Rhythms of Life
Transcript
Good morning. Happy Father's Day. Good to see you all this morning. We are going to be beginning a series today called The Hammer in the Hammock. It's going to last six weeks where we're going to spend some time talking about work and rest, the rhythm of life that God's placed in the world. So there was an economist.
His name was John Maynard Keynes. In 1930, he had a quote where he said, Our grandchildren will only work about three hours a day and probably only by choice. So I wanted to ask, how is your three-hour workdays going, your voluntary three-hour workdays? Have they been nice? His prediction didn't quite come true, did it? What he was doing was he was seeing how life and work was being able to – we were able to get more done because of the increases in technology and machinery.
And so what he was saying was all that was going to do to life was we were going to be more productive in a shorter amount of time, and then we'd have more time for rest. But that is not what happened. We did become more productive in a shorter amount of time, but all it has done is increase the pace at which life moves. Being able to travel long distances faster just means that you have more to do more quickly, that being able to get projects done quicker means that we just have more to do, more production, more, more, more. And the pace of life has increased. And if we're honest, most of us are very, very busy.
That's kind of the American mantra is just that I'm busy. I have so much going on. For many of us, we have – technology has made it to where we can work anywhere. But what ends up happening is we end up working everywhere, that most of us have work in our pockets, that we use our phones, we're receiving phone calls, we're sending messages, we're getting emails that need to be answered within 24 hours, and it's better if you do it sooner. And that for many of us, work never stops, and our busyness never stops, and we're constantly going. And in America, we are busy.
Life feels too full. We are overstressed, overworked, overanxious. And the increasing – the rates of depression are consistently increasing. I read an article in the magazine called The Economist. It's stationed in London. It says that ever since a clock was first used to synchronize labor in the 18th century, time has been understood in relation to money.
Our hours are financially quantified. So what I'm saying was that prior to this, there was – time was understood as separate from finances. But you might think about a day's worth of labor. But for many of us, when we began working, we started thinking of hourly wages. And so it's all of life now feels monetized, that you worry about wasting time or spending time wisely or saving time, that we've kind of connected these ideas together, and so that our time and our money are tied together. And so what it says was is when economies grow and incomes rise, everyone's time becomes more valuable.
And the more valuable something becomes, the scarcer it seems. So it says the U.S. has grown in wealth. Everybody feels busier. They go on to talk specifically about America. Like I said, this was written in London. But they say American workers toil some of the longest hours in the industrial world.
Employers are not required to offer their employees proper holidays. That's just how they say vacation. But even when they do, their workers rarely use them all. The average employee takes only half of what is allotted, and 15% don't take any holiday at all. Nowhere is the value of work higher and the value of leisure lower. This is the country that invented takeaway coffee after all.
So what it's saying is that in the United States, we overvalue work. We undervalue leisure. And then it takes a shot. It says, you know, coffee used to be something you sat and enjoyed at a cafe. You had conversations. But that's not what we do.
We roll up to a drive-thru window. And we're like, please inject caffeine directly into my neck. I've got things to do. That in general, we are busy. We are moving at a fast pace. And we are exhausted.
It goes on to talk about women in the workforce. It says, So what it's saying is that as more women went into the workforce, they also began to fell a greater pressure to be better moms. And that as many moms, as they watched other women in the workforce, began to say, no, being a mom matters so immensely. And they began to up the ante on what it meant to be a mom. And so overall, this rise in the pressures of motherhood. This article went on to say that parents today are spending more time with their children than any other generation.
That they're spending more time specifically devoted to their children than previous generations in these countries. But they feel worse about it. Feel more like they are failing. That fathers and mothers are more at home doing work. And so it is Father's Day. I didn't want to say that that was one of the statistics was that fathers have begun to do more at home.
So good Job, y'all. But it did say that dads do more of the fun jobs, like they play with the children. Or they said they do more of the kind of task-oriented. This job gets finished. So like some fixing things around the house, some repairs, or some yard work.
But it said that moms tend to do the unending jobs. Feeding children, cooking for the family, cleaning, doing laundry. They have unending tasks that it never stops. I know for many of you that you come in here this morning and we're supposed to be here. We're supposed to be worshiping. We're supposed to be praying.
We're supposed to be studying the Word together. We're supposed to be taking a deep breath and kind of relaxing for just a moment. And you can't. As soon as you sit down, as soon as you get a pen, as soon as you get a paper, you start taking, when you're going to take notes, you start writing down a to-do list and grocery list. You thought, you thought I didn't know. The reason I know this, you just thought I thought you were paying attention.
But the reason I know this is I looked over before while I'm preaching and seen my wife and thought, man, this must be a good sermon. She's taking some diligent notes. And then I come down and she's like, hey, can we get this stuff at the grocery store later? But that's the way my wife is. When a pen touches a paper for her, she begins to write out lists because she feels like she lives in a world of unending things to do. Jeffrey Godby says, working mothers with young children.
He's a time-use expert at Penn State. That's helpful to know. Jeffrey Godby, a time-use expert at Penn State. It says that working mothers with young children are the most time-scarce segment of society. That for all of us, we are busy. Now, one of the ways we've reacted to this is we've just said, this is what life's like.
We've just kind of owned it. Some of you are like, yeah, I'm busy. Yeah, I'm exhausted. But this is just a season. This is just for now. For some reason, we all kind of think that future us is going to rest.
Like, I don't know about y'all, but future me gets to sleep in. Future me gets to take days off. Future me is well rested. He's not as irritable as present me. And for many of us, we're doing that. We're like, I'll get through this.
I just got to get through this. As soon as the holidays are over, as soon as this is over, as soon as this, you know, the summer's kind of busy. As soon as I can, then I'll be able to stop. But that's not how it works. Many of us are like, well, I'm in a season. It's like, well, it's a 12-year season for you, and you need to figure out a new pace of life.
And so what has been – what has happened as a kind of a response to this over-business in our culture is that we have begun to place a lot of pressure on the time off that we do have so that we anxiously approach it. We have a vacation planned later in the year, and that's going to be our big vacation. We're going to have all of our family memories, and everything's going to be special and magic, and we've got to get everything done in that one week, and we come back more exhausted than when we left. And then there's a whole other segment of our culture, of our society right now that's just kind of rejected this.
They're extending adolescence. They're trying to avoid this type of work, this type of – They feel like it imposes on their life to take on this weight, to take on this responsibility, is going to rob them of everything that is good. And so they spend their time – I mean, they're working really hard right now to find a part-time job that pays full-time pay so they can keep up with playing Frisbee golf. And for some of us in this room, you are busy, and you're the busy type of person who can't sit still. And for others of us, we're kind of pushing back on that and being like, really, if I could do nothing and survive, I would.
If I could do nothing and get away with it, I would. And so there's some of you that have full-time jobs, but when you go to work, you're not really trying to be productive. You're not really trying to pour into what you're doing. You're really just there to get a paycheck so that you can look forward to the time off that you do have. And we've begun to push back on this idea of being too busy and life moving too fast. Now, I know that for many of our older generations, they're going to look at the younger generations and say, you don't know how to work.
Look at how lazy they are. And there's some truth to that. There's some truth to some of these younger generations right now kind of pushing back on this. But I've seen documentaries on the 60s. I know that a whole generation of people just quit their jobs, moved away from their homes, went out into the woods and rolled around in the mud wearing nothing but a guitar. I don't think this is new to this generation.
I think there's a consistent inner turmoil when it comes to work and to rest, when it comes to laziness and busyness. And we've got to figure out a better pace of life. Many of us oscillate between the two. We're busy, busy, busy, and then we're just exhausted and we crash and we're lazy. And some of us just – you'll see somebody go, this is it. It's just too much, too much.
I can't be a part of a community group anymore. I can't be a part of this church anymore. I volunteer for too much. I got too much going on with the kids. We've just got to – I'm going to quit my job. We're just going to move to a new city.
And they almost just – they freak out and they need to just reset life. But the problem is we don't have a healthy pattern. So as soon as they move, as soon as they get another church, as soon as they do all of that, they just begin to rebuild the same problems they had before. And we've got to have a better way to work and to rest and a better rhythm for it. So grab your Bible and go to Exodus chapter 20.
Exodus chapter 20. This is where God gives the Israelites the Ten Commandments. And the Ten Commandments are the primary framework of the law given in the Old Testament. So what had happened was God had taken the Israelites. They had been his covenant people, and they had been enslaved in Egypt for 400 years. And so God shows up, and through Moses and through the plagues and through the parting of the Red Sea, he pulls the Israelites out.
And then on Mount Sinai, he gives them the Ten Commandments and says, This is how you will worship me. This is how you will know me. This is the beginnings of me showing you what I'm like. And so as we read the Ten Commandments, they're the framework, kind of the foundation of the law, that many of them say a major idea or concept, and then much of the law is then going to be explaining how to do that. So he's saying, have no other gods but me.
And then there's going to be whole sections of the law on how to worship. He'll say, do not commit murder. Do not commit adultery. But then there's whole sections on the law on how to relate to others and how to walk through life together. But in the Ten Commandments, we're going to pick up in verse 8.
We're going to read 8 through 11. And then we're going to spend some time talking through it. So God says, Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work. You or your son or your daughter, your male servant or your female servant or your livestock or the sojourner who is within your gates.
For in six days the Lord made the heaven and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. So this is in one of the Ten Commandments. And what we see is that God says, Remember the Sabbath. Remember means practice it. Hold it in front of you.
Keep it going. The word Sabbath just means rest. So he's saying remember the rest. Remember this. He says to keep it holy. Holy means to be set apart.
Many of you, maybe your mothers or grandmothers have china or they have like special Christmas dishes, and they're set apart. They're used for special occasions. You don't go to your grandma's house and get out her fine china or get out her Christmas dishes and just start eating your lucky charms in them. That's not acceptable. She'd look at you like bugs are crawling out of your ears. She might strike you.
I don't know what your grandmother's like. But you don't do that. It's set apart. It has a special purpose. And so that's what he's saying is that there is one day in your week. Your week will be six days long and all six of the other days will look very similar.
And then there's one day that's set apart. There's one day that's holy. It's different. Just a bit of history. The Israelites practiced this. They had the Sabbath, which was the seventh day in the week.
So that was Saturday. Later, as Jesus comes and Jesus goes to the cross and he dies and he rises from the grave on Sunday. It's the first day of the week. The Christians began to worship on Sunday. They called it the Lord's Day. We see that referenced in Acts and in the book of Revelation.
And then as the Emperor Constantine becomes a Christian later, I mean, there's some speculation over whether or not he's actually a Christian, but as the Roman Empire moved in that direction, he declares that Sunday will be a Sabbath. The Romans prior to this had not practiced the day of rest, but he declares that Sunday will be a Sabbath. And then push on down into the future. When the U.S. gets started, we had a kind of a debate over whether or not we would have Saturday as a Sabbath. We would do the Jewish one or we would do the Sunday one. So we just took both.
And that's why many of us have a five-day work week or five-day school work week, a two-day weekend. Now, with retail and service industries, a lot of us do work seven days a week, but this is where that began. So here's what it says. This is in the Ten Commandments. And so what we gotta understand is that as we approach the Ten Commandments, we hold these up as these are helpful, these are binding, these are the weight of these is still present. When the Bible says to not commit adultery, to not commit murder, but I want us to play a little game.
Which one of these is not like the others? So the Bible says in the Ten Commandments, it says you should not have any other gods but me. You should not create a graven image. You wanna have no other handmade idols. You will not commit adultery. You will not commit murder.
Hey, one day a week, take a day off. Rest. It just strikes us as different, but we wouldn't. So what we kind of treat this as, a lot of times, is nine commandments and one suggestion that we act as if, of course you can't murder, of course that's evil, of course that's heinous, and then someone's like, what about the Sabbath? And we're like, well, you know, I mean, not if you're busy or have something else to do. You see, when we come to the law, we have to understand how we as Christians ought to understand this, how we ought to approach it.
We believe that Jesus Christ fulfilled the law on our behalf, that the weight of the law, see, the law given in the Old Testament was designed to really do two things. It was designed to show us our inability to live to God's standards, our inability to live up to what we were meant to be. And secondly, it was to teach us, to train us what God was like. It was to prepare us, to build into us a pursuit of his holiness. And so Jesus comes and Jesus does not abolish the law. He does not throw this out.
He fulfills it. That Jesus Christ accomplishes the law on our behalf. What he does is he lives a perfect sinless life. He perfectly fulfills the law. The heart behind the law and the regulations are fulfilled in Christ and then Christ is cursed for us. That he takes the curse of the law on himself and he dies on a cross.
That's what Galatians tells us. That Jesus takes the curse for us so that we might have his, he takes our failing report card and gives us his perfect score. That he graduates and gives us his diploma. That he swaps places with us and takes our curse so that we might be free. And so that when we come to texts like this, the weight of the law does not bear down on us. This does not crush us.
It shows us our inability and it drives us towards Christ and we ought to take it as the good gift that it is. That it does help us that the Ten Commandments are life-giving because of Christ. And so as we read this, we should not easily set aside the Sabbath. So let's pick back up in verse eight and let's try to understand this a little better. I mean verse nine. So he says, six days you shall labor and do all your work.
Now this specific commandment is for training these Israelites who had been slaves to rest. They were slaves. Their value came from their productivity. That they were useful only in as far as they were producing. And when they ceased to produce, when they ceased to be healthy, when they ceased to be strong, when they ceased to be able to do work, they were useless. And so he takes these slaves and he says, that's not how your value works anymore.
One day I want you to rest. I want you to sit like I sat. See, God wove this pattern into the world that he created for six days. The Bible and the world began with God working. With him creating and cultivating. And so he creates, he cultivates, he works, and then it says that after six days he rested.
So that on the seventh day, God doesn't create anything. He doesn't make anything. He doesn't, he just rests. He enjoys his good work. And so what this says is, six days you shall labor and do all your work. Now many of us in this room lean towards busyness, but some of us lean towards laziness.
You've been waking up at the crack of noon. And you are too valuable to be lazy. Too valuable to throw off, to reject the weight of existence that God has given you. That God has poured intelligence and strength, ability into you. And that we were designed for good work. That we were meant to do what God did in creation, which was to work and to look at our work and see that it was good.
It's one of the things that Ecclesiastes says. It's one of the few joys given to us is that we would work and enjoy the work of our hands. It's Father's Day. I want to speak specifically to men for just a second. We are seeing right now in our culture a prolonged adolescence specifically for men. We're seeing men push responsibility further down, further back, further along the timeline.
They're living with their parents longer. They're pushing off getting married. They're using Tinder rather than truly trying to pursue somebody. They're pushing this all further down the line. And we even have kind of a consistent cultural push towards this idea that some forms of masculinity, traditional forms of masculinity, are simply evil. Now, not all forms of masculinity as we've been taught are biblical and beautiful, but there is a lot of weight and beauty given to masculinity and good godly masculinity is to be celebrated.
But there are currently some, it seems, that as if they would lay the idea of toxic masculinity directly on top of just any form of masculinity and they are anti the idea. And so what they have done is what you have done when you've removed the good weight placed on men for self-discipline and self-sacrifice, what you end up getting is only toxic masculinity because you have guys filled with testosterone and no real way to use it. So they end up depressed and angry and violent. Men, you were meant to carry weight. I see articles a lot that are saying, why aren't there any more female CEOs? Why aren't there more females this?
And honestly, I celebrate the idea of females doing things. God poured value and worth into you as well, but I'm not mad at male CEOs. Men are supposed to be carrying weight. even currently with watching kind of the movies that are out with my son, there's a lot of areas right now, women, where it feels like our society is just behind you just clapping, just celebrating what you're doing and we ought to. That's a good shift from some of the ways that things have been done in the past because God, ladies, has poured a lot of weight, poured a lot of his value, his energy, his design into you that you were made in the image of God.
But watching stuff with my son, every time I watch a movie with a leading lady, she's smart and capable and strong and every time there's one with a little boy in it, he's like awkward and confusing and weird. I have to work really hard to find movies that I can show him where it's like, yeah, be like that guy. Men, you were meant to carry weight, you were meant to work. Same for women. But it seems as if in our culture right now, there are many women who are flourishing and many men who are floundering and we were designed to be tethered, designed to have discipline, designed for sacrifice, designed for good labor.
You are too valuable. God has put too much into you for you to be lazy, to reject the good design God has. So six days you are to labor. forever. But then it continues, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it, you shall not do any work. On it, you shall not do any work.
You have six days to get all your work done and on the seventh day and on the seventh day, you're not to do any work. You see, you're too valuable to be lazy, but you are not indispensable. The world continues to run even when you are taking a day off. See, God looks at the Israelites and says, your value no longer comes from your work. You can sleep in. You can rest.
You can simply worship. You can sit and remember that you used to be slaves and know now that you are set free because there's going to be a day every week where every bit of productivity stops and you remember. You remember me and you remember what I've done. You see, it's a day of rest that we're meant to stop, slow down. So many of us don't know how to rest.
Our current kind of cultural cycle is that we wake up in the morning and we're tired so we grab a cup of coffee. Some of you are like, well, I don't drink coffee. Okay, Mountain Dew. Monster. We pour some caffeine into our face. Some of us go to a coffee shop and we're like, please, I'd like a cup with caffeine in it and then I'd like a smaller, more concentrated bit of caffeine poured down in that and I'd like some whipped cream and I'd like some chocolate.
I need some simple carbohydrates. Then we go to work. We get to work. We start to slow down at some point. Maybe we start just taking in simple carbohydrates. We start eating just some candy.
Maybe some of you have M&Ms on your desk. We begin to just kind of fuel ourselves with garbage and then we go to lunch. We eat. Come back from lunch. We get back to work. At some point, you start to slow down.
You begin to, three or four in the afternoon, your body's like, well, I'm done. You're like, oh, no, you're not. If you're like me, you drink more coffee. Some of you, it's another Mountain Dew. Some of you all go get a Diet Coke from a gas station that's the size of my newborn infant. We go home.
We're wired. We're kind of exhausted from the day, but we can't calm down. We can't slow our minds. We can't stop thinking about things. Our phone's still going off. Work's still hanging over our heads.
We've got all these issues that are going in our minds, and so the best thing we can come up with is we'll turn the TV up loud enough to drown out the noise. We think maybe watching TV will calm us down, but it doesn't because it's just a bunch of stressful stuff shining in our face, so then maybe we decide we're going to lay in bed. We'll go to sleep, but some of us can't sleep, so we're using our phone to flip through Twitter or Facebook, and have you ever noticed if you do this long enough, you don't even read. You just start kind of looking at the pictures, and your brain, you start going faster and faster, and you're only reading half of a sentence, and then you're just moving on, and we wonder why we all have ADHD, and we're twitchy.
We're sticking iPads in the hands of two-year-olds and being like, here, pay attention to this, and every single one of us is losing our minds, so you've been laying in bed with a phone in your hand, which is the equivalent of shining a flashlight in your eyes. Like, that's going to help you sleep, and then eventually we take an Ambien, drink some Zequil, fall asleep, so we can get up and start again. We are over-busy, over-anxious. We don't know how to rest. I talk with a lot of pastors, and I know that even for really committed Christians, many of them, not all of them, but many of them, only gathering at the church one to two times a month, even though they would say they're devout, they love Jesus, and some of that has to do with the fact that we've lost the Sabbath.
We've lost this day of rest, and it's not just a day of rest, but he says that this is a, the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God, that it's a rest towards God. That we're supposed to stop and aim ourselves towards God. You see, without work, you'll only be able to achieve unfulfilling frivolity, unfulfilling fun, unfulfilling leisure. It'll be like eating a bag of potato chips for dinner. It's salty, it's sweet, but then it doesn't feel right. It's not weighty enough.
And so that for those of us who have rejected the idea of work, existence is too light, and it's unfulfilling. But without rest, all you'll have is unending toil. Joy and color will drain from life. You see, we were designed for life-giving labor and soul-satisfying rest. Both a rejection of work into laziness and slothfulness, which we'll talk about next week, or a rejection of rest is a form of self-sufficiency and self-glorification. We are, in our pattern of work and rest, sinning and in need of repentance.
And some of us have so self-glorified and so grown into self-sufficiency that we claim to be Christians, but we practice as if we are not because we are unable to rest in the finished work of Christ and in the fact that He rules sovereignly over the universe so that you can go lay down, you can take a nap, you can put your feet up, you can close your computer, and the world will continue to move. And some of us have begun to live as if the whole point of existence is our own comfort, our own enjoyment, that everything is meant to terminate on us, that our satisfaction, our fun, is the point of everything so that we have rejected the weight that God has placed on us to serve those around us and help keep the world moving and to reign and have dominion over the world as He taught us in Genesis so that we've rejected this idea and we have glorified ourselves well beyond our position. And when it comes to our approach to work and to rest, we're sinners who need to repent. But we need to repent and enjoy Christ.
You see, this is a Sabbath. It's a rest to the Lord. We have labor unto the Lord and we have rest unto the Lord. You see, Jesus used to get into it with the Pharisees all the time. They would argue with Him all the time. If you read the New Testament, you'll see a lot of places where it goes on a Sabbath day and it tells a story and then it says on another Sabbath and it tells a story and it says on another Sabbath.
And the reason it jumps from Sabbath to Sabbath to Sabbath is that these were some of the times that Jesus was butting heads with the Pharisees. The Pharisees were a strict sect of those who practiced Judaism and they were very strict when it came to Sabbath regulations. They were very strict as to what it meant to practice the Sabbath. What was work? What wasn't work? How far could you walk?
How much could you do? And Jesus is constantly getting into it with them because they're trying to over practice the legality of the law and they're missing the point of it. So in this conversation with them, and this will be up on the screen, it's found in Mark 2, verse 27 and 28. Jesus says this. He's in an argument with them over the Sabbath and he said to them, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath. This idea of a weekly rest, this idea of you taking time to stop is a gift. It does not rule over you to hem you in, to cause you harm. It is a gift. It was made for you. We were not designed to be able to move at the pace we're moving.
If we were to right now, if everybody just had to stand up and we all just had to run, just run as far as you can go. I know some of us, we'd make it to the parking lot and you'd be like, okay, I'm done. You might light up a cigarette and just have a seat. Other of us would go a little bit further. Some of you that are like, oh, I think right now I could probably run a marathon. We're so proud of you.
We saw your sticker. But all of us eventually would shut down. Our bodies would force us to stop. And for many of us, we are higher capacity. You feel like you can handle the weight of this. You feel like you can go without rest and you feel like you can just muscle through.
And the truth is, at some point, your body will shut you down. And the Sabbath was made for you. And the Sabbath was made for me. That it's a gift from God to us that we might rest because he is good and he is sovereign. He has set the slaves free. Jesus doesn't just say the Sabbath was made for man.
He says, I am the Lord of the Sabbath. He calls himself the Son of Man. He says, the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath. So what it means is that as we find the Sabbath, we find the Lord of the Sabbath, Christ. That in the Sabbath, we not only receive this good gift, but we received Christ. That we run to Jesus.
That we get more of Jesus in resting because he's the Lord of it. He doesn't say he's gotten rid of it. He says he's all about it. He's the king over it. You see, we believe that Jesus Christ came and that he did the work. That we are saved by good works, but it's Christ's works, not ours.
That when he was on the cross and he said, it is finished, that meant that forever the slaves have been set free and that we can rest. That we've been set free from our eternal slavery to our sin and our guilt and the weight of the law that bears down on us. So that in Christ, we can be free. That's why he says, all you who are weary and heavy laden, come to me and I will give you rest. You see, Jesus is the Lord of rest and our hope is that in this series, as we begin to learn about work, we learn how to work unto him that we might enjoy him, but then we begin to have a good balance of work followed by healthy rest that we would work hard and rest well, that we would have life-giving work and soul-satisfying rest.
You see, many of us have downtime, but it's not rest. The best we muster is laziness, distraction, escape, when we lost the ability to rest in the Lord and unto the Lord that we might be soul-satisfied. That we might be filled back up. So our hope in this series is that we would learn how to work and we would learn how to rest and that we would all have a healthy pattern of joy-filled life in Christ. We believe that Christians ought to be some of the hardest working and some of the best resting. That we ought to know more than anybody how to rest, how to enjoy life, and that we might get a lot of life and joy out of our work knowing that all of our labor is to the Lord.
As for today, the question is, where do I need to work then? Have I rejected God's good design for me that I might labor, that I might work, that I might be productive? Have I thrown that off? Have I glorified myself in my comfort that you might run to Christ asking for forgiveness and asking for His help? Have you so over-elevated your self-sufficiency so as to lose Christ? So overvalued your productivity, your work, so as to push Him away, so as to reject God that you've lost the ability to rest?
We ask that you would repent. I run to Jesus, the Lord of rest, that He might give you rest in the gospel.