Finding Rest in Jesus
Today we’re continuing our teaching series called The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, which is about how to have peace in our world of hurry. Our primary research for this series comes from a book called “The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry,” which was written by Pastor John Mark Comer who did extensive study on the unhurried life of Jesus. What we’re doing in this series is we’re learning from the life of Jesus, how to live an unhurried life like Jesus. What we’re learning specifically from the life of Jesus today, is the importance of practicing Sabbath.
We live in a world where we are constantly trying to be fully satisfied. Influencers post about themselves traveling all over the world, eating at all different kinds of restaurants, wearing all kinds of different clothes. What would it take to be fully satisfied? The answer is everything. No matter how much we achieve in our careers, how many places we check off our travel bucket list, how many different types of foods we try, we will always be left wanting more until we have tried everything.
I have experienced this in my own life. I am a bit of a thrill seeker and an experience seeker. I have had the blessing to travel to some incredible places, eat incredible food, meet incredible people, and see incredible things. However, on a recent work trip to Seattle, I had the opportunity to travel to Vancouver, BC. It was an unbelievably beautiful place. The food was amazing, the people were chill, and the views were like scenes out of a movie. However, when I came home, I was left wanting for more. Like I hadn’t done enough. Hadn’t checked off enough. So a week and a half later, Savannah and I had the opportunity to go to Fairbanks, Alaska. We checked things off of our personal bucket lists and recognized that we were able to have experiences and see things like the northern lights not many people are able to see in their lifetime. Unless, of course, a once in a lifetime solar flare hits the earth and pretty much the entire globe has the opportunity to see them.
I would be lying if I told you all this morning I wasn’t disappointed by that. There were people as far south as the Florida Keys and the Bahamas recording video and sharing pictures of their viewings. I traveled all the way to Alaska to see something I could’ve seen clearly in my backyard? Desires go unfulfilled. Unless our desire is for what we were created to be fulfilled by. Dallas Willard says it this way: “Desire is infinite partly because we were made by God, made for God, made to need God, and made to run on God. We can be satisfied only by the one who is infinite, eternal, and able to supply all our needs; we are only at home in God. When we fall away from God, the desire for the infinite remains, but it is displaced upon things that will certainly lead to destruction.”
So, what do we do? Is there any answer for this restlessness and lack of fulfillment? The good news is that there are many solutions as we’ve been discussing the past two weeks. Jesus gives both skeptics and believers an invitation to find rest and restoration for our weary, burdened, hurried souls. But Pastor John Mark Comer boldly claims that at the top of the list is the practice of Sabbath.
Pretty easy to find our text this morning. Open to the very beginning of your Bibles and flip over a couple pages to Genesis 2. We will be in the first three verses this morning and if you don’t have a bible, the words will be on the screen for you to follow along. The title of today’s message Finding Rest in Jesus and the big idea of today’s message is that Sabbath isn’t just a command, it’s a prescription. Sabbath isn’t just a command, it’s a prescription.
Here’s your context. Genesis 1 is the very beginning of all things. The beginning of the whole story. God spends six days creating the universe, the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth, the sea, the sky, land and sea animals, and finally humans. After he finishes each creation, he calls it good and then when he gets to humans, he calls them very good. We are the delight of his creation. The focal point. The crown jewel.
Chapter 2 picks up at the end of these six days.
Let’s read God’s Word together. Verse 1 says: “So the heavens and the earth and everything in them were completed. On the seventh day God had completed his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done.…” After these initial six days of creating and working were completed, God rested. He had made everything perfectly, exactly the way he intended. Matthew Henry describes God’s act of resting “not as one who was weary, but as one well-pleased with the instances of his own goodness and the manifestations of his own glory.” Who has ever finished a project or assignment and sat back, cracked their knuckles, and breathed a sigh of satisfaction in the work you’ve completed? This is what God does on the seventh day.
This seventh day is referred to as the Sabbath. It comes from the Hebrew word Shabbat. The word literally means “to stop.” Stop working, stop wanting, stop worrying. It is one day set into our week that can disrupt our entire lives in a good way. Jesus understood the importance of this routine and built it into his life. In Mark 2, he is “caught” by the Pharisees when he and his disciples are performing miracles on the Sabbath and he responds in a monumental way. In verse 27, he tells the Pharisees, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” This is where we begin to see that it is not just a command, it is a prescription. The Sabbath was made for us to take advantage of. God rested not because he was tired (although many of us could use Sabbath to spend some time recovering from the busyness of life), but instead to enjoy what he had made. Jesus built the practice of Sabbath into his week because he knew and understood the importance of enjoying his father’s creation.
You could be saying to yourself this morning, “I have too much going on. I don’t have time to rest.” God did. Maybe you’re thinking to yourself, “I am an extrovert and need to be around people and six days in a week isn’t enough to see everyone and everything!” God rested. Perhaps you are looking at the chaos of your life with kids, and school, and work, and cleaning the house, and cooking meals, and birthday parties, and everything else thinking, “Taking an entire day to rest is not in the cards for me right now.” God rested.
Church, this is hard for me. I’ve always been a busy person. Whether is was 24 credit hour semesters in college with part time jobs or working a full time job with a number of random side hustles, I enjoy being busy. I hate being bored. And I also hate when people tell me I have too much going on or I am too busy. It really irritates me. Because I personally believe God created me with a higher capacity than most people. What an arrogant thing to say right? But surely, I am not the only one who believes this? Maybe I am. And that’s okay. God has been beating me over the head with this text and this practice not just during the preparation of this message but this whole year. We are too busy. If the Creator of the Universe took time to rest, it is that much more important and necessary for me to rest as well. John Mark Comer says, “When we fight this work six days, Sabbath one day rhythm, we are literally fighting against the grain of the universe.”
Verse 3 says: “God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, for on it he rested from all his work of creation.”
You might think it strange that God would bless a day. He blessed the animal kingdom and humans and told them to be fruitful and multiply but the seventh day is the only other part of his creation that he blesses. Pastor John Mark Comer draws a conclusion here that should encourage us and challenge us to take this practice of weekly “stopping” all the more seriously… He blesses animals and humans with the command to be fruitful and multiply. Why would God also bless the seventh day?
Because the seventh day has the life-giving capacity to bring more life into the world. 10 years ago, there was a study done by a doctor who recorded his findings in the Huffington Post and it found that the happiest people on earth were 7th Day Adventists who religiously follow the command to Sabbath. The study found that they live ten years longer than the average American. John Mark Comer did the math for us and found that if we Sabbath every seven days, it adds up to ten years over a lifetime almost exactly.
Sabbath is something we should be taking seriously church. Not to be legalistic or make our relationship with Jesus about a set of rules… But for the sake of our relationship with Jesus. For the sake of our mental and physical health. At the start of this year, I was trying to practice Sabbath regularly. I’d leave my phone in my room all day Saturday, zero work (and I mean zero… no checking emails just to “make sure” nothing was wrong, no writing copy, etc.), and I just hung out with my girls. If they didn’t want to practice with me, that was fine but I did not participate in busyness that they wanted to do if I didn’t feel like I could stop and rest and glorify God with what I was doing. Some Saturdays it looked like resting all day – laying on the couch, reading a book, watching shows, playing games, etc. Some Saturdays it looked like serving my wife by completing home projects, or going on family walks or bike rides, some Saturdays it was going to the beach or my parent’s house to swim. But it does need to be a part of our rhythm. Somewhere around Easter, I stopped. I got busy. I began opening the work computer on Saturdays again. I began checking my phone every single minute because I felt like someone needed me. And you can maybe guess what happened. I began feeling stressed and anxious again. Depression began to creep in. I would spiral in my mind. I never feel fully rested. Sin in my life started to have its way with me again. It is not that hard and it doesn’t take that long to discover that when you stop resting, you stop feeling rested. The Sabbath is a blessed day. And while the blessing is on the 7th day, that doesn’t mean it has to literally be the 7th day of the week. There’s disagreement about what that day is anyways so don’t get caught up in that. The 7th day = the Sabbath day. And that day is blessed.
God also notes that the Sabbath is holy.
Our God is not found in a temple or a space, he is found in a day.
John Mark Comer says, “If you want to go and meet with this God, you don’t have to make a pilgrimage to Mecca or Varanasi or Stonehenge. You just have to set aside a day of the week to Shabbat, stop long enough to experience him.”
Another thing I noticed when practicing Sabbath regularly at the start of the year was how much more connected to God I felt. I didn’t feel he was distant or laughing at me. I felt like his son. I felt his love for me when I sinned. I felt like an heir to the Kingdom of Heaven – not like an imposter.
We meet with God during our Sabbath because the day is holy.
So, we know that God sets the standard and rests. We know that he blesses the Sabbath and declares it holy.
What, then do we do?
Practically speaking, Pastor John Mark Comer points out two Sabbath commands that he thinks are the most important in the Bible for us to follow and apply.
Number one: Sabbath as rest and worship.
Hundreds of years after the events of Genesis 2, the Israelites have found themselves in the clutches of the Egyptian empire. All hours of the day, every day of the week, they are making bricks to assemble together to build the pyramids and shrines for the Egyptians. They are slaves. Bound in hopeless captivity with no chance of rest or Shabbat. God appoints Moses and miraculously delivers them from the Egyptians and as they are in transit to their new home, the Promised Land, God gives them the code by which they are to live called the Ten Commandments.
In Exodus 20, God lays out the expectations for the Israelites and the fourth commandment he gives them is to remember to observe the Sabbath day of rest dedicated to the Lord your God. Read Exodus 20:10-11. “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy…”
Church, it is easy for us to forget there is a day that is holy and blessed. It is easy for us to forget that God rested. We live in a world where we have access to everything. We are held captive and in bondage to our own form of Egypt… our phones. Our social media. Our email. It consumes us and drives us with whips of wanting likes, impressing bosses, and smashes us under the oppressive thumb of a constant desire to be satisfied by information and knowledge. Our phones are the apple that Adam and Eve reached for (pun intended) and we do it on average 144 times a day. We are forgetful by nature but we also have the cards heavily stacked against us with the unlimited access we have.
God’s encouragement to the Israelites was to remember.
Full stop, shabbat, and remember like the sabbath is a gift we forget about or a pet we forgot to feed. And once we remember, we rest and we worship. And that doesn’t mean we spend our entire day listening to praise music and reading our bible and praying (although it could…). Worship means an entire life orientation toward God.
As you are beginning this practice this week, and I would encourage you to, ask yourself “Is this rest and worship?” If the answer is “no” or you are unsure, then save it for the other six days. And again, week to week, this can look different. There are some days where working in my yard can be a restful experience for me.. Other weeks, this may be exhausting and I may be cussing and spitting my way through it. That does not constitute as restful or worshipful. So I shouldn’t do it.
The second command is this: Sabbath as resistance.
40 years after Mount Sinai, Moses has to deliver a revised edition of the ten commandments to the Israelites before they enter the promised land. In this second edition, the instruction regarding the Sabbath says this: “Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the Lord your God has commanded you…” The difference is the word observe, like we observe a holiday. We plan and prepare for it.
Pastor John Mark Comer goes a bit of a different way with this but for me, Sabbath as resistance means this: the devil wants us to be busy. He wants to suffocate us with the to do lists, and the email inboxes and the social media influence. He wants us to have our eyes on anything but Jesus. The more we look at Jesus, the more we see him. The more we see Jesus, the more we want to be around him. The more we are around Jesus, the more like him we become. Celebrating a Sabbath is an intentional breaking away from the things we “must” do and it is resisting against the urge we may not consciously feel to be spending time doing anything but spending time with Jesus. And the more we build this rhythm into our life, the more we will be able to slow down and eliminate hurry during the other six days of our lives.
Rest and worship.
Resist.
That’s the strategy.
Let’s make it even more practical because many of you are probably wondering, what does this look like? I want to be careful to give too much direction or advice because the last thing we need is to feel a sense of legalistic religiosity about keeping the Sabbath (though it may not hurt…) but here are a couple of pointers.
For me and my family, and by the way, we are still working on this. This is still something we are not good at and are trying to implement in our lives… but for the Alderman’s we cannot Sabbath on Sunday. Today is a “work day” for us. Even though, the time we are here at CA is the most concerted effort we make to orient ourselves toward God every day, it is not always restful. So, for us, our sabbath is on Saturday. We try and plan for it throughout the week. We clear the schedule on Saturday, turn off our phones or at least leave them in a room where we won’t see them/interact with them, invite the Holy Spirit to pastor us into his presence, and then we rest and worship.
The big idea of the message is Sabbath isn’t just a command, it’s a prescription. It’s a prescription for peace that passes understanding. It’s a prescription for rest for our weary souls. It’s a prescription to resist the devil and follow Jesus in obedience.
Hebrews 4 talks about Sabbath again and in verses 9-11 it says: “So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his. Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience.”
Church, we don’t worship an egotistical God who wants to steer us around just to watch us fail and suffer and attempt to do everything right for his own enjoyment. Every command God gives, he does so with intentionality and purpose to help us. When I command something of my children, I try not to use the “because I said so” reason. Sometimes, that’s just the best answer, amen?
But other times, I want to teach them. I want them to learn. I want them to see the why behind what I am commanding them to do.
God doesn’t just command us to practice Sabbath because he did and wants us to do the same. He know that practicing Sabbath will help us enjoy him more, be aware of him more, and desire him more.
Sabbath is a gift to us.
Hebrews 4 closes with “This high priest of ours understands our weaknesses, for he faced all the same testings we do, yet he did not sin.” God understood how busy we would be, how distracted we would be and he created something that would give us permission from the God of the universe to take advantage of his rest and shabbat.
May we stop. May we pause. May we remember and observe. Rest and worship. The literal years of our lives are depending on it. But more importantly, our relationship with Jesus depends on it.