Rest is NOT a reward: Overcoming Christian Leadership Burnout and Reclaiming Sabbath Rest

I want to start today's podcast with a confession. And it's because I think that a lot of you are going to recognize yourself in it. So for years, I treated rest like a paycheck, like it was something I had to earn, something I got to collect only after I had done enough, produced enough, served enough, proven enough. Rest was the reward at the bottom of the to do list. And here's the problem with all of that. The list never ended, so the reward never came. I would literally tell myself, once this launch is over, I will rest once this quarter closes, I will rest once the kids are older, once the season slows down, once I get ahead. And every single time I got to the finish line, somebody had moved it. And that somebody was me. So today I want to say something to you that took me an embarrassingly long time to learn. Rest is not a reward. Rest is not the prize you collect for being productive. Rest is a command. It is built into how God made you. And the most faithful, the most strategic, the most spiritually grounded thing some of you can do this week is to stop. Stay with me. This one's gonna step on some toes, including mine. Foreign. Welcome back to Leadership clearly, the podcast for Christian leaders who want to lead with clarity, communicate with confidence, and build something that actually lasts. I'm your host, Julie Wagner, executive leadership coach, and I'm so glad you're here with me today. If we're meeting for the first time, here's what I need you to know. This is a space where faith and leadership are not two separate conversations. They are the same conversation. We talk about communication, character, and conviction, and we do it all with the Bible open and the calendar honest and up front. And as always, before we get going, let me tell you what is in my cup today. Tonight, I've got me some pink slush. Alani New and because we're talking about rest, and I am fully aware of the irony of holding an energy drink while I do it, this should be a fun one. All right, so go grab your journal, grab your note taking device, grab a pen, get comfortable, and let's go ahead and get into it today. Quick thing before we dive in, if today's podcast stirs something in you, if you finish this episode and think, okay, I actually need to do something about this, I have built something just for you. Now, previously, this was called the Clarity Code Bootcamp, and I want to let you in on a little insight as to why we've had this change. First of all, after filming everything and really sitting down and putting my heart and soul into this program, basically, for the last eight months. This is way more than a boot camp. This is a foundations course. And what this is, is this is that first step into the method that I teach. And so I sat down with my lawyer and my business advisor and my coach, and we talked about it, right? I talked about it with my CEO, who is God, by the way. And if you have not heard me talk about having a business conversation with God, we will definitely have to link those podcasts into this episode. But to get back to it, I want to let you know. So it's no longer called the Clarity Co Boot Camp. It's totally, totally revamped. It's totally better. It's still five days. It's drip content, so it comes out once every day, same time. You get to log into your portal and then you get a video. And you're going to also get a workbook. It's very. It dives in deep. Okay, so we're going to now call it the Leadership Clearly Foundations course. And this, again, like I've said before, it's my flagship course course. This will walk you step by step through the same framework that I coach my private clients through. But this is the base. Like, this is just really where you want to start it. So what I do call my my framework is called the Leadership Clearly Method. And this is so you can lead from a place of clarity instead of running on fumes. Right? And it's also so you can learn how to understand the people that you're working with, but also understand how you communicate. So it officially launches on July 1st. We actually have a date. I've sent all my videos off to my producer and he is working on those. And this is weird. It feels just very weird. But I am so excited to launch it. You can find more details at Julie Wagner Co or LeadershipClearly.com I will tell you a little bit more at the end, but I wanted to let you know it's there before we even start. So thank you for listening to me ramble. And let's go ahead and dive right into this podcast. Okay, let's talk about how we got here. I'm going to name the lie out loud, because naming things out loud is half the work of leading. Clearly, the lie is this. Rest is what happens after the work is done. I mean, it sounds reasonable, right? It sounds responsible and it even sounds godly, because we've wrapped it into this idea that hard work is holy and rest is what lazy people do. But I want you to notice something. That belief is not actually from scripture. We absorbed it from a culture that measures your worth by your output. We baptized hustle and we called it faithfulness. And here's who gets hit the hardest by this high capacity women. The ones who carry a lot, the ones who people lean on. If you are the person at work, at church, or at home, who everyone counts on, you have probably been rewarded your entire life for not resting. You got the promotion because you answered the email at 11:00 clock at night. You got the reputation because you never dropped the ball. You became the strong one. And the strong ones do not get to be tired. So you kept going. And somewhere along the way, rest stopped feeling like a gift and started feeling like a risk. Like if you stopped, you would find out that you were only ever as valuable as the last thing you produced. I want to gently call that what it is. That is not strength, my friends. That is fear. Wearing strength is a costume, and we're going to deal with it tonight. I told you this was going to be uncomfortable. I'm already uncomfortable talking about it. So let's go straight to the source because I do not want to give you my opinion on rest. I want to show you the design. Rest is not a New Testament suggestion. It's woven into the very first week of creation. God made everything. And then on the seventh day, he rested. Not because he was tired. God doesn't get tired, okay? He rested to establish a rhythm and to model it for us. Rest was built into the architecture of the world before sin ever even entered the picture. Before there was a single thing wrong, there was already rest. And then it shows up again in the Ten Commandments. Not as a tip, as a command sitting right there next to do not murder and do not steal. Honor the Sabbath, keep it holy. God took rest so seriously that he legislated it. For a people who had just come out of slavery, out of a system that defined them entirely by their labor, the first thing he did with their freedom was to teach them to stop. I want you to sit with that for a moment. The opposite of slavery in God's economy is not more productivity. It's rest. So when you cannot stop, when you physically cannot make yourself put it down, I want you to ask a hard question. Who am I actually serving right now? And then there's Jesus. Here's the verse I want you to write down tonight. So grab your note taking device or your journal and a pen and write this down. This is Matthew 11, 28:30. This is NLT version then Jesus said, come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear and the burden I give you is light. I want you to catch something in the way that Jesus says this, okay? He does not say, come to me once you have it all together. He says, come to me when you're weary. Come to me carrying the heavy thing. The invitation is not for the rested. The invitation is for the exhausted. Your tiredness is not a disqualifier, my friend. It is the exact condition that Jesus is speaking to now. The message version of the Bible paraphrases that passage into an invitation to learn from the unforced rhythm of grace. I loved that phrase, unforced rhythms when I was reading it because I like to compare and contrast. Right? I think comparing and contrasting the Bible versions is really good because most of us are living in forced rhythms. We're grinding gears that God never designed us to grind. And. And Jesus is standing there saying, there is an easier yoke, not no yoke. He doesn't promise you a life with no weight. He promises you a weight that fits. Now let's talk about why you're not resting. So if rest is commanded, if it's built in, if Jesus himself is handing it to us on a big silver platter, why are we so bad at it? I'm going to give you three reasons why I believe, and I want you to be honest with yourself about which one is yours. Maybe it's all three. Because let me tell you, all three is me. I'm all three of them. So the first reason you've made yourself the load bearing wall, you believe somewhere deep down that if you stop, it's going to collapse. The team, the family, the ministry, the business, you are the wall holding the roof up. And the load bearing wall cannot rest because resting means the entire structure comes down. Here's the clarity I want to give you. If your entire operation cannot survive you taking a Sabbath, you don't have a rest problem. You have a leadership problem. You've built something that depends on your exhaustion. And that is not a monument to your dedication, it's a liability. Part of leading clearly is, is building something that can breathe without you for a day or two. If you're an architect or if you are a foundation in the leadership clearly method, which, by the way, you can go take the online free quiz on my website and find out which one you are. This one might hit you a little hard because you're wired to hold structure and stability. For everyone else, the strength is real, but so is the trap. Reason number are afraid of what you'll hear in the quiet. For some of you, the busyness is not only about the work. The busyness is the anesthesia. As long as you're moving, you don't have to feel the thing. You don't have to sit with the grief. You don't have to sit with the disappointment. The question you've been maybe avoiding. Maybe it's that conversation with God that you're not sure you want to have. Rest gets quiet. And the quiet is where the truth catches up with you. So you stay loud. You stay full. You keep the calendar packed because an empty hour feels dangerous. I'm not going to push too hard here because I know that this one is tender. But I will say this. The thing you're avoiding in the quiet is not going to get smaller because you outran it. It's going to get smaller when you bring it to the one who is gentle and humble at heart. Now here is reason number three. You have tied your worth to your output. I truly believe that this is the deepest one and it's the one that's underneath the other two, right? So if you're looking at a stacking order, this is that bottom one. This is that essentially foundational one. If you believe functionally in how you actually live and not just what you would say out loud, that you are worth what you produce, then rest will always feel like losing value. Stopping will feel like shrinking. Every hour you are not producing will feel like an hour you are worth less. And my friend, that is a gospel issue. Because the gospel says you were loved before you ever produced a single thing. Your worth was settled at the cross, not on a performance review. You do not rest to earn anything. You rest because you have nothing left to earn. It's finished. That is the whole point. So now let's talk about what rest actually looks like. So for those of you who did not know, I am a clarity kind of gal. I love clear communication. So I'm not going to leave you with some beautiful idea and no plan. Okay? Let me get practical because rest is not just sleeping more. Although your girl here do, I do love to sleep. If I get a good like seven or eight hours, I'm good to go. But if I only get like six hours, you can bet your bottom dollar that I'm taking a 20 minute nap somewhere in this house at some point during the day, probably around lunchtime anyways. There are a few different kinds of rest and you're probably starved for a different one than you think you were actually wanting and needing. So of course we've got physical rest, which is the obvious one, sleep slowing your body down. If you're running on five hours of sleep and an energy drink, start here. And yes, I. I'm looking at the can that is sitting on my desk in front of me. We've already covered this. Then there's mental rest, which is permission to stop solving, to put the problem down and not pick it back up at 10pm at night or even 2 in the morning. For a lot of leaders, the body is still, but the mind never clocks out. That is not rest, that's just sitting while you work. Then we've got emotional rest, which is having even just one space where you don't have to perform, where you can be the one who is tired instead of the one who's always having to be strong. And then there is spiritual rest, which is the deepest kind of Jesus offering rest you can find. It's the settledness that comes from knowing you're held, that the outcome is not actually on your shoulders. And yes, you can actually release the grip. So here is your homework. And I, I mean this, right? Do your homework, my friends. I want you to actually do this. 1. Pick a window this week, not someday, this week. You got Monday through Sunday, baby, a real block of time, even if it's just for a few hours. And you protect it like you would protect a meeting with your most important client. Block it out in your calendar because this is a meeting with your maker to two, Decide before you get there what you are not going to do in that window. Name it. Maybe no emails, no problem solving, no scrolling, because scrolling is not rest. It's just a different kind of consuming. Okay. Three, Ask yourself which kind of rest are you most starved for? And aim. And aim the window at that one. And then here's the hard part. When the guilt shows up, and it will show up, I want you to talk back to it. You are going to feel like you should be doing something. That feeling is not your conscious, that is the old lie trying to clock back in. You answer it with this. Rest is not what I do after the work. Rest is part of the work of being a person God made on purpose. Now let me tie this all back into leadership, because this is the leadership clearly podcast and this matters for the people you lead. Here's what almost nobody tells you. Your relationship with rest is contagious. Your team is watching how you treat your own limits, and they're learning what is allowed and what's not. If you answer emails at midnight, you have just told your team that midnight is fair game. If you never take a day off of work and use that pto, you have built a culture where nobody else can either, no matter what your handbook says. Okay? You do not lead with your policies. You lead with your patterns. So when you rest, you're not being selfish, you're giving permission. You're modeling sustainability. You are showing the women and the men that you lead coming up behind you that you can lead at a high level and still be a whole human who sleeps and worships and takes a Sabbath. That is a gift to everyone downstream of you. And on the personal side, just hear me out on this one. You are not a machine that exists to produce. You are a daughter or a son. If you're listening to this, and you're a guy, hey, you're welcome here, too. You are a child of God who gets to work from a place of rest instead of working in a desperate attempt to earn it. And those two, those are two completely different ways to live. One of them will burn you to the ground. The other one will sustain you for the long haul, which is honestly the only kind of leadership that actually lasts. So this week, I'm going to challenge you to do the most countercultural, most faithful, most clarifying thing you can do. Stop on purpose before you have earned it, because you never will and you were never supposed to have to. Now, before I let you go, I told you at the beginning of this episode that I would come back to you. This. Remember what I said early on? That some of the deepest exhaustion does not come from the workload. It comes from leading in a voice that's not yours. Now, if that landed with you, if a part of you recognized that, you know, maybe you've been depleted in a way that rest alone has not fixed. That is the thread I want to invite you to pull right now. The Leadership Clearly Foundations course was built exactly for that. It's my flagship five day course and it walks you through the full leadership clearly method. Day one clears the noise. Then you get to find out how you're actually wired to lead. You learn to honor the people you lead and you build a way of communicating. You can sustain. Not white no knuckle in it, but sustain because leading from your real voice is not just clearer, it's also less tiring. That is the connection, the clarity and the rest, they are the same work. But if you're ready, you can go check it out at juliawagner co or leadershipclearly.com and go to where it says the course and that will give you all of the the information that you need. Signups open on July 1st now all right, friend, here is my prayer for you this week. I pray that you would have the courage to stop before you are forced to. I pray that you would feel, that you would really feel that you are loved completely apart from any thing you produce. And I pray that you would find that easy yoke, that light burden, those unforced rhythms of grace that Jesus is holding out to you right now. You do not have to earn your rest. It was given. So go take it. Well, thank you for joining me on the podcast today. I'm so honored and thankful that you're here. If this episode really tugged at anything with you, if you felt that tug, if you felt that urge, if you got emotional like I did, and I probably had to stop like three times because I was starting to tear up and get choked up, if you felt like that in any point in this podcast, I would be so honored if you shared it with someone else who might also need that heart tub. Plus, if you just love listening to Leadership clearly, please go and subscribe. Give us a great review on wherever you listen to your podcasts, no matter what. I am just so honored that you're here and you're listening and hanging out with me. So until then, I will see you next week and leave clearly.