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You’re tired.
Not just physically; though yeah, that too.
You’re tired in your bones. In your soul.
Trying to be a steady husband, an intentional dad, a man of God… but deep down, you feel like you’re falling short. Like you’re carrying more than you know how to hold.
Dad Tired is a podcast for men who are ready to stop pretending and start healing.
Not with self-help tips or religious platitudes, but by anchoring their lives in something (and Someone) stronger.
Hosted by Jerrad Lopes, a husband, dad of four, and fellow struggler, this show is a weekly invitation to find rest for your soul, clarity for your calling, and the courage to lead your family well.
Through honest stories, biblical truth, and deep conversations you’ll be reminded:
You’re not alone. You’re not too far gone. And the man you want to be is only found in Jesus.
This isn’t about trying harder.
It’s about coming home.
I am kind of coming out of this season where. For three or four months or so, I was really struggling with fatigue, just physically kind of feeling exhausted and you know, the kind of emotional swings that come with that. I really felt like for several months that I had enough energy to get to work, do my work, but when I got done with the day, that was just it.
And I. So I go see my doctor and do all the blood work, right? Like get all the panels and they put me on vitamins, other things, you know, anywhere there's an issue they try to resolve. And it took a couple weeks, three or four weeks, but all of a sudden my energy returned and felt like I had some vitality and life.
And what I found really quickly was all of a sudden I had motivation again. And motivation to to get up. Motivation to work, motivation to accomplish task. And this has happened several times in my adult life where I've swung from this place of fatigue to this place of hyper motivation. And what happens is for me is predict productivity becomes really addictive.
And so. Do you know the feeling of when you, you have a list of things to do, and when you get the list done, all of a sudden you, you have this rush of like, kind of adrenaline of feeling accomplished, feeling like you're worth something, like you added some kind of value to the world. And so I'm living in this place to be honest, where I'm, I'm really wrestling with.
The, like addiction or productivity. Like I'm, I'm really enjoying getting things done and I'm running and I'm running hard and fast and, and that's all really good in balance. But the problem with, for me, when I swing to this place of being super productive all the time is that I lose my, um, my devotion.
I lose my. Ability to sit still and to sit before God and to ponder. I, I think the strength of any Bible teaching is the ability to really meditate upon the word of God, to sit before it and ask questions like, what is the spirit saying? And I. What is the historical context here, and is there anything in the linguistics that changes the way that I interpret this text?
And that takes time and diligence and kind of a careful posture, but when I'm in hyper predict productivity mode, I'm just running and buzzing. Um, and so I. Whenever I get to this place, I really have to focus on devotion, the focus on my devotional times being blocked off, and I have to remind myself that I'm living for the sole purpose of knowing God and serving God, and worshiping and adoring God.
And the purpose of my life is not to check as many boxes I can check. Obviously productivity is really good. Work ethic is really good, but it has to be held within the confines of, of my devotion of what I'm living for. And so I'm thinking about devotion again. And so for the next several weeks, I wanna talk to you about some of the themes that I'm really wrestling through.
So I'm reading and thinking about Soren ki Guard, who's a Danish philosopher. He wrote a book called The Purity of Heart is To Will One thing, purity of heart is to will one thing. And he's really wrestling with the idea of double mindedness. And so if you take the example I just gave you, when I start to live in this place where I'm addicted to productivity, on one hand my mind is set to serve God.
But on the other hand, my mind is set to see how much I can get done today. So my focus is actually shattered and. When I live this way for long enough, productivity can become an idol, and I know it's an idol when I go from spending, um, a good amount of time in prayer to spending little time in prayer because I need to get to the next thing.
I know it's an idol when my Bible reading is really quick and I'm not reading slow enough to really, um, savor what I'm studying. And so that would be an instance of having split motives or a split heart, a divided mind. And so when he talks about being, having purity of heart is to will, one thing, ki guard is encouraging the reader to get back to this place where they have one single focus, one single desire, one single motivation.
And that one thing is to love God, to serve God, to obey. God. And again, he's pointing to James' idea of being double-minded, that when we're double-minded, we're tossed to and fro. Now, so I wanna help you think through some of these thoughts. Um, surrounding devotion. It's really kind of elementary. Like we, we understand these things, but it's rare that we stop to process them.
And so I wanna process them a little bit with you and hopefully help you reestablish in your heart what is the one thing that I'm living for, and am I really sure that I don't have a split heart? That I don't have an idol in my life that's stealing my attention from serving God. Okay. When I think about devotion and the way the New Testament uses the word or communicates the idea, oftentimes I think about Acts two.
Uh, it's a really common verse we kind of quote to each other. This is after the outpouring of the Spirit, acts two, verse 42. They devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and the fellowship into the breaking of bread and the prayers. So the church, after the outpouring of the spirit and the establishment of this new community, this new Ecclesia.
They devote themselves to the apostles teaching and to prayer and to fellowship, and to serving one another. They devote themselves. I. That Greek there is pro, um, prosero, which means to attend to constantly or give your attention to it means to continue steadfastly and or to be earnest towards something.
And so when we think about devotion, it usually has this religious context because we mean to give yourself to something and then to. Give yourself to it again and to attend all your attention to it, to to keep coming, to keep pouring yourself out towards this one goal. And so the early church, they kept attending to the apostles teaching, meaning week after week, day after day, they came to hear what the apostles had to say.
And to put their mind and focus on understanding it. And then they attended to prayer and they attended to fellowship. They, they gave themself with an earnest effort towards these things. That's what it means to be devoted. It really has a lot to do with your attention. It's actually interesting, that word again, a pros, presca.
It's, it's given one time in Mark chapter three when Jesus tells the disciples to make sure they have a boat ready for him because the crowds were pressing in and they might crush him. So Jesus says to the disciples, get a boat, make sure it's ready. And that word comes through 'cause he's saying essentially.
Pay attention disciples 'cause the crowds are crushing and we need to be prepared and ready to shift into a boat off the shore so that we're not crushed by the crowds. Be attentive is, it's a really literal way. The word's being translated here. Be attentive. And so the idea, again, of devotion or of willing, one thing is that my attention is set fully on what I'm really.
In the place of my will, which is, uh, kind of the, the, the freedom that I have, the, the will is the, the desire. It's the decisions I make. It's my place where I'm responsible for things. And so ki guard's saying is that will, that soul place where you decide what you're going to live for, you need to be intentional with it and attentive to it.
Two things, intentional with it. It and attentive to it. So Kiir guard starts to work through all these ways that we can have a fractured will or a fractured, um, place where we're a fractured devotion, a place we're living from. And so Kiir guard is arguing that the enemy and the world, thus everything it can to split or to fracture our desires.
And so as a believer, you're called to one desire. To know Jesus. To serve Jesus and to proclaim Jesus that he would be my one thing. He would be my my yes, my yes to Jesus. It supersedes my yes to anything else. It drives all of my living. Ki Guard is saying that worldly desires, when a person becomes obsessed with wealth, their their, their devotion can become fractured because no longer are you making decisions based on.
What would please Jesus, but you start to make decisions based upon what would please Jesus or what would bring me the most gain. And when those two things come into conflict, like the command from scripture to give to the poor, I. Or to be generous fiscally, all of a sudden you have a conflict of devotion.
Are you devoted to your financial, uh, gain? Are you devoted to your financial future or are you devoted to Jesus? Sometimes those things are perfectly compatible, right? Like you can save for retirement. You can do, Dave Ramsey, do all this stuff, all that's totally good. But if you save for retirement and, and never give to the church or give to missions or give to the poor that I would say that you don't have a solidified desire to just love and serve Jesus.
You actually have a fractured will. You love Jesus and you love your money. You have an, you have an idol. We can do that with status, we can do that with pleasure. We can do that with the fear of man, right? Like you really want people to approve of you, but there are these moments where serving Jesus is not always the most popular, and so you're forced to decide, am I really living for Christ and that Christ be known, or am I living for the praise and applause of man?
And for me right now, the place, just in full transparency where my heart is, I'm starting to feel like I have some motivation. I'm starting to get work done. I'm able to give more attention to the church, to the things that I'm trying to build, and I have to challenge myself regularly to make sure that my, I.
Heart is not after numeric growth or prosperity, or the church being healthy from a purely natural perspective to make sure that my heart is actually devoted to Jesus, fully devoted to Jesus, solely devoted to Jesus. And that my work ethic and my motivation, it derives from my desire to be loyal and.
Faithful to Jesus, not from my desire to be as product, uh, productive as I possibly can, and to be seen as someone who gets a lot of things done. And so Ki Guard makes a couple observations that are kind of interesting, and I know this is a bit heady, but, but I think it will help you. Um, one of the observations he makes is that.
Believers can come to God for reasons other than to know and to love and serve Jesus. And sometimes those reasons are like the benefits of the Christian life. And so when you live the Christian life long enough and you honor your wife and you communicate well, and you don't look at pornography. You steward your money?
Well, there are benefits. There's fruit of righteousness that comes to the believer, and so sometimes people will come to the church and come to Christianity, not because they've fallen in love with Jesus and seen the beauty of his sacrifice, but because they're motivated. By the benefits that they could gain if they practiced a life of righteousness.
And so in other words, kinda the concepts of sowing, reaping. If I sow a life of faithfulness, then I should reap, generically speaking, reap a life of blessing. And generically speaking, that's true, but it's not a formula. And so some of. The believers who serve the Lord so faithfully throughout their lives, they, they lived lives of faithfulness and reaped persecution, or they lived the lives of faithfulness and, and reaped suffering.
So suffering and persecution are often yoked to the Christian life and their means by which God uses to sanctify us. But if you think you came to faith to kind of love Jesus, but to also have a good life. And all of a sudden life's not good anymore, but life's hard and challenging. Maybe you lose a job or you lose friends, or you lose, lose family, then you're, you're, you can turn and look at Christ and say, ah, you didn't actually give me all the things I wanted to get out of you, and so I'm done.
I. And what that shows is that you never actually had a single devotion, a single mind to love and serve Christ. You always were fractured in your motivations. Does that make sense? I know that's kind of a challenging thought. You were fractured in the reasons that you came. So people do the same thing with hell, especially I live in the South, I've lived my whole life in the Bible belt.
Um, the classic Southern Christianity is that you come to Christ to avoid the fires of hell. And Ki Guard says what that does is it produces a. A lowest common denominator kind of Christianity, how much do I have to do to not go to hell? And your entire motivation is, um, I wanna do as little as possible to not experience the pain of hell.
And it's never, I wanna do as much as I can to love and serve and know Christ. It's the motivation is fractured. It's not love Jesus. It's. Escape hell and kind of adore Jesus, or it's fractured this way. It's love the benefits of Christianity and kind of adore Jesus. But what we are after is a kind of single minded devotion where the only reason I live.
The reason I get up out of bed in the morning. The reason I serve my wife and love my kids and lead my family is because I'm enamored with the person of Jesus. I am devoted my heart, my mind, my my will. The deepest places of me have decided to give myself frequently to the person of Jesus. And so there, there are essentially three things that are birthed out of this idea that, that I wanna.
Pop that really quick. Again. The first is intentionality that I've, I've intentionally decided to say yes to Jesus. So I love where Jesus says, let your yes be yes. And your no be no. Um, to not be a person that always needs to swear and needs to kind of bolster up. Convince people that you're serious about what you're serious about.
Jesus wants us to be people who are Yes. Is simple. Yes. And our no is simply no. We mean what we mean and we say what we mean. And I like to use this analogy of like. My yes to Jesus is yes. I, when I said yes to him, I meant it. My yes to Jesus is yes, and my no to the world is no right. So, um, no to pornography.
It's just no, no to the idea of living for my own financial gain. It's just, no, I'm just not living that way. My yes to him is sure it's short up, so intentionality. And then devotion requires an attentiveness. So I'm intentional about the decision I made, and then I'm attentive, or I give my attention. I.
Two, that decision. And so again, part of the idea of devotion is that my eyes are open and my mind is applied to some of what I'm wrestling with right now is distraction. It's the, I could be doing this or if I prayed shorter than I could get up and go to that meeting and maybe get more things done. And so distraction.
It can become a real hindrance to devotion. So one, I'm intentional with my decision, my yes to Jesus, and two, I have to give my attention daily, frequently, often, to conversation and communion with the Lord. I need to learn what it means to pray without ceasing, to have a constant conversation. With the Lord, he has to have my attention, the first person to have my attention.
The third thing that comes to play is the idea of perseverance. So to be devoted to Christ means that I'm not just devoted to Christ on good days. I'm not just devoted to Christ. When I'm financially prosperous. I'm not just devoted to. Christ, when my marriage is going well, to be devoted to Christ means that I persevere in that intentional decision.
I keep coming. So right When they're devote themselves to the apostles teaching, it implies that they didn't just hear it once, but they heard it. They decided to do it. They gave their attention to it, and they kept coming back to hear more. They kept the idea of devoting yourself to Prayer is not just that you give yourself to prayer.
One time with real intentionality and fervency, devoting yourself to prayer is giving your life to prayer constantly, frequently, regularly. And so the three things that I'm really pondering right now are intentionality. What is the desire of my life? And am I sure that that desire of my life is just to know Jesus and serve Jesus?
Then I have to give my attention to that desire, uh, my attention to the word, my attention to. Prayer, my attention to serving people, loving people well. And then three, I have to persevere in that decision and in that intentionality, I need to persevere. Keep coming. I need to be devoted to God. Tomorrow morning, tomorrow evening.
I wanna come frequently, often, I wanna commune with him. I want to be a person who prays without ceasing. And so for me right now, and as we kind of slide into this idea of devotion for the next several weeks, I'm in this place where I'm really trying to ponder and examine what are the motivations of my heart?
And am I sure that I'm really living for what I say I'm living for? So my big challenge for you this week. Is to maybe sit down with a journal or a piece of paper and to sit for longer than five minutes, sit for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and ask the Holy Spirit to help you and just kind of pray. Holy Spirit.
What is the desire of my heart? Kind of pray. Holy Spirit, help me to purify my intentions. Holy Spirit, help me to decide today that I'm gonna live only for you, and sometimes what you need to do is to pray. Lord, show me. Idols in my life. Show me am I distracted. What I'm wrestling with right now is distracted.
Am I distracted? Am I motivated by worldly gain? Am I double-minded? Um, am I motivated by? The idea of being seen by people and loved by people. Holy Spirit, show me if there's any idolatry in my life. And then from there, just crucify it. I just crucify, um, by the spirit put to death, that's where we get the idea of mortification of sin by the spirit put to death the flesh that you'll live.
I just bring all of this before you, Lord, that I'm living distracted. I'm living, um, to see how productive I can be because I'm addicted to, to a checklist right now. I bring my checklist before you and ask you to crucify it and to purify me. And I and I and I choose today. I will today in the deepest place in me to live just for Jesus.
And I, I want you just to kind of get there. I just bring my yes to Jesus today and then ask the Holy Spirit, ask God the Father for help. Help me to I. Live intentional to give my attention to you and to persevere in my devotion. I want to be a person who's fully devoted, solely devoted to the person of Jesus Christ, that when my kids look me in the eye and say, what is the one thing you lived for that I'm able to say clearly, concisely, and with conviction.
I lived for Jesus and Jesus alone. I hope that's a challenge for you this week to, again, to really shore up. What am I living for? Am I sure that I'm not double-minded, not living fractured, not living for selfish gain and, and that my heart burns for Jesus? I want you to ponder those things. Hope it, hope it challenges you this week, man.
God bless you, and I'll see you next week as we keep talking about the idea of being a person of devotion.