There is something honest and unsettling about admitting that your spiritual fire is barely a flicker. For believers who have walked with God for years — even decades — the experience of burnout can feel like a personal failure on top of an already exhausting season. But burnout is not a new problem, and it is not a sign that God has abandoned anyone.
The metaphor worth sitting with is this: a dying fire does not need to be rebuilt from scratch. It needs logs. Fuel. Something thrown in that catches the remaining heat and gives the flame somewhere to grow.
What follows are four biblical survival logs — practical, Scripture-rooted commitments drawn from the experience of someone who has faced the depths of burnout, thoughts of suicide, seasons of depression, and the weight of ministry that never quite ends. These are not theoretical suggestions. They are hard-won.
Survival Log One: Surround Yourself with People Who Love God
"Above all, taking the shield of faith with which you will be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one." — Ephesians 6:16
When Paul wrote this letter, he was sitting in a Roman prison. The armor imagery throughout Ephesians 6 was not abstract to him — he could see Roman soldiers every day. And one thing distinctive about the Roman military shield was the ridges along its edges, specifically designed so that soldiers could lock their shields together and create a unified wall of defense against arrows and attacks.
Paul did not write about a soldier standing alone. The design of the shield assumed community.
Spiritual burnout is one of the conditions where isolation becomes most dangerous. When a person is already running low, being cut off from genuine community accelerates the decline. And the inverse is also true — being surrounded by people who genuinely love God provides a kind of warmth that cannot be manufactured alone.
This is not about finding people who will simply say encouraging things. It is about positioning yourself near believers who will speak God's truths into your pain, especially when you are too exhausted to reach for those truths yourself. A spouse, a mentor, a close friend, a church community, a small group — any of these can serve this function if they are rooted in genuine love for God and for the people around them.
If those relationships do not currently exist, the path forward is not to wait for them to appear. Find a church. Join a Bible study. Begin investing in people who have what you need. The shield was not effective unless the soldier moved toward others and locked it in place.
Survival Log Two: Regularly Count Your Blessings
"In everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you." — 1 Thessalonians 5:18
Paul's instruction here is straightforwardly broad. Not in some things. Not in comfortable things. In everything.
Gratitude, practiced consistently, is one of the most accessible spiritual disciplines available to a burnt-out believer. Opening a Bible and reading deeply requires a certain mental bandwidth that burnout often strips away. Sustaining long periods of prayer can feel impossible when the motivation to pray has nearly vanished. But a short, honest prayer of thanks — even for something small — is almost always within reach.
God, thank you for my coffee. And then, thank you for this walk. And then, thank you for the park. Thank you for my family. Thank you for work that provides. These prayers build on each other, and before long, a thread of gratitude has wound its way through what would otherwise have been a morning dominated by anxiety and self-criticism.
The default posture of a depleted mind is often a running list of deficiencies. Not productive enough. Not disciplined enough. Not spiritual enough. Not enough, full stop. Gratitude does not deny those feelings, but it interrupts them with evidence. Evidence that God has been faithful. Evidence that life, while difficult, contains real gifts. Evidence that the same God who provided in the past has not stopped providing.
These moments of thanksgiving accumulate into something substantial — a record of God's faithfulness that becomes a resource to draw from when the next difficult season arrives.
Survival Log Three: Make Prayer and Bible Reading More About Loving God
"And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. This is the first commandment." — Mark 12:30
When Jesus was asked which commandment was greatest, He did not say: read your Bible, pray every morning, attend church, complete your devotionals. He said: love God.
This distinction matters enormously for anyone navigating spiritual burnout, because one of the subtle ways burnout takes hold is through the slow conversion of spiritual practices into spiritual obligations. Prayer stops being communion and becomes a task. Bible reading stops being relationship and becomes duty. The heart is still performing the motions, but the love has drifted to the background, replaced by a checklist.
Over time, that shift hollows everything out. A person can maintain the disciplines of a healthy spiritual life on the outside while their actual relationship with God quietly stagnates. And when burnout finally arrives, stripping away the energy needed to maintain those disciplines, what remains is often the uncomfortable awareness that the practices were being done out of obligation, not love.
The corrective is not to abandon prayer and Scripture. It is to approach them differently — to pause before beginning and remember that God is not an assignment. He is a Father. He is a friend. The quiet time is not a transaction; it is time spent with someone who genuinely knows and loves the person sitting down.
That reorientation will not feel authentic every single time. Spiritual sincerity is not always immediately accessible, especially in seasons of depletion. But the more consistently a believer reaches for that posture — sitting down not to check a box but to actually be with God — the more naturally it comes. Discipline and love are not opposites; practiced long enough, discipline creates the space where love can deepen.
Survival Log Four: Take the Smallest Steps
"Immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, 'Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!'" — Mark 9:24
This passage contains one of the most honest prayers in the Gospels. A father came to Jesus with a son in desperate condition. He asked Jesus for help, adding that qualifier — if you can do anything. Jesus pushed back: if you can believe, all things are possible. And the man, rather than pretending to a faith he did not fully possess, cried out with tears: I believe. But I know my unbelief is in me too. Help me.
He did not wait until his faith was perfect to act. He moved toward Jesus with whatever faith he had, acknowledged honestly the limitations of that faith, and asked Jesus to supply what was missing.
That is the posture worth emulating in burnout.
When reading an entire chapter feels impossible, read a few verses. When a long period of focused prayer feels out of reach, go for a walk and pray while moving — thanking God for what is visible, working through concerns one at a time. When formal devotions feel hollow, call a believing friend, or listen to a Bible teaching. The specific form matters less than the direction — keep moving toward God with whatever is available.
These small steps are not lesser than the larger disciplines. They are appropriate to the season. A person rebuilding strength after an injury does not begin by running a marathon. They begin with what they can manage, and they build from there.
What this passage also reveals is that weakness is not a barrier to approaching Jesus — it is the very context in which He works most clearly. The man's tears were not a sign of insufficient faith. They were the honesty that made his request real. Bringing limitations to God and asking Him to help with those limitations — the laziness, the discouragement, the pride, the unbelief — is itself an act of faith. And when a person responds to God in that way, even in small steps, God responds back.
Throwing the Logs In
Four survival logs for a dying fire: surround yourself with people who love God; regularly count your blessings; make prayer and Bible reading more about loving God; and take the smallest steps.
These four commitments do not require extraordinary spiritual energy. That is the point of them. They are designed for the person whose fire has burned low — who is still holding embers but is not sure how much longer they can keep them alive.
There is a moment in John 6 where a young boy offered Jesus five loaves and two small fish — what was likely his lunch. It was not a significant amount. But Jesus used that offering to feed five thousand people, with twelve baskets of leftovers. God has a pattern of honoring small, honest offerings of faith and doing more with them than any reasonable expectation would predict.
For anyone sitting in the middle of burnout, the invitation is not to manufacture fire that does not exist. It is to give what is actually on hand — five minutes a day, a quick prayer of thanks, a verse, a phone call to a believing friend — and let God work with that.
Find a twig. Throw it in. And keep going.
Over time, the fire grows. And as it grows, what tends to deepen alongside it is the understanding that no amount of personal failure or spiritual depletion changes the fundamental truth that Jesus loves the person in the middle of it all.
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