St Michaels Church Podcast
The God of rest | Sam Banner | 21.07.24
This morning we've got two short readings. The first is from Exodus chapter 20 verses 8 to 11. And if you've picked up a church Bible on this way and it's on page 78. Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and to the earth, the sea and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. The second reading is taken from Hebrews chapter 4, verses 9 to 11. She's on page 1203 of the church Bibles. There remains then a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For anyone who enters God's rest also rests from their works, just as God did from his. Let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest so that no one will perish by following their example of disobedience. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks, Sean. As I said a few moments ago I'm Sam, one of the clergy team. It's brilliant to be here with you. Work, work, work, work, work. This morning we're going to be thinking about work and rest. Sometimes we're asked, do you live to work or do you work to live? I hope that we can appreciate that work is more broad than what we paid to do. You may well be a full-time parent or I volunteer at a school, a charity shop or a hospice. There's lots of kinds of work. Let's pause for a moment and just think, what is work for us in this season of life? What is your work? And with that in mind, do you live to work? Do you get up in the morning buzzing with the thought of cracking on with the tasks ahead of you? If that's you, how do you find switching off? What does rest look like for you? When was the last time you turned your phone off? Put it in a drawer and left it behind for a few hours. Or do you work to live? There's stuff that has to be done to look after yourself, your family to put food on the table. But you don't relish the work itself. It's just a means to an end. Well, if that's you, how do you bring God into your time off when it comes around? And though you might be resigned to or even resent your work at times, how do you bring God into it? The good news this morning, whatever, wherever you fall on that spectrum, is that God has something good to say about work and rest. It's not a matter on which God is silent. From day one, he's been crystal clear. And the question for us this morning is, what do we do with that? Our God is a God of rest. Let me be clear, though. He's not a God of idleness or sloth, but of rest in its proper contest, a healthy rhythm of work and rest. Of all their beings or people or goals you could put on the throne of your life, the God of the Bible is the only one who cares about you enough to give you that healthy balance, just what you need, work and rest. This is the final sermon in our Messages from the Heart series, looking at the nature and character of God. And as has been said this evening, we'll go a little bit deeper and have a bit more chance for discussion in our pre-chariots of fire discussion. Eric Little jeopardized his chances of winning Olympic gold and risked embarrassing the nation by refusing to run his 100 meter heat because it was on a Sunday. His Christian conviction meant that even that 10 seconds of work was not something he was willing to do. Now for the sake of that seminar this evening, I'd love it. Please redeem your favour. There's a QR code that is going to come up on the screen. Now this is a request to take your phone out, scan the QR code, and it'll take you to a slider where you can put in your questions and I'd love it and my co-host this evening would love it. If you could ping in your questions, hopefully we'll cover some of them in the sermon, but if not, you can come back tonight and we can discuss further. So you go for that submission to get your phone out. Was Little mad? How'd he gone cookie? Was he getting worked up about an Old Testament law that doesn't apply anymore? I found Tim Chester really helpful. He argued that although the Old Testament law no longer defines the will of God for us, the law continues to point to the will of God for us, continues to point to the will of God for us. Jesus perfectly fulfilled the law and in Christ we fulfill it too, but that doesn't make it redundant. It still points to who God is and what he values. He is a God of rest and he wants us to rest too. One surprise I find when I come to rest or come to rest in the past, I was sort of finished work, crash out of work and thinking that rest was just the absence of work. You just get home and that's rest. You think it comes easily, comes naturally, but my experience, maybe yours too, is that the rest can be as hard as works as well as knowing how to rest well. What is it that actually gives you life that recharges your batteries and how do we be intentional about that, making time to enjoy those things or prepare for that time? And I heard the next few minutes where I encourage us, inspire us, equip us to love our neighbors as ourselves as we come to the God of rest. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, by your spirit at work among us with the unfolding of your word, bring light to our lives this morning. Amen. So from three different passages, we're going to see why rest is important to God, what he's done about it and how he invites us into it. So the first point from Exodus 20 is this rest as reliance, rest as reliance. God created us for rest. God's people, the Israelites are receiving the Ten Commandments. In Egypt, they became a numerous people liberated from Egypt. They now need guidance as to how to live and shape their common life together in a way that pleases God. Note that God didn't give the Ten Commandments and say, "Meet these and I'll rescue you." He rescued them. He heard their cry and then gave them the Ten Commandments. Number one, have no other gods before me. Number two, don't worship any created thing. Number three, don't use my name as anything other than my name. Number four, remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. The fourth command, remember the Sabbath. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord, your Lord your God. "On it you shall do not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns." Keep the Sabbath special. Set apart for God. Sabbath comes from the Hebrew word for rest. Six days for labor and work, the seventh Saturday, a day of rest. For everyone, the locals, the expats, your children, your pets, your animals. Why? For in six days, the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. That last line is lifted directly from Genesis 2 with seventh day being replaced as Sabbath day. This isn't an idea that God thought up on the flies as people were coming through the Red Sea. This has been his plan since the beginning, the seventh day, the Sabbath day, a unique day, special day, a day positively set apart for him. commentator David Atkinson writes that it was the seventh day that was the pinnacle of the creation week. God sitting back to admire and enjoy with us all that he had made. As Jesus said, no servants is greater than his master. If God the one, the only one who's infinite and has no need physically for rest, if he laid down his tools to enjoy a day off, then how proud are we to think that the world would fall apart if we stopped for a day? Of course it won't. Atkinson again, the fourth commandment is an invitation to imitate our maker, to reflect his image in us. We're called to observe the same pattern in our service of God in creation as God in the creating itself. Sabbath is a trust exercise. God invites us to rest, to demonstrate our reliance on him and to enjoy with him the work of our hands. You might have done one of those trust exercises where you're invited to maybe stand on some blocks and trust that the folks, the friends, the people you're with behind you are going to reach out and catch you. It made me think of that scene towards the end of Mean Girls where they're invited to come out one at a time and confess and say sorry and then as a crowd they all catch each other. The Sabbath is a bit like that. We're invited to trust. One of the issues that I find with that though is it, it leaves us open to vulnerability, to criticism. Say with this triple example of writing this sermon, spending the week thinking about Sabbath, thinking about working six days, hanging day off, thinking about that principle and how to talk about it, commend it to all of you here this morning. Well, I was very tempted to not do that myself this week. I, you know, so have caught up in writing this sermon, wanting it to be a good sermon to please you, to impress you, to serve you. I wrestled with the matter. Should I sort of eke out those extra few hours or was it better to put it to one side, to trust and to rest? Now having taken the rest option, you could quite easily say to me, well, Sam, you know, you're something really could have done with those extra few hours and I'm open to that, that criticism, but that's what Sabbath does. It makes us vulnerable to, to that critique. Invites us to trust actually that, that it's worth it. It's worth laying down our work, our projects, our endeavors to rest, to enjoy God, to enjoy one another. I'm sure you can think of times like that where you've been torn between resting and catching up on the week or attending to that thing that hasn't quite been done, getting ahead of Monday morning. Rest demonstrates reliance. There's a scene in the film, Patch Adams, which is quite a niche Robin Williams film, but I recommend it to you. It's based on the true story. He's a doctor in America and he believes that laughter and happiness, joy, is crucial to the sort of the well-being of the people. So he goes about trying to encourage people, make people laugh as part of his doctoring. But in that sort of happy kind of, in that project, there's this tragic moment, spoiler, where the love of his life, I can't remember if they're married at this point or engaged or what, but the love of his life, also a doctor, answers the phone, there's sort of an emergency call from one of their community, and she goes to try and help. And this chap's having a, has a psychotic episode, kills her and then turns the gun on himself. And Patch, the film sort of started with me because you sort of see him then on this sort of cliff top and a wilderness, American kind of wilderness scene, crying out to God that I don't think he believes in, but he's crying out to God, to the Creator, you know, if it's true, and if, if you created the world in seven days, well, why did you rest on the seventh? Why didn't you fix this problem? Why did you stop when there was clearly work still to be done? That's the sort of criticism that, that stopping and resting leaves us open to your vulnerability and rest invites us, God invites us to trust him. And we see this trust throughout the Psalms. In peace, I will lie down and sleep. Then I'll struggle with sleeping. In peace, I'll lie down and sleep for you alone, Lord, make me dwell in safety, Psalm 4. This is the trust that Little exercised, remembering the Sabbath, that in his not competing, the world wouldn't fall apart, that God would be glorified. And that's about all we all face, isn't it? The desire to get things done. It seems one application from Genesis, the creation story, is that gardening is for the six days and resting for the seventh. Often, growing up, my mum would cook a splendid Sunday roast. You know, we'd be a nice day on the patio in the garden, enjoying that rare day of sunshine, enjoying slowing down, enjoying the peace and quiet. And then, sure enough, one of our neighbours would start the lawnmower, and the peace and quiet would be shattered. Can't we all just slow down, just enjoy a day of peace and quiet? The struggle is real, isn't it? We see the lawn looking unkempt, or the pile of paperwork building up, the washing pile growing, and it's like we can't help ourselves. But we're invited to rest because God rested. We rest to demonstrate our trust in God. We rest as worship. We sit back and admire the work of God's hands and the work of our own hands. What's the point in working six days if we don't stop to just sit back and enjoy it? As for what counts as work and what doesn't, that is dangerous territory, and I don't think a prescriptive list is particularly helpful. So much is a framework through which to evaluate our life choices. Christians celebrate on a Sunday, not the Jewish Sabbath, the Saturday. We say we're on a Sunday, the first day of the week, because that's the day Jesus rose. So in talking about the Sabbath, we're thinking about the Sabbath principle of resting from our work to reconnect with God, with others, ourselves with creation. So the question might be for you, does sorting out the washing up or putting a wash on, doing your emails, going to the shops, does that facilitate that rest, that reconnection? Does that recharge your batteries? And it might be that it does, it might be that getting that thing done makes your heart sing, brilliant essay. But if not, if it's a chore, why not trying it done the day before or leave it till tomorrow? The world won't fall apart. Does that make sense? The God of rest made us to rest, that we might demonstrate our reliance on him. The second aspect I'd like us to consider together is rest as resistance. God rescued us for rest. I think it's fascinating that the Ten Commandments are repeated, rehearsed in Deuteronomy. It's called Deuteronomy Second Law, and sure enough, the Ten Commandments are there right at the start. And you can play spot the difference, they're very similar, there's a few changes of wording. But one particular difference is the rationale for the Fourth Commandment. In Exodus chapter 20, Ten Commandments, it's creation, that's why we should rest. But here in Deuteronomy, the rationale is the Exodus, it's the fact that God has rescued his people from slavery. One of my friends worked at Wimbledon the last few weeks. He was involved with the sound broadcaster who was there a few weeks before setting up mics and cables, and he was there the two weeks of the championships to make sure that wherever you were in the world, you could hear the hits of the tennis ball that cried the players, the shout of the crowd at just the right level. And although he worked shift and had sort of a morning off here in the evening off there, he was relieved last Sunday when he got back to ours, he was staying with us. He was relieved that it was over because he hadn't had a proper day off for a few weeks. That's how we feel, isn't it, when we've been working through the week for two, three, four weeks. And you probably felt that when you've had to work a weekend for one reason or another. The Israelites, they had had 80 years plus of harsh forced labor. They had missed a lot of days off and they cried out and God rescued them. And here the Israelites, the next generation of Israelites are reminded that they, their parents, the days of people had been rescued from slavery. So don't go back, don't enslave yourselves again. In Egypt, they were told to make bricks. And that's what the world commands us, make bricks, be productive, be more efficient, get more done. And this second iteration of the comments invites us to rest as resistance, to Pharaoh and to the world. By taking off a day, a day, a week, we show that we're not enslaved to anyone or anything. We express that only God has ultimate authority in our lives and we bow the knee only to him. Paul writes, "For the whole law is fulfilled in one word. You shall love your neighbor as yourself." There's an emphasis not only on our rest as resistance to the systems and the pressures of the day, but as a way of loving our neighbor. It's not only about our rest, but lying others to rest. God's care encompasses all society. He doesn't say you sit back and have someone else do your work. That would be easy enough, wouldn't it? But he says sit back and all of your household with you. Our desire to rest shouldn't come at others' expense. We're called to be prepared to be intentional ahead of our day off, perhaps to pick up those extra bits we need the day before. A day to sit back, rather than fretting about missed targets we're getting ahead, a day to enjoy what, under the Lord's hand, has been achieved. Doesn't that sound great? Third and finally, the God of rest invites us to rest. Our reading in Hebrews spoke of a Sabbath rest for the people of God. We work, we give ourselves, to the good works created for us to do. We work as those freed from slavery. We work as an expression of our joyful, thankful adoration and worship. We can rest because Jesus cried out it is finished as he hung on the cross and died for you and for me. Jesus is our Sabbath rest. He says, "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I'll give you rest." A few moments ago we had the pleasure of baptizing Rufus and Annie. Baptism is that first step in the journey where we place our trust in Jesus and enter God's Sabbath rest. So are you working to live or are you living to work? If you are living to work, how might you practice the principle of Sabbath this week? How can you ensure you're working from a place of rest in Christ rather than striving for your own name and your own accumulation? Where can you take time this week to lay down your work entirely, to rejoice in God in his creation and share his gifts with others? Are you working to live? If you're working to live, Jesus has a bigger vision of your nine to five. You're his craftsmanship, his good works, prepared in advance for you to do. Might it be that you could possibly do something different that helps you to worship him? Or are there ways that you can bring God in to your present situation? God's character is to bless us. The Sabbath commandment wasn't to spoil our fun, it was to care for us, to prioritize our well-being in our relationship with him. So come to Christ, discover and enter the Sabbath rest he has for you. Work from that place of rest and let the rhythms of your life point to the one who does hold all things together and works all things for your good. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you to you know that we are but dust and that from the start your day that we should both work and rest and that we can do so as worship to you with you. In your kindness you set us a pattern for our flourishing and have set us free from the sin that enslaves us. May we along with Rufus and Annie and all the saints enter the Sabbath rest that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. And knowing that he has done everything necessary for our salvation, may we give ourselves to living ordered balanced lives of exuberant thanks and joyful worship. To your praise and glory. Amen. 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