Exodus 20:8-11

8 Remember to observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 9 You have six days each week for your ordinary work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath day of rest dedicated to the Lord your God. On that day no one in your household may do any work. This includes you, your sons and daughters, your male and female servants, your livestock, and any foreigners living among you. 11 For in six days the Lord made the heavens, the earth, the sea, and everything in them; but on the seventh day he rested. That is why the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and set it apart as holy

How important is it that we have time in our week when we slow down and become still and quiet?  Important enough for God to make the command for a day of rest, a Sabbath, so important that He included it as part of the Ten Commandments! If you were going to write 10 commandments for living what would you include, would you include rest? Rest is included next to don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, all things we would agree are important, but rest? Is rest really that vital for living? We look at rest as something we do after we work but is that really how it works? The Sabbath was God’s final day of creation when He rested from His work, but it was man’s first full day of existence, so man begins his life with rest, not work!

“On the seventh day God had finished his work of creation, so he rested[a] from all his work. 3 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 2:2-3

Rest is not the absence of work but the presence of a relationship with God. It’s out of this relationship that work gains its meaning; we cannot find meaning in work without rest. Many of us are doing life backwards we are working to rest instead of resting to work! So our world is preoccupied with working to retire instead of retiring with God so we can work. We live for the weekend and miss the week; we make life about retirement instead of relationship. For many of us true rest (resting in our relationship with God, just being with Him) is hard. We rebel against the idea of a Sabbath rest, we want to work. Just as we need rest, so does the ground we work.

2 “Give the following instructions to the people of Israel. When you have entered the land I am giving you, the land itself must observe a Sabbath rest before the Lord every seventh year. 3 For six years you may plant your fields and prune your vineyards and harvest your crops, 4 but during the seventh year the land must have a Sabbath year of complete rest. It is the Lord’s Sabbath. Do not plant your fields or prune your vineyards during that year. 5 And don’t store away the crops that grow on their own or gather the grapes from your unpruned vines. The land must have a year of complete rest”. Leviticus 25:2-5

By this rest, the soil is restored and revitalized; the vines and trees are given the free growth, unpruned, and again renew their vitality. The value of the sabbath in regenerating the soil is very great. But man, lacking faith, prefers his own work to God’s work, and his proposed work to God’s Sabbath. So man invents ways around rest, we “create” modern sprays, manufactured fertilizers, and other devices. Yet the soil is steadily mined and abused, treated as something science can make and re-make, and even do without. The earth clearly is renewed by rest, or it is exploited ruthlessly through work. Rest renews and produces useful fertile soil where continued work exhausts and drains, finally producing a desert. What does the soil of your life look like, are you renewed or exhausted? What are you resting in? Religion teaches us that we have to work to get and then work to hold onto, but a relationship with Jesus teaches that He has done the work and we get to rest in His work. Do you have a relationship or religion, are you resting or working? Is it time to get alone with God to renew your soil and really rest?

Revelation 3:19-20

19 “I correct and discipline everyone I love. So be diligent and turn from your indifference. 20 “Look! I stand at the door and knock. If you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in, and we will share a meal together as friends.”

God wants our hearts, He wants into our lives, He wants a face to face relationship where we fellowship together. Yet Christ is reporting that—in His own church—some know that He is at the door, but they will not rouse themselves from their spiritual lethargy to open it. What keeps us from such a relationship? Why don’t we answer the door?

1—WE DON’T HEAR—

There is so much noise in our lives that we simply don’t hear the knocking! What has dulled your hearing? We need to be quiet and listen

2 WE ARE TOO BUSY

Entangled with the affairs of life we have become so busy that we don’t have time to answer the door. We need to slow down and be still.

3 WE ARE NOT EXPECTANT

We are so pre-occupied that we don’t pay attention to what is really important in life. We have become so self-focused that we don’t hear what is going on outside of us. We need to get an outward focus and make room for more than just ME, MYSELF, and I.

4 WE ARE TOO FAR AWAY

Some of us are just too far away to hear, we are like Peter following afar off.

Mark 14:54 “And Peter followed him afar off, even into the palace of the high priest: and he sat with the servants, and warmed himself at the fire.”

Something happened in your life and now you feel like God is a million miles away but God never moved, you did. With that distance you now have a hearing problem, you are so far away you don’t hear the knock. Will you come back?

5 WE HAVE BARRED THE DOOR

Lots of times things get in our lives that shouldn’t be there. We hurt so we turn to what makes us feel good and we build up barriers fearing to hear the voice of God. We didn’t just walk away we barred the door to our hearts in an effort to not feel the pain. But we are dying in there we have become the prisoner in our own cell. Will you open the door and come out.

How tragic that our Lord Jesus would have to stand on the outside of our lives and knock continually only to be ignored. We leave Him standing on the outside of the innermost parts of our hearts only to wonder why we feel so empty and alone.

Two verses later the letter continues and says “After these things I looked and behold a door standing open in Heaven.” This is the door that the Lord wants you to open, come with me and see what the Scripture says lies beyond the door that the Lord wants you to open today, right now. ………..

   “Immediately I was in the Spirit and behold a throne set in heaven and One sat on the Throne.”

We are in the very throne room of God, we have stepped into the innermost sanctuary of the mighty God of all creation. This is the place where we fall on our faces casting down our crowns before the throne saying You are worthy, Oh Lord, to receive glory and honor and power for you created all things and by your will they exist and were created. The awe and the majesty and the trembling power of that place will completely take you over and you will cry “Holy holy holy . For too long we, as the people of God, have only entered into “His courts with thanksgiving and into His gates with praise.” And while there is great emphasis in ancient Israel for worship of joyful abandon and gladness, this is not the only “mood,” of worship. Even prior to Jesus manifesting Himself on the earth there was a worship of awe and of reverence where one could barely lift their heads. The power would fall, the shekinah glory of the living God would fall with such a “Holy heaviness,” that one could barely lift their heads.

If we are to go deeper in this relationship to a different place with God we must answer the knock at the door of our hearts. In order to hear that knocking we must abandon the “cares of the world. Instead of seeking the treasures of this world, we must turn our eyes to the treasures of heaven and its throne room. If we are to hear God, we must become silent before Him. We are moving into a time where it will be vital to be intimate with Him. There is a time for shouting and praising God, but if we are ignoring the knocking, then all of our shouting and praising God will just be noise. If our lives are not reflecting the Glory of God, if we are not becoming like His Son, daily then it may be time to stop shouting to go deeper than the courts and into the throne room to kneel before the King.

Are you keeping Him on the outside looking in? If you are then it is really you who are on the outside looking in, content to just know about Jesus instead of Knowing Him.  There is HOPE the word “if” holds out hope—hope because we can repent, we can change, we can choose to open the door to Christ rather than ignore Him. Are we opening the door? Are we opening ourselves up to Christ to build the kind of relationship He desires and we need? His knocking is for the purpose of renewed fellowship. Is it time to answer the door and get alone with God?