Bandon First Baptist

06/18/2026

06/18/2026

Change Your Routine

So the creation of the heavens and the earth and everything in them was completed. On the seventh day God had finished his work of creation, so he rested from all his work. And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because it was the day when he rested from all his work of creation. (Genesis 2:1–3)

June 18, 2026
By Pastor Chuck Swindoll
Following the sixth day of creation, the Lord God deliberately stopped working. He rested. It wasn’t that there was nothing else He could have done. It certainly wasn’t because He was exhausted. Omnipotence never gets tired! He hadn’t run out of ideas, for omniscience knows no mental limitations. He could easily have made more worlds, created an infinite number of other forms of life, and provided multiple millions of galaxies beyond what He did.

But He didn’t. He stopped.

He spent an entire day resting. In fact, He “blessed the seventh day and sanctified it,” something He did not do on the other six days. He marked this one day off as extremely special. Like none other. Sounds to me like He made the day on which He rested a “priority” period of time.

If we intend to “be imitators of God,” as Ephesians 5:1 suggests, we, too, will need to make rest a priority.

A good night’s rest on a regular basis
A full day’s rest at least once a week
Moments of rest snatched here and there during the week
Vacation times of rest for the refreshment and repair of both body and soul
A release from the fierce grip of intense stress brought on by daily hassles
Tell me, why do we have such a hard time with this? I’d like to suggest that several things contribute to our lack of inner rest:

Failure to give play, fun, rest, and leisure a proper place of dignity.
Our strong tendency to compete and compare, leading to a wholesale dissatisfaction with things as they are.
Our preoccupation with always wanting more and self-imposed guilt . . . unrealistic expectations.
Our long-time “heredity habit” of the all-work-and-no-play-will-make-me-happy philosophy of life.
The result? Look around. Stretched across the faces of most Americans driving to and from work is boredom. Not fulfillment. Not a deep sense of satisfaction. Not even a smile of quiet contentment.

Even though our work-week is decreasing and our weekend time is increasing, our country lacks inner peace. External leisure does not guarantee internal rest, does it?

Sure, we have more time on our hands. But meaningful “rest” in the biblical sense of the term? No way!

I suggest you and I do more than wag our heads at the problem. That helps nobody! Our greatest contribution to the answer is a radical break with the rut of normal living.

Change your routine, my friend. Blow the dust of boredom off your schedule. Shake yourself loose and get a taste of fresh life. Need several suggestions to add “zip” to your leisure?

Begin jogging and/or an exercise program.
Get a CD of your favorite music or your MP3 player and lie down flat on your back, drinking in the sounds.
Start writing letters of encouragement to people you appreciate.
Dig around in the soil, plant a small garden, and watch God cooperate with your efforts.
By the way, don’t miss those sunrises and sunsets, or the smells along with the sights.
Broaden your world. Kick away the thick, brick walls of tradition. Silence the old enemy Guilt, who will sing his same old tune in your ears. And work on that deep crease between your eyes. Look for things to laugh at . . . and laugh out loud. It’s biblical! “A joyful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit dries up the bones” (Proverbs 17:22).

06/17/2026

Relating with Our Friends

So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. While the man slept, the LORD God took out one of the man’s ribs and closed up the opening. Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib, and he brought her to the man. (Genesis 2:21–22)

June 17, 2026
By Pastor Chuck Swindoll
After God made man, He observed a need inside that life, a nagging loneliness that Adam couldn’t shake.

Then the LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.” (Genesis 2:18)
As a fulfillment to the promise to help Adam with his need for companionship, God got involved:

So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. And the LORD God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man. (Genesis 2:21–22)
Later we read that the Lord came to relate to His creatures “in the cool of the day” (Genesis 3:8). I take it that such a time must have been a common practice between the Lord God and Adam and Eve.

He considered them valuable, so the infinite Creator-God took time to relate with His friends in the Garden of Eden. He got personally involved. He observed their needs. He carved out time and went to the trouble to do whatever to help them. He cultivated that friendship. He saw it as a worthwhile activity.

I was amused at a cartoon that appeared in a magazine. It was the picture of a thief wearing one of those “Lone Ranger” masks. His gun was pointed toward his frightened victim as he yelled: “Okay, gimmee all your valuables!”

The victim began stuffing into the sack all his friends.

How valuable are relationships to you? If you have trouble answering that, I’ll help you decide. Stop and think back over the past month or two. How much of your leisure have you spent developing and enjoying relationships?

Jesus, God’s Son, certainly considered the relationship He had with His disciples worth His time. They spent literally hours together. They ate together and wept together, and I’m sure they must have laughed together as well. Being God, He really didn’t “need” those men. He certainly didn’t need the hassle they created on occasion. But He loved those twelve men. He believed in them. They had a special relationship, a lot like Paul, Silas, and Timothy; David and Jonathan; Barnabas and John Mark; and Elijah and Elisha.

As the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge once put in his poem “Youth and Age,” “Friendship is a sheltering tree.” How very true! Whatever leisure time we are able to invest in relationships is time well spent. And when we do, let’s keep in mind we are imitating God, for His Son certainly did.

06/16/2026

Make Leisure Part of Your Day

"Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.
So don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today’s trouble is enough for today." (Matthew 6:33–34)

June 16, 2026
By Pastor Chuck Swindoll
Matthew 6:25–34
How do you get good at getting the rest God said was good for you? How do you get good at leisure? We can, of course, nod in agreement to all we’ve discussed in the past couple days about how important it is to rest and get recharged, but our greatest need is not inclination; it’s demonstration.

Here are two suggestions that will help.

1. Deliberately stop being absorbed with the endless details of life. Our Savior said it straight when He declared that we cannot, at the same time, serve both God and man. But we try so hard! If Jesus’s words from Matthew 6 are saying anything, they are saying, “Don’t sweat the things only God can handle.” Each morning, deliberately decide not to allow worry to steal your time and block your leisure.

2. Consciously start taking time for leisure. After God put the world together, He rested. We are commanded to imitate Him.

For the rest to occur in our lives, Christ Jesus must be in proper focus. He must be in His rightful place before we can ever expect to get our world to fall into place.

A bone-weary father dragged into his home dog-tired late one evening. It had been one of those unbelievable days of pressure, deadlines, and demands. He looked forward to a time of relaxation and quietness. Exhausted, he picked up the evening paper and headed for his favorite easy chair by the fireplace. About the time he got his shoes untied, plop! Into his lap dropped his five-year-old son with a big grin.

“Hi, Dad . . . let’s play!”

He loved his boy dearly, but his need for a little time all alone to repair and think was, for the moment, a greater need than time with Junior. But how could he maneuver it?

There had been a recent moon probe, and the newspaper carried a huge picture of earth. With a flash of much-needed insight, the dad asked his boy to bring a pair of scissors and some transparent tape. Quickly, he cut the picture of earth into various shapes and sizes, then handed the homemade jigsaw puzzle over to his son in a pile.

“You tape it all back together, Danny, then come on back and we’ll play, okay?”

Off scampered the child to his room as Dad breathed a sigh of relief. But in less than ten minutes the boy bounded back with everything taped in perfect place. Stunned, the father asked, “How’d you do it so fast, son?”

“Aw, it was easy, Daddy. You see, there’s this picture of a man on the back of the sheet . . . and when you put the man together, the world comes together.”

So it is in life. When we put the Man in His rightful place, it’s amazing what happens to our world. And, more important, what happens to us. I can assure you that in the final analysis of your life—when you stop some day and look back on the way you spent your time—your use of leisure will be far more important than those hours you spent with your nose to the grindstone. Don’t wait until it’s too late to enjoy life.

Live it up now. Throw yourself into it with abandonment. Get up out of the rut of work long enough to see that there’s more to life than a job and a paycheck. You’ll never be the same! Your stress fractures will heal.

06/15/2026

Give Yourself Permission

Imitate God, therefore, in everything you do, because you are his dear children. (Ephesians 5:1)

June 15, 2026
By Pastor Chuck Swindoll
Since most humans suffer from a lack of balance in their lives, our best counsel on living a steady and stable life comes from God’s Word. In Paul’s letter to the Christians in Ephesus, he includes this most unusual command:

Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children . . . (Ephesians 5:1 NIV)
Maybe you never realized such a statement was in the Bible. It seems unusual: “imitators of God”! The Greek term translated “be imitators” is mimeomai, from which we get the English word mimic. One reliable scholar says this verb “is always used in exhortations, and always in the continuous tense, suggesting a constant habit or practice.”1

In other words, this is neither a passing thought nor a once-in-a-blue-moon experience. The practice of our being people who “mimic God” is to become our daily habit. We are to do what He does. Respond to life as He responds. Emulate similar traits. Model His style.

But to do that, to be an imitator of God, requires that we come to terms with the value of quietness, slowing down, coming apart from the noise and speed of today’s pace and broadening our lives with a view of the eternal reach of time. It means saying no to more and more activities that increase the speed of our squirrel cage, knowing God requires that we “be still” (Psalm 46:10 NIV).

To be God-mimics, we must begin to realize that leisure is not a take-it-or-leave-it luxury.

Please understand that leisure is more than idle time not devoted to paid occupations. Some of the most valuable work done in the world has been done at leisure . . . and never paid for in cash. Leisure is free activity. Labor is compulsory activity. In leisure, we do what we like, but in labor, we do what we must. In our labor, we meet the objective needs and demands of others—our employer, the public, people who are affected by and through our work. But in leisure, we scratch the subjective itches within ourselves. In leisure, our minds are liberated from the immediate, the necessary. As we incorporate leisure into the mainstream of our world, we gain perspective. We lift ourselves above the grit and grind of mere existence.

Interestingly, “leisure” comes from the Latin word licere, which means “to be permitted.” If we are ever going to inculcate leisure into our otherwise utilitarian routine, we must give ourselves permission to do so.