hand, we must say Jesus is enough, for he himself is our peace.

[Jesus] is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility. (Ephesians 2:14)

We have already been reconciled in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:16–20). While laboring to apply this reconciliation takes hard work, we must remember that he has made us one — even if we don’t feel like it (Ephesians 4:1–3). The peace Jesus provides is strong enough to hold back the gates of hell and weather the storm we face today.

The world does not have an answer like Jesus. They have no power and no lasting solutions. But we have an opportunity to show them the unity that Jesus prayed for and purchased with his blood (John 17:20–21). 

At the cross alone, fear mongering, finger pointing, and apathetic indifference are put to death, and real reconciliation comes to life. 

3. God has brought unreached peoples to us.

For centuries, the American church has been praying, raising money, and sending workers to take the good news of Jesus to people who have not heard. This work is important and must continue, but we can’t overlook what God is doing in our own backyard.

God has brought unreached peoples to us. 

“What would happen if Christians opened their homes and their lives to the strangers who live next to them?” 

Though policies surrounding immigration are debated, the reality of immigration is not. Tens of millions of legal and illegal immigrants have settled in the United States. Many have fled war-torn countries and are seeking a fresh start. Many are seeking hope which cannot be found in Allah or any other supposed god.

Regardless of your political views, if you are a Christian, your theological convictions should spur you to action. What would happen if Christians opened their homes and their lives to the strangers who live next to them? Showing Christlike hospitality to Muslim neighbors is essential for them to understand the true message of Christianity. 

I do not say this lightly — we are positioned to fulfill the Great Commission. 

Dispersed peoples and advances in technology have opened unparalleled opportunities to advance the gospel. While we are able, we must steward this opportunity and make disciples among the nations, and by his grace, many are in our backyard. 

4. Persecution is purifying us.

Jesus promised that following him would be costly. He warned, “If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you” (John 15:20). Ostracism and affliction have marked the church since its beginnings. Yet, the United States has been largely spared this common experience of believers. 

Many minority groups have tragically endured oppression, but as a whole, the church in America has known freedom to worship Jesus. In fact, public worship has not only been allowable, but advantageous. Churchgoing opened doors for business, made one appear trustworthy, and was required for social acceptability.

But the tide is changing. And as it does, Christians are experiencing increasing pressure from the world to conform or be conformed. This pressure will expose some so-called “Christians” as imposters, but for true believers, it will produce maturity.

Pressure from the world pushes Christians deeper into Christ. As this happens, we will be pruned and purified. We are forced to search his word to explain our convictions (1 Peter 3:15). The importance of prayer becomes undeniable. Political power is exposed as a mirage. Sin’s offerings are less desirable. Our affections are reoriented toward heaven.

In his mercy, God uses persecution to purify our profession of faith to the point that we can honestly say, “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you” (Psalm 73:25). Persecution should never be sought, but when it comes, we can trust that God will use it for our good. 

5. We are closer to seeing Jesus than ever before.

The hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed. (Romans 13:11)

Every generation since Christ’s ascension has clung to this promise. As time has passed, it has only become truer. Whether Christ will return in our day is yet to be seen, but the horizon is brightening as the day is darkening. The believer sees this hope with unveiled eyes and senses the sweetness of approaching glory. 

Until now, many of us have gone days or weeks without even giving thought to the Lord’s return. Our love for the world has drowned out the need to hope in the world to come.

“Whether Christ will return in our day is yet to be seen, but the horizon is brightening as the day is darkening.” 

Yet, in God’s kindness, today is a new day. As we grow in our love for Christ, our hearts will be oriented toward heaven. We will find the chatter of the world emptier and the promises of heaven fuller. 

The Lord’s return cannot leave us unaffected. Let it move you to prayer for perseverance (Mark 14:38). May it press you to risk all to reach the unreached (Matthew 24:14). Ready yourself for your heavenly bridegroom, and let his coming keep you sober, knowing it could interrupt your next breath (Luke 12:40).

It is a wonderful time to be a Christian. God is working among all nations, including ours. Let us not despair or be deceived, but lift our eyes in hope to him who is coming soon. 

Garrett Kell (@pastorjgkell) is married to Carrie, and together they have five children. He serves as pastor of Del Ray Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia.