Moments in the life of a Pastor

Walking with God

Category Archives: Rest and Waiting


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10 Sabbath Rest Part 1

Exodus 20:8-11 “Remember to observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. You have six days each week for your ordinary work, 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. 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.”

When most people think of the 10 commandments they tend to focus on the rules and miss the relationship. The first 4 commandments deal with our relationship with God and the next 6 our relationship with others. What is interesting is that of the 10 commandments keeping the sabbath is often the one taken most lightly. Against the other commandments like, “Thou shall not kill”, “Thou shall not steal”, and “Do not commit adultery”, “Remember to observe the Sabbath day” seems rather mild and innocuous. Yet nothing could be further from the truth, as the final commandment dealing with man’s relationship with God it concludes with all that we need to know in order to have a full life. The problem is that when we hear the word sabbath instead of thinking rest we hear rules and regulations. Sabbath is not about rules and regulations it is God’s gift of Sabbath rest. You may be asking “How can we afford Sabbath rest in the midst of the craziness of modern life?” Perhaps the better question is, “How can we afford to IGNORE the Sabbath rest in the midst of the craziness of modern life?” If we would value God’s gift of Sabbath rest enough to embrace it we would discover the key to living a life of tranquility even in the midst of turmoil. When we rediscover God’s gift of the Sabbath we rediscover rest. In our modern world of more and more, go and go, do and do the margins become blurred and our boundaries erased. God our Father created us and knows our limitations, He knows our need for boundaries when it comes to work. Many of us choose to ignore this God given gifts, the blessing of boundaries, we see them not as rest but restriction. We think we know more than our Maker, we start to resent His rest and rebel, referring to them as Old Testament rules that don’t relate to us. Yet God has given us boundaries about the marriage relationship, no extra-marital affairs or boundaries for our tongue, be quick to listen and slow to speak or boundaries about chasing after, accumulating and putting our trust in wealth, when he said “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?” So too God gives us boundaries regarding work, to keep work in its proper place. His boundaries keep us from becoming “human doings” and allow us to become the “human beings” that He created and intended us to be. Keeping the sabbath is not about ritual or rules it is a boundary marker meant to be a guardrail to keep work from consuming us.
These lists of the 10 Commandments can be found in two places, Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. In each of these lists the commandments, boundaries are the same but each passage gives a different reason for the boundary. They have a differing explanation as to why Sabbath is to be honored and each reason for Sabbath is significant. Exodus 8:11, gives us this reason. “For in 6 days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, but he rested on the 7th day.” We keep Sabbath because God himself did, the created order, His work was done. When God concluded a boundary was set and He modeled for us a weekly rhythm. From the very beginning God was teaching us that this was and is His design, plan, model and intention. We need to remember that Sabbath is pre sin, it was created before sin entered the world. So when we honor it we are participating in something that sin hadn’t touched. Yet for many we forgo God’s pleasant plan of rest opting instead for self. What if we stopped viewing this as ritual and rule and instead participated in His plan of restful relaxation? What are you resting in?

 


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9 Revealed Rest

Genesis 2:2-3 “By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. 3 Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.”

Rest is a word we often hear, but do we really grasp its importance in our lives? We are a people too busy for our own good, too busy to stop and realize that in our frantic business we are actually accomplishing less and aging more. By and large, Americans don’t value rest and relaxation, instead we have made a virtue of unceasing labor. We constantly talk about how busy we are, as if the hectic pace of our lives is proof that we’re important and significant. We feel guilty when we’re not working, in fact we no longer ask, “how was your day?” we ask “what did you do today?” Today we have traded a connecting culture for a constant culture. The constant culture trains us to view rest as laziness yet the bible tells us that God himself rested. Rest is a good thing, and after reading Genesis 2 it’s hard to accuse God of being lazy or unproductive. This balance of work and rest that we see in God’s creative activity is intended to be a model for us. To God, rest is not just wasted time or time when we could be doing something useful and productive. No, rest properly understood, has value and worth and peaceful purpose for our lives. In fact, it’s not optional, rest is a requirement, it’s essential to our physical and spiritual well-being. I have often been amazed at the Chinese pictograph for the word busy, it is composed of two characters, the character for heart, and the character for killing, it literally means that when you are busy your heart dies. Rest seems like such an obvious thing and yet as people we seem to constantly underestimate our need for it. God designed us to need rest at every level of life, physically, emotionally and spiritually. Rest starts with stopping, God stopped working, it’s only when we stop that we can truly seek solitude and experience soul care.  Why is rest so important, well we could talk about this for a long time but let me give you a few reasons I have personally learned what I call the results of rest. Rest allows us to listen to God, if you are like me you get so caught up in the hustle and bustle of daily life that you become deaf to the still, small voice of God. We can become so busy doing things for Christ that we forget to simply be with Christ. When this happens we get tunnel vision and become so fixated on completing our list of tasks that we have no time for anything else but work. Yet somehow, the list of tasks never gets any shorter, for every one we complete two more rise up to take its place. Without rest we run on a treadmill toward a finish line that never gets any closer. When our lives lack quiet, unhurried fellowship with the Lord, our perspectives become warped and our attitudes poisoned. We start running on autopilot and instead of being guided by the Holy Spirit we are guided by hurry, we become controlled by emotion, habit and circumstance. Time away from our labors and with the Lord helps us to regain our perspective and realign our priorities. It helps us to remember what’s most important, that the things of God are eternal, while the things of this life are temporary. Rest also reminds us of who we are, rest reaffirms our humanity as men and women made in the image of God. I am not merely the sum of what I accomplish, as people we are not merely a means of production, we are not cogs in a machine. Today we have tied our worth to work, trading our value for vanity. Like a dog chained to a stake the more we try to work the more wound up we get. When we buy into the lie that work equals worth we step onto the never ending hamster wheel of self-effort. But a man is not a horse, to be valued according to how well he pulls a wagon or a plow; he is not a tool, to be valued only for the tasks he can perform. Yes, our work has value, but it’s not our work that gives us value. Our value is inherent within us; it comes from the fact that God made us and gave his Son to die for us. Your value is not dependent on your effort and rest releases us from this lie. Another great result of rest is that it keeps us humble, it helps us maintain a healthy perspective on our place in the grand scheme of things. A period of withdrawal from our usual responsibilities reminds us that we are not as indispensable as we had imagined. Charles DeGaulle once said, “the graveyards are full of indispensable men.” For many we don’t stop because we are afraid to face the painful yet powerful truth that even without me the important tasks still get done. In my absence the company will continue, somehow, the earth continues to revolve on its axis and the sun continues to rise and set. The sooner we embrace this truth the healthier we can become. When we become too grandiose in thinking of ourselves as essential, then we become either arrogant and prideful, or stressed out and depressed. Either way, we’re taking a load upon ourselves that only God is equipped to bear. Today stop and sit for a moment, start by setting aside a special time to relax physically and renew yourself emotionally and spiritually. We need rest just as we need air, water and food, this isn’t about surviving it’s about thriving. The truth is that when we fail to rest fully and deeply, we not only hurt ourselves, we run the risk of hurting others. Yet when we stop striving and start being still we open our hearts to the ministry of the Holy Spirit. It’s in these times of quiet rest that God tills the soil of our souls. Today will you resolve to rest?