Mental Health: Rhythms of Renewal by Rebekah Lyons

Show Notes

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Rebekah Lyons teaches us to take charge of our mental wellness by practicing simple rhythms that bring us back to God during the times when anxiety and panic come crashing into our lives.

 

Watch the video of Session One

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Creators & Guests

Guest

Rebekah Lyons

Rebekah Lyons is an author, blogger, and speaker. She uses her personal experience in dealing with anxiety, depression, and consumer impulses to help other women seek God and his plan for their lives. She is the author Freefall to Fly: A Breathtaking Journey Toward a Life of Meaning, and You Are Free: Be Who You Already Are. She and her husband, Gabe Lyons, are co-founders of the nonprofit organization, Q Ideas.

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First Listens Season 2: Episode 4
Rhythms of Renewal
By Rebekah Lyons

[MUSIC PLAYING] SHELLEY LEITH: Welcome to Study Gateway’s First Listens, here you get first listens of the first sessions on Study Gateway so you can find your next video Bible study.

Hi there! I’m your host, Shelley Leith, and we’re in Season 2 of First Listens, where we’re focusing in on the topic of mental health. I’m bringing you sessions from seven Bible studies that deal with different aspects of mental health. So far we’ve heard from Chris Hodges on depression in Out of the Cave, Karen Ehman on people-pleasing in When Making Others Happy Makes You Miserable, and Pete Scazzero on emotional un-healthiness in Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. In future episodes we’ll be hearing from Gary Thomas, Jennie Allen, and Lecrae. These respected pastors and authors have all published their studies with HarperChristian Resources, and we stream their videos on Study Gateway. Once you have the taste of these first sessions, you’ll be saying – I’ve gotta have more of that one! And you’ll know what your next Bible study is going to be!

This week’s episode is from Rebekah Lyons, whose life message is all about mental wellness – her mission is to help us take charge of our emotional health. In Rhythms of Renewal, she gets very personal as she shares how her own struggles with anxiety drove her to discover new rhythms that helped her receive God’s peace. Today we’re going to listen to her first session, Living in Rhythm.

REBEKAH LYONS: Rhythm is something intentional that we decide that we're gonna do every day.
And renewal is. To repair something that has been broken down or worn out.

Rhythms of renewal is God inviting us in to a cadence with him where we rest with him and he leads us. He wants to be our nourishment every single day to offer us the daily portion and through that regular cadence. We walk into healing even in rhythm. There's patience and there's waiting. There's stillness and [00:01:00] silence, and then new seasons will sweep in full of action and energy. There's fruit on the other side of that journey.

Nine years ago, we moved three kids to toy poodles and a minivan to Midtown Manhattan, which is not cool anywhere, but particularly when you're pulling into New York City. And I remember in that time thinking I was entering a life of meaning. My youngest was going off to kindergarten and I was ready to just to recover the Rebecca somewhere, wherever she went before the diapers and Cheerios.
And right as I'm beginning to think that I'm entering the season of meaning, I turns out I find surrender instead. And I can tell you today that meaning follows surrender. Four months into my time in New York, I developed panic disorder and that lasted about 15 [00:02:00] months. And the Lord arrested my life in the middle of that and brought me into a healing journey.

And after that, I retreated to the woods and started to. Quiet myself, begin to journal, begin to just start to heal in a way that would require trusting God to do the work. Slowly and surely. By the end of that summer, I reentered the city and I was going to visit a friend in Queens. One thing you need to know about the subway system in New York is that the boroughs are the deepest underground, and so I started to descend these flights of stairs that just kept going and going and going.

And as I continued to go underground, I started to feel something rise in me again, Those familiar feelings of fear and anxiety, the thing, the same feeling. Drove me off a subway before I would jump off, I would avoid, I didn't wanna walk right back into that, but I knew that, uh, the point of fear is that you have to actually overcome it.

You have to, Bravery is moving scared, so you have to walk into fear. And so as I started to do that, I [00:03:00] just kept saying, Jesus, I come under your covering of peace. I come under your covering of peace. I'm not gonna go. To the street level. I don't have another way to get there. I don't have time. Now. I'm late.

I'm not gonna run back to that crippling. So I come under your covering of peace. And that whole time on that subway train going to Queens, I just kept saying, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Because I knew that something was gonna have to play out now that I was back in the crazy, hectic life of Manhattan.

It's awesome to have these rhythms of retreat in the woods, but now, Facing people and facing stress. What was this gonna look like? So once I come back up to the surface and I visit my friend and I go back home later that night, I reflect in my journal that I had begun months prior during retreat, and I scratched out the words rhythms of renewal because I knew that I was gonna have to get serious about what a healing journey would look.

Initially, I had these grand plans with these rhythms renewal. I had a schedule Monday [00:04:00] through Friday with 30 minute increments, all the things I wanted to incorporate. But over time it just got overwhelming. And so eventually after flushing this out over the next few months, I paired it down to four concepts that we see modeled throughout scripture, which is rest, restore, connect, and create.

These would be rhythms that would help with sustained emotional, spiritual, relational, and vocational. So rest, for example. Is our spiritual life. It's our inner life. We ask God what he wants to do. In our hearts, restore is our physical life. It's our active life. How do we take care of our bodies? Connect is our relational life, right?

Our social life, our friendships, our community. And then finally, create is our vocational life. What gifts do we have to offer? And the reason we do these in this order is that the first two are input rhythms, rest and restore. It's where we come to God and we say, Please fill me. Show me the [00:05:00] places where I have lack.

We take inventory of our lives. We examine and confess. We get honest before God. We get raw. We just say, Please fill me. Show me what I need to know. Then once we do that in our hearts, we go in our bodies and say, Where are we depleted? Where are we burn out? Where are we lacking? Where are we? Just, just ready to quit?

Whatever it is that we have in front of us. And yet, this is the very thing that God says, Hey, I've given you something that needs to be strong, and that's your body. I've given you a body that you need to steward, so you should care about what you put in your body and how you move and how you walk this out so that you live from a place of vitality.

But once, Received these two rhythms, and I give you a lot of examples of how to do this going forward. Then we're going to have these output rhythms where we connect, what do we have to now offer someone else? How do we live with the spirit of generosity? How do we play? How do we seek adventure? How do we venture out?

And so we'll talk about that going forward. And then finally [00:06:00] create. We recover our passion. We work with our hands. We take risks and we say, So why do we talk about rhythm? Where was this established? Well, God created in rhythm. If we go to Genesis one, let's look at how he created in rhythm. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Now the earth was formless and empty. Darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the spirit of God hovered over the water and God said, Let there be light. And there was light. He saw the light was good, and he separated the light from the. He called the light day. The darkness night, and there was evening and morning the first day.

So there we have a rhythm right out of the very beginning of creation. Evening and morning was the first day. Then God said that there were an expanse between the water to separate water from water. So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above, and it was so he called the expanse sky and there was evening and there was morning the second.
There's [00:07:00] a cadence and there's a rhythm that begins right here in creation. Evening, morning, first day, evening, morning, second day, God said, Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, let dry ground appear. And it was so. He called the dry ground land and gathered waters. He called seas. He saw that it was good.

It continues here and says there was evening, morning, third day. Why rhythms? Well, because God created in rhythm from the. Day and night, land and sea, earth and sky, sun and moon, light and dark. These are all examples of how God created in rhythm. And at the end of every day, he would say, And there was evening and there was morning the first day, the second day.

The third day, the fourth day, and so on. So even from day one, he creates rhythm and then follows that rhythm into more rhythm. How awesome is that, That there's layers of rhythm. And not only does he create the land and the sea and the animals, he then culminates his creation with [00:08:00] humanity and with all his creatures that he creates.

He gives us pulse and heartbeat and circulation. All in rhythm. Even in the constellations and the galaxies and the stars orbiting on their axis, there's more rhythm. Then we have seasons. We have spring and summer, fall, winter rhythm. Every year they come back at the same time and the Earth does what it does in those particular seasons.

In rhythm. So I wondered why I grew up in Florida and we didn't have seasons. I mean, I guess we did, but it felt like everything was in the seventies and cold was like a light jacket when it got down to 60, you know, in the evenings. So when I went to college in Virginia, 18 years later, I was so excited about this idea of seasons that would come in rhythm.

I would begin to look forward to the new rhythm of every season of how, what would happen in nature, how the leaves would turn, how they would fall, how there would be a stillness and a silence of [00:09:00] winter, knowing that so much life was happening below the ground, and then know. Spring would bring new rhythm, new life, new vitality.

And that summer, yes, I love summer because there was no school, there was no college happening during that time. But we don't even realize how much we count on rhythm, how much we rely on it and expect it because God actually put it in us. Everything about even how our bodies function are in rhythm. So I wanna set that basis for us so that when we talk about this idea of rhythm, why it matters, it's like, because God's saying everything you're gonna need to face, that's gonna be hard in a fallen world.

Everything that's broken where you feel fear and stress and anxiety, those are gonna come in opposition of the created order of rhythm that God already established. So what do we do with that? He says, I don't promise that fear won't come knocking, that you won't be faced with conflict in hardships, but I do always promise a way of escape.

Another way. He [00:10:00] says, This is here in first Corinthians 10 13. No temptation has seized you except what is common to man, and God is faithful. He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way. So that you can stand up under it. There's a couple key words in this verse that resonate so much for me.

First of all, he's saying that this is common to man, the things that are gonna happen in our lives that we're talking about in this curriculum. Anxiety, stress, worry, doubt, fear. He's telling you that these are common things. You're not the exception. So many of us face those kind of fears on a daily basis.
What he's saying is he's not gonna allow you to be tempted beyond what you can bear. Meaning he's going to meet you there and he's going to equip you there. He's gonna stand alongside you and give you everything you need in those moments to push back the dark. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out.[00:11:00]

So here's the thing. When we face these things, sometimes we really believe that like, no, God just gave us all these hardships and we just have to sit in the middle of it. But yet, so much in scripture talks about when you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you don't camp there and take residence there.

You walk through it. We were not made to harbor pain. Yes, we will feel hardship and we will feel suffering and we will feel grief and loss, absolutely. But it's when we camp there and we hold onto it and we take residents in a place of fear that our lives begin to live small when we don't access what God gives us and brings us to equip us in our way out.

[MUSIC PLAYING] SHELLEY LEITH: We need to walk through the valley, not camp there! I’m so glad you’re joining me today at Study Gateway’s First Listens. Rhythms of Renewal is published by HarperChristian Resources and it streams on Study Gateway. Study Gateway is a streaming video service, and we’re the only one that has a subscription plan especially for small groups. For our First Listens listeners, we are offering an exclusive rate on our small group plan. When you use the promo code FIRST at studygateway.com, you’ll get a small group plan for up to 20 people for only $15.99/month, a 20% savings. And, for a complete experience with Rhythms of Renewal, take advantage of our publisher-direct pricing on the essential Bible study guide designed to be used with the videos. You’ll get the group discussion questions and leader materials, the memory verses and key ideas, and personal Bible study and reflection exercises to do between sessions. Get all the details at Studygateway.com.
And now, back to Rebekah Lyons.

[MUSIC PLAYING] REBEKAH LYONS: So let's talk about how. Just like the father modeled rhythm. I love how God, the triune God works in rhythm, so that even with Jesus coming onto the scene as a son of man, he gives us practical application as humans. How did he walk out rhythms? What did that look like for him? First of all, Jesus rested.

Amen. Aren't you [00:12:00] so glad that he rested and he was God? It really helps it for the rest of us who when we're tired and we just need a nap, it's okay. We're supposed to take a nap. It's ordered by God, right? He's not casual about it. He's like, No, you need to. It's a mandate. So rest. So Jesus models that for us right here, He says in Luke five, verse 15, Yet the news about him spread all the more so that crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses.

But Jesus often withdrew, Do you hear that? But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and. . So imagine a public life, you know, he doesn't have a home to run back to and shut the door and lock it and just get quiet on a prayer mat or go to a closet somewhere. He was such an active public ministry, and everywhere he would go, people would find him and they would just follow him.
So he didn't really, if he was an introvert, he wasn't able to leverage that. He was just kind of there and available to anyone who would need him. So to offset that, he would [00:13:00] retreat. So often in scripture to a quiet place where he could pray because he knew that he needed filled up. He needed that input rhythm yet again, because he's living out this output rhythm of connecting and creating.

But yet, the input rhythms for Jesus were so vital. He knew that he actually would have nothing to give if he didn't receive first from the father. That's why his ministry begins with 40 days of solitude, even in the wilder. Even in temptation, even in fasting, he knew that he would be equipped in this place to begin a public life of ministry.

And I think we so often shortcut that we are so ready to run after God and to serve him and to do big things for him. And yet he's saying, No, I care more about your presence than your performance. I want you right here in the still and secret place so that I can pour into you and show you the riches of heaven and to fill.

So that the overflow is what you carry out from that posture of rest. The second thing he modeled is Jesus was restored one [00:14:00] way. He did this physically right, so as he would go off to pray, the Lord would even equip him to make major decisions. We find it here in Luke six, in verse 12. One of those days, Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray and spent the night praying to God like we just.

When the morning came, he called his disciples to him and shows the 12 of them who he also designated. Apostles Simon, Andrew, James, John, Philip Bartholome, you, Matthew Thomas, James, Simon, Judas, and Judas is scar. Yet the thing about this is, so he consulted with God to pray, and you gotta know that in that time, the Lord just confirmed in him like, These are going to be the people that you are going to choose that are gonna live out my will.

My will for your ministry while you're here on earth. What a big decision, right? How often do we go to God and say, I need you to restore and show and reveal what the next step. Because that step is very strategic and it actually [00:15:00] affects so many things down the road. There's a ripple that comes from that, and sometimes we wanna barrel ahead with our decisions just based from our gut.
But that stillness and that restoration shows us how God is saying no. I actually wanna sharpen your mind. I wanna speak into you in that time away so that I can equip you with all that you're gonna. From these resources that are gonna come around you to execute what I have for you. Third, Jesus connected.

He walked and talked and celebrated and gathered and dined, and laughed, and went to weddings. We know that Jesus was with people all the time that he loved. Specifically scripture mentions the disciple. Jesus loved several times, and we're not positive who this person was, though we have ideas. We know though that he referenced that person on the cross, even with his own mother, that they would care for one another even after he was gone.

We know that Lazarus was the one that he loved because when he was sick, they called him Mary and Martha. We know that he was in deep friendship with them, that they spent a lot of [00:16:00] time together. Obviously, Jesus had. Communion with his disciples, right? Even in the upper room where he gathers them for several chapters in John and, and he, he proceeds, I call it the great commencement speech of Jesus where he proceeds to tell them all the things they were gonna need to know because he connected with them.

He says, I'm gonna go, but I'm gonna give you my spirit and my spirit's gonna prompt you of everything I've ever said, and you're gonna do greater things than me, and I'm gonna pray that you would be one. And he goes on and on because he's know. This time of ministering with these people that walked with him, that talked with him, that ministered with him, were the ones that he connected with, and what a model for us, right?

To just to even have the three or the 12 in our lives that we invite in and we say, I wanna make sure that I don't withhold things from you, that I become a trusted friend to you, and that I make myself vulnerable to you as well. Jesus modeled this through connection, and finally, Jesus created. Just like [00:17:00] the father created something into existence.

Jesus spoke. He was the. And he used words to speak of a kingdom that would come. He paints pictures for us through this holy imagination, through parables. Sometimes people could understand and sometimes they couldn't, and that's why Jesus kept saying, if anyone has ears to hear, let them hear. He wanted to make sure that he was painting something, a visual understanding, even though we couldn't quite see it.

Now, he wanted us to grasp. Even then, what the Kingdom of Heaven would be like. And so he gives us so many illustrations of this, right? And sometimes when we read those parables, now we're like, Oh, each time we read it, we see new insights, new understanding of what those parables might be. So one example of these parables is the sower, right?

The four soils that he so seeded on and how they all have different impact. And what that means to us as we read that, is it represents how each of us hear God's word and what we [00:18:00] do with it and where our heart is. How hard it is, how soft it is, how tender it is for something, for fruit to grow from it.

So there was something there that's like a story, but yet it, we process it internally. Like, how do I, which soil do I wanna be? How do I wanna yield fruit? How, how soft is my heart? Is this among rocks where I just hear this and I discard it and I, and then the birds take it? Or is it something that I'm gonna actually receive and I'm gonna see fruit in my life?

We also have the prodigal son, which we are many of us are aware of, where sometimes this sun goes and he wants his own. You know, and whether he's covered in shame or he feels condemnation for himself, he lives a life that is out of the created order of his family, um, out of even just what was imagined for him and he's running, and how many of us do that in our own lives.

We just begin to run. We kind of wanna live our own way, live according to our own will, and Jesus is back. Through this parable to go, Hey, just so you know, there's a father in heaven [00:19:00] who calls you by name, who ordered you from the womb, who spoke destiny over your life, and you can keep running, but the father is not gonna scorn or shake his head when you slowly come home with your tail between your legs.

No. He's gonna be looking out and waiting in expectancy with celebration to come because he is calling you back to himself. See the work of Jesus, even in all these rhythms is reconciliation. The point of these rhythms are to bring us back. There's a cadence where we wanna run sometimes, and he's like, The rhythm is for you to come back to me.

I wanna reconcile you back to the father because I have mighty plans and purposes to accomplish through you. That can be thwarted by the distraction of a. And anxiety, and stress and unhealth, but these rhythms are always intended to bring you back into reconciliation with God so that you can live out your kingdom purpose each and every day.[00:20:00]

[MUSIC PLAYING] SHELLEY LEITH: It’s a beautiful idea that the purpose of the rhythms is for us to come back to God. What a great recipe for our mental health. That was a first listen to the first session Rhythms of Renewal, a video Bible study by Rebekah Lyons, published by HarperChristian Resources and streaming on Study Gateway. Here at Study Gateway you can find your favorite authors, pastors and Bible teachers, all in one place. We’re the only streaming video subscription service that offers a small group-sized plan, AND has user-based pricing for churches, no matter what the size. And don’t forget, you can use the promo code FIRST to get a 20% savings on a small group plan. What does 20% mean to your pocketbook? It means you’re going to save $4/month, so instead of $19.99/month, you’ll pay only 15.99/month for your entire small group of up to 20 people, which works out to only 80 cents per person per month!
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Come back next week for Episode 5 in the Mental Health season, when we hear Gary Thomas talk about toxic people in When to Walk Away. Make sure you rate and review this podcast so other people can find this show too. See you next time on Study Gateway’s First Listens.