Receiving God's Rest

Thinking about that song a second ago, I don't know, some of you may know this, but we have this religious word that we say called "hallelujah." You hear it in songs; you just heard it in the song we sang a second ago. If you're not aware—a lot of people don't know this—it actually is rooted in a couple Hebrew words.

So, hallelujah: halal, which is a Hebrew word for "to praise, bless, confess," and the word yah, which is for Yahweh. It's a compound word that combines the two together, and it means "praise the Lord." So if you didn't know that this morning, that's essentially what you're saying is "praise the Lord." So, little tidbit for free there this morning.

Okay, this morning's scripture reading is going to come from Matthew, the end of chapter 11. We're going to start in verse 28, and we're going to be going through the first 14 verses of chapter 12.

Before we begin, one of the things to know is originally I was going to teach this perhaps as a series under the heading of Sabbath, because there's a string of passages here in which Jesus talks about rest or about Sabbath. Matthew has combined these passages together for us, and Sabbath is a really big issue and big theme in the Bible. Part of the challenge, as I studied, I saw this theme was even larger than maybe I had anticipated. And so there's a challenge to synthesize all of that information into something that is coherent, and at the same time, anytime you do that, there are things that you have to leave out, things that you may emphasize too much of one thing or another.

What we find in this passage, though, is not something that is prescriptive for how we are to keep Sabbath, but something that is descriptive for a gift that God gives, and that is his rest. So I pray, Lord, that I am able to do and to explain and bring that forth this morning.

Scripture reading

Starting in Matthew 11:28, Jesus says:

"Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."

At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, "Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath." He said to them: "Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? Or have you not read in the Law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless? I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. And if you had known what this means, 'I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,' you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath."

He went on from there and entered their synagogue. And a man was there with a withered hand. And they asked him, "Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?"—so that they might accuse him. He said to them: "Which one of you who has a sheep, if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out? Of how much more value is a man than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath."

Then he said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." And the man stretched it out, and it was restored, healthy like the other. But the Pharisees went out and conspired against him, how they might destroy him.

This is God's word.

Introduction

We have lost our rest. We've lost our rest, not just in this age and in this time period, but really all the way from the beginning, and we'll talk about that in just a second.

Even in today's age, we can look at just the constant motion and activity of life that continues to go on 24/7 in our lives. We feel our lives. We work, our hours get longer, technology brings it into the home—so we're answering Teams messages and emails and all sorts of things, even into the late hours of the night at times. We get on our phones and information processing comes: What should I buy? I'm curious about this. I need to make a decision here. Texts, emails, decisions, information constantly streaming into our minds. We're more tired; we sleep less than our ancestors before us. Just over and over is the humdrum and the beat of today.

We fill our lives constantly with activities. And I'm not trying to be condemning or, like I said, prescriptive—it's only a description of what is happening in our world today. So much so, I actually did a little bit of research and I looked this up. These are some observations from secular people who were not Christians and who were not religious—a couple of them were secular Jews, one's an atheist—and this is their observation coming from the culture; they've written books on it.

Derek Thompson writes in Workaholism Is Making America Miserable:

"The economists of the early 20th century did not foresee that work might evolve from a means of material production to a means of identity production. They failed to anticipate that for the poor and middle class, work would remain a necessity, but for the college-educated elite, it would morph into a kind of religion promising identity, transcendence, and community... College graduates, elites of the U.S., are less likely than any previous generation in the country's history to affiliate with traditional religion, but they have funneled religious thinking into work itself. Their desks have become their altars."

I think it's a problem: when we worship work, we worship a god that doesn't care about us. This guy is not a religious person at all, and yet it sounds so much like it. Work is not bad; work predates even the fall itself. So let me just balance that first off—this is not me harping on that. Like all things in life, we find this balance and this tension where when something takes the place of God—when the good things of life take the place of God—then they become bad. And so that would be something that we could see in this, again, not that work is bad in itself.

Another quote here about the Sabbath world says:

"We are slowly catapulted into the world of total work. That is, there is no day any longer in which the entire community takes its rest in whatever way—worship, study, sports, picnics, etc. In other words, we cannot gather everyone that we would wish into a community of friendship, family, activity, or simple companionship."

It's the observation that, unlike generations past, we don't stop on a certain day. We're always busy; we're always going in different directions. And it's very difficult, her observation is, for communities to begin to form because of these challenges. I realize this is the world we live in, and it is very difficult. And yet God speaks into that.

One more right here: the author of The Anxious Generation writes:

"Almost every great truth that we get from the ancients..."

Also not a Christian and not religious; this guy's an atheist:

"...almost every great truth that we get from the ancients about how to live a better life, to become a better person—'Judge not, lest you be judged,' 'Be slow to anger, be quick to forgive'—the online life, the social media life, the life of technology infusing our homes, the phone-based life, it tells us to do the opposite."

We've lost so much of our rest, and rest is a gift from God.

We look back to the very beginning in Genesis, and it reminds us that God created the world in seven days. So how did we lose that rest? It says that God on the seventh day rested from all of his work. That rest is something that extends beyond into Adam and Eve's life, that they are under God's reign and authority and rule as he rests over his creation, as he takes his seat over creation. There's this old idea of God just taking his dominion: he's done all that he needs to do. Not in a deistic way that he's wound up the world—he still preserves life, his common grace and his rule and his power still emanate, his saving grace is still available in our world today—it's not like the ceasing of everything, but God's dominion takes its seat.

In Adam and Eve, as they walk in Eden, they experience God's rest. Their work is kind of like work on vacation. You know, when you go on vacation, you still cook, right? You still clean, you still do things around the house, you prepare to go to the beach. There's still activity, but it's different. It's a different kind of activity. Maybe that's the closest way to understand what work in the garden for Adam and Eve was like before the fall: when they named animals, when they got their supper or things that they needed, when they picked the harvest from the crops that were around them. Work in itself is not bad, and it's just changed when it's in God.

When Adam and Eve fell, the Bible teaches that they lost that rest. They left the garden; they were sent away from that. In life, rest tells us we find such safety and protection and peace and identity in God, and resting in him and in his finished work. But when we get out in the world on our own, when we are our own God determining our own course and our own fate in life, when we take it in our own hands, we feel restless.

Augustine even talked about that. He was a monk from the 4th century, and he said that we are constantly restless until we find our rest in you alone, O Lord. And so it is in our lives that we have lost this rest.

In the Old Testament, as the people had wandered away from him, as they had become more restless in their lives, God gave them the gift of Sabbath: God's rest ordered into their daily lives. The children of Israel had been in bondage in Egypt, and God delivered them from the bondage of tireless slave work. You do not get days off in slavery. Pharaoh even complains about that to Moses: "You're distracting the people so that they rest right now. They need to work, they don't need to think." It's this tireless engine. And yet God brings them out of slavery, and one of the things that he does is he gives them rest on the seventh day and calls them to enter in and to begin to experience that in the rhythms of their life.

It's huge. It actually plays forth through all of the ways they have to think about what they're going to do the night before Sabbath, so that they may rest and receive the replenishment and the revitalization and the worship and all of the benefits that come with Sabbath. Not only that, there's times during the harvest season where, after seven consecutive Sabbaths, they're supposed to take another break and they have a feast unto the Lord and they rejoice. Deuteronomy records this, enjoying the rest and the gift and the benefit of God. There's also the 7-day feast that appears in scripture.

We find also that after seven years, there's the sabbatical or Sabbath year, where God programs into where the land itself gets rest—that you're not supposed to plant or till the land or even harvest it for yourself and your granaries, but you're supposed to leave it open for whatever just happens to spring up from the ground itself. That order is built into creation itself.

So much so, we go even further and we find that after seven consecutive Sabbath years, after 49 years, they celebrate the 50th year, which is known as the Year of Jubilee. So if you had land that was somebody else's and belonged to them, you essentially rented it and it went back to them. If you had resources or slaves or anything like that, those things were relinquished so that you could release those things—the land and the people and your animals—to experience rest.

God's rest is pervasive, not just in our lives, but over all of creation, and it's programmed throughout all of scripture. But Psalms reminds us that they did not enter the rest of God. The people in the land of Israel were supposed to enter the promised land and experience God's rest, but they didn't experience that rest because of their disobedience.

As we get to Hebrews chapter 3 and chapter 4, we are reminded that:

"Since therefore it remains for some to enter that rest, for those who formerly received the good news failed to enter because of disobedience..."

It's talking about the children of Israel. Again he points to a certain day, "Today," saying through David so long afterwards:

"Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts."

Then he explains: for if Joshua had given them rest, he would not have been inviting hundreds of years later for David to say, "Today, enter into that rest." It's something that the children of Israel did not find, and that is how we have lost our rest.

Yet God from the very beginning wanted us to experience that in our lives, and Sabbath was just a signpost that pointed to a reality. It's not just stopping; it's not what we probably think about, just sitting around on a Sunday. It's actually about worship and experience.

1. The Invitation to Rest

There are three pieces that we're going to look at here, and the first is right here at the very end of chapter 11, right where Jesus says:

"Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."

Jesus is providing an invitation to rest. He's inviting us to experience and to enter into what we lost in Eden. There was this type or this form that the Israelites were invited to after they came out of slavery and bondage, just as we are delivered from bondage and slavery and invited into the rest of God. But they couldn't enter into it because of their unbelief, and Joshua couldn't bring them into that. The land lies in darkness until Christ appears, and the light of God, the light of that seventh day, the rest of God being extended, comes and offers it.

This is a striking thing, because who can offer rest to the people? Who can offer true rest? Only God, because God is ultimately the one who manufactures rest itself and who has invited us to it. For Jesus to make such a claim like this—to come to him and that he will give rest—it is to say essentially that "I am God, that I am the one that can give you the rest of God that you so long for in your lives."

Why does Jesus invite them to rest? One of the reasons is because in Jesus's day, Sabbath had become so pervasive that the Jewish leaders, so wanting to honor God in a good way—like we do in religion; we so want to honor God with our lives—began to fence the law. They began to define all the ways that we could be guilty of breaking Sabbath, and they wanted to leave nothing to chance.

One of my favorite Bible commentators, R.T. France—a fantastic New Testament commentator who wrote a commentary on Matthew—talks about how if you've never read things like the Mishna (which was written about 200 years after Jesus and catalogues to the nth degree ways that they wrote what you can and cannot do on the Sabbath), you cannot appreciate the complexity and the detail of how they defined what you could and could not do on the Sabbath. Everything! If I lift food to my mouth, at what point does it become work? If I walk a hundred yards, is that work? You've ever heard in the Bible where it talks about a Sabbath day's journey—it's about half a mile. They defined how far you could walk on a certain day.

There were all these rules and conditions, but after a while, what that becomes is slavery. You become bound to a system and a ritual in a way that makes you begin to not fulfill what God really wanted to give in his rest: to restore, to heal, to give life. And so they've lost something about that.

We also know that because of sin, we go our own way. When we do, when life is in our own hands and when we've got to sort of be our own God, we become anxious. We have to provide and fend for ourselves; we have to protect ourselves. When all of that depends upon us, it is wearing. It is overwhelming, because the more that you live in life, the more that you begin to realize how little control we have in this life, how vulnerable we are to all sorts of things that we see in the world around us. No amount of laws or better healthcare or any of these things sometimes can stop the reality of the fragileness of life.

The ancients felt it much more than we did. If the rains didn't come and the crops dried up, it got serious really quick. But we should not forget, even in our modern times, how dependent we are on God. The more that we try to control, the more that we try to be our own God, the more that we become restless.

Jesus invites us to be released from being our own God and to be released from a ritualistic system that can enslave us. Because the reality is, if you walk away and don't hear this today—that "I need to fix my life by doing a technology Sabbath or by entering into these very legalistic, ritual systems on Sunday or whatever"—then you'll miss the real joy and the worship and the gift and the invitation of what God's rest is inviting us to experience. Not just a rest of the body, but a rest that extends beyond one day a week and infuses and informs our daily life, so that we don't feel that anxiety, so that we can rest in the promises of God, so we can rest in his provision, we can rest in his care for us.

That's what God is ultimately always trying to get us to see: come to me, all you weary and heavy laden, those who are working to save themselves—because religion can do that as well—and I will give you the rest that you really seek.

Ultimately, it's not about the digital detox; it's not about the legalistic rules. It's about coming to God, becoming vulnerable before him: I can't do it. I can't even be righteous enough. I can't even save myself. I can't even earn my own salvation. I have nothing. I'm wholly dependent upon you for everything: for my protection, for my provision, for my life, for my salvation. Everything I see around me is a gift from you. And I shouldn't take it and make it something he didn't design it to be, but receive it and enjoy it.

When we begin to do that, we begin to experience God's rest, the invitation to rest. Otherwise, we wind up striving in our lives to measure up, to prove our self-worth, and we lose our rest.

2. The Purpose of Rest

The second thing is that Jesus shows us the purpose of rest. He says in the second story here, when he encounters the Pharisees encountering his disciples picking grain from the grain fields: essentially, what they did is they would sort of scoop the grain up off the end of the stalk, it would all come into their hands, and they would rub their hands together to separate the chaff from the wheat itself so they could eat it. It was a pretty simple process, not very laborious—it's probably actually harder to shell a pecan, if you've ever shelled pecans before, which are very difficult sometimes to get those little pieces out.

The Pharisees look at this, though, and they go, "That's work." It's actually written—we have it written in the Mishna—that things like this would have been defined as work. And yet Jesus says something to them:

"Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which was not lawful for him to eat, nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? Or have you not read in the Law on the Sabbath that the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless? I tell you, something greater than the temple is here."

Jesus invites us into a worship, into a mercy, into a replenishment. Ultimately, the purpose of rest is to enjoy the gifts of God. Just like on that seventh day when God created the world and provided for Adam and Eve—before there were weeds, before there was a curse, before there was pain, before there was toil, before there was hardship—there was rest. Even their work and their livelihood and their lives connected to that when they rested in God: they enjoyed his presence, they worshiped him, they enjoyed his gifts, the good things that he gave in life.

So much of what is beyond Sabbath is that kind of rest that doesn't lose itself in legalism, but finds what God behind all of that wants to give us: to call us to himself, to enjoy his gifts, and to enjoy him.

What he begins to do is to say there are exceptions. This is kind of an argument he's making when he argues with the Pharisees here; he points out essentially two exceptions.

He says David got that bread, and that was for priests, and David ate that. Somehow the priest at that moment saw that human need superseded the legalistic temple rules, so he made a decision as the priest there, and God didn't kill him. Jesus makes this first argument.

The second argument that he makes is the fact that he says you're supposed to not do any work, and yet think about how much work you do in the temple on the Sabbath! Think about all those sacrifices, all the killing of animals, and you've got to stoke the fire and all of that stuff that has to be done to keep that temple going, which is exactly what God wanted them to do. But somewhere along the way, the priests looked at that and they said temple ritualistic law is more important than Sabbath. In this case, there's an exception, because behind it all, we need to fulfill and please and worship God.

Then Jesus says something: someone greater than the temple is here—than even the ritualistic rules and the laws and all of that behind it all. I am the one, and my rules and my way and my rest supersedes and redefines what true rest really is. Picking grain from a grain stalk and eating that on the Sabbath is not breaking the Sabbath; it's actually enjoying the gift and the fruit that God gives. It's reconnected to the actual purpose of Sabbath, which is not to make people fast (which was also disallowed on the Sabbath), but to feed them, to refresh them, to turn their eyes to me and see the one who gives the wheat and the fruit of the vine and all of these gifts in life, and let it lead them to enjoy and to rejoice and to worship and to see my mercy and my goodness in it. It connects us to God and his reign, to enjoy his gifts, to move us to worship.

The law tends to fence it so much that we miss the actual point. The purpose of rest is creative in so many ways. How do we enjoy that same rest in our world today? What would that look like? Something tells me that it's different for all of us. It's kind of like asking someone, "How do I love you best?" It kind of defeats the purpose if you have to get all the hints on what to buy them when you could just do it naturally when you think about the heart of the matter.

In the same way, how do we please God? How do we enjoy his rest? How do we do that in our own lives? It probably is creative and different for all of us. I'm trying to be a little bit practical in this today, because I don't want us to be lost in all of the metaphor and the different things. Rest can look different in the sense that it might be taking a walk and enjoying God's creation and nature in the world around us. It may be feasting, because they would do that on Sabbaths—feast and enjoy God's fruit and the gifts of fellowship and one another in that feasting. It can come in a variety of different ways.

I'll pull from a few folks who have written on this idea, because I'm trying to be incredibly practical and not abstract on this. A few people suggest, for example: ceasing, resting, embracing, feasting. How do we fulfill the Sabbath? What does that look like in our lives? It's creative, but it's ultimately about enjoying God.

Some people say not only are we to rest from work, but also from productivity, anxiety, worry, possessiveness, consumerism. Resting of the body as well as of the mind, the emotions, the spirit. Embracing is about deliberately taking hold of Christian values, of our calling in life, and the wholeness that God offers us. Feasting is about celebrating God and his goodness in individual and corporate worship, as well as in feasting with beauty, music, food, affection, social interaction.

I'll give you one more. This is from a pastor named Tim Keller, who is very thoughtful. I'm not going to read all his stuff, but he actually has multiple categories that he recommends that we consider on the Sabbath in creative ways, so that it's not just sitting around watching football on Sunday (not to say that's bad). He gives a series of categories:

• Completely unplanned time: We need time of this kind and complete cessation from activity—time off.

• Avocational time: Something that's pleasurable that takes some skill or expertise. This could be a sport, a game, or music. The key insight here is personal: a fisherman shouldn't fish on Sabbath because that's work for him. What actually refreshes you will be different from what refreshes someone else.

• Contemplative time: We need that in our lives. Prayer, solitude, journaling, reading, and reflection are crucial ways to replenish our inward rest. We need time with God; Sabbath should be about connecting with God as well.

• Aesthetic time: We need time to simply enjoy the beauty of God's world—a walk, sitting in creation.

• Relational time: A meal, gatherings, enjoying friendship and company.

We also want to inject Sabbath into our work. Associated with the Sabbath laws were the gleaning laws in which owners of fields were not allowed to harvest out the edges. Listen to this: some people have used this as an inspiration for deliberately setting fewer goals for themselves in a given day or week—not harvesting out the edges, not trying to squeeze productivity out of every single second of the day. This is for people so given to overwork that even a day off doesn't break the cycle; they need to practice restraint.

3. The Expansion of Rest

Ultimately, we find that expansion of rest that he talks about there at the end is the final thing that Jesus is really showing. One of the things that we can see here in this passage is that God's rest expands beyond a single day of the week. Sabbath is a gift, but it's also a signpost to something that points to an ultimate reality—a day, as it records in Revelation, when we enter the final rest of God in all its fullness.

By the way, do you know that the author also describes in Revelation that hell is a place of restlessness? There is no rest. Rest is a gift and a theme and something God has for us, and it talks about it all the way from the beginning to the very end: that we have lost it, and it is promised to us again. When we come to Christ, we begin to experience the rest that we so desperately need. It's not in its fullest sense—there's still discouragement, there's still toil, there's still pain, there's still suffering, there's still hardship—but in the midst of that, we can find a calm and a peace and a rest in God that informs and allows our lives to be signposts to an ultimate reality and a promise of what is to come.

Jesus here expands his rest to one who does not have rest on this day: this man in the temple who has a withered hand. If you think about ancient times, when harvesting or carpentry required people to work with their hands so much—it's not like the service industry today—it was hard. To not have the ability to use one of your hands was very difficult. There's something about the reality of the curse, that the impact of that is not just that we've lost rest on the inside, but the pain and the toil and the fear and all of these other things released in the fall in our lives mean that we don't experience the fullness of God's presence, we aren't able to enter into that rest in a full way.

This man on this day isn't able to do that. And so Jesus heals the man on the Sabbath to show that the man's need—his need for rest—is what the Sabbath is really about. It's about God extending his gift and his rest over his creation, even to those who are not in rest in that moment, and to invite a man with a withered hand who is living with something as a result of the fall in his life, and have God spread his tent, to spread his goodness, to spread his salvation and his healing power over the life of the man.

Jesus says that withholding good on the Sabbath is ultimately evil. There's something about the rest that we receive where we don't get caught in the legalism of it, we don't lose our way in it, but we are called to be people who extend that.

Now, Jesus is different: he heals with just his speaking. For us to try to heal, if we were going to become doctors or something, there is a hardship, right? We're not called to go into the hospital every single day and work through the Sabbath—the implications are different for us. We still have to enter into rest as well. But there's something about our lives, whether it be on the Sabbath or outside of the Sabbath, that we begin to extend God's rest to model it to the world around us, because our lives, when we have that kind of rest in our lives, display something to the world around us.

There's something about Israel in ancient times: when she began to enter into that rest, when she began to live out the rhythms of Sabbath, it was so different to the world around them. In ancient times, you know about farm life. Farm life's hard, and farm life doesn't cease, especially during the harvest season. And yet God called them to rest one day a week, to trust in his provision that even if they couldn't pick it fast enough, somehow God would fill and supply all that they would need, and they could take a break and they could rest. The model of their lives was unique to the nations around them in the ways that they operated: in letting the land rest, in letting their animals rest, in letting their slaves and servants rest. It's remarkable! It was so different that the nations around would begin to see and wonder what was so different: how could they trust their God to that degree?

It is the same for us: when we can have God's rest in our lives, when we can begin to unplug from the world in a variety of different ways to experience not just the rest from work, or the rest from consumerism, or the rest from technology, but also the rest deep within our souls, then we begin to become a signpost to the world around us that displays God's peace in our lives.

God's design was that we should always enjoy his rest. Through Christ, we begin to experience that rest that relieves our fear, our anxiety, our labors to provide for ourselves fully, the guilt or the shame of measuring up. He has done all that we need; we find all that we need truly in him.

Finally, there is a day that comes when we will enter into the fullness of his rest in the kingdom that comes. When we receive rest, it infuses and informs all of our lives. It becomes a rhythm in which we experience rest, but we also carry that rest into our work and daily lives. Our work becomes an extension of God's rest—not about accumulation; our work is about creation of human flourishing. Whether we create a healthy work environment where people labor and encourage one another to grow in their skill set, or we create products and promote healthy business practices, even our work can find higher meaning and purpose. It can! There is good in work. We can labor for a different end and a different purpose than even perhaps the main company goals; we can create more meaning and invite others into it.

The parent that is a homemaker does the same thing: creating an environment where the family grows and thrives, and extends that in forms of hospitality to those around them. Our rest means that we also don't worry when sales goals are missed or company downsizing looms. As difficult as these things are, in God's rest, we can remember that he loves us, that he promises to care for us. We can have a kind of rest.

It's scary to receive that rest, because it means surrender. It means that we must acknowledge our limitations and lack of control over life, and enter into a submissive trust that we work, but he gives the growth. We fail, but God is still working a good plan for us in it all.

Entering into Ultimate Rest

Rest extends beyond this life. Before I say that, I'll just say: man, I am preaching to myself this week. This word hits home for me.

I think it invites all of us into something beautiful and good, and I hope that we could hear that from God's word today: to enjoy his presence and his gifts in life. There's just so many ways I thought about enjoying and entering into these moments in life—when your kids are playing, you remember that, some of you parents, in those moments where you just go, "Man, this is good."

Years ago, Sher and I packed up a U-Haul when we left Colorado. I remember seeing those mountains in the background as we went, and here we were on this journey back to the Southeast. I just remember thinking: what a gift a wife is to a man, and the gift that she was, and she came because God gave that gift to me. There's something in just entering into the rest and the gifts of God in this life. I'm just trying to paint a picture, practically, of how we are called to enter into the rest: to enjoy God, to receive from him, to see him as the provider, the protector, the sustainer of life.

Sometimes I find even in my own self—I'm just being honest here—I find myself laboring too hard, pushing too hard, not trusting God enough, worrying too much. I need to let that go. I think probably for all of us, to some degree, we do. But that's the practice of life: God is always refining us, always calling us, shaping us so that we might depend on him more, we might rest in him more.

Rest extends beyond this life. Ultimate rest is the life to come; we only taste it now. But when we bury a loved one, we can grieve and yet not grieve as those with no hope. We can also have a peace and a hope and a rest in God's promises for all his people. In that sense, when our lives become infused in God's rest, we become signposts. The Sabbath rest is a sign of an ultimate rest that is found now, and its fullness in the life to come.

God reigns, and yet the world is fallen. Our world is burdensome, and yet we can infuse meaning into it. We can labor for an alternate end. Each decision to rest, to trust, to unplug, to work for human flourishing, to see God's common grace and good extended in this world is a way we extend his rest to others. We invite them to receive it, and one day we will fully enter into that rest. By God's grace, people around us will also enter into it because of our lives.

The weeds, the sweat, the frustration of our work will be gone, and we will enjoy God's rest fully, and our work will be without burden.

Let's pray.