Celebrate

Celebrate

Chet Phillips

Transcript

Good morning. My name's Chet. I'm one of the pastors here. We are in the last week of our Hammer and Hammock series where we have been talking about work and rest. And as we start today, I just want to remind us that we believe a gospel of rest. We believe a message of rest, that Christianity is a proclamation of rest.

Over and against and compared to all other religions, Christianity is fundamentally different. So that if we had another faith, if we believed in another God, if we worshipped in another religion, but primarily what they teach and what is taught and what is said and what we would understand is, come do these things, don't do those things, and then you'll be one of the good guys. Come do these things, don't do those things, and then God will love you. Come live this way, be this type of person, have this type of life, celebrate in this manner, and then you'll be welcomed. Then you'll reach nirvana.

Then you'll have inner peace. Then you'll have, and Christianity isn't that message. The fundamental message behind Christianity is not, hey, come here and do these things. The fundamental message of Christianity starts off like this. You're terrible. It gets better.

That's how it starts off. You're a sinner. You are broken. You cannot do the things it takes to be okay with God. You cannot do what is necessary. You cannot work hard enough, be moral enough, be holy enough to stand before God and have him accept you.

But Jesus is good. And he has lived perfectly on our behalf and died in our place for our sin, and that his death is a sacrifice that covers us. And so the gospel of Christianity, the message of Christianity is come to Jesus. He saves sinners. It's a gospel of rest. It's a message of rest.

It's not come labor, come work, come have something to present to God. It's a message of when Jesus says, come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. That's the message, to come to Jesus and have him save you, have his good work on your behalf. And then it's out of that that we do everything else. And so in this series we've been talking about we're designed by God in creation. He set the pattern of six days of work, one day of rest.

Six days of work, one day of rest. Six days of work, one day of rest. So that's the rhythm he put into creation. And so we spent some time talking about that we're meant to have purpose, we're meant to have dominion and work, good work that we do that takes time and effort, and that we're meant to shut everything down and rest for a day. We've tried to spend some time talking about what that looks like, and that it's worth taking the time and energy to figure out how you rest well. So some of you work with your minds and you need to rest with your hands.

You need to take up a hobby. You need to learn how to paint or play the piano or build birdhouses. And some of you work with your hands all the time and you need to start reading some fiction. And maybe it is restful to watch a show or two or a movie on Netflix, but it is not restful to have all of your rest just be Netflix. And trying to figure out what it looks like for you to rest, it actually may be more difficult for you to rest well and actually feel rejuvenated because you have to get in your car and you have to drive somewhere and you have to walk around and be near trees and get bitten by a bug.

But that actually makes you want to go back to work rather than just wearing sweatpants all day. And so what we've tried to talk about is we've got to figure out a way to do that. And so in this last Sunday, we're going to talk about one specific thing. As we were talking about this, we just started looking at it, and we were looking at kind of the calendar that God put into the world. And so he says, work six days, rest one, work six days, rest one. But he also intentionally calendared other interruptions.

And so we want to talk about celebrating. That Christians are designed and humans are designed to celebrate, to have rhythms of vacation, rhythms of holidays, rhythms of days and weeks and times that are feasts and celebrations. And so here's kind of our point today. That we were designed, humanity was designed for celebratory rest, and Christians should be better at this than anyone. We were designed for celebratory rest, and Christians should be better at this than anyone. And we already kind of know that.

That's the way we understand culture. You can remember being in high school or being in college and being at a party, and it just not being that good of a party. And you thought to yourself, this party needs more Christians. And then it would be great. This isn't something we're known for, but it is something that we ought to be known for. You have never thought that.

Some of you were Christians in high school, and you still didn't think that. You showed up to parties as a Christian in high school, saw other Christians and thought, oh man, and you need to repent. But here's the thing. We're supposed to. We're designed for it, and we're supposed to be good at it. So grab your Bibles, go to John chapter 2.

We'll spend most of our time there. I'm going to read a little bit from Deuteronomy 16 to kind of set the stage, but we'll spend most of our time in John chapter 2. I'll let you flip there, and then we're going to pray. It should be on page 517 if you have one of the blue Bibles in the row. If you don't own a Bible, take that one. It's our gift to you.

We bought boxes and boxes of them. So you may have them. And go home and use a magnifying glass so that you can read it. All right, let's pray. God, we thank you for this time we get to spend in your word this morning, and we thank you for this time that we get to spend with your church this morning. And we pray that you would bless it, that we might grow closer to each other and closer to you, and be equipped and rested to fulfill all that you've given us and all the weight and purpose that you've laid on us as your people.

In Jesus' name, amen. All right, so before we get to John chapter 2, I'm going to read a few places in Deuteronomy 16. So this is where God rescues the people of Israel out of Egypt, and he gives them the law, and he begins to teach them this is what it's going to look like to follow me. This is what you'll be. So we've spent some time in the Ten Commandments because he sets up the Sabbath there, that one of the Ten Commandments is take a day off, and then he starts giving them feasts and festivals that they're going to participate in.

And so I want to read a few of these, and we'll have them above on the screen. So in Deuteronomy 16, he lists out three feasts where he wants everybody to stop and gather in Jerusalem. And he's kind of telling them before they get into the Promised Land, this is how it's going to work. And he says, Then you shall keep the feast of weeks to the Lord your God. This is verse 10 in Deuteronomy. With the tribute of a freewill offering from your hand, which you shall give as the Lord your God blesses you.

So everybody is supposed to bring something to this feast. And you shall rejoice before the Lord your God, you and your son and your daughter and your male servant, your female servant, your Levite who's within your town. So here's the command. You shall rejoice. You're going to take time to rejoice. You're going to bring something and you're going to celebrate.

Rejoice means to display or feel great joy or delight. So one of the commands in the law, and people will quote commands from the Old Testament law on a regular basis. They're trying to say, Well, the Bible says this. The Bible says that. Nobody's ever proof text this one on you. Well, the Bible says you shall rejoice.

It's like, but it's in there. One of the commands was, and they got in trouble if they didn't do this. These were aggressive commands. They weren't like, Hey, this is kind of a suggestion. I was thinking maybe I should have a feast. He says, Everyone's going to be there.

And if you're not there, you're going to be cut off. If you're not there, you're not welcome anymore. If you don't come to this party, we're done. You're not my friend anymore. This isn't how it works. It's aggressive in the commands here.

And it's a command to rejoice, to take time to celebrate. He keeps going. The Feast of Tabernacles. He says this. You shall rejoice in your feast. You and your son and your daughter, your male servant, your female servant, the Levite, the sojourner, the fatherless, the widow who are within your towns.

So he says, Everybody. This isn't just for the elite. This isn't just for a certain group. This isn't just for men. This isn't just for children. Everybody's showing up and everybody's having a good time.

For seven days, you shall keep the feast to the Lord, your God, at the place that the Lord will choose because the Lord, your God will bless you and all your produce and in all the work of your hands so that you will be altogether joyful. So God sets up the rhythm of you're going to work six days. You're going to rest one. And then in that, he interrupts it with extra holidays and feasts. And he says, you're going to gather all of you together and you're going to have a good time. You're going to rejoice because I'm going to bless you.

You're going to be joyful and grateful in my presence in front of me together. That's the command. And so he writes this into the rhythm of humanity that we're designed to have holidays. We're designed to have vacations. We're designed to have joyful, delightful rest. He wants us to.

It honors him. It is not honoring to God for you to always be sad and mourning and bitter and everything's dark and everything's depressed. That's not that. No. Sometimes, yeah, sometimes there are things to mourn and sometimes there are things to be sad for. And absolutely.

But sometimes you're supposed to eat a steak and say, thank you, Jesus. Sometimes you're supposed to wrap that steak in bacon and be thankful for grace and God's good work on earth that he invented flavor. And some of you, you're like, I don't get down with steak. Well, sometimes you're supposed to eat some crispy kale right out of the oven and do the best you can to praise the Lord. So here's the thing.

We don't carry these feasts over into the Christian calendar. So when Christianity starts in among a Jewish people, starts with Jesus who's Jewish and his disciples who are Jewish and it explodes among Jewish people and they thought, here's the Messiah. He's going to save the Jews. And then all of a sudden, the Holy Spirit does something weird and he saves people who aren't Jewish. And they had to have a meeting. And this is a thing that Christians do forever is the Holy Spirit does something and then we have a meeting about it to see if we're okay with it.

So they have to have a meeting to be like, are we cool with this? Can the Holy Spirit save people who aren't Jewish? And they decide in Acts 15 to follow the leadership of the Holy Spirit and they say, yes, he can save non-Jews. And they have a discussion about, are we going to export Judaism or were they saved just by Christ? Do they need all the practices of the law? And here's the meeting they have in Acts 15.

They look at each other and they say, guys, we're not even good at the practices of the law. Why would we give those to these people who've been saved by grace in Jesus without it? I'm reading between the lines but they kind of said that would be mean and unhelpful. So they say, no, they just get Jesus. And so the Jewish people continue to practice some of the feasts and the festivals and some of the practices of the law. They continue to practice them but they practice them in grace and in understanding that this is part of their heritage and who Christ is and that they're Jewish but they hand off to all the Gentiles just Jesus and all the stuff we have in the New Testament.

So we don't carry, we don't import all of the things from the Old Testament to the New Testament but what we do understand is that God did design this rhythm and so that it makes sense for us as Christians to celebrate Easter when Christ rose from the grave and to celebrate well and to be grateful. It is okay for us as Christians to celebrate other holidays and other times and other vacations for us to have time set aside where we're going to be grateful, we're going to celebrate, we're going to honor God, we're going to gather together, we're going to make a big deal out of how big and good He is but not necessarily all the feasts and everything that we see in the Old Testament. Okay, so John chapter 2. Now this is just a story about Jesus.

It's His first public miracle, His first public sign that He displays His glory in and I love this story. So we're just going to kind of spend some time in the story and then we're going to talk out of it. I want to point out a few things. The main point of this story is that God, that Jesus shows His divinity, shows that He is God and this is His first public miracle. That's kind of the main point John's hanging on this. But there's so much beauty in that whenever we see Jesus working and acting on the earth, we get a picture of who God is.

He's the perfect image of the invisible God. So sometimes people think, well how would God act towards me? How would God treat me? We get to look at Jesus and answer a lot of those questions. And so we see God's heart carried over in celebration in this story. And then, I also think we see a beautiful picture of, a small picture in this moment of what Jesus is ultimately going to do.

And so we know that we were created for celebratory rest, for vacation, for holiday. There was times and seasons we're meant to do that. And in this, I want to spend a little time talking about this story and then I want to help try to prove the idea that Christians should be better at this than anyone else. Alright, but let's spend a little time in this story. John chapter 2, verse 1. On the third day, there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee and the mother of Jesus was there.

Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples. He's just getting started. He has about five disciples at this point. He's going to keep recruiting. Okay, pause for a second. Wedding in Cana.

We've got to understand this. This was a small town near probably where Jesus grew up in Galilee. Jesus' mom's there so it's likely that they were related to some of these people. Weddings then work a little differently. So they would, parents would work out who you were going to marry.

They would go pay the bride price. The groom would go pay a bride price. It's kind of a negotiation thing. So like, you know how like now when you have to go like meet their parents or whatever? In this day, you've got to take your parents with you. Made it nicer.

So anyway, they work it out and then the groom leaves and he goes and prepares a place. So they work out. We're going to get married. It's going to be at least a year. He goes and prepares a place near his father's house. His father kind of keeps looking.

To see if he's prepared it well enough. This is where Jesus says things like, I'm going to go prepare a place for you. That's husband-wife talk. That's bridegroom talk. When Jesus says, I don't know the day or the hour but the father does, that's bridegroom talk because the father keeps getting to look at the place the son's preparing and then he signs off on, okay, this is good enough. You can go get your wife now.

So then, when the father says that, like he walks in, I'm sure he walked in sometimes and he's like, yeah, you going to bring your wife in here? See any crown mold? Y'all going, this is, uh-huh, you got some work to do, boy. And you leave, you know, and finally he says, okay, this is good enough, go get her. They go marching in. This is the story where Jesus tells later where he says that the groom shows up and everybody had to be ready.

They just kind of knew at some point he's going to show up but they didn't know exactly where he comes marching in. He gets the bride. They march back out. They have a wedding ceremony that was kind of small and then after consummating the marriage, they have a week-long, five to seven-day long celebration. It was all part of it and everybody gets pretty much invited to that. So that's kind of the zone we're in.

We're at this wedding. We're at this party, this week-long wedding celebration that Jesus and his disciples were invited to. When the wine ran out, it just got intense. Now the story's taking a turn on us. This is bad news. All right, so Jesus was invited to the wedding with his disciples, verse three.

When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, they have no wine. And Jesus said to her, woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come. His mother said to the servants, do whatever he tells you. I love this moment in human history where the God of the universe has to interact with his mother on earth. Here's what happens.

She apparently knows they don't have any wine. We don't know how related to, close to the situation, but she's heard they don't have any wine. This is a problem. Wine was the predominant drink you would be drinking. They wouldn't have had water and other drinks. They would have wine mostly.

It is alcoholic, but it's not as alcoholic as the wine we have now, most likely. It was regular drinking wine for the whole extent of this party. We don't know how far in we are, but we know that it was the groom's family's responsibility to provide wine, to provide this feast. And all of a sudden, now there's going to be this kind of shadow, this dark cloud hanging over this family that they didn't do this well. They didn't. It kind of starts the whole marriage off in a little bit of, it's a problem.

And so Jesus' mom is involved somehow. She goes to Jesus and she just says, Jesus, they've run out of wine. Now, she apparently knows something about Jesus. She thinks he can handle this. Now, there are stories that aren't in the Bible that people have kind of made up about Jesus doing miracles his whole childhood. We don't buy into all of those.

We don't know that. We aren't given much understanding of Jesus' childhood or his youth or whatever, but she feels like Jesus can handle this wine problem. So there's got to be something. She's seen enough. You know, she saw the angel show up telling him he was God. So she thinks maybe he can handle this.

I don't know. She comes to him. She says, they're out of wine. And Jesus says, woman, what does this have to do with me? Now, most of y'all would get in trouble if you called your mom woman. Jesus was not being disrespectful.

It is a sin to be disrespectful. Jesus was not being disrespectful. As best we can tell, this is a kind of a term of endearment, but also a little bit of a, you know, maybe some mix between ma'am and mama, but it was a little bit of like, like I might always say mama with a long pause. What does this have to do with me? Not the caterer. Like that's kind of what he's saying.

He says, he says, woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come. So what he's saying is I'm not here to, this isn't, this is my plan. I'm not doing, this isn't really what I'm, they're out of wine. That's, I'm sorry. And you know what his mama does?

She listens to him. And then she looks at the servants, says, y'all do whatever he tells you. And she walks. She doesn't respond to him. She just, and isn't that like a mama come tell you what to do in front of your disciples and everything. So she just says, do whatever he tells you.

And I just, I can't, I can just kind of see Jesus just, he doesn't say this. I can just see him watching her walk away like, now he's got to do something. So it says, now there were six stone water jars there for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding 20 or 30 gallons. Okay. Stone water jars, Jewish rites of purification. The Jewish rites of purification were stuff that the rabbis had added over time to be a little bit extra holy.

It wasn't in the law, but it was like, this is good. It's not a bad thing. It's a good thing to wash our hands before we eat, to wash our cups and our dishes in this special ceremonial way. But it was added. It wasn't stuff God had handed down. It was stuff that was added.

So God did give specific laws about how to celebrate and how to have ceremonies and how to have sacrifices. And this was just added. For example, maybe your grandmother told you when you go to church on Sunday, you better dress as nice as possible. I can't, like I don't know about my, my grandmother would go, like if I was wearing, if I was wearing this, like I think it's bothered her when she comes on Sundays. It's nice to dress up. We got some folks here who do it, who do it well.

It's not in the Bible though. Sunday best was, came up somewhere else. They didn't hear. Now it's nice to be respectful. It's nice to dress well. So it's a good thing that sometime at some point became codified.

Do this or you're wrong. That's what happened with these ceremonial jars. So Jesus sees these giant jars and I, again, doesn't say this. I think he cracks a smile. He says, fill those up. Fill the jars with water.

They filled them up to the brim. He said to them, now draw some out, take it to the master of the feast. So they took it, the head caterer. When the master of the feast tasted the water, now become wine and did not know where it came from. Though the servants who had drawn the water knew, the master of the feast called the bridegroom. So here's what he did.

He took these ceremonial jars for this practice that you were going to have to do to make yourself a little bit more holy, make yourself a little more pleasing to God, to be one of the good guys. He says, fill those up and he turns it into wine. Do you know what you can't do with the ceremonial jars anymore? Wash your hands. They're filled with wine. So Jesus just took these ceremonial jars and he continued the party.

He served this family. He says, fill them with wine. Okay. The master of the feast called the bridegroom. So, here's what we know. Master of the feast is over top of this.

So he just says, take it to the master of the feast. Somebody's heading up this. You know the master of the feast has to think, hey, we've run out of wine. At some point he just said, hey, this wine's gone. He may not know fully that there's no other wine anywhere else. This isn't like, he just says, hey, we're out of wine.

They go back and look and they're like, oh no, we're out of wine, out of wine. This is going to be embarrassing. This is going to be problematic for the family. I don't know the bride and groom, how well they know each other. I don't know how that was going. I don't know if she was like, we're getting low on wine.

He's like, oh no. She's like, if you hadn't had to invite your whole village and all your friends that drink so much and if your cousins hadn't showed up four days early. Like, I don't know how that's going. I don't know if they're arguing. I don't know if she just does the look thing. If she's just like, I don't know.

It's stressful for the groom. He's got to know, like he's over top of, the master of the feast is over top of this stuff. Other people are finding out Jesus' mom's in on it and then the master of the feast comes and he does like this to the groom. And you know, at that moment, I just can imagine his stomach just tied in a knot. He knows what's coming. Master of the feast holding a wine glass.

He's going to walk over there and he's going to say, last cup. You want to announce it? You want me to announce it? You want me to end the party early? You want me to end the party early? Calls him over there.

Yes, sir. He said to him, verse 10, everyone serves the good wine first. Groom thinks, yep, they drank that. And when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. He's like, yep, drank that. But when you have kept the good wine until now.

And the train of thought in the groom's head just crashed all into it. He's like, what? This is the first of his signs Jesus did at the Canaan in Galilee and manifested his glory and his disciples believed in him. So the master of the feast says, hey, you did this in reverse. This is the best wine you've had and you're just now bringing it out. Cool party trick.

Either that or he was just like, hey, next time you have a wedding, do it the other way, moron. I don't know if he's corrected him. Jesus not only made the wine to serve his mom and to serve this family, but he made good wine. Then it says, this is the first of his signs. This is kind of the point of the story as John tells it. Jesus did at Canaan in Galilee and manifested his glory, put on display who he was and his disciples believed in him.

After this, he went down to Capernaum with his mother and his brothers and his disciples and they stayed there for a few days. So after this wedding, he goes and spends more time, just spending time with family. Now, I love this story because it shows us the heart of God and how he serves and how he loves and how he approaches celebration. He wasn't there looking down on it. He was there enjoying it. And it's a beautiful picture of what he's done for us in the gospel.

You see, we're like the groom having to do so much to just make this good, having to do so much for this just to be okay, having to do so much for this to just work out and we're failing. We don't have enough. We can't do it. Our tank's empty. We don't have anything that we can do. And Jesus comes along and he takes all the ceremony and he brings joy.

He covers us. He takes all the ceremony, all the extra work, all the effort we would put in and he brings new wine. And you see, Jesus is ultimately able to do this because this is what he does on the cross. He took all of the law and all the weight of the commandments that we had to fulfill and all of the weight of having to stand before God and be made okay and he dies for us. It's actually he tells his disciples the night before when he shares a cup of wine with them and he says, this is the covenant in my blood poured out for the forgiveness of sins. That he's going to be the better wine.

That he's going to cover us and bring joy where there was anxiety, to bring hope where there was despair, and to absolutely bring us into a celebration. We're told in Revelation that when he comes to get his bride, he brings him to a wedding feast. That Jesus in his first miracle was at a wedding feast and he was picturing what he was ultimately going to do. And this is why I believe that not only is humanity designed for celebratory rest, holiday, vacation, but that Christians should be better at it than anybody else because we have the gospel. We've already been invited into the party. We've already been set free from our work.

We've already been given the ability to set our tools down, to rest well, to enjoy each other and enjoy God's good work on our behalf. And we don't need the party. We don't need the celebration here. We can just enjoy it. We don't have to have it to have a good life. We don't have to find a way to celebrate and to enjoy.

It's not frantic. It's just enjoyable. That we get to celebrate. We get to rest. We get to take a vacation and we get to do all that knowing that we've already ultimately had Jesus die for us, save us, redeem us, and provide for us in the cross. The story of Christmas Carol is about Scrooge McDuck and he, I have a three-year-old, so that's the version I watch.

He loves money. That's all he cares about. And then his friend Goofy, who had passed away, shows up at his house the night before Christmas and scares the living daylights out of him. And then he goes on these three. He gets to go back in time. He gets to go to the present and kind of see what's going on.

He gets to go to the future. And the story is that he sees this picture of what his life has been like, what his life is like now, and what it's going to be. That he's invited to look kind of behind the curtain and see who he is and what he's like and where he's headed. And he's kind of told at the end, it's too late. And then he wakes up and it's not too late. And the last line of the Charles Dickens novel, short story, is that it was always said of him that he kept Christmas well.

That from that day on, it was always said that like, there's a person who knows how to celebrate. And it was because he had gotten a picture of where he was headed and he had gotten set free from it. And that's kind of how we get to be as Christians. We get to be the people that said they celebrate well. They know how to do it. They know how to rest.

They know how to celebrate because we've gotten to see where we were headed and what our sin was going to do and how our work was going to fail. And we've been set free. We've gotten to see Christ die for us to rescue us and to redeem us and all of the weight and the pressure is off. That we're redeemed by Christ and so we can celebrate and enjoy and rest well. So here's how we're going to finish our time.

I'm going to give us some specific pictures of this. We're going to take a little bit of time to talk through this so that we get to, as Christians, kind of celebrate up. We get to roll our enjoyment up. It's not just terminating on the thing here. When you eat a good steak, it's not just the steak that gets praise, but it's Jesus who gets praise. When you enjoy a good vacation here, it's not just the vacation.

It's not just the place you went. It's not just how the days went. It's not just that you were off work, but that we get to roll it up in praise and glory and honor to Jesus who provides all of that for us. Okay. So how do we capture this?

How do we enjoy this? First one is that we begin to value celebration. Some of us just don't. You just don't value celebration. You don't make time for it. Valuing celebration really practically means you budget for it.

You start looking and saying, hey, we're going to have to set aside for this. That's one of the things that in the feasts in the Old Testament, he would say, I'm going to bless you. I want you to set aside a portion of this to come celebrate. That's why he says, nobody shows up empty handed, but everybody would have showed up with a kind of what fit their celebration, what fit their life, what fit their budget, but there to celebrate. So we budget for it.

We also have to schedule for it. If you're going to take a vacation, you have to be intentional about setting aside time. If you're going to enjoy a holiday, you have to be intentional about setting aside time, asking off of work, planning it. I know some people don't take vacations because of the type of work they're in. So they feel like, well, if I go on vacation, I miss out on sales.

If I go on vacation, somebody else will be able to do that listing. Somebody else will be able to show those homes. If I go on vacation, somebody else is going to, and they just have this kind of a frantic approach to there's no way I can be gone. Now, certainly, some of you maybe have seasonal work and you work around that. My family's run a pool store pretty much my whole life. We had to work around how we vacationed because during the summer is not the best time to do stuff because people want to buy swimming pools.

So we had to plan on it and work around it. We skipped school the first week of school a lot to go on vacation because my parents wanted to sell swimming pools. And I'm going to tell you I was a child I was cool with that. But Exodus 34, 24, God actually tells the people of Israel, I want all the males to gather. You have to be there. And during that time, you won't get attacked.

During that time, I'll defend your borders. And so there's something about us taking rest and taking vacation where we get to say, hey God, I'm resting and celebrating and vacating and doing this holiday because I trust that you're good, that you've provided. I want to celebrate that. And I'm going to trust that you'll take care of everything while I'm here. It's a faith thing. Some people will say, well, I can't take a vacation.

I can't do this because it costs too much money. Yes, it can be expensive, but there's ways to do this cheaply. You can stay home and just take off time from work and figure out ways to rest there. You can go camping. That's cheap. Some people like when you celebrate, you can go to, my family used to rent a room at a hotel in town just so we could use the pool.

My dad used to take us for a big day out to the dump to shoot at rats with a.22. You can find things to do. Y'all just learned a thing about me. Yes, that was what my family was like when I was growing up. This means, students, when there's time off, when there's vacation, when your family's going on a vacation, when there's a holiday that you're getting carried off somewhere to your family's house, some of y'all do that really well. Some of y'all pout your way through it.

And we're supposed to value it, to enjoy it. It also means that because your schedule's different from everybody else because you have school and then you have the summer off, it means that there's times where you actually, you're not exempt from this. You need to hold something special and you need to make some time to enjoy the time off. Also, to continue to be busy for six days and rest one. Some people say, well, it's really hard for me to rest. It's really hard for me to vacation during this time because I'm just, I'm in pain physically or I'm in pain emotionally.

And yes, there are seasons of that. And so there are times where this one's going to be really hard for you. But that can't continue forever because we also are called to rejoice, commanded to rejoice and to find ways to appreciate all the good that God has given to us and done for us. I had a pastor friend say, when we were first getting started with planning the church, he said, you've got to, he said, pastoring, and some of y'all's jobs are like this, but he said, pastoring is like being on a treadmill. It just, it never ends. You never run out of people to talk with.

Sin never stops. You don't ever reach a season where you're like, hey, we did it. We all have our act together. That's true. That's not even true for me. Like, we don't.

I have continual sin I have to confess to my group. Like, we don't ever really get off of it. And he said, you've got to find ways to get off the treadmill and pop the champagne. And that's part of what we're called to do is to value and to find a way to say, hey, I know work never stops. I know this will never cease. I know the kids are not, but I'm just going to get off and celebrate.

I'm going to find something to enjoy, something to celebrate. Okay. Celebrate with purpose. So some of you are, you do go on vacations. You do celebrate holidays, but you lose the purpose. Thanksgiving is about food rather than thankfulness.

And so we've got to find a way to be purposeful in our celebration, to actually have it be rejoicing before the Lord, not just rejoicing. That as Christians, our rejoicing does not terminate here, but that it rolls up in praise. So it is rejoicing in the thing we're rejoicing in, but it's rolling up to him. So that means we infuse things with meaning. I have to be really careful with this because I am a pastor. And so people real quick, like I want to be like, hey, let's talk about Jesus.

And my family's like, hey, let's just eat the food. And I have to be real careful with that because it's real quick. Like they don't, you know, they're waiting for me to be like, hey, let's say a thing we're thankful for. And they're like, okay, grandma. Like it just is, it's hard. So I have to try to find ways to sneak around this.

I know a pastor who's in Tacoma, Washington. He said that, you know, they were doing a party and he was helping put it on and they kind of just said, hey, you're a pastor. Will you pray right before we do this? And it was a 4th of July thing. And he said, that was just a token. We know you're a pastor.

We don't believe this stuff, but this is probably a thing you do. And so he said, in order to not just pastor it up, he just said, hey, take a second. It's 4th of July. Think about a thing that you appreciate about being free. And then in a second, I'm just going to quickly thank the Lord that we get to be a part of that. And he said, it was real quick, but it was just something to infuse it with meaning.

I try to, at Christmas, try to make things not just about gifts for my son. I know that's what he's going to get super focused in on, that at Christmas he gets things. So the night before, I put him in a room and cut the lights off. I told him everything was scary and dark and terrible. He was 2. Totally age appropriate.

And that God had sent hope into the world. And so we lit a candle, also age appropriate because he loved anything that was like fire was like a big deal to him. So it was like, boom, lit a candle. And then we just talked about how ultimately Christ came. He was the hope. He was the redemption.

We cut the lights on. Then we went outside and we followed the star, which was cloudy, so it was just the moon. I was like, there's the star. Let's go. We ran around our house. We get to the back.

He goes, Daddy, that's the moon. And I was like, well, aren't you clever? So anyway, but I tried to find something. You got to find something to make it special, to pour some meaning into it. This means making some things holy. There's some people who are entering a new stage of life in our church family that are older couples.

Maybe your kids, you're now kind of empty nesters. People have moved out and they come to you and that's kind of new. So a lot of times when you're growing up, you go to other people, but now your family comes back to you. And this means making some things holy, something set apart that's special for, we're going to eat this dish. We're going to have these plates. We're going to have this kind of a moment when we have this celebration.

But you set something aside so that this indicates that we're celebrating. This indicates that we're, they used to have in the Old Testament, they'd have a fattened calf. Maybe some of y'all need to put a calf in your backyard and when your family comes, I'm just kidding. But like some kind of, we eat turkey, we eat this. I take the time to prepare this dish that takes a week long. For my grandmother, that's cinnamon rolls and ham biscuits.

She makes in preparation for her family to come and when I taste the cinnamon roll and I smell ham biscuits, I know it's Christmas. Something that you set apart. For newly married people, this is you making your own new traditions. Carrying over some things from your parents, but learning how to have your own traditions. For single people, sometimes I know that single people will be like, well, what's the point? What's the point in celebrating well?

What's the point in partaking in this holiday? And you've acted as if the point of a holiday is just a spouse, just another person that you would enjoy it with and you're completely negating the fact that the point of holidays is Jesus and ability to worship Him and to enjoy Him. So take the time to figure out how to do that well and also go hang out with your church family. Go be around them to remind you of all the good joy and good that God's put in your life. We celebrate milestones. So this is moments.

This is birthdays, graduations, weddings. I know some of y'all find out about a graduation, you find out about a wedding, you find out about a birthday and you just feel like, I don't want to go. I have no desire to participate in that. And I understand that because I'm kind of like that and my wife's kind of like that and you need to go and you need to celebrate and you need to learn how to enjoy and celebrate well because we're supposed to be good at this. That we celebrate milestones. For birthdays, sometimes people are like, well, it's hard to celebrate birthdays.

It's so expensive now. When I was growing up, we did, on your birthday, you got the ride in the front of the vehicle. You were in charge of the TV for the whole day and my mom, you got to pick what everybody had for dinner. Not like separate things. I couldn't be like, he's going to eat sticks. It was like, you got to pick the main dish.

But that was a way to make it special. When we had no, my dad would take the little coat hanger things with the sticky part at the bottom and he would break that and he would take telephone line and put it and make us nunchucks so that we could be Ninja Turtles and that cost him very little money. And he gave me those every year for my birthday because you would hit your brother with them and they'd break. So you had to ask for them again the next year. But finding ways to make something special even when it's difficult or your budget doesn't allow it, this is something we're supposed to do.

I think this is something you're supposed to do in other things. Make a milestone. So my son, when he turned two, we were getting rid of his pacifiers. So we had a big ceremony. Again, let him light a candle because the kid was digging some fire at that point. So we lit a candle.

We talked about how he was turning into a big boy. I put all his pacifiers and he had them in his mouth all the time. Put them all in his hand and we held them over the trash can and then we celebrated and we sang and danced and we made a big deal out of it for two reasons. One is a big deal that he was growing up and two, I wanted him to remember it when he asked me for a pacifier later. I was like, no bro, you've got to light a candle. Pacifiers are done.

Don't you remember us dancing? We can't go back to that. You can't unlight the candle, kid. Come on. But infusing things with meaning.

Celebrating milestones. Celebrate with your group, with your community group. This is something we're designed to do as Christians is to celebrate well with each other. Some of us, when you get the email or the Facebook message or the group meeting and it says, hey, we're just going to be hanging out this week, you think, not me. Y'all going to be hanging out with your own selves? If it's just dinner, if it's just board games, I'm going to be at the house.

And you've missed the point of enjoying each other and of getting to be family, of getting to have ridiculous moments that you get to do difficult things with each other. You get to mourn with each other. You get to hurt with each other. You get to serve each other. You get to be on mission together to try to see people meet Jesus and you get to play that little heads up game and accomplish nothing other than being friends with each other. And we're designed for that to make time for that.

The last one, we get to celebrate as missionaries. You see, Jesus went to that party and he displayed who he was and we get to go to parties and display who he is. We get to celebrate as missionaries. There are rhythms of celebration in our city. There are rhythms of celebration in your neighborhood that you get to take part in. Maybe you don't care about Halloween at all, but your neighbors do.

So go buy some candy and go meet your neighbors. It's the one time a year they're going to come knock on your door and actually appreciate getting to see and talk to you. Only time. It's also the only time you get to go knock on their doors and they'll be okay with seeing and talking to you. Try that in the middle of June. Go knock on your neighbor's doors with your child and be like, hey, we just wanted to meet y'all.

They will act like you were psychotic. But Halloween, put a mask on that kid, you get to meet all your neighbors. You get to celebrate as a missionary. You get to take part in what the city's already doing to welcome people and get to know people. This is us doing some things with Thanksgiving at Gentle Pines where we take a holiday that means something and we take extra time out to go to a neighborhood around here and serve meals and get to know the residents there. Maybe this is Fourth of July or New Year's, but you get to find out what, you get to do what Jesus did was find out what the party's lacking and show up and serve.

Maybe that's somebody who needs to stay after and clean. Maybe that's somebody who needs to give some rides. Maybe that's somebody who needs to bring some extra food. But we do what Jesus did and we bring the better wine. And we always get to celebrate without debauchery. The point of the celebration for us is enjoying all the good gifts God gave us.

So we do eat, we do drink, but we're not gluttons and we're not drunkards. We're not overdoing it. The point isn't the party, the point is Jesus and so we enjoy the good things he gave us and in praise and honor and glory to him. A lack of ability to celebrate is a failure to believe this aspect of the gospel. That if you can't party, if you can't rest, if you can't vacation, you've missed out on some of the good joy and rejoicing that Jesus has brought into the world. And so we ought to believe the gospel fully and learn how to party well.

Because Jesus, when he rose from the grave, started the celebration for all those who would believe in him. Band's going to come back up. We're going to sing a couple of songs in celebration and then in our community groups this week, we're going to enjoy each other, celebrate, and accomplish a whole lot of nothing with each other and you need to be there. And if you're not there, we're going to ask all the group leaders and we're going to list your names next Sunday. Let's pray.

God, we thank you that you're good and that in the cross we have hope and joy and life and celebration. And we pray that we would honor you well by celebrating well. We would honor you well by celebrating with joy and hope and honor you and all the things that we partake in that are good. We thank you for flavor. We thank you for that when we are excited something about us wants to dance or to shout or to sing. We thank you for all those holy moments that you've written into the world and in our lives that we get to honor you and praise you and glorify you and we pray that we would.

We pray that we'd do all of that without sinning and displaying your glory just the way you did in your first miracle. We love you. We praise you in Jesus' name. Amen. Y'all stand. Let's sing.

Practicing Sabbath

Practicing Sabbath

Spencer Cary

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Transcript

Good morning. All right. My name is Spencer Carey. Like I said before, I'm pastor and training here with Mill City Church. We have taken the last four weeks and the next two weeks to walk through a series called The Hammer and the Hammock. And the hope of this series has been to grow in our theology of work and rest.

Because as a church and culturally, we are terrible at that balance and how we honor God. We spent the first three weeks mostly talking about work. The last three are mostly on rest. Last week, Chet got to address some of the heart level issues and how we justify ourselves and our overwork that we never deal with what he called the inner murmur, this endless, restless drive to work and to please and to work and to strive. And we make that as a justification for how we don't rest. And he kind of gave us a vision for what rest is supposed to be, for what Sabbath is supposed to be.

And then he kind of left us hanging. Like he didn't give us practicals for a reason because this week we get to practically walk this out and see how we can practically Sabbath. But on the front end, I want to be clear about what the Sabbath is. It is one day a week where we cease from work and we confess with our rest that we are not God. God. It is one day a week where we cease from our work and we confess with our rest that we are not God.

I heard a pastor mention a word, a Japanese word called karoshi as it pertains to rest. The history of that word is that in the after World War II, after we decimated Japan with all the bombings that we did, it completely destroyed their country and destroyed their economy. And one of the ways that their new prime minister said that they're going to build the economy back is through really, really hard work ethic. So they did. I mean, they're the third largest economy in the world and they built it. But one of the consequences for the work ethic that they put into their people is that people started to work themselves literally to death.

They had to invent a term in the 70s called karoshi, which means death by overwork. And it still affects their culture today. There are stories of people who will put 80 hours of overtime work in a week and they will literally work themselves into insanity and commit suicide. There are stories of people in their young 30s who put in so much work, they die of heart failure, that they get strokes, that their government has had to step in and put policies in to keep this from happening. Now, I would say that we are not quite like that culturally, that we don't work us work ourselves into instant death, but I would argue we karoshi ourselves slowly, that it's a slow death for us.

I mean, you can read study after study after study of what we do to ourselves. We put work and all kinds of stress on ourselves, that it slowly takes years off of our lives, that we slowly work ourselves to death. Now, that begs the question, why? Why can we not work and work and work and thrive? Why is it that we suffer because of our overwork? Well, we see from the scriptures that it is because we are limited by design.

We are limited beings made in the image of an unlimited God and He has chosen to make us limited so that we might rely on Him. And that means that our body needs rest, it needs refreshing, and that's what Shet was getting at last week. Today, we get to tackle that practically. So, if you are a note taker, today was made for you. Some of you take notes, like this is your time to shine. You can take notes.

Sometimes, as we are teaching, I'd rather you get caught up in the narrative of it all, but today you actually get to take notes. And if you are not a note taker, I would encourage you this week to take some notes. There's pens pretty much everywhere. I made sure of that, so you can take notes. If you are morally opposed to taking notes because it reminds you of how the system used to oppress you when you were in school for 12 plus years, then do your best to engage and to walk out of here with some mental nuggets of how we can grow in our patterns of rest. We're going to start out in Exodus 20, the fourth commandment of the Ten Commandments on the Sabbath.

And we're going to walk through this. After we walk through this, we're going to see what the Sabbath is and what it isn't. And then we're going to put some handles on how we can practically Sabbath. I'll pray and then we will dive in. Father, I thank you for the good news of the gospel. I thank you that you give us rest.

God, I pray that as we work through this today, you would give us a vision and some handles on how we can learn to rest well in you. Amen. Exodus 20, starting in verse 8, it says, Remember the Sabbath day to keep 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. You or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant, your livestock or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, and he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. So to read this, you've got to look at the back end.

When it says in verse 11, For in six days the Lord made the heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. That is rooted in the story of Genesis and the story of creation. That means that the Sabbath is a rhythm of creation. That it is eternal and it is meant for everybody. That God put this as a rhythm that we might obey all of God's people and everyone who's made in the image of God.

And what's really interesting that we don't have a lot of time to get into today is that an infinite God who we know from the Psalms never sleeps, never slumbers. An infinite God shows to rest on the seventh day that he might model rest for us who are limited. And that is a rhythm that carries through. And then as the law is being handed down in Exodus, we see it's a commandment here. And then we see kind of ups the ante a little bit. In Exodus 31, 14, it says, Everyone who profanes it, who doesn't obey it, shall be put to death.

That there's a seriousness that's brought to the Sabbath. There's actually a death penalty attached to it. So why did God want his people to take this command so seriously? I can think of two immediate reasons. Firstly, the Israelites had just left being slaves for 400 plus years. That in Egypt, they belonged to Pharaoh and their worth was in their work and what they could produce as slaves.

And God redeems the people of Israel and he says, You are no longer Pharaoh's, you are mine and your worth is not in your work and what you can produce. And one way I'm going to remind you of that is that one day a week you will cease. As the Sabbath is translated rest or cease to be. That you will rest. And I think secondly, like all of the law, there's a seriousness to it. But there's also the idea that we won't perfectly fulfill the Sabbath.

We won't perfectly walk the law out. That it's pointing forward to the one who will in Christ. So there's a seriousness brought to the law. And like much of the law, the nation of Israel, they responded poorly. At times, they just forgot the Sabbath completely. But what we see is on the other end of the spectrum is that there was a tradition that took the Sabbath ultra, ultra seriously and started adding things to it.

They made it more of a sacrifice. There is a group of laws called the Shabbat laws. Shabbat is just Hebrew for Sabbath. And there's 39 categories of work. And in it, there's like hundreds of laws that you could and could not do. And those still, they still exist and they're in the context of the day.

When I was in Israel about seven, eight years ago, I was in Jerusalem. And I remember that I was in a hotel. And as I was in a hotel on their Sabbath, I went to use the elevator. And the button was already lit up. And the elevator door opened. And I stepped in.

And I looked and I saw all of the buttons were lit up. Because on the Sabbath in Israel today, you cannot push buttons. Because if you were to push a button, that's considered work. And you'd be breaking Sabbath laws. So it was really annoying, especially if you were like me and you were on one of the top floors.

Because literally every single floor, it opens, it closes. It opens and it closes. And if you needed to get anywhere in a hurry, you'd be in trouble. And there's all kinds of laws like that that still exist today. They're really absurd. And there were also laws like that at the time that Jesus comes on the scene.

And he jumps in and starts critiquing how they have approached the Sabbath. In Matthew 12, Jesus and his disciples, they are plucking the heads of grains in a field. And the religious leaders, they see him do this. And they say, you're breaking the Sabbath. And then Jesus, he jumps in. And he quotes Hosea 6-6 from the Old Testament.

He says, I desire mercy and not sacrifice. They had lost it. What the purpose of the Sabbath was. It was supposed to be a mercy. It was supposed to be a grace. And they made it a sacrifice.

They made it a burden. Then he says, I'm the Lord of the Sabbath. He drops the mic. And that's kind of it. I mean, through the rest of the Gospels, that's kind of the gist of how Jesus, he approaches the Sabbath. And there's not much in the rest of the New Testament on the Sabbath.

It kind of leaves us a little bit hanging. And as we try to see that, yes, this is a creation rhythm that is meant to be eternal, but it's not meant to be a burden. We try to walk this out in the New Testament as a New Testament church and getting more practical. And that's what the hope is today. That we would see it for what it is. That it is one day a week.

We cease from work. And we confess with our rest that we are not God. But before we put practical handles on it, I want to quickly go through what it is and what it isn't. So firstly, the Sabbath is a day of rest. It is a day of rest once a week. For the Jews, that was Friday night to Saturday night.

That was their Sabbath. They measured days from evening to evening. So that was their Sabbath. And the New Testament church, we see a tradition that falls out of that. They made Sunday the day that the church would Sabbath. Because Sunday was the day that the Lord resurrected.

And that is why the tradition that comes out of that is that the church gathers together for worship. But they also gather together to rest on Sundays. Now there's a movement that happened out of this. They call themselves Sabbatarians. It's just a fancy way of saying that you have to obey the Sabbath. And it has to be on Sunday.

And if the church isn't Sabbathing on Sunday, if God's people aren't resting on Sunday, then you are living in sin. And that movement actually was carried over to America. It actually shaped much of American culture, which is one of the reasons we have Sunday off. And Saturday off comes from the Jewish calendar. And it shaped much of our culture. And it still exists a little bit today.

But if you look at the New Testament, there's not a case that can be made for that. The Sunday has to be the day that the Sabbath happens. You just don't see that. You see it form out of tradition, but you don't see that everyone has to have their Sabbath on the Sunday. But I'd argue that it is probably the best time for you to Sabbath.

That if many of you that don't work on Sunday, because you grew up in this country where you have a tradition of having Sunday off, if you don't work on Sunday, I'll argue that Sunday is probably the best day for you to take your Sabbath. And the reason why is because the Sabbath by nature is meant to be communal. It's meant to be a time where the church communes together and Sabbaths together. That's why the nation of Israel, they would Sabbath together as a nation the same way. It's meant to be something that we do together. So if you're not like me, I have work on Sundays, whether it's doing real estate, whether it's ministry, if you're not like me and you have the freedom to have Sunday off, Sunday should be the time that you choose to rest with the rest of the church.

So the Sabbath is a day of rest. It is not work. Sabbath is not work. Now we're going to get into the practicals of learning how to Sabbath, but this needs to be clearly stated on the front end. It is not work. It is designed for us to help us reboot, to help reorient our hearts towards grace, towards God.

And your work takes away from that. Now we're going to get practical and walk through some activities. And as I do that, some of you are going to immediately go to, oh, I can do this and I can do that. And I can get that accomplished. I've got some freedom here. And if that is you, if you're like me and you're looking for loopholes, you need to pull back.

This is meant to be rest. It is not work. The Sabbath is worshipful. It is designed to be worshipful. That is why the church has gathered for thousands of years on the Sabbath to worship like we're doing now, to sing songs, to read scripture, to hear the word preached. It is meant to be worshipful together as we have our hearts formed and shaped and knowing more of who Jesus is.

So part of that is gathering together for worship. Another part of that is incorporating God's word into your Sabbath. That on your day of rest, on your Sabbath, you might open up God's word. You might read in it. You might sit in it. You might meditate on it.

Because God's word is what forms us and shapes us and reminds us of who God is. That your Sabbath needs to be filled with prayer. And one of my favorite ways of resting and incorporating prayer, when it's not like 100 degrees and melting outside, is to go outside and to walk and to see the sky and God's creation and His handiwork and to be reminded of who He is and what He has done for us and just talk to Him and just pray. It needs to be filled with God's word. It needs to be filled with prayer. It needs to be filled with fellowship.

That's why we gather here. One of the reasons we gather here on Sunday is that we might fellowship. If you are extroverted and you are fueled by people, it could be a good idea for you to connect with people. If you are introverted, we're glad you're here. And we want you to be here regularly. And be wise.

Meet with some people, but also take some time for yourself. The Sabbath is meant to be worshipful. It is not escape. The Sabbath is not escape. We have confused restfulness with escape. It is so easy for us to think, oh, I'm going to chill out.

I'm going to escape. Like how many of us have watched like five hour-long episodes on Netflix. And after those five hours, I thought, man, I'm really refreshed. I feel so much better now. No. You don't feel better after you've watched five hours of a show.

It's even worse because Netflix puts up a little reminder and says, are you still watching? You get judged by a company that makes money off of you watching. It's not restful. That's escape. Escape. And we so often like to feel moments of silence with escape, whether it's Netflix, whether it's our phones.

Man, how often I will try to sit and just be in silence and pray or meditate, and I quickly grab my phone, and it just magically appears in my hand. And five minutes later, I'm like, oh, what are they doing today? It's like, what just happened? Or if I'm good, I'll put it away, and I put it away, and I feel this phantom vibration in my leg. That's addiction. That's a problem.

We are so prone to want to fill moments of silence, void moments with entertainment, with escape. And we need to fight that because we need to let that silence be, let God fill up that silence that we might be filled and fueled. The Sabbath is not meant for escape. So that's kind of what it is and what it isn't. It is a day of rest that we cease from work. We confess with our rest that we are not God.

So how? Like, how do we practically walk that out as a church family? I have about six handles we can walk through of how we can do this. The first one is decide to Sabbath. Now, I say that. Some of you just rolled your eyes.

Like, seriously? Like, that should be self-explanatory. You're deciding to Sabbath. Thanks a lot. That's a great start. No.

No. Decide the Sabbath. Because here's the deal. If you don't consciously make the decision that you are going to reshape your life to have a pattern of rest that happens once a week, you won't do it. You don't just stumble into patterns. Like, you don't just stumble into one to eat healthy and work out.

You don't just rock out at McDonald's and eat salads like it's nothing. You don't just end up three days a week in a gym. That's not how that works. You have to gear yourself up. You have to consciously decide, this is going to be a lifestyle for me and I'm going to do this. You have to decide to Sabbath and commit to it.

So step one, decide to Sabbath. Second, plan to Sabbath. You need to plan it. I had to stop in my sermon prep and repent. I had to, I realized, I mean, sometimes I can preach and I know I'm weak in areas and I can be a little bit self-deprecating, but man, I felt very hypocritical if I was going to think through one more thing that I was going to say. I had to stop because I don't, my tendency is that somewhere between Friday and Saturday I'm going to have a Sabbath and it just kind of shows up on a Friday.

I'm like, oh, I guess it's time to shut it down and then I get a phone call and then I respond to this and then Saturday I'm kind of like, oh yeah, and it just ends up not being restful at all. So I had to stop. I want to show you a little bit of what I was working on. I had to create a plan for Sabbathing. The top one is a week that I'm not preaching or a week that I don't have a ton of real estate. I'll sleep in until 7 and spend some time in the Word and get my kids up, make breakfast, maybe listen to a sermon, whatever.

From 8.45 to about 11.30, I can do sermon stuff, I can do real estate, but I'm shutting it down at 11.30. That's when it's going to begin. I can play with my kids during lunchtime as they go down to nap. We've started this new rhythm where I let my wife go. I was like, just vacate, go to, she loves Dunkin' Donuts, go to Dunkin', go wherever, spend some time, and then we usually have our date night on Friday. Saturday morning, I wake up, spend some time in the Word, do some restful activities that I'll get to in a minute, and then have lunch.

And that's, and the second one is if I have all Friday off, that's the plan I made. I had to get really practical because if I don't plan this, I'm not going to do this. You have to plan well to rest well. Because if you don't, you won't rest well. The nation of Israel, they understood this. They called this the day of preparation.

That there was a time that they would, before the Sabbath, they would get all of their work done so that when the Sabbath began on that Friday night, it'd all be done and they could check, they could begin to Sabbath rest. And the reality is is that it's actually, it's actually genius. The most productive week of work I've had this year was the week before I went on vacation. Because I was checking out and I had to get all of my work done. And the reality is is that if you, if you plan to rest, you're going to get a lot of work done as you prepare so that you can rest well. So for some of you, that means you're going to have to answer the emails, you're going to have to answer the phone calls, you're going to have to set up an auto reminder on your email, you're going to have to get real practical.

For some of you, there are activities that you would normally do that are really draining. Like for some of you, you like cooking. For some of you, it drains you. So maybe for your day of rest, you don't cook. Whether that means you prepared food the day before, whether that means you go out to eat, whether that means you order in food. Whatever it is, whatever kind of work that does not fuel you, that drains you, you get it done and you plan so that you don't have to work on the Sabbath.

You have to plan well to rest well. Third, value your Sabbath. Value your Sabbath. I was watching this TED Talk and this reporter was talking about this. She went to interview this high power CEO. This woman had four kids.

She owned her company. She was a CEO. And she went to interview her and she was talking to her assistant. She was like, how does Wednesday morning look? And the assistant said, well, actually, Wednesday morning through the afternoon, she's booked up. She's actually gone hiking in the mountains by herself, but we can pick another day.

And it baffled her. She's like, how in the world does a woman who's a CEO, has four kids, owns her own company, how does she, in the middle of a work week, to get to just check out and go hiking? So she asked her in the interview. And what she said was so telling. She said, you know, some people say, I don't have time for this. What they really mean is, I won't make time for this.

Because you will make time for what you value. She's like, I value time to get away. I value time to go and be in the mountains and to hike and to, like, that's what I value. So I make time for it. You make time for what you value. Man, that is so true.

I have a standing offer from one of my buddies. He works for KFC Corporate. And he gets to go to the Super Bowl every year because KFC's a sponsor in the NFL. And I asked him, I said, bro, if the Colts make it to the Super Bowl, will you take me? Well, he took down a heartbeat because he's like, y'all ain't making the Super Bowl. Not by the time I get another Job.

And I was like, deal. But let me tell you something. If somehow magically Andrew Luck comes back and he starts throwing just money and we start winning games and we somehow make it through the AFC Championship, you best believe on that Super Bowl Sunday, I'm going. I'm going to make time for it. Because that's a bucket list thing for me. I want to go just one time.

That's a big skill thing that we make value statements on. We do it all the time in the smaller things. How many of us this fall are going to clear all of Saturday for football? We'll make time for that because we value it. Fill in the blank. Maybe it's a TV show that comes on every week.

You are going to be there to see it. Maybe it's a TV show that gets released once a year. You're going to block off that weekend for it. You will make time for what you value. Fill in the blank. You will make time for it.

And my fear is is that many of us will hear this sermon. We'll walk through this series. We'll talk about rest in our community groups. And we might do it for a few weeks. We might do it for a couple of months. But then we're slowly going to drift back into the same stuff we've always been doing.

And that is going to be because we don't value the Sabbath enough. We don't value rest enough. Honestly, we've talked about this as pastors. That's one of the reasons why our gatherings, the average of our church family, the average member shows up twice a month to gatherings. That's why the seats are not... If everyone was here every week, we'd be filled up.

We'd have space issues. But we've realized that. And that's an indictment on us because we don't value Sabbath resting, worshiping together as a church. What you value, you will make time and space for. And we need to respond to that as we try to Sabbath. Fourth, Sabbath for the season you're in.

My wife and I, man, back when I was in seminary, we could drop what we were doing and we could go on a date night. We'd just drop, head on out, and we could do the whole thing for 20 bucks. Because in seminary, we didn't have money. I was paying for seminary as we went. I was like, we can do the whole thing for 20 months. Stop what we're doing and go for it.

That has changed. We have kids now. You don't stop and drop and go do anything. Like, you've got a plan. We've got to make sure we have sitters. That's going to be more than 20 bucks on top of what we're going to do.

So we've had to adjust for the season that we're in. And what has happened for many of you and for us is that we have not adjusted for the season we're in when it comes to Sabbath rest. Because some of you could just, on your day of rest, could just go to a coffee shop and spend hours there and read books, listen to podcasts and sermons and journal. Some of you could go kayaking all day. You could just check out, not tell anybody, go hiking all day. If some of you tried to do that now, there would be a missing person report following you.

And we remember, man, that's how it used to be. I got to rest that way. And we haven't adjusted for the season that we're in. Times change. Seasons change. Your schedule changes.

Some of you start getting married. Some of you start having kids. And the season changes and you've got to change with it. This is especially important for moms. I want to talk to you moms for a second. Sabbath rest for you looks different now and it has been hard to adjust for this season.

In this season, I want to say something very clearly. It is okay for you to put your kids in front of a TV, especially if you have little ones, to put them in front of a TV for a little bit and go and have a quiet time. It's okay for you to buy some time. I don't care what the internet says. You have to take care of yourself. You've got to, you strive to take care of your kids to make sure they're eating well, to make sure they're growing well, to make sure they're learning well.

You've got to take time for yourself. That means, husbands, we've got to step up and give some space for our wives to go and rest. That means that you need to reach out to some friends, some church families, some people in your community group and say, you just come watch the kids for a few hours so that I can go and reorient my heart towards grace so that I can rest well. And if you have older kids, that means you get to tell them from this time to this time on this day, guys, don't come to me. I'm checking out. I love you, serve you, take care of you, cart you everywhere for six days a week.

From this block, you ain't going to see me. I'm going to be in this room. You guys entertain yourself. And if you, I know y'all crush it as moms, you love and serve them, they'll get it. And what they'll see is, is that you are valuing this time and that it's important. And that rest is important.

And that's going to stick in their head as they become adults. Which brings me to my next point. In the season you're in, you need to take time for yourself individually, but we rest together as a family. We need to Sabbath well as families. And that means being creative about your family and what your family does. You know your family better than anyone else.

How could you create rhythms in your family so that y'all can rest individually, but also you can rest together? I heard a pastor once say this. He said, On the Sabbath, for my kids and my wife, which is Sunday for them, we make sure that we go out to a nice restaurant. Nicer than normal. So not Moe's.

Step your game up. Just go a little bit higher. And then you also, he said they order a dessert so that his kids can really look forward to the Sabbath. So they can really look forward to this time. So for some of us, we can incorporate exciting things into our Sabbath as we rest together as families.

It means doing restful activities together. So if that's playing games for you, it's like, guys, we're going to take a few hours together and play games as a family. If that's restful for you, if your goal in a game is not to destroy your family member, destroy your kids and make sure that somebody's crying. If you're not super competitive, you've got to know your family. You've got to know what y'all do. Maybe that's later bedtimes.

It's making this day special because this is the day we also get to rest together as a family. So we need to respond to the season we're in. We need to make some adjustments and rest well for the season that we're in. The fifth one is study for your Sabbath, which kind of seems like an oxymoron. Study for your Sabbath. Stay with me for a second.

Some of us don't know how to rest. Some of us have forgotten how to rest. This is my wife. My wife, we had kids and she's forgotten. In the past year, we have been having conversations. We've been trying to figure this out.

We've been trying, I've been trying to help her. See, let's try this. Maybe this is it because she's changed. And some of you are changing and stuff that you thought was restful five years ago, you're still trying to do and it's not restful anymore. I heard a commentary say once that if you work with your mind, rest with your hands. If you work with your hands, rest with your mind.

And there's some wisdom in that. You have to study yourself. You have to figure out how you rest. I was able to do this as well in thinking through how I rest. It will come up on the screen. There it is.

I started to brainstorm what are some restful activities for me that's super blurry graphic that I couldn't make clear. So I started to think what is restful? I'm a people person. People fuel me. So I started, I like to connect with friends, like to go to coffee shops.

That's something I like to do. I like to do yard work, which I know when you see that, you go, wait a second, you said it wasn't work. Yard work for me is restful. It just is. I don't work with my hands and I get to do yard work and it's cut and dry. Like I go to my stepdad at my mom's house sometimes and I used to mow their acre and a half front lot on a one mile per hour lawnmower.

It took me four hours. As soon as I graduated and went to college, my stepdad got the nicest, fastest, zero turn. Sometimes I go to their house and I'm like, can I mow your lawn? Because it's 45 minutes and I get to turn and cut. It's awesome. I love it.

One day a week when it's not winter time, I get to at my yard, I get to mow the grass, it's overgrown, I get to cut it, it's clean, I get to edge, I get to weed eat. For me, it's enjoyable, it's restful. I can listen to sermons, I can pray, I can do all of that and it's two hours, it's cut and dry. What's not restful for me is house projects. Man, house projects, sometimes they work well. You've heard about my YouTube tragedies, sometimes they don't.

Then I'll watch a YouTube video and I'll go and I'll figure out how to do the project and then I'll go to true value, I pick up a part and then I come back home and then I realize I missed something else, I get back to true value, pick up another part, then I realize I don't have a tool. It's not restful for me. So I just made a decision the past two weeks, like honey, I won't find times for me to do some of these household projects elsewhere but on my Sabbath, I just can't. I can't, it's not restful for me. I've had to go through and think through. Shopping, going to the grocery store, it's not restful for me.

Driving, I drive all the time for my work. It's not restful for me and obviously real estate and ministry and phone usage, it's not good for my soul. We're going to give some space in community groups for you to do this, for you to do this this week. Some of you need to learn and relearn how to rest. You need to figure it out, try some things. Sometimes it won't work.

You might stumble upon some things that actually do work but some of us need to learn how to rest. We need to ask ourselves what is restful, what is fueling, what is good for our soul and what is draining. So we need to study for the Sabbath. Lastly, we need to Sabbath regularly. Sabbath is one day a week. There are also regular rhythms of rest that we need to incorporate throughout our days.

We used to call that a lunch break. That's what used to happen. Some of you still do but a lot of us, it's not a lunch break anymore. You'll go and you'll pick something up and you'll eat really quickly. You'll get back to work. The irony is that a couple weeks ago as we were preparing for sermons on the Sabbath, we had to do a working lunch.

I was like, this screams of irony. Because we work and we work and sometimes we need to take breaks. Sometimes we need to, like I'm a binge worker, I'll go four hours straight and then I'll feel my body start tensing up and I was like, no, I've got to take moments just to breathe. You've got to figure out you and start to incorporate regular rhythms of rest. These are practicals. These are meant to help us as we strive for rest and if we start to make some adjustments, if you start to work some of this out, if you start to figure out how to rest, how to incorporate these rhythms and if you start to see that it is one day a week where we cease from work and we confess with our rest that we are not God, it'll change you.

If we don't do that, if we don't take this seriously, we are heading for burnout. You were not made for limitless work. You will eventually burn out. One of my favorite shows is Better Call Saul. It's about attorneys and it's a spinoff of Breaking Bad and this last season, one of the attorneys, her name is Kim, she went out on her own as an attorney. She picked up a bunch of clients or she picked up one client with a bunch of work and then she's not sleeping well, she's working extra hours, she's staying overnight at the office and then she picks up a second client and she doesn't sleep.

She works and she works and she strives and then she has this really big presentation that she's got to go to. She packs up her car, puts all the boxes of papers of presentations in the back seat and she starts driving and as she's driving, she's rehearsing what she's going to do. She's rehearsing her words, she's going through this presentation, it's the biggest moment of her career and it's shot from her perspective and immediately she crashes. She wakes up, she fell asleep at the wheel and I want to put this picture up, it's a picture of the scene. She steps out of the car and the thing that kept her from going off the cliff is a rock.

She realizes she almost died, her arm is broken, her face is bloodied and all of her work is scattered across the road. And man, that is such a picture of us. If we work and we strive and we struggle and we don't rest, that's a picture of where we're heading. That we are heading for burnout. That we are heading off a cliff and that we're going to end up broken, we're going to end up bruised, we're going to allow in a season of crisis and a season of a nervous breakdown and a season of turmoil for sin to creep in and to take us down. And that picture is so picturesque, all of your work will be scattered.

The irony of this is if you overwork, eventually you will break down and you will have to step away from work like it is scattered across the highway as it is a mess. That's a picture of who we are if we don't learn to rest. And we need to take that seriously. But hear this. When you choose to rest, when you choose to honor the Sabbath, you will experience God in a whole new way. You will start to incorporate these rhythms of rest that will reorient your heart towards grace that will fill you up.

You will have moments of silence that are turned to worship and to joy and you will be refreshed in a way that you never were before. And out of this, once we are regularly refreshed every week, we'll get to serve our family better, our wives better, we'll get to love our kids better, we'll get to serve our co-workers better. as we learn to balance, work, and rest in a God-honoring way as we honor the Sabbath.

How the Gospel Gives Us Rest

How the Gospel Gives Us Rest

Chet Phillips

Transcript

Good morning. My name's Chet. I'm one of the pastors here. We are in the fourth week of our Hammer and Hammock series where we're talking about work and rest. Two things that take up the majority of our time that we're going to either be working or we're going to be not working. And we've got to figure out how to do that well.

We've got to figure out how to have a healthy balance. And so what we did was we started off the first week talking about that God has designed us to have a rhythm of six days of work and one day of rest. So this is actually how God created the world, that he worked, that he began the world by laboring, and then he rested. And if you think about that, for a cosmic being who is beyond time, beyond energy, like he's who can create everything in an instant, to take six days to create everything and then to take a day where he does nothing, is a crazy concept. But God designed it that way and worked that way so that we might follow his pattern.

And he instituted this into the world. And it says that he blessed the seventh day and he made it holy, meaning the seventh day, the Sabbath, is set apart from the rest of the week. And that it's blessed so that those who befriend the Sabbath will be blessed. Those who take part in it will be blessed, will receive the goodness of that day. And so what we're talking about is how do we work for six days and rest for one. And I love the little video we have because we're on different sides of this.

There are some of you who love work. You love being busy. You love the energy. And there's some of you who love rest. And so what we've talked about is that some of you who want to rest four days a week and kind of work three need to change your lifestyle. You need to work six and rest one.

And some of you who are like resting one day a week sounds ridiculous. You're watching the first half of that video and you're like, yes, chopping things, hammering things. Yes. Being a mom, doing yes. And then it goes boop, doop, doop, doop, boop. And then you start seeing people in a hammock and you're like, oh, that sounds so stupid.

I hate the second half of that. And some of you are like, the first half seemed awful. But when that dog started like trotting through the field, that was amazing. And your little spirit wakes up. And so what we're trying to do is figure out how to have a healthy pattern here. There's a first century Stoic philosopher.

His name was Seneca. And he was looking at the Jewish people who practiced the Sabbath, who one day a week did nothing. They had a day of preparation for it where they would get ready to do nothing the next day. And he says that it was absurd. He looked at the Jewish people and said they spend almost a seventh of their life in inactivity. And so as we start today, what we're going to be talking to is the person who kind of agrees with Seneca.

We're talking to the person who is just consistently busy. And I think that there's two types of this person. There's one person who says, look, I get it. The Bible tells us we're supposed to rest. It's in the Ten Commandments. I'm aware that those ten are pretty important.

But you tell me how on earth I'm going to do that. I have like 17 children. I don't think it's actually 17, but it feels like it. I have three jobs. I have you're looking and going. There's no way like I would love to take one day off a week.

That would be amazing. But I'm not going to ride a unicorn to work. And this also isn't going to happen. Like unless that magical thing happens, this magical thing isn't happening. Some of you are just looking and going like, look, sounds great, but there's no way to do that. And on the other side of that, there's someone else who just goes, that doesn't even sound great.

But taking a day, one day a week to do nothing sounds excruciating. And if I'm honest, stupid. And I don't want to. And there's some of you who feel that way. It's just like, no. I mean, I get that it's good and people should rest or whatever.

But like I got a vacation coming up later. Plus, I got some leagues and stuff I'm in. And I just said, I'm not really going to do it. And so we're talking to you today. We spent the past couple of weeks talking to the person who wants to sleep most of their life. And we tried to say, here's why work is important.

Here's why work is valuable. But today we're talking to the person who doesn't ever want to stop or feels like they can't. And we're actually going to spend the next two weeks. So today we're going to talk kind of more big picture, heart level stuff. And next week we're going to talk about all the practical things. So hopefully today you'll leave with a lot of practical questions of like, okay, I'm on board.

But I still need to know how on earth to do that and what to do in a Sabbath. That's next week. So if you get a little annoyed and feel like a lot of your questions aren't answered today, then I did my job because they're not supposed to be. So here's the thing. I read a book called Switch. And what Switch talks about is how to make a change in your life.

And the big kind of example they give is that they say everybody, functions like a person riding on an elephant. That there's an elephant and there's a rider. And the rider is intelligent. The rider understands facts and figures. The rider likes PowerPoints. And the elephant doesn't.

Doesn't care. The elephant is your emotions. It's your heart level desires. And so what the point of the book was is that if you just talk to the rider, but you don't get a hold of the elephant, nothing will change. And we know this to be true. Some of you are like, I'm going to quit smoking.

I know that it's bad. I've seen the little pictures they put on the cartons. I get it. I know that there's a general who became a surgeon. And he has some warnings for me. I get it.

And you're like, I'm going to stop. And the elephant's like, that's cute. Because you're not like the elephant heading in on board with the facts and figures. Some of you are like, this is it. I'm going to start working out. I'm going to start eating right.

I'm going to start tomorrow. And the elephant's laughing at you and then takes you to McDonald's like you. Some of you are like, I'm really, this is the semester when I'm really going to study. I'm going to get ahead on my stuff. I won't show up to class and be like, wait, we have a paper due today. I'm going to already know about it.

I'll have already written it. And your elephant is playing Xbox. It already left the room. It wasn't even paying attention to your PowerPoint. You showed it. And that's what's happening here is that some of us are going, okay, I'm on board with the idea of a Sabbath.

I'm on board with the idea of rest. But we've got to actually untie the soul level, heart level knot. Otherwise, we won't ever actually be able to rest. So I want to talk to all the elephants in the room a little bit today. Grab your Bibles. Go to Hebrews chapter 3.

Here's what I want us to understand as we go to Hebrews chapter 3. It's on page 581 if you have one of the blue Bibles. If you don't own a Bible, take our blue Bible. That's our gift to you. You were not made to endlessly strive. You were not designed by God to endlessly strive.

You were designed by God to do good work, to carry weight, but not ceaselessly. God commands that we rest. And if we don't, all you will have is joyless toil without rest. And eventually, you will burn out. If we don't rest, all you will have is joyless toil. All of life will lose color.

All of life will lose joy and hope and happiness. And all you'll have is just ceaseless toil. And then eventually, you'll die. Or you'll throw off everything in life that holds you down, that weighs on you. And you'll try to escape. You'll derail everything.

So we have to figure out how to do this. And we have to overcome what's stopping us. Let's pray and then we'll look at the text. God, we thank you for this time we get to spend together. And we pray that in these moments for the person who does not know how to rest. Who does not know how to stop.

Who does not know how to sit still. Who does not know how to enjoy moments of quiet and peacefulness. We pray that you would help us to see you in all your glory today. And that the cross might set us free and invite us into rest. In Jesus' name, amen. So in the book of Hebrews, the author, we don't really know who the author is.

Some people think it may be somebody writing some stuff that Paul taught. Some people think that it might be Luke. But we really don't know. In the book of Hebrews, the author is going through and systematically saying, See this? Jesus is better. See angels?

Jesus is better. See Moses? Jesus is better. And he's just consistently saying, Here, let me show you how Jesus is better than this. How Jesus is the fulfillment of this. Let me show you the temple.

Let me show you how Jesus is better than that. And he just consistently does that. And so we're going to pick up in Hebrews 3, verse 14, where he's begun to talk about Moses and the law. And what he said earlier was, Jesus is better than Moses. And that if we're not careful, we'll join with the people who are following Moses and we'll run away from Jesus. So let's pick up in 14.

For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our confidence firm to the end. So he's saying we belong to Christ, we share in Christ, if we keep it, if we keep our confidence, if we keep walking with Christ. As it is written, and he's going to quote from the Old Testament, he says, Today if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion. So now he's going to talk about what that rebellion is. He says, For who were those who heard and yet rebelled? Was it not all those who left Egypt led by Moses?

And with whom was he provoked for 40 years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, but to those who were disobedient? So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief. All right, so here's what he's saying there.

He's saying that Moses led a group of people out of Egypt. The Israelites were slaves in Egypt, and then God sent Moses to go lead them out of Egypt, to go declare, Let my people go. And the Pharaoh was like, No, I will not let them go. And he's like, Let them go. And they were like, I will not let them go. Let them go.

Like that. And that's what happened. And then God sends plagues. And then the Pharaoh decides to finally let them go. And then when they come to the Red Sea, God parts the Red Sea. And there's all this miraculous stuff that takes place to get the Israelites out of Egypt, the slaves to be set free.

And then God gives them his Ten Commandments. And God declares, I'm going to bring you into a rest. I'm going to bring you into the promised land. I'm going to bless you. And you'll get to be my people. And he institutes the Sabbath at this point.

He says that your value doesn't come from your work. You're no longer slaves. You don't have to endlessly, ceaselessly toil. You're going to work six days. You're going to rest one. So this is what God does.

But then the people rebelled, which is terrifying, by the way, that they could see so clearly who God was and what he had done and that he could rescue them from slavery and they could still reject him. That's what the author of Hebrews is saying. Don't do that. Don't be invited into something so beautiful. Don't see so clearly who God is and then reject that. He says if they did it, we're in danger of doing it.

Because you would look and say, if God sent plagues and if he parted the Red Sea, if these people walked on dry land with two sides of water on the side of them, like I think I would get to the other side and go, you know what? I think God's real and I think he's good. And then they walk around in the wilderness for a little while and they're like, I want something else. And he says, that's terrifying. Don't do that. And so his point is, they, because they did not believe, did not get to enter into the rest that God was offering.

He was inviting them into the promised land. He was inviting them into the rest, but they had unbelief that kept them from the rest he had welcomed them into. Let's keep going. Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it. For good news came to us just as to them, but the message they heard did not benefit them because they were not united by faith with those who listened. For we who have believed entered that rest, as he has said.

As I swore my wrath, they shall not enter my rest. So what he's saying is, those who believe enter into the rest of God, enter into the salvation of God, enter into the promised land of God, and those who disbelieve, who have unbelief, are not welcomed in. That's the major point he's making here. And he's talking about metaphysical rest. Beyond just our physical life, beyond just what we can touch, it's this eternal rest. He's not talking about the Sabbath yet.

What he's saying is that those who believe are welcome into a rest that is offered by God through salvation. And those who have unbelief do not get the rest. Do not get the eternal rest offered by God. Then he says, although his works were finished from the foundation of the world, he has somewhere spoken of the seventh day in this way. And God rested on the seventh day from all his works. And again, in this passage, he said, they shall not enter my rest.

Here's what we need to understand. He says, those who believe get to enter the rest, just like God worked and rested. And those who have unbelief do not get to enter the rest. And this is mirrored. It is pictured in our lives so that if you have an inability to rest, I want to argue with you today that that means you have a practical, functional unbelief in the gospel at work in your life. That if you're a Christian, but you can't sit still, if you're a Christian, but you can't stop, if you're a Christian, but you can't rest, I want to argue with you that you have a functional unbelief.

That you might say, no, I really believe in Christ. I really know who he is. I really, but the problem is those who know Christ are marked their entire life. Even their work is marked by a rest because we're not having to strive to prove ourselves. That we're welcomed into a rest that only comes through salvation. That we're actually, if we're unable to rest, we're looking to something else to satisfy us, to assure us that we're okay. to give us our value, to give us our worth, that we have unbelief.

That God has invited us to rest from our works, to rest from our labor. And we are, like them in the rebellion, hardening our hearts and saying, I want something else. I need something else to validate me. I need something else to give me my worth. I need something else. So I can't stop.

I can't rest. I can't do nothing. I can't have inactivity because I need it to tell me I'm okay. And that is a practical unbelief. I want to read a quote by Judith Shulovich. She was writing for a New York Times.

She, she's a New York Times author. She is, grew up Jewish and then she kind of, as she got older, she just rejected her practicing Jewish faith. And then she realized that she started really, really struggling and about every weekend around Friday night, she said she just got depressed. And the point of the article is she realized that she needed the Sabbath. That she had practiced it religiously growing up and that it was very aggressively enforced and that she just kind of rejected all of that. But then she was striving endlessly and exhausted.

And so every Friday night she would get depressed and she realized I need to rest. And that's the point of her article. Now she's writing from the standpoint of a Jewish person, but I think that she gives some very clear pictures of what it feels like and what it's like for us to not be able to rest. She refers to our neurotic drive to achieve. That there's something wrong with us, but we have to constantly have something that we're marking off, that we're checking off, that we're achieving, that we're adding to our list of who we are. She says, I love this quote, she says, oddly, one of the few times a parent can truly, not that quote, I'm reading a different one.

I'm going to get to that one in a second. Oddly, one of the few times a parent can truly relax is when lingering on the sidelines of a child's baseball or soccer game. There's nothing like being forced to be somewhere and do very little for an hour and a half to declench the muscles of the mind. I love that phrase, declench the muscles of the mind. So what she's saying is that there has to be this time that we rest and she keeps going and I like this quote as well that uses bigger words so it's going to be up here.

So when she's talking about the Sabbath, she's talking about this time where we specifically stop to take a long period of rest. Not just a little bit of time, not just time that's forced on us, but it's actually we force it into our schedule. She says this, not only did drudgery give way to festivity and family gatherings and occasionally worship, but the machinery of self-censorship shut down too, stilling the eternal inner murmur of self-reproach. She says, this is the purpose of the Sabbath. I think her argument is helpful, the words that she uses here, that there's this self-censorship, there's this eternal inner murmur that by forcing ourselves to stop, we're forced to face and this is why some of us loathe having nothing to do.

Because what happens is when everything ceases, when our activity ceases, when we no longer have something that we're being productive, it's as if a maestro walks to the stand in our mind and just starts making all of this stuff, starts singing and crying, yelling at us. Like some of you, you go to rest, you go to sit down, you're like, finally, I'm going to take a nap and you lay down and it's this immediate, you really should be doing something else. You're being kind of lazy right now. There are other things that you could do that are more important with your time that you actually could, maybe you should actually get some of this work done you've been saying you were going to do so that you can spend some time with your children later.

Maybe like immediately like lists and tasks and so I don't know how long you can stand it, five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes and then you're up. You got stuff to do. Maybe some of you lay down and finally you're exhausted and you're like, I'm going to go to sleep and you lay down in bed at night and your brain's like, hey, you want to replay everything that happened today and judge yourself? And you're like, no. And your brain's like, it's going to be fun. And you reevaluate your entire day and you start trying to figure out how you're going to do better the next day.

That you have this inability to stop. You have something to prove, something to earn. You've got an inner murmur, this self-censorship, this self-correction that is constant. Maybe some of you, your brain's consistently telling you, rest is for weak people and you're not weak. Rest is for the unimportant, but you're important. That there's something about you getting called in on your day off, there's something about you having to do work on your day off that confirms for you in your soul that I matter and I'm valuable and I have worth.

Other people can take time off, I can't, and that means that I'm worth something. That I'm accomplishing something. That I'm doing something. You work through lunch and it's a badge of honor because of how important you are and how much you matter. For some of you, you've brought this into your relationship with Jesus. So the stuff that the Bible talks about, about walking with Jesus where Jesus says things like, come to me all you who are weary and I'll give you rest, doesn't feel like your relationship to Jesus.

You don't feel like a weary person who got to go rest with Jesus. You don't feel like someone who's drinking deeply from a cool well or an unending river. You actually feel like someone who's accomplishing a lot of tasks and presenting Jesus with your checklist of all the good things you've done. So that your Bible reading has become, I'm going to read this much, I'm going to memorize this much, I'm going to do this much and it's become this, I'm going to labor for you Jesus and then I'll present to you what I have accomplished. And so even in walking with Jesus, you've brought in this idea of I have to be active and I have to be purposeful and I have to display to you what I've done.

And it's not restful and it's not joyous. Some of you feel like anytime you rest you've just pushed off the important things. If I rest now, I'm just going to have more to do later. If I stop now, I'll just complicate all next week. There's no way I could take an entire day off because it's just going to ruin everything and so that you consistently just never take time off. You never really stop.

You kind of rest and you kind of, I know some of you are like, well it's kind of rest but I also like it'll be more restful if I just get all the laundry done and then I'll really feel good if I can just get the grass cut and that'll be restful. And one of the ways that I'm going to rest this week is I'm going to invite five people over to my house and that'll be restful even though you hate people and you're just going to bring them over because you're kind of supposed to and then you'll feel better about yourself if you can and you've added in all this activity when you were designed for some inactivity so that you might actually have to face the maestro. You might actually have to take the time it takes to steal the inner murmur. That we were designed to stop so that we might come face to face with some things that God actually wants us to face.

This is why I think one of the helpful things that Adam Gibson who from Midtown came and spoke to us the other day, two weeks ago, said that there's a difference between rest and entertainment. There's a difference between rest and just kind of numbing our minds with watching television and that sort of thing. that some of that is us turning up the television so that we can drown out the course of the inner murmur but rather than actually facing it, unclenching it, walking in it and figuring out how to have true rest in Christ. I was talking with Nadine Pabone. She's one of our group leaders and she serves a lot in our church in a couple different areas and we were talking about this and just how busy she is and she said one of the reasons she doesn't like resting, she doesn't like taking time off is that she became a mom when she was 17 and that she actually doesn't know who she is apart from being a mom, being a wife and doing ministry and that when she rests she comes face to face with the fact that she has placed her identity in her activity so that if you looked at her and said, hey, take the day off, go do something you enjoy, her response is, I actually don't really know what I enjoy.

I watch a lot of children's programs. I fold a lot of laundry. I've got four children but I don't really know what I like. I don't really know what refreshes me and what she realizes when she comes to those moments of your whole day is cleared and you can rest, she comes to the face to face with the fact that I don't really know who I am outside of the things that I do and for some of you, you've placed all of your identity in work, you've placed all of your identity in your activities, you've placed all of your identity in who you are and what you do so that when you have a day off, you come face to face with the fact that you actually don't know who you are and it's excruciating.

So your inability to stop tells on you. Your inability to pause your life declares to you, it snitches. Your inability to stop tells on you that you actually have an internal issue with knowing who you are and being able to rest in the salvation that's offered in Christ. That you have an inability to stop because you have an inability to rest in the fact that Jesus has done all the work on your behalf and you still have something to prove and you still have something to achieve and you still have something you need to assure you that you have value. So how do we fight this?

That's offered in Christ. That you have an inability to stop because you have an inability to rest in the fact that Jesus has done all the work on your behalf and you still have something to prove and you still have something to achieve and you still have something you need to assure you that you have value. So how do we fight this? How do we silence the inner murmur? How do we learn

How to rest? How do we learn how to quiet ourselves so that we might be able to enjoy what Christ has offered? verse 8 I love this verse for if Joshua had given them rest God would not have spoken of another day later on 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 now again

This is beyond our weekly rest this is beyond the regular Sabbath but he talks about this Sabbath rest and what he says is if Joshua had given them rest then God wouldn't have kept talking about this idea now we got to understand who Joshua is for this to be really encouraging because if you don't know who Joshua is you're just like neat Joshua he failed I don't know him but he dropped the ball here's who Joshua

Is Joshua is the person who took over after Moses died and Joshua actually led the people into the promised land so he delivers them into God's promised land and he begins to set up them following the Lord and practicing the laws and so here's what it just said the promised land and obedience to the law will not provide for you rest and some of you have convinced yourself it will some of you have said if I can just achieve enough if I can just work hard enough if I can finally

I'll just finally feel okay I'll finally reach this moment where I'll tell myself I've done enough you've convinced yourself that if you're good enough if you behave well enough then finally your soul will be at rest and it won't and some of you have said if I can just get to the promised land and I don't know what your promised land is certain amount of money certain Job title kids out of your house I don't know what you think the promised land is but you keep telling yourself if I can just get there if I can just get there

If I can just get there I'll get rest and let me tell you something Joshua fails every time but there is a Sabbath rest for the people of God and it is found in Christ that we actually get to cease our striving our endless desire to prove our value our worth to assure ourselves that we're okay because of Christ I want to read from Galatians chapter 2 verse 16 and verse 21 he says yet we know that a person is not justified that means made right

That means that you won't ever actually be able to stand and say I'm perfect I've done it I've achieved it I can rest he says you're not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ so we also have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law because by works of the law no one will be justified to use the language of Hebrews by works of the law no one will find rest 21

I do not nullify the grace of God for if righteousness were through the law then Christ Jesus died for no purpose so here's what he's saying in Galatians he's saying that if we consistently have to work to prove that our value comes from our work that we're going to present to God something amazing that he'll finally accept us that what we're doing is we're looking at the cross and saying no thank you we're hardening our hearts towards it we're nullifying the grace of God

And we're rejecting the offer of free salvation to actually lay down our work so here's what I want to say if you're in Christ and your faith is in Christ you've been given rest that is beyond any rest the world can ever offer and therefore you actually can rest here you've been given an eternal rest and therefore are free to rest here because you have nothing to prove

And you have nothing to earn it's all been carried out in Christ and if we're unable to rest here I believe it tells on us that we actually don't believe that we've been assured what we've been assured and given what we've been given in Christ you see our actions show what we believe that through as Christians we show what we believe

When we face adversity we show the hope that we have when we face loss we show what we believe by the way we spend our money we show what we believe by how we rest every week that you ought to be able to shut everything down and be fine and here's the thing that you need to know if you're in Christ you have value you have worth you have been given everything you need verse 11

Let us therefore strive to enter that rest so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience so what he's saying is let us work really hard to believe this truth to find Christ and so here's what I want you to understand in order for you to Sabbath in order for you to rest in order for you to enjoy this you actually have

To put in effort some of you say I don't know how on earth I'm going to take an entire day off and the truth is the way your schedule is set up right now you're not that's why there was a day of preparation for the Jewish people you actually have a lot of work to do the day before you

Rest but then you actually get to shut everything down to declench your mind to silence the inner murmur and rest so let me let me tell you this it's the gospel that allows you to actually rest and it's actually resting that helps you believe the gospel that you're actually going to have to fit this into your

Schedule so that you can come face to face with the maestro and Jesus can stand up risen from the grave and tell them all to shut it and sit down that Jesus is able to do that but we actually have to come face to face with all of the inner murmur and we have to take the time it takes to sit and listen and face it

And hear it so that we might actually begin to silence it we have to work to rest and you can't rest as long as your activity saves you as long as your movement and work and effort validates your existence so it's rest that helps us believe this it's actually practicing this rest that proves to us

That this is true and gives us the time to rest in Christ and the salvation that he offers there's a movie called Chariots of Fire it came out in late when did it come out in the 70s it's about two guys in England that both run track one's name's Eric one's name's Harold one of them is Jewish and one of them is a Christian they're both very fast

They're going to get to go to the Olympics it's based off of a true story some of you haven't seen this movie but you've heard the song boom boom boom boom ka ka ka ka ka ka ka ka bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum and I don't care what it's put to the back of you get excited it's like ba da da da da da da da da da and you're like I can accomplish anything I ever wanted to

That's that song okay I think some of y'all should put that as your ringtone that wakes you up in the morning or whatever you just hear boom boom boom ka ka ka ka you just pop out of bed so anyway it's about these guys that are in the Olympics and they find out on the way to the Olympics that one of the events is going to be on a Sunday and so Eric who is a world class runner and this is his event

Says I don't do things on Sundays that's my Sabbath that's the Sabbath and I'm taking it off and so the whole movie is about this guy who could go win a gold medal and like the kings and the people over at Britain are coming to him and saying you should do this and he actually looks at him at one point and says I know y'all are in charge of this country but I have a bigger king who's in charge of everything and he raises kingdoms and he lowers kingdoms

And I'm going to do what he says and even if you don't believe you're just like that was amazing I'd love to say that to a king and he doesn't run now Harold has run his entire life facing anti-Semitism that people just dislike Jewish people and he's run running has actually allowed him to enter into society running has actually allowed him to have people value him running has been his thing that he's used to show that he has value that he has worth

There's this line in the movie where he actually says when that gun goes off I have 10 seconds to prove my existence I've got 10 seconds to prove my existence I've got 10 seconds to show that I have value now Eric doesn't run not because he's trapped not because he's hemmed in by God's rules he doesn't run because he's free he doesn't have to prove that he has worth he's been given worth in Christ he's free to run

Or not run one of the lines that he has in the movie is he says that God's made me fast and when I run I feel his pleasure see running for him was just a way to worship God to honor God to enjoy God and if it came down to it he could rest or not rest run or not run because he he was free and for some of us our work is us saying I've got 40 hours I've got 50 hours

I've got 60 hours to prove my worth I've got this project to earn my right to exist I've got these children that'll prove that I should have been here and you're free because Christ has given you his worth he's given you his value it's sealed in the cross and the empty tomb and you are free it is unassailable it will not be taken from you that when he says come to me

You who are weary and I'll give you rest it's a promise for eternity and it's practiced now that we get to cease our labors we get to rest and we get to practice practically reminding ourselves that I have my value in Christ and I can spend a seventh of my life in inactivity and unproductiveness and walk in front of the king and be saved by his work that's why God

Takes slaves out of Egypt and says you will practice the Sabbath this is how your week works now because slaves only have value as far as they're able to work they only have value in their productivity and he's looked at us and declared in Christ you are not slaves your value does not come from you or what you have done it comes from Christ and you are free to feel his pleasure in your work and to stop

And accomplish nothing and know that he ceased from his labors that he rose from the grave that he left the cross that your fate is sealed and you have freedom and value and hope in him so the Sabbath the taking a day off every week helps us untie that knot it helps us actively practice and remind ourselves of that truth and it's that truth that allows us

To consistently take that time to rest Matt's going to come back up we're going to sing so we're going to practice the Sabbath to rebel against the notion that our value comes from our labor that our identity comes from our activity that we're going to rebel against that idea that we're going to practice rest because we know that in Christ our value has been carried out our identity has been sealed and we're going to do this so that we might remember who Jesus is and what he's done

Because our work and our activity is cluttering our view of him and it's lying to us in our inability to rest our work has lied to us and told us that we need it in order to be okay and all we need is Christ the way we're going to end today is we're going to sing a song here in a minute but we're going to take communion before we do that communion is a practice that has been given to the church it was instituted the night before Jesus went to the cross where he took bread and he broke it and he said this is my body broken for you

And he took a cup and he shared it with his disciples and he says this is the new covenant of my blood poured out for you and as we go from here learning how to practice the Sabbath and learning how to rest so that we might have Jesus silence the inner murmur of self-censorship and self-reproach before we do that we're going to practice communion which is a reminder of why we get to rest that Jesus Christ went to a cross that he did the work for us that our value is carried out in him and that he has accomplished for us all that we need for salvation

And for rest that there's a better rest that Joshua couldn't give us that hard work couldn't give us that the promised land wouldn't give us but that Christ did so in a moment I encourage you to take some time to pray to reflect to repent where you need to and if you're a Christian we invite you to take communion if you're not a Christian this is something given to the church so you're welcome to to stay seated and then in a moment stand and sing with us let's pray God I pray that everyone here would know true rest

That's found only in surrender to you that's found only in faith in Christ and then I pray that that would practically be carried out as we become some hard working well resting people I pray that we would be able to cease from our labors and have inactivity so that we might come face to face with you and watch you silence the chorus of accusation of doubt the burden of proving our value we love you

And we praise you in Jesus name Amen

All Good Work is God's Work

All Good Work is God's Work

Spencer Cary

Transcript

Good morning. My name is Spencer Carey. I'm a pastor in training here with Mill City Church. We're going to be in Genesis 1 today, which is in page 1 of your Bible, so you can go ahead and flip there. We're going to work through that. We'll get to that in a moment.

Recently, my wife and I, we got to go on vacation. A couple weeks ago, we had to go to the beach. Going to the beach and getting on the beach used to be this relaxing experience. You'd take a book. You'd see the ocean. You'd just take it all in.

It was not that, and it will not be that for a very long time for us. We have a daughter who turns three tomorrow. We have a son that turns one in a few weeks. Getting out on the beach first was getting an umbrella in the ground. That took a total of about two hours because at one point, wind carried it. It almost impaled a lady.

We had to get that in the ground. I'm kind of putting a foot on that, trying to put dirt, sand on that. Then my wife brought this blow-up pool that theoretically our children would have played in once it got blown up. We did not bring a pump, so I had to do it all by the power of my lungs, which don't have maximum capacity at all. It took about 45 minutes to watch them plan it for three. So a different experience at the beach, not as much relaxing, but I did get to do one fun activity that I've been wanting to do with my daughter.

Growing up, my brother and I used to go to the beach, and we used to play. As the tide was coming in, we used to build these sand forts. The whole goal was you'd build this massive sand fort. You'd build a moat. You'd get it going. So when the waves came in, it was just kind of a challenge.

How long can we go up against the ocean until the ocean winds? It was just fun. I was like, all right, I'm going to get to do this with Ellie, my daughter. So I get her out there, and we start building this fort and start digging it out. She's kind of getting into it, and we start kind of building the fort and kind of got the moat going and getting everything ready. Then I was like, well, you want to decorate it, which we didn't do when we were growing up because we were two boys.

But she started to get more into it. She started picking out shells and kind of placing them in on there. If I had like a big bucket of pink paint and just throw it on there, she would have been overjoyed. And we kept going, and as this is happening, I'm like, Ellie, look, the waves are coming. So we've got to get this strong because when the waves get here, it's going to be a challenge.

And finally the first wave came in, and it came up, and it kind of took some of the sand away. And she saw it, and I was like, see? And then she really started to get into the ocean. Like she was adamant about facing off against the ocean. And she kind of forgot about the fort and started going. She would run up to the waves and go, no.

And she'd be screaming at him. And she says gibberish sometimes. And she's just like, no, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then she started like kicking the water. And I was like, okay, you're getting really into this. I didn't really see this coming.

And she had gotten so lost in going up against the ocean that she at one point goes to the fort. She grabs a hunk of the fort in sand and starts pelting the ocean. And I was like, whoa, kid, like that. We won't be here five more minutes if you keep this up. She got so lost in the activity, so lost in what was happening. She lost sight of the purpose of what we were actually there to do.

And I feel like work, that happens in how we approach work. And that's why we spent this period of time, six weeks going through the hammer and the hammock, going through work and rest that we might have a better theology, a better understanding of what work and rest are supposed to be. And today we're going to focus on what the purpose of work is. Because I feel like when we're getting pummeled by waves, when we're getting owned by the different problems at work, challenges at work, different things that we face, that oftentimes I feel like we lose the purpose of what work is supposed to be. So what work very clearly is in the Bible is this.

It is a good gift that God has given us that we might glorify Him. That is what the Scriptures teach. That is a good gift that God has given us that we might glorify and worship Him. And oftentimes I feel like if we're honest, we don't really functionally believe that. I don't think we actually functionally believe that. I think that there are three main views of work that we fall into that are fallen, that are corrupted by sin.

I think the first view of work that many of us have in our culture is that many of us view work as a mere necessity. It's just necessary. It's a necessary means. You might hear common phrasing with this that says, I don't live to work. I work to live. And the mindset is that work is just an exchange.

I exchange my time. It's a commodity. I exchange my time, my effort, and you give me a paycheck. And that's how I pay to live. So that's one common aspect we'll get to in a little bit that has fallen, that does not capture what work is supposed to be.

The second is that work is an enemy. And this is a little bit what Adam from Midtown, when he came and preached last week, which if you were not here, I encourage you, please go back and listen to it. It was a very helpful, a ton of wisdom as he preached through Proverbs on laziness, on the sluggard. And many people fall into this view that work is an enemy. It is an enemy of my recreation, of my fun, of my joy. It impedes on my life, and I will do whatever it takes not to work.

And the third kind of fallen way I see in culture is that work becomes an idol. It becomes something that we worship, whether it's the success it brings, the productivity it brings, whatever. We place that in the place of God, and we give it our affection, our devotion, all of our thoughts, till we elevate it to the point of worship. So we'll get to those three fallen perspectives in a little bit. But we have to reclaim what work actually is, that it is a good gift that God has given us that we might glorify him.

And in order to do that, we're going to be in Genesis 1, verses 27 through 31. And as we work through this, we're going to see a few things. We're going to see that we are made in the image of a worker God. We're going to see the calling to work, which is a call to subdue and bring dominion. And then as we work through that, as we establish what the purpose of work is supposed to be, then we will be able to tackle those three fallen worldviews. So I'm going to read from Genesis 1, verses 27.

So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. And hear this, subdue it and have dominion.

Over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heavens, over every living thing that moves on the earth. And God said, Behold, I've given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth. And every tree with seed and its fruit, you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth and everything that has the breath of life, I've given you every green plant for food. And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made.

And behold, it was very good. I'll pray and then we'll dive in. God, thank you so much that you have given us a picture of what work is supposed to be. I pray that you would help us be present this morning. That you would help us listen to your word. That you would speak powerfully to us.

And you would reshape our understanding that we might have a better perspective on what work is supposed to be. Amen. Alright, so it's important to note this very last part of this verse. That he said it was very good. That's important because of where we are in the story. This is before the fall.

This is before in chapter 3 when Adam and Eve sin against God bringing sin in the world. This is a picture of what work was in its original design uncorrupted by sin. So in order to understand work, that's why we're in Genesis 1. We're getting back to the original design of what it's supposed to be. In the same way, I feel like we need to reclaim the original design of what macaroni and cheese is supposed to be. I feel like we've lost it.

I would say that we originated what mac and cheese in its purest form was supposed to be. We made it. And then the rest of culture saw it and said, oh, let's give our spin on it. And people started putting vegetables in it. Y'all, I put one time my fork into what I thought might be mac and cheese. And it came out and I found out it was cauliflower and cheese.

And I was like, that's an abomination. That's not what mac and cheese is supposed to be. We need to, as a culture, reclaim that. Get back to the original design for our own good. And that's what we're doing with work. We're getting back to the original design.

It starts off in verse 27 when it says that, so God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created them. Male and female, he created them. Now, I don't have a ton of space to get into. This is one of the biggest doctrines we have in the Bible, being made in the image of God. We are going to spend a good long while in the book of Genesis coming up starting in August.

So we'll spend a whole week working on the image of God. But the overview is this, that we are made in the image of God, which means we bear his likeness, his creativity, we have value, that we are made different from any other aspect of creation. We look like him. And in this context, it means that we are made in the image of a worker God. A God who created everything out of nothing. Who made all of the raw material that we have.

Who made metals. Who made water. Who made coffee beans and agriculture. He made everything. And we are made in the image of that God. A God who made everything out of nothing and who brings order to chaos.

So we're made in the image of him. And then it continues. It says in verse 28, and God blessed them. And he said, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. And have dominion over the fish of the sea. And then he keeps going with a long description.

The birds of the heavens. Every living creature. Every plant that yields seed. Every fruit. All the beasts of the field. All of it.

That we've been given dominion and called to subdue that. Now before that he says, be fruitful and multiply. Which we don't have time to get that this week either. But that is make babies. That is form families. That is making societies.

And we'll get to that when we tackle Genesis. And then he gets to these two unique commands that we have attached to work. To subdue it and have dominion over it. Now he's talking about all of creation. And he could have just said everything. That's what I think is unique here.

He could have just said, subdue it and have dominion over everything. And that's it. But he doesn't. He says, he gives this long description of everything that humanity has been given. And I think that's helpful for us. I think it's helpful for that to be longer.

So that we might understand the responsibility of what we've been given. That Adam and Eve in the garden were given all of this. And I'll have to wonder how they would have reacted to that. And looking at everything that God had given them. That they're looking at things like a tree that has these beautiful fruits on it. That's not quite orange.

It's not quite yellow. It's peach. And then we get to cultivate peaches. That are so good that we get a harvest of right now in this season. They would have peaches. And they would have dominion.

They would be able to subdue bears. That we have dominion over the wildest creatures. That we have responsibility over waterfalls. And rivers. And dogs. And even cats.

Which I know in theory are good because of what the Bible says. But that's debatable. If you're a cat person, I'm sorry. Kind of. We get dominion over all of that. And the picture is that God gave the keys to the kingdom.

He gave the keys to the business empire to his kids. And he said, run with it. This is your responsibility now. Subdue it. And have dominion over it. Now, subdue is an interesting word choice here.

It's actually a little bit of a violent word. In the Hebrew and the Aramaic. Which are similar words that is being used here. The idea is conveyed as beating down a wild growth into a path. Or in other ways, it's being used as subduing. Bringing into submission someone or something that is wild or chaotic.

He could have just said, take care of everything. But he intentionally uses the word subdue for a reason. Because the earth, in its original form, its essence is wild. It is need. It is chaotic. It's a need to be subdued.

And that's... My common perspective of this before walking through this was that the world was... When God brought order to chaos, he did almost all of the work. But the picture is, is he did most of the work. The rest he has given to us. And I've applied that.

I've started to think through, okay, that makes sense. I have two dogs. I have one that is bigger. She's a puppy. She's going to be a great dog. And I have another dog that's been with us for a long time.

I know I've talked about him before. He's just not a great dog. He has bitten me countless times. He's bitten my wife. He has attempted to bite our children. He's just not a good dog.

And for the longest time, I've thought, it's because of the fall. It's because this dog is uniquely affected by sin. And he's jacked up. Which is true. But it's also, he has a wild streak in him that goes all the way back to creation.

And I have done, at times, a poor Job of subduing him. So I get to share in the blame a little bit when it comes to him. We're called to subdue what is wild. And we're called to bring dominion to what is chaos. The word dominion is another interesting word that is used here. It is commonly used in the context of kings or in ruling.

And that kings would come in. They'd bring in their dominion, their rule, their order. And we hear that commonly now when it comes to presidential cycles. That every, well, it used to be every four years. Now it just never ends.

It's always campaigning. One side saying, we're going to come in and do it better. You see how they're messing it up? We're going to come in and bring our order to the chaos. And the other side, when they're not in power, says, no, we're going to bring our order. They're doing it wrong.

Dominion, the word that is being used here, is a word of power. And God has given us power that we might bring order to what is chaotic, to what is wild. And with all of creation, we get to share because each of us, hear this, each of us are made in the image of God. And each of us has a share of dominion. Each of us has a calling to bring order to society, order to this world. Which means that every single person in this room and in this world shares in this.

That your job, your work, it matters. Your job matters. I can make a case for 99.9% of jobs and how each of them are good and each of them matter. Let me go through a couple that will catch a wide range of our church family. If you work on air conditioning units, if you work on HVAC units, you matter. Like I've felt that so clearly this week.

This week, our HVAC unit went out and we didn't have air conditioning for a day. So my parents were generous enough to take us in for a night. And I slept in a room with our son who knew we were in the room and decided that he wanted to basically keep us up all night because of that. So I got very little sleep and had a 14-hour work day the next day. And I was exhausted. And my wife also felt the burden of that.

Having the kids and having to keep them out of the house and having to keep them entertained away from it all. And then finally, a man came. A knight in shining armor came into our house and went to the magical machine that takes 100-degree oppressive Columbia heat and magically changes it into 70-degree bliss. And we were so thankful because our whole work week, our whole everything could function now. We could be home. That job and so many other blue-collar jobs matter because it brings order to what is chaotic and to what is broken.

If you work in the service industry, whether you serve coffee or you bartend or you are a chef, like you bring creativity, you take raw materials and order them in a way. I can go to a coffee shop where someone has obsessed so much over coffee. I'm so thankful for hipsters because of all the investment they've done in that industry. And we get to be the benefits of it. I can go to a pub and I can order a drink that someone has intentionally thought about. I can go to a restaurant where someone has spent so much training and time and energy and has made this great dish that we can eat and enjoy because that is helpful for us.

That gives us joy in the things that God has created. You bring order. You bring value. If you are an accountant and you work with Numbers, your job matters. Man, this week I was in a meeting with a couple of other pastors, Matt Chet and Razz and were talking and they pulled out this graph with statistics and probability and Numbers. And they started explaining and I think they finally saw me at one point and they saw the confused look at my face.

And they finally started to explain it. And I was like, I think I understood half of what they were saying. But in the inside I was dying because I hate Numbers. I'm so bad at them. I made a D in college trigonometry. And I was a pretty decent student.

I was okay. And I said, you know what, D's equal degrees. I'm out because I never want to see math again. But if you're gifted in that and God has given you that, you work with Numbers and you make it, you order the world and our finances. You bring value to what is chaotic. I could keep going on and on.

If you work at a call center and do customer service, you deal with difficult people, you help us solve problems, you matter. If you are a mom or just a parent in general, if you're a parent that works a job away and then comes home and clocks in, you and your work matters because children are forces of chaos and destruction. They just are. Every night my wife and I, we clean up the downstairs. And I didn't used to care about having a clean living area. But now I do because she's installed that in me.

And we go to bed and we come back and we bring our children down. And they start to eat breakfast and they smear all kinds of food everywhere. Then they go in and they don't pull out one toy. They pull out all the toys and they spread them around. And my daughter, she does crafts and makes messes and all over the place. And we get to, as parents, help order that.

We get to, as parents, help bring discipline. Have you ever met an adult who was never told no as a kid? Who did not receive any form of discipline? They're the worst. They're adult babies. You get to help bring value to society because you are a parent and you do the hard work at bringing order to what is chaos in families.

I could go through a ton of different jobs. Unless you're selling your body as a prostitute or you're writing blogs to help other parents feel bad about the way that they parent. Unless you're not doing something that's inherently evil and wrong. Like you bring value and order. Because the world is an uncultivated garden and you get to own your share in cultivating it. You get to share in bringing order to it.

Because here's the deal. If you don't do that. If you don't carry the weight that you're supposed to. Somebody else will. Somebody else has to help pay your bills. Somebody else has to help pick up a shovel.

And I know there's I'm not talking about extenuating circumstances when you're temporarily unemployed when you're going through disability. I'm not I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the general call to pick up a shovel and to use what God has gifted you with to help carry weight. It affects other people when you don't do that. And it affects you. Because you were designed to carry weight.

And I get it man. Work is difficult sometimes. And I really I used to think it was difficult because of the fall. Like I love productivity and getting stuff done. I love efficiency. I love writing a sermon that lands.

I love I do real estate. So I love doing deals that actually get done. I love having a finished day work. I think all of us value that. And I think oftentimes when that happens at least from my perspective it has been well thorns and thistles. Because work has been corrupted.

And that's partly true. That comes from Genesis 3. When the curse is handed down we see how it affects work. In Genesis 3 it says cursed is the ground because of you. In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you.

And you shall eat of the plants of the field. Meaning that you sometimes you will cultivate a garden. You will work hard and it will be fruitless. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground. So yes work has been cursed.

And it is sometimes fruitless. But it's also difficult. And it's difficult because that's how it was originally designed to be. That sometimes as a real estate agent I will spend months and months and months on a deal to watch it just vanish into thin air. It's just gone. That sometimes I can put 30 plus hours into writing a sermon and preparing it to make sure because we care about the word of God and it being taught accurately and helpfully in our church.

That I can rock up here. I can let it rip. I can walk off the stage. And I can be like man I thought that I think that felt pretty good. And I go and talk to my wife and she goes well it was okay. And I'm like really?

And it's like man my often perspective has been well because thorns and thistles. And that's not actually the full picture. That as I've worked more through this I've actually started to see this goes all the way back to the garden. That work was meant to be difficult. It's a part of the fabric of creation. Because the earth is chaotic and because we're called to subdue it sometimes that's going to take longer.

Sometimes that's going to be difficult. It's almost as if we have an infinite God who could have in Genesis 1 could have been he created the world. Boom everything existed. That's what it could have been. But God chose over a six day work week to slowly form everything out of nothing.

It's almost as if God is trying to teach us something. That if the infinite God of power of all of the universe took a six day period to actually make everything out of nothing. That maybe work is sometimes meant to be slow. That maybe sometimes work is meant to be difficult. Because in the slowness and the difficulty you get to grow into Christ likeness. You get to grow into the character of God.

That the work of subduing is sometimes slow and difficult and long term. But ultimately it points us to what the end of work is supposed to be. That the end of work, the purpose of work is not productivity. It's not results. It's God. That is the end result of our work.

That it's growing in the character of God. That as we work slowly and through the difficulty and through the challenges of work. God would grow us in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness. All of his fruit. All of his character would be forming us and shaping us through the slow and sometimes difficult, sometimes repetitive work. That's why I love Adam when he came last week and preached.

He said, We become the people we are by what we choose to do again. I love that. That through the repetitive, through the monotonous, through the slow work. We are being formed and shaped. That there's a vertical change that happens. That we are growing into Christ likeness.

That we are being shaped by him. But there's also a horizontal effect where we affect other people. Not just with what we make and what we bring order to. But by the character that we show in our work. That we might model the gospel to those we work with. That they would see the very character of God in how we work.

And when we start to understand that. We start to understand that good work is actually a gift that God has given us that we might glorify him. Once we've owned that. Then we can start to fully understand how we can repent of the fallenness that we fall into. And those three perspectives I mentioned earlier. So my first question is are you prone to seeing work simply as necessary?

Is that you? Do you just see it as a necessary exchange? That you put in the work. That you put in the time. And you put that in to get a paycheck. And that's all it is.

It is a transferal of goods. Now sometimes that is an explicitly fallen mindset. That all of your decisions. That all of your decisions in work. And how you're going to move. And how you're going to advance.

Is always based on money. I want to maximize the amount of money I can get. Because I want to maximize the stuff I can buy. That some of us have fallen for the American dream. And we want to have it all. And that's all that work becomes.

It becomes a necessary means to that end. And we've talked about as a church family. That that is a fallen mindset. That we don't need to fall for that kind of materialism. But sometimes this is a little more subtle.

And sometimes this actually looks a little more holy on its face. Now I've heard some people that say. You know I work. And I work this job. And I want to earn more. So that I can give more to the church.

So that I can give more to the mission. Because I want to see God advance the kingdom. And I hear that attached sometimes to. Man you know what. You're doing the real work in ministry. I just do.

I do this nine to five. It's not. We don't talk about that. You actually. Your job actually matters. I want to help invest in that.

And there's so much. So much good in that. I love hearing people that have been. That have been transformed by generosity. That understand. The generosity that God calls it to.

And I want to uphold that as good. But what's underneath all of that. Is that what I do doesn't matter. It's just necessary. I put my time in. I get my paycheck.

And I can be generous. And when you have that mindset. You are missing out on what work can be. That is a good transformative gift. That can grow you. And shape you.

That you can have a profound effect. On the people that you work alongside of. On your employees. On the people that you get to model the gospel to. So we need to grab hold of that.

That work is not just necessary. It is a good gift that God has given us. The second mindset we need to repent of. Is if you have the mindset that says that work is simply an enemy. Is that you? Is work an enemy of joy?

Is it an enemy of your recreation? Is it an enemy of what you could be doing? Like do you put the minimal amount of effort in. In your job? Like I can do just enough. I am going to count down the clock.

Until I can clock out. And then I will be on. And be able to do what I actually want to do. Here is the deal. Hard work is valuable. And it is powerful.

Because it can actually grow character in you. But man. A lack of hard work will reveal a lack of character in you. That needs to be formed. That needs to be shaped. So is that your perspective?

Do you avoid as many jobs when you get called to do the extra stuff at work? Do you avoid that? Because I don't want to deal with that. Do you avoid work at home? Like if you have a family that you go home to. Do you avoid the different work that you could be carrying weight in.

Because you have better things to do. That applies to the church too. Do you have the mindset? Nah. I know I am being asked to serve in Kid City. I know I am being asked to serve in Host Team.

But there is about a thousand other things I would rather be doing. So I need to come up with some very honorable looking excuses that I can get out of. Because I don't want to carry weight. Colossians 3.23 says, Work heartily as for the Lord and not for men. That is the calling in work. To work hard as to the Lord.

Because ultimately He is the end of our work. And when you do this. If you'll grab hold of this. What's going to happen is God is going to tap into some potential. He's going to grow you and shape you. You're going to see more of the character of God growing in you.

And that is going to have a profound effect on everyone who gets to be around you. So some of you, if you're honest with yourself. And you heard last week's sermon. And you start to feel the conviction of that. And it's time to grab hold of the good gift that God has given us and repent of that mindset. Lastly, are you prone to seeing work as an idol?

As something that takes your affection, your devotion, your mental energy. Whether that's success that is attached to work. Whether that's productivity that is attached to work. Is that you? Because if I'm honest, that's me. That this is where I fall in.

And I love my jobs. I love being a real estate agent. There's two real estate agents. Mary Beth and I in our church. And I love what I do. But it is always on the clock.

At any moment, I get texts sometimes at 12 o'clock at night about houses. And I'm consistently thinking about listings. I'm thinking about showings. I'm thinking about inspections. I'm thinking about appraisals. I'm thinking about marketing.

I'm thinking about exposure. I'm thinking about all of that. And I love it. And I'm starting to think through how I can get more results. How I can move and shake. How I can make all these things happen.

And as a pastor, I'm consistently thinking about sermons. And how the sermons are shaping me. And how we're crafting them. And I'm thinking about our community groups. I'm thinking about our community group leaders. And every week, I love that we as pastors get to sit down and pray for our groups.

That we pray for you. That we pray for the people in our groups. And I'm thinking about counseling. I'm thinking about all the different things. And what happens in the midst of all of this is that I start to think about results. That my end goal is I want to see deals done.

I want to see people changed by Christ. And I get so caught up in success. I get so caught up in the results of getting stuff done that I miss the thread. I miss the purpose. Like a child taking a handful of sand and chucking out the waves. I've completely lost the purpose of what work is supposed to be.

That it is a good, transformative gift that God has given me. That I might grow in worshiping Him. And not the things that it brings. Not the success that it brings. Not the results that it brings. So that's my question for you.

Is that you idolize work? Like is your joy attached to success in work? So that when you're doing well at work. Whether it's sales. Whether it's admin. Whatever.

When you're doing well in work. You're happy. Things are great. But when work nosedives. And it's hard. How many of you are plagued by anxiety?

How many of you can't sleep? How many of you are quick to be prone to depression? And it's a roller coaster. Of productivity. That when you are doing great in work. You are great.

And when you are not. You are low. If that's the case. You are probably. You probably have made work an idol. You have worshipped something.

You have worshipped creation. Rather than the creator. Do you idolize work? Do you have trouble shutting off? Can you be as a. Can you.

If you have a nine to five Job. Can you actually be present? When you come home. Are you consistently thinking about things at work? And if you're a stay at home mom. Can you actually go on a date.

And not think about your kids. And not talk about your kids. Can you get coffee with a friend. And not think. And talk. And obsess.

And I know that's a little bit different. Because it's our children involved. I get that. But maybe. Just maybe. Underneath all of that.

Is idolatry. Not just of work. But of children. That sometimes. You need to. Clock out.

And not be consumed. With your job. Because you have idolized. And made an idol. Out of work. And the reason why.

We've got to take that seriously. I think this is probably. One of the more dangerous ones. Because what happens is. Is you go. And you grind.

And you work. And you hustle. And then. Eventually. A season comes. Where burnout happens.

In the midst of burnout. In the midst of midlife crises. Man. People make. Really bad decisions. People walk away from the church.

Because they've gone. And they've gone. And they've gone. And they make a bunch of terrible decisions. And they're out. And if you think you're above that.

Take heed. Because you might fall. We need to take that. Seriously. And I say it bluntly. We need to burn that idol.

To the ground. And we need to repent of that mindset. And grab hold. Of the good gift. That God has given us. In work.

That we might put it. In its proper perspective. In worshiping him.

Sluggard

Sluggard

Adam Gibson

Transcript

All right, well, good morning. As Chet said a little bit ago, my name is Adam Gibson. I am one of the pastors at Midtown Fellowship. We're in downtown Columbia. We started, I guess, about 12 years ago almost now, getting close to there. We started meeting weekly in January 2007.

We were, at the time, we planted almost all college students, and so it was a nightmare, as you can imagine. We had no wisdom, no money, and lots of energy, and no clue what to do with it. And one of my favorite memories is one Sunday we were passing around the offering basket, and somebody, and this is not a joke, someone put a pack of Skittles in the offering plate, and that was their contribution. And it's like, thank you. I do like Skittles, so I appreciate that. So we have grown since then, and we've got some families and some kids, and we've planted a few churches, and we're now a family of churches in the Columbia area.

And then in, I guess it was 2012, I met Chet. We went to lunch at Monterey's in downtown. He said he wanted to plant a church. We said, that's great, you should do that. And so we just sort of sent him out. Our church planting process has gotten a little more beefy since then, that was what it was back in the day.

And Raz was a part of Midtown, and we happily sent him, and they got to meet Matt. I really like Matt and Raz, still deciding about Chet. I'm grateful for the invitation this morning. I think I'm not qualified to be a pastor here. I can't grow facial hair. And it seems like maybe that's one of those unspoken pastor qualifications at Mill City.

So I'll have to remain at Midtown with our underdeveloped facial hair. But I'm glad to be here today. So pretend like I have a nice man beard, and maybe you'll be more willing to listen to what I have to say. It'll sound more authoritative. So last summer, we did a study in the book of Proverbs.

Our church did. And I came across sloth or the sluggard. I don't know if you're familiar with the book of Proverbs. It comes up a lot, and it wasn't something that I had studied before. Up until that point, I thought sloth or slothfulness or someone who was a sluggard. I just thought it was laziness.

That was all that I had heard of it. I'd heard of sloth as one of the seven deadly sins. I don't know if you're familiar with that or the movie Seven. Not that I would recommend it, but it is a great movie. But they talk about sloth in that movie.

And the Latin word that sometimes gets used as part of the seven deadly sins is acedia. That's the Latin term for sloth or sluggard. And as part of what you guys are studying over the summer, the hammer in the hammock, which is a brilliant series name. I don't know who came up with that, but that's gold right there. This fits really, really well. And so Chet invited me to come and share some of this.

And honestly, what I'm doing is just I had to do some research on it and heard some people teaching on it. And I basically am just taking what they taught and would love to share it with you guys today. And I think you'll find that it is helpful and fits right in with your summer series. And so if you want, you grab a Bible because we'll look at the book of Proverbs together. We'll start in chapter 24. So if you want to grab a Bible, it looks like there's some on seats around you.

If you didn't bring a Bible, you can use one of those and flip. Proverbs chapter 24 is where we'll start. Proverbs is almost dead in the middle of your Bible. And so if you just want to almost try to cut it by 50 percent, you're probably pretty close to Proverbs. And then you can navigate from there. So if you're familiar with the book of Proverbs, you know that it's not written linearly.

It's a collection of wisdom and sayings, most of them from a father to a son. And so it's a little bit scattershot. And so we won't necessarily work straight through a passage this morning because that's not how Proverbs is written necessarily to be done. What we'll do is read a few different places in the book of Proverbs that talk about the issue. And then we'll draw some points out of that. So let's look at Proverbs chapter 24 first.

And then we'll flip to chapter 26. And we'll read both of these. And that will sort of launch us in. So Proverbs 24. We'll read 30 through 34. Here's what it says.

I passed by the field of a sluggard. So that's the way that Proverbs describes a person who is slothful, called a sluggard. By the vineyard of a man lacking sense. And behold, it was all overgrown with thorns. The ground was covered with nettles. Its stone wall was broken down.

Then I saw and considered it. I looked and received instruction. A little sleep. A little slumber. A little folding of the hands to rest. And poverty will come upon you like a robber.

And want like an armed man. Alright, flip over to chapter 26. Proverbs chapter 26. And look at verses 13 through 16 with me. The sluggard says, There is a lion in the road. There's a lion in the streets.

As a door turns on its hinges, so does a sluggard on his bed. The sluggard buries his hand in the dish. It wears him out to bring it back to his mouth. The sluggard is wiser in his own eyes than seven men who can answer sensibly. Proverbs actually says some really funny things about sloth, slothfulness. Someone who is a sluggard says that this person makes up these silly excuses.

There's a lion. I can't do my job today. I can't be responsible. I can't get up. There's a lion that might get me. It's quite obviously not what's going on.

It's a silly excuse for not doing what he should be doing. It says that he turns in his bed as though he's hinged to it. Like a door is hinged to its frame. He just rotates back and forward. A very funny picture about someone unmotivated to get up and get to work. He buries his hand in the dish.

It's like I've got this nacho in my hand. But it just sounds exhausting to lift up my hand. I have to bring it all the way to my mouth. Then I'm going to have to chew it if I do all that work. There's just still more work to be done. Just a silly, ridiculous excuse, ridiculous picture that's being painted.

This is an image of someone who starts things and doesn't finish them because it's too much of a burden. Proverbs presents the sluggard as a person who makes excuses, who can't finish tasks, who leaves work undone. But it's not just laziness. So I was reading from a book by an Eastern University professor named R.J. Snell. He wrote a book called Ascedia and its Discontents, Metaphysical Boredom in an Empire of Desire.

As you can tell from the title, it's a real page turner. But here's what he said. It's really helpful. Let me just read a little excerpt here. This is from R.J. Snell.

He says, It is a mistake to think that sloth is laziness. More than indolence or apathy, sloth rejects the burden of order, choosing instead the breezy lightness of freedom, loving self more than relation or relationships, and autonomy more than the good. In sloth, one rejects the weight and density of living in an ordered creation. In sloth, we abhor what is there. We abhor what is. We abhor limits and place and order and being.

Our misguided addiction to freedom without truth is a revolt of the self against any charged world, which might demand attention, care, obligation, or respect, and certainly against any mandate of working to fill God's beautiful kingdom. They are seen as insufferable demands, as illegitimate restrictions on our unbridled freedom. And so we find ourselves hating the place God has provided, the work God has given to us, and the proper ways of laboring. He says that underneath all of what might appear to be laziness, that slothfulness or someone who is a sluggard, this is a refusal and a rejection of purpose.

That's what's actually happening in the heart of a sluggard. That really what's going on is that they've rejected God's purposes for their life. It's the rejection of being created and designed for a purpose or a particular end. The thought that I would have expectations or demands on me is too burdensome. This is a rejection of responsibility because it encroaches on my freedom. Responsibility and having a particular purpose introduces into my life restraints, and I don't want those.

I don't want to be designed for it. This is what philosophers would call a telos, a designed purpose, an end, an intended end, an aim for our lives. And slothfulness is a rejection of being designed for a purpose with a particular end in mind. So in other words, this idea is not the absence of activity. You could be filled with activity and yet still be eaten up with slothfulness in your life. God has designed us for some particular reasons with particular intentions.

So for example, God has made us in such a way that we are to relate to him. I'll give you three. God's designed purposes for our lives. He's given us this higher purpose, this higher calling, and slothfulness is a rejection of, number one, the fact that we're made to relate to God. But God has made us to know him, to glorify him, to enjoy him forever, to worship him, to submit our lives to him, to love him with all of our heart and our mind and our strength, all of our energy to be given in pursuit of God.

And slothful people reject this purpose. They don't see their life as meant to relate to God. They don't pursue God with zeal and energy and effort. They don't exert energy in glorifying God with their lives. That's too burdensome. That's too, I'm tired.

That's too constricting. Too much restraint is brought into my life to love God with all my heart and soul and mind and strength. I'd rather just lay here. It's a rejection of purpose. Speaking of the slugger turning on his bed like he's hinged, commentator Matthew Henry says, this is an elegant hyperpoly, showing how his sin is his punishment. Those that are slothful in the business of religion will not be at the pains to feed their own souls with the word of God, the bread of life, nor to fetch in promised blessings by prayer, though they might have them for the fetching.

That in being slothful, we're rejecting our purpose that we were made to relate to God. We're also, number two, made to relate to each other. This is part of God's created order for all people. If you think about back to the garden, that Adam and Eve are made to love one another just as God has loved them. That they're designed to pour out their lives for one another. But slothfulness rejects this as a purpose because relationships are hard.

People are so exhausting and they never stop sinning, especially in the annoying ways that they sin. Those are the ones they just can't ever stop. People require things of me. They want me to talk. They want me to help. Right?

Slothful person says, Oh my gosh, I don't want to be obligated. I don't want to have responsibilities. I don't want you to need my help. No, I can't have you with my phone number because you might text me or heaven forbid call me. I don't want to have to answer the phone and talk. It's hard work relationships are.

Self-donating love infringes on our autonomy and a sluggard resists relationships, particularly difficult ones. Number three, created purpose. We're made to have dominion. Dominion. We're to harness the earth's resources to create culture. For the good of humanity.

We're supposed to take the raw materials of creation and rework them in such a way that people are blessed. In a way that makes others' lives better. We're to fill the earth with beauty and goodness. To be a help to other people. So educators work to fill the earth with people who have knowledge.

It's part of our calling. Artists take raw materials and they draw out beauty from those raw materials. Accountants take the chaos of Numbers and they bring about order. And we could just go on and on and on with whatever your field or profession is. You're designed to have dominion. But a sluggard rejects this because that takes a lot of work.

Proverbs says, The land of the sluggard was filled with thorns and thistles. The walls are in disarray. The earth itself is languishing under the failed dominion of the sluggard. That he or she is contributing nothing to creation. Nothing to humanity. No one is helped.

No one is nourished. This is failed dominion. He's turned inward on himself. Instead of being turned outward towards God and to the people that were called to love and bless, the sluggard is turned inward on himself. He's folded his hands. He sleeps.

He slumbers. His personal comfort and freedom and rest and pleasure are his only pursuits. He prefers to be left alone with no responsibilities, no demands. It's actually a picture of anti-love. This idea of slothfulness. It is anti-love.

No restraints. No expectations. No demands. No obligations. Just leave me alone. Stop bothering me.

Stop needing things from me. It's an abhorrence, sloth is, of place and calling. It's a rejection of the idea that God has put me in this place, in this marriage, in this family, in this job, in this church, in this town, in this school. And I don't like those restrictions and I don't like the obligations that come with them. I actually think this is part of why Americans, statistically speaking, are more and more delaying marriage and delaying having kids. And there could be some reasons for that.

It's not necessarily wrong to do that. But if you actually look at the trends, we are pushing marriage and children further and further and further off into our lives and getting older and older and older. And I think part of the reason why that's happening is because of sloth. We understand that to be married is to be obligated to someone else. And we don't want that kind of restriction. That to have kids is to be obligated to these little humans who will constantly need you at all times, in all ways.

And we don't want anything to do with that. And so we just push it off. I think this is what happens when someone has what we call a midlife crisis. I think this is what happens when someone just all of a sudden it's like they just explode and they're gone. They're running away. They're off, you know, in the convertible with the secretary or whatever.

It's actually a slothfulness explosion. And I realize that term doesn't just roll off the tongue. So I'm not trying to like change the phrasing of midlife crisis. I think what's happening though is it's this sort of I have all these restrictions and I've built my life a certain way and now I realize I can't change it. My life is the one that I have. And I've done it long enough now where I realize I can't get out of this and I've got all these restrictions and all these obligations and people just snap because they don't want it anymore.

I'll tell you that this idea shows up in some smaller ways as well for me in particular. I've got a five-year-old, a three-year-old, and a three-month-old right now. Made a huge mistake. We had way too many kids. And if I'm not careful, that was a joke. I realize you don't know me so you don't know when I'm joking and when I'm not.

I've got to be more careful with folks who I don't know. If I'm not careful, the mentality that will sneak in is I am just counting down the clock until I finally get to put them in bed. And at the end of the day, when their day is over is when my life begins. And that is a broken, busted way to lead your family and to be a dad. And it's sloth. It's, this is tiring, this is exhausting.

When you're awake, there's things I have to do. But when you're asleep, I get to do what I want to do. So whether it's these big extreme ways or these maybe smaller and more subtle ways, I would argue that all of us have some level, some degree of slothfulness going on and we need some help. So I'll continue to investigate a little bit here and give you some consequences of slothfulness. I'll just give you three consequences of slothfulness. Here's the first one.

Metaphysical boredom. I'm trying to use big words to impress you. Metaphysical boredom. Let me think about for a second how much time we spend trying to cure our boredom. Like how much entertainment and social media we just flock to. Those things are fine.

There's nothing wrong with those things. But we just flock to them. Americans check their social media accounts on average 17 times per day. One seven times per day. We spend an hour and 40 minutes per day on social media. Adults actually spend more time on social media than teenagers do in case you were about to blame the teens for skewing the data.

7.5 Hours per day teenagers spend engaging media. Just all types of media. YouTube, Netflix, whatever is cool. We're just inundated with media to cure our boredom. And I'm not... When I say boredom this is why I said metaphysical boredom I'm not saying the problem is I don't know what to do right now.

That's not what I'm... I don't have anything to do right now. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about bigger than that. I'm saying we are now plagued with I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing. I don't know why I'm here.

I don't know the purpose for which I exist. That's a different kind of boredom. That's a metaphysical boredom. Not just I don't have anything to do it's I don't know what I'm meant to do. So I have nothing to give myself to.

This boredom is a result of being unhinged from our purpose and design. So this is something people don't realize. Purpose is meaning you have to do this. To have purpose in your life you have to say this is what I exist for. This is why I'm here. I'm not here for all these other things.

Purpose. So if you want to have purpose in your life you are going to have to cut off some options. You're going to have to say this is not for me. These are not why I'm here. These are not why I exist. And if you demand that you keep all of your options open and that you are never obligated and you're never committed you can do that but you cannot also have purpose.

You will have to pick one or the other. You can either have obligation and commitment and purpose or you can have none of them. But you don't get to have it both ways. Purpose requires limiting yourself restraining yourself restricting yourself. And you know this in all kinds of smaller ways. If you want to be a world class musician you're going to have to spend a lot of time practicing.

Right? You have to cut yourself off from other options and say this is what I'm going to do because this is my purpose. If you want to be a world class athlete you have to spend a lot of time refining your skills and working out and all sorts of things you could be doing that you now cannot spend your time doing. You're going to be limited. To have a purpose means other things are not for you. And right now in America we don't know why we exist we just instinctively reject any answer that actually places limits on us.

So as soon as somebody starts talking about this is our purpose and this is what we should do and these are the things we should not do people start freaking out because we don't want to have any sense of commitment or obligation or restriction but it's coming at the cost of our purpose. If you're not gripped with something bigger than yourself to give your life to you're going to struggle. We aren't gripped with purpose we've not let anything great capture our imagination and therefore nothing is bigger in our lives than our own convenience and comfort and pleasure and desires. And I'll just tell you when you're not pouring yourself out you're going to try to find something to fill yourself up with and so we just consume social media celebrity gossip inner workings of sports teams TV show after TV show shopping whatever it is for you I've got a friend who says you can tell how he's doing spiritually just by looking at his smartphone data usage for the month.

How he's doing spiritually just by looking at his smartphone data usage for the month. That if he's doing really well spiritually that he's way less addicted to his phone and his data usage goes down he said a couple of months ago he had the worst month he can remember having and he over tripled his data for the month. He's just constantly something to fill up something to distract

Something to numb it's consumption without contentment so there's no deep peace there's no lasting joy because we're not fulfilling our purpose for which we are created we're meant to love God to love people and to do good work for the good of humanity here's how Proverbs 13 4 says it the sluggard craves and gets nothing but the soul of the diligent is content the sluggard craves

It's this constant consuming but there is no contentment because the sluggard does not embrace his purpose of giving himself in love and contributing something consuming is easier but it's also emptier it's the first consequence of slothfulness number two second consequence of slothfulness is that we lie about God that to be slothful is to speak

Lies about God we were made to be thrilled with God to be enamored with him to be caught up in how incredible he is and how beautiful he is and how smart he is and how wise he is that how somehow he's always working all things for the good of those who love him these are the kind of things that are supposed to fill us

With energy and joy and be thrilled by him but the bored sluggard says God is boring to me there's nothing about God that would make me want to put this remote down there's nothing about God that would make me want to close this app and think about him for a minute there's nothing

About God that would make me want to pursue him with everything that I have he's not worthy of my awe and attention and service his words are irrelevant to me see our misuse of time says something about our view of God and living in a persistent state of sloth and boredom is actually a denial of God's worthiness

What if just like every now and then when you were bored you prayed instead of picking up your phone not like all the time just every now and then what if you picked up a Bible instead of picking up the Netflix marathon where you left it when you had some

Time on your hands not every now and then let's still let's still do some Netflix I'm not being ridiculous here Netflix is great it's just not as good as God is right we're saying with our time and energy God TV and media and

Clothes and whatever is better than you so we get bored we start looking at pictures of other people's vacations and we look up and it's been three hours and that got the head nods because y'all do it too huh okay number three

Third consequence of softfulness is brokenness brokenness like things just fall apart things just fall apart around you and that's the language of the Proverbs is that surrounding this sluggard is just sort of disarray it's just overgrown it's broken things aren't what they're supposed to be because God gave this person this person who's being spoken to in Proverbs he gave him things to do

And without him doing those things they left they're left undone so there's just brokenness where sloth reigns you will find brokenness where people shrug off the work of of cultivating relationships then you'll find people around them who are hurting and lonely and struggling where people shrug off the work that's been given to them you're just gonna find life breaking down

My wife and I have a good friend who just decided she wanted to leave her husband he's great he's a sinner but he's great I mean he's done nothing that would necessarily you would think cause this sort of reaction they've got two kids and she just said I don't want to be obligated anymore I feel tied down I feel restricted I don't want to do it anymore and so she's out with no concern for how this is

Gonna affect her former husband or these children and so now because of her slothfulness there's this breakdown in their family and there's all this brokenness and now each of the three of them are in counseling to try to work through some of this stuff if you've been through these situations you know that these kids are now blaming themselves and thinking what should I have done so

That mommy would stay this is what happens where slothfulness reigns in rules where people reject the good purposes that God's given to them is that there's gonna be brokenness there's always collateral damage and the slothful person leaves a wake of hurting frustrated people in her wake in his wake so we gotta ask how do we break free like what do we do to reject slothfulness and

Embrace our good design I'll give you three three answers how do we break free number one carry your load carry your load that's language from Galatians chapter six verse five in that passage it says that that God has given each of us a load to carry particular things that we're supposed to carry work to do that's contrasted in Galatians chapter six with burdens burdens are unusually heavy things that we all need help with

That we need the community of faith to come around us to help us with that's a burden the language here though is is load these are the normal regular things of life that God gives each of us it's work to do and we're supposed to carry those things your your load is the work that God has given to you it's a demand and expectation and that we're called to reject false freedom and embrace our design to carry the load of the work and the people that God has given to us to embrace the call

To give ourselves to God to others our spouses our kids our roommates our neighbors RJ Snell whom I quoted earlier speaks about carrying our load and here's how he talks about it he says we do this in concrete ways finishing the report paying our bills wiping away childish tears washing the car caring for our tools doing the dishes staying in mundane ordinary work while perhaps unromantic allows for virtue since natural virtue requires repetition

There is no virtue without repetition and so we stay put we sink our roots deep parents can confirm this exhausting yes but a new character forms with every nap meal diaper wet bed and smile we become the people we are by what we choose to do again isn't that a good last line we become the people we are by what we choose to do again so carry your load carry your load in your work

And we all have work if you're a student if you're in school if you're in middle or high school part of your work is to honor your father and mother in school you get the report done like on time you read the assignment right you carry your load at your job you be on time you get your work done on time you be reliable you follow up with the client you put the finishing

Touches on the painting you keep setting the alarm and you keep getting to work on time you don't be late you take care of your tools you see the project through if you primarily stay at home with children then your work your load is to build into them to draw out their potential to nurture and come alongside of them we carry the load in our jobs we carry the load

In our relationships you allow yourself to be inconvenienced by others you do the the hard work of pursuing difficult people including your difficult weird roommate have you guys picked up on the fact that you always have one weird roommate you know this is how life works there will always be one weird roommate if you don't have a weird roommate I have horrible news you are the weird

Roommate I'm sorry to be the one to tell you that when I was in college there was a group of us that stayed at a house that we rented and one of our roommates he was downstairs and there were some mice that were sneaking in and so he went and bought a mouse trap caught a mouse

Took the mouse out of the trap cut its head off put the head on a stick put the stick in the ground he said as a warning to all the other mice of what would happen if they came around so we all saw that and we were like just I'm going to slowly back away with no

Comment you always have a weird roommate and part of carrying the load is to continue to serve and love and be a blessing even to difficult people even to weird roommates you carry the load in your marriage in a room this size

I would bet some amounts of money that someone is thinking about leaving their spouse stay do the hard work of staying of pursuing you carry the load and God will bless it he will use it in your life your persistence your commitment

You stay you serve your spouse you carry the load with your kids especially if you have younger kids they're exhausting but you do the baths you do the bedtime routines you explain the same thing

For the 100,000th time without losing your patience you carry the load with your kids carry the load in your community group I know some of you are in a group and you have difficult

People that are killing you and it would be so easy to just begin to distance yourself from that person some of you have been distancing yourself from your group because they want more for you than you

Want for yourself right now if we're honest but you haven't said anything like you haven't said hey guys I'm just going to drop out of the group I think because you knew they would actually confront you and come after you and pursue

You so you've just gotten more and more creative with your excuses don't reject your purpose don't reject your design stay stick it out God will use it we become

The people we are by the things that we do again we carry the load in our relationship with God some Christians lack any sort

Of discipline and energy in their pursuit of God that's a shirking of responsibility to pursue God with all your heart and I've heard people who I swear they sound like the

Dude in the book of Proverbs with their excuses as to why they're not getting any quality time with Jesus why they're getting no time in prayer it's like oh gosh I was going to but there's a lion outside you were made to relate to

God to pursue him with all your heart and mind and strength and when you carry the load that God has given to you over time you develop virtue your character develops over time but the more that you give yourself in love to others

You're formed and to say it more strongly you cannot become the person God is shaping you to be if you refuse to carry the load that he has given to you when you serve your roommate again you are taking yet another step in the direction

Of becoming a servant hearted person that's how it works but to get there you got to stay you got to carry what's been given to you and a lot of life is doing the same things over and over like I can't clean a room in

My house without one of my kids running behind me just knocking everything back onto the floor right after I just picked it up my kids don't want to play with a toy they want to play with the toys they just throw them all on the

Floor and do snow angels in the toys it doesn't this the type of toy is irrelevant it just needs to be a pile so I'm just constantly doing the same stuff over and over and over your character is shaped with every single load

Of laundry because we become the people we are by what we choose to do again the big moments in life are not going to be what ends up shaping you the most we have some false beliefs as Christians sometimes that these mountaintop experiences

Are the life defining life altering moments and I'm not taking away from those they can be really powerful but what I'm telling you is the things that are going to make you the person you become are the things you do a thousand

Times not the things you do once very rarely is it one single thing going to dictate the direction of your life but the things that you do over and over and over again will absolutely dictate the direction of your life you're formed by the things you do

Again here's how Proverbs 21 talks about all this he says the desires of the sluggard kills him for his hands refuse to labor all day long he craves and craves but the righteous man gives and does not hold back

The righteous man has he has become the kind of person who gives who invests who labors who stays and does I can't read this stuff and not think about my dad he's such a good example for me he's

Been a real estate agent for 30 years and he is just so faithful he does a good Job he's honest he has integrity his clients love him one of the pleasures of my adult life has been growing up and meeting

People that my dad has worked with through the years and hearing how they brag about my dad it brings tears to my eyes how proud I am that this is my dad who is faithful with the work that God gave him growing up when I would ask my dad

To play I have this is a true story I have no memory of him saying no I won't play with you now he had to have said that right like there's no way he just always did but I'm just telling you I have no memory of that because more often

Than not the answer was either yes I would love to or give me ten minutes let me finish what I'm doing and then I'm outside let's play basketball so all I remember is my dad being faithful with what God entrusted to him it's him serving and blessing and

My entire family and everyone that my dad has worked with all through the years would say they've been blessed by being around him and being associated with him simply because he carried the load that God had given him you're becoming a certain kind of person by

Staying under the weight and continuing to carry the load that God gives you and the demands on your life will form you into the person God has called you to be that's number one number two way that we break free we gotta distinguish between rest and escape

We gotta distinguish between rest and escape I think this is important and I'm glad you guys are studying it over the summer this idea of rest or the hammock rest is not escape those are different rest is when I'm recharging in a God in a Godward way so that afterwards I am ready to get back to work that's rest

I'm recharging in a Godward way so that now I'm ready to get back to killing things I gotta go to work I gotta get to hunting that's rest escape is a false substitute that we often turn to when we're tired just to turn our brains off so I don't know if you've

Ever been to the end of the day and you think I literally I'm so tired I can't do anything but watch TV my counsel to you would be no if that's all you can do then just don't do anything go to bed you need to rest if all you can do is watch TV

That's that's your body saying it's time to go to sleep right rest is not escape and you can watch TV but that's not rest because if you're anything like me you know that watching a show does not make you want to next get up and go out

To work it makes me want to watch more shows right escape begets more escape rest leads to work and we gotta learn what's restful for us and distinguish where are we inclined to just go towards escape I just don't want

To have to think about this anymore I just want to shut down I want to turn my brain off that's escape now what's restful for you might not be what's restful for me and that's fine so there's going to need to be

Some self awareness here and you got to know how you're wired so my Job as a pastor is lots of reading lots of talking and I'm never done people just keep sinning myself included so I'm never ever finished so what's restful

For me is something that is mindless I don't want to have to read I don't want to have to talk to people because that's what I do all the time and I want it to be something that when I'm done it's over and I never have to think about it

Again so sometimes yard work is actually restful for me because it's the opposite of my day Job sometimes cooking is restful for me it's just working with my hands I don't have to think about it too much it's done we ate the meal glad you

Liked it I'll never think about this ever again but now if you're a chef or if you're on a landscape company then probably those things aren't going to be restful for you so you got to know where you're coming from

And what actually is restful for you and some self-awareness is needed but if you don't know you need to learn otherwise you're just going to escape and find that you're never recharged to get back to work

So we got to distinguish between rest and escape lest we be tired and exhausted all the time and then number three and as I'm saying this I'll invite the band to come back up because we'll

Prepare to sing and respond a little bit number three look to Jesus we got to look to Jesus we break free from slothfulness by looking to Jesus Jesus carried the load that was given to him he was obedient to his parents Jesus spent

Most of his life as a carpenter think about this now the God of the universe incarnated and spent most of his time here doing work with his hands think about how honoring that is to labor and to work and Jesus did good work as a carpenter

He did not make bad tables Jesus made good tables like if you bought a table from Jesus it wouldn't wobble and you wouldn't have to fold up a napkin and put under one of the legs to get it to

Be balanced right he did a good Job he carried the load he said my food is to do the will of him who sent me and ultimately Jesus carried the load of the cross he stayed on the cross embracing the demands

And the responsibilities he could have saved himself or he could save us and he chose to save us we ultimately break free from slothfulness when we look to Jesus for our example when we realize that Jesus was our substitute that he carried

The load that he bore the price of our sin so that we might be free and through him we can renounce slothfulness and through the spirit's power we can embrace our purpose and embrace our design and find that God actually shapes

And blesses us through it let me pray for us Jesus thank you that you have embraced your load that you with joy set before you move to the cross scorning the shame Lord that you could have chosen to save yourself or to save us and that you saved us

As we want to look to your example we want to receive your righteousness and Jesus we want to reject sloth we want to repent where sloth has taken root in our lives and my assumption is for all of us we have some responding

And some confessing and some repenting to do so Lord would you send your spirit to help us see ourselves clearly to be aware to realize the places in our lives where we're pushing off the obligations and responsibilities

That you have lovingly given to us both for our good for the people around us good and for your glory and so would you help us as believers to embrace the load the restriction the responsibilities that you have given us that we would

Pursue you with all our heart soul mind and strength that we would serve and bless and pour out for others and we would do the good work that you've called us to do and the places

That you've put us now that our whole city our whole area would be blessed that's ultimately what we're after so we ask all this for your glory and for our good amen amen

Rhythms of Life

Rhythms of Life

Chet Phillips

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Transcript

Good morning. Happy Father's Day. Good to see you all this morning. We are going to be beginning a series today called The Hammer in the Hammock. It's going to last six weeks where we're going to spend some time talking about work and rest, the rhythm of life that God's placed in the world. So there was an economist.

His name was John Maynard Keynes. In 1930, he had a quote where he said, Our grandchildren will only work about three hours a day and probably only by choice. So I wanted to ask, how is your three-hour workdays going, your voluntary three-hour workdays? Have they been nice? His prediction didn't quite come true, did it? What he was doing was he was seeing how life and work was being able to – we were able to get more done because of the increases in technology and machinery.

And so what he was saying was all that was going to do to life was we were going to be more productive in a shorter amount of time, and then we'd have more time for rest. But that is not what happened. We did become more productive in a shorter amount of time, but all it has done is increase the pace at which life moves. Being able to travel long distances faster just means that you have more to do more quickly, that being able to get projects done quicker means that we just have more to do, more production, more, more, more. And the pace of life has increased. And if we're honest, most of us are very, very busy.

That's kind of the American mantra is just that I'm busy. I have so much going on. For many of us, we have – technology has made it to where we can work anywhere. But what ends up happening is we end up working everywhere, that most of us have work in our pockets, that we use our phones, we're receiving phone calls, we're sending messages, we're getting emails that need to be answered within 24 hours, and it's better if you do it sooner. And that for many of us, work never stops, and our busyness never stops, and we're constantly going. And in America, we are busy.

Life feels too full. We are overstressed, overworked, overanxious. And the increasing – the rates of depression are consistently increasing. I read an article in the magazine called The Economist. It's stationed in London. It says that ever since a clock was first used to synchronize labor in the 18th century, time has been understood in relation to money.

Our hours are financially quantified. So what I'm saying was that prior to this, there was – time was understood as separate from finances. But you might think about a day's worth of labor. But for many of us, when we began working, we started thinking of hourly wages. And so it's all of life now feels monetized, that you worry about wasting time or spending time wisely or saving time, that we've kind of connected these ideas together, and so that our time and our money are tied together. And so what it says was is when economies grow and incomes rise, everyone's time becomes more valuable.

And the more valuable something becomes, the scarcer it seems. So it says the U.S. has grown in wealth. Everybody feels busier. They go on to talk specifically about America. Like I said, this was written in London. But they say American workers toil some of the longest hours in the industrial world.

Employers are not required to offer their employees proper holidays. That's just how they say vacation. But even when they do, their workers rarely use them all. The average employee takes only half of what is allotted, and 15% don't take any holiday at all. Nowhere is the value of work higher and the value of leisure lower. This is the country that invented takeaway coffee after all.

So what it's saying is that in the United States, we overvalue work. We undervalue leisure. And then it takes a shot. It says, you know, coffee used to be something you sat and enjoyed at a cafe. You had conversations. But that's not what we do.

We roll up to a drive-thru window. And we're like, please inject caffeine directly into my neck. I've got things to do. That in general, we are busy. We are moving at a fast pace. And we are exhausted.

It goes on to talk about women in the workforce. It says, So what it's saying is that as more women went into the workforce, they also began to fell a greater pressure to be better moms. And that as many moms, as they watched other women in the workforce, began to say, no, being a mom matters so immensely. And they began to up the ante on what it meant to be a mom. And so overall, this rise in the pressures of motherhood. This article went on to say that parents today are spending more time with their children than any other generation.

That they're spending more time specifically devoted to their children than previous generations in these countries. But they feel worse about it. Feel more like they are failing. That fathers and mothers are more at home doing work. And so it is Father's Day. I didn't want to say that that was one of the statistics was that fathers have begun to do more at home.

So good Job, y'all. But it did say that dads do more of the fun jobs, like they play with the children. Or they said they do more of the kind of task-oriented. This job gets finished. So like some fixing things around the house, some repairs, or some yard work.

But it said that moms tend to do the unending jobs. Feeding children, cooking for the family, cleaning, doing laundry. They have unending tasks that it never stops. I know for many of you that you come in here this morning and we're supposed to be here. We're supposed to be worshiping. We're supposed to be praying.

We're supposed to be studying the Word together. We're supposed to be taking a deep breath and kind of relaxing for just a moment. And you can't. As soon as you sit down, as soon as you get a pen, as soon as you get a paper, you start taking, when you're going to take notes, you start writing down a to-do list and grocery list. You thought, you thought I didn't know. The reason I know this, you just thought I thought you were paying attention.

But the reason I know this is I looked over before while I'm preaching and seen my wife and thought, man, this must be a good sermon. She's taking some diligent notes. And then I come down and she's like, hey, can we get this stuff at the grocery store later? But that's the way my wife is. When a pen touches a paper for her, she begins to write out lists because she feels like she lives in a world of unending things to do. Jeffrey Godby says, working mothers with young children.

He's a time-use expert at Penn State. That's helpful to know. Jeffrey Godby, a time-use expert at Penn State. It says that working mothers with young children are the most time-scarce segment of society. That for all of us, we are busy. Now, one of the ways we've reacted to this is we've just said, this is what life's like.

We've just kind of owned it. Some of you are like, yeah, I'm busy. Yeah, I'm exhausted. But this is just a season. This is just for now. For some reason, we all kind of think that future us is going to rest.

Like, I don't know about y'all, but future me gets to sleep in. Future me gets to take days off. Future me is well rested. He's not as irritable as present me. And for many of us, we're doing that. We're like, I'll get through this.

I just got to get through this. As soon as the holidays are over, as soon as this is over, as soon as this, you know, the summer's kind of busy. As soon as I can, then I'll be able to stop. But that's not how it works. Many of us are like, well, I'm in a season. It's like, well, it's a 12-year season for you, and you need to figure out a new pace of life.

And so what has been – what has happened as a kind of a response to this over-business in our culture is that we have begun to place a lot of pressure on the time off that we do have so that we anxiously approach it. We have a vacation planned later in the year, and that's going to be our big vacation. We're going to have all of our family memories, and everything's going to be special and magic, and we've got to get everything done in that one week, and we come back more exhausted than when we left. And then there's a whole other segment of our culture, of our society right now that's just kind of rejected this.

They're extending adolescence. They're trying to avoid this type of work, this type of – They feel like it imposes on their life to take on this weight, to take on this responsibility, is going to rob them of everything that is good. And so they spend their time – I mean, they're working really hard right now to find a part-time job that pays full-time pay so they can keep up with playing Frisbee golf. And for some of us in this room, you are busy, and you're the busy type of person who can't sit still. And for others of us, we're kind of pushing back on that and being like, really, if I could do nothing and survive, I would.

If I could do nothing and get away with it, I would. And so there's some of you that have full-time jobs, but when you go to work, you're not really trying to be productive. You're not really trying to pour into what you're doing. You're really just there to get a paycheck so that you can look forward to the time off that you do have. And we've begun to push back on this idea of being too busy and life moving too fast. Now, I know that for many of our older generations, they're going to look at the younger generations and say, you don't know how to work.

Look at how lazy they are. And there's some truth to that. There's some truth to some of these younger generations right now kind of pushing back on this. But I've seen documentaries on the 60s. I know that a whole generation of people just quit their jobs, moved away from their homes, went out into the woods and rolled around in the mud wearing nothing but a guitar. I don't think this is new to this generation.

I think there's a consistent inner turmoil when it comes to work and to rest, when it comes to laziness and busyness. And we've got to figure out a better pace of life. Many of us oscillate between the two. We're busy, busy, busy, and then we're just exhausted and we crash and we're lazy. And some of us just – you'll see somebody go, this is it. It's just too much, too much.

I can't be a part of a community group anymore. I can't be a part of this church anymore. I volunteer for too much. I got too much going on with the kids. We've just got to – I'm going to quit my job. We're just going to move to a new city.

And they almost just – they freak out and they need to just reset life. But the problem is we don't have a healthy pattern. So as soon as they move, as soon as they get another church, as soon as they do all of that, they just begin to rebuild the same problems they had before. And we've got to have a better way to work and to rest and a better rhythm for it. So grab your Bible and go to Exodus chapter 20.

Exodus chapter 20. This is where God gives the Israelites the Ten Commandments. And the Ten Commandments are the primary framework of the law given in the Old Testament. So what had happened was God had taken the Israelites. They had been his covenant people, and they had been enslaved in Egypt for 400 years. And so God shows up, and through Moses and through the plagues and through the parting of the Red Sea, he pulls the Israelites out.

And then on Mount Sinai, he gives them the Ten Commandments and says, This is how you will worship me. This is how you will know me. This is the beginnings of me showing you what I'm like. And so as we read the Ten Commandments, they're the framework, kind of the foundation of the law, that many of them say a major idea or concept, and then much of the law is then going to be explaining how to do that. So he's saying, have no other gods but me.

And then there's going to be whole sections of the law on how to worship. He'll say, do not commit murder. Do not commit adultery. But then there's whole sections on the law on how to relate to others and how to walk through life together. But in the Ten Commandments, we're going to pick up in verse 8.

We're going to read 8 through 11. And then we're going to spend some time talking through it. So God says, Remember the Sabbath day to keep 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. You or your son or your daughter, your male servant or your female servant or your livestock or the sojourner who is within your gates.

For in six days the Lord made the heaven and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. So this is in one of the Ten Commandments. And what we see is that God says, Remember the Sabbath. Remember means practice it. Hold it in front of you.

Keep it going. The word Sabbath just means rest. So he's saying remember the rest. Remember this. He says to keep it holy. Holy means to be set apart.

Many of you, maybe your mothers or grandmothers have china or they have like special Christmas dishes, and they're set apart. They're used for special occasions. You don't go to your grandma's house and get out her fine china or get out her Christmas dishes and just start eating your lucky charms in them. That's not acceptable. She'd look at you like bugs are crawling out of your ears. She might strike you.

I don't know what your grandmother's like. But you don't do that. It's set apart. It has a special purpose. And so that's what he's saying is that there is one day in your week. Your week will be six days long and all six of the other days will look very similar.

And then there's one day that's set apart. There's one day that's holy. It's different. Just a bit of history. The Israelites practiced this. They had the Sabbath, which was the seventh day in the week.

So that was Saturday. Later, as Jesus comes and Jesus goes to the cross and he dies and he rises from the grave on Sunday. It's the first day of the week. The Christians began to worship on Sunday. They called it the Lord's Day. We see that referenced in Acts and in the book of Revelation.

And then as the Emperor Constantine becomes a Christian later, I mean, there's some speculation over whether or not he's actually a Christian, but as the Roman Empire moved in that direction, he declares that Sunday will be a Sabbath. The Romans prior to this had not practiced the day of rest, but he declares that Sunday will be a Sabbath. And then push on down into the future. When the U.S. gets started, we had a kind of a debate over whether or not we would have Saturday as a Sabbath. We would do the Jewish one or we would do the Sunday one. So we just took both.

And that's why many of us have a five-day work week or five-day school work week, a two-day weekend. Now, with retail and service industries, a lot of us do work seven days a week, but this is where that began. So here's what it says. This is in the Ten Commandments. And so what we gotta understand is that as we approach the Ten Commandments, we hold these up as these are helpful, these are binding, these are the weight of these is still present. When the Bible says to not commit adultery, to not commit murder, but I want us to play a little game.

Which one of these is not like the others? So the Bible says in the Ten Commandments, it says you should not have any other gods but me. You should not create a graven image. You wanna have no other handmade idols. You will not commit adultery. You will not commit murder.

Hey, one day a week, take a day off. Rest. It just strikes us as different, but we wouldn't. So what we kind of treat this as, a lot of times, is nine commandments and one suggestion that we act as if, of course you can't murder, of course that's evil, of course that's heinous, and then someone's like, what about the Sabbath? And we're like, well, you know, I mean, not if you're busy or have something else to do. You see, when we come to the law, we have to understand how we as Christians ought to understand this, how we ought to approach it.

We believe that Jesus Christ fulfilled the law on our behalf, that the weight of the law, see, the law given in the Old Testament was designed to really do two things. It was designed to show us our inability to live to God's standards, our inability to live up to what we were meant to be. And secondly, it was to teach us, to train us what God was like. It was to prepare us, to build into us a pursuit of his holiness. And so Jesus comes and Jesus does not abolish the law. He does not throw this out.

He fulfills it. That Jesus Christ accomplishes the law on our behalf. What he does is he lives a perfect sinless life. He perfectly fulfills the law. The heart behind the law and the regulations are fulfilled in Christ and then Christ is cursed for us. That he takes the curse of the law on himself and he dies on a cross.

That's what Galatians tells us. That Jesus takes the curse for us so that we might have his, he takes our failing report card and gives us his perfect score. That he graduates and gives us his diploma. That he swaps places with us and takes our curse so that we might be free. And so that when we come to texts like this, the weight of the law does not bear down on us. This does not crush us.

It shows us our inability and it drives us towards Christ and we ought to take it as the good gift that it is. That it does help us that the Ten Commandments are life-giving because of Christ. And so as we read this, we should not easily set aside the Sabbath. So let's pick back up in verse eight and let's try to understand this a little better. I mean verse nine. So he says, six days you shall labor and do all your work.

Now this specific commandment is for training these Israelites who had been slaves to rest. They were slaves. Their value came from their productivity. That they were useful only in as far as they were producing. And when they ceased to produce, when they ceased to be healthy, when they ceased to be strong, when they ceased to be able to do work, they were useless. And so he takes these slaves and he says, that's not how your value works anymore.

One day I want you to rest. I want you to sit like I sat. See, God wove this pattern into the world that he created for six days. The Bible and the world began with God working. With him creating and cultivating. And so he creates, he cultivates, he works, and then it says that after six days he rested.

So that on the seventh day, God doesn't create anything. He doesn't make anything. He doesn't, he just rests. He enjoys his good work. And so what this says is, six days you shall labor and do all your work. Now many of us in this room lean towards busyness, but some of us lean towards laziness.

You've been waking up at the crack of noon. And you are too valuable to be lazy. Too valuable to throw off, to reject the weight of existence that God has given you. That God has poured intelligence and strength, ability into you. And that we were designed for good work. That we were meant to do what God did in creation, which was to work and to look at our work and see that it was good.

It's one of the things that Ecclesiastes says. It's one of the few joys given to us is that we would work and enjoy the work of our hands. It's Father's Day. I want to speak specifically to men for just a second. We are seeing right now in our culture a prolonged adolescence specifically for men. We're seeing men push responsibility further down, further back, further along the timeline.

They're living with their parents longer. They're pushing off getting married. They're using Tinder rather than truly trying to pursue somebody. They're pushing this all further down the line. And we even have kind of a consistent cultural push towards this idea that some forms of masculinity, traditional forms of masculinity, are simply evil. Now, not all forms of masculinity as we've been taught are biblical and beautiful, but there is a lot of weight and beauty given to masculinity and good godly masculinity is to be celebrated.

But there are currently some, it seems, that as if they would lay the idea of toxic masculinity directly on top of just any form of masculinity and they are anti the idea. And so what they have done is what you have done when you've removed the good weight placed on men for self-discipline and self-sacrifice, what you end up getting is only toxic masculinity because you have guys filled with testosterone and no real way to use it. So they end up depressed and angry and violent. Men, you were meant to carry weight. I see articles a lot that are saying, why aren't there any more female CEOs? Why aren't there more females this?

And honestly, I celebrate the idea of females doing things. God poured value and worth into you as well, but I'm not mad at male CEOs. Men are supposed to be carrying weight. even currently with watching kind of the movies that are out with my son, there's a lot of areas right now, women, where it feels like our society is just behind you just clapping, just celebrating what you're doing and we ought to. That's a good shift from some of the ways that things have been done in the past because God, ladies, has poured a lot of weight, poured a lot of his value, his energy, his design into you that you were made in the image of God.

But watching stuff with my son, every time I watch a movie with a leading lady, she's smart and capable and strong and every time there's one with a little boy in it, he's like awkward and confusing and weird. I have to work really hard to find movies that I can show him where it's like, yeah, be like that guy. Men, you were meant to carry weight, you were meant to work. Same for women. But it seems as if in our culture right now, there are many women who are flourishing and many men who are floundering and we were designed to be tethered, designed to have discipline, designed for sacrifice, designed for good labor.

You are too valuable. God has put too much into you for you to be lazy, to reject the good design God has. So six days you are to labor. forever. But then it continues, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it, you shall not do any work. On it, you shall not do any work.

You have six days to get all your work done and on the seventh day and on the seventh day, you're not to do any work. You see, you're too valuable to be lazy, but you are not indispensable. The world continues to run even when you are taking a day off. See, God looks at the Israelites and says, your value no longer comes from your work. You can sleep in. You can rest.

You can simply worship. You can sit and remember that you used to be slaves and know now that you are set free because there's going to be a day every week where every bit of productivity stops and you remember. You remember me and you remember what I've done. You see, it's a day of rest that we're meant to stop, slow down. So many of us don't know how to rest.

Our current kind of cultural cycle is that we wake up in the morning and we're tired so we grab a cup of coffee. Some of you are like, well, I don't drink coffee. Okay, Mountain Dew. Monster. We pour some caffeine into our face. Some of us go to a coffee shop and we're like, please, I'd like a cup with caffeine in it and then I'd like a smaller, more concentrated bit of caffeine poured down in that and I'd like some whipped cream and I'd like some chocolate.

I need some simple carbohydrates. Then we go to work. We get to work. We start to slow down at some point. Maybe we start just taking in simple carbohydrates. We start eating just some candy.

Maybe some of you have M&Ms on your desk. We begin to just kind of fuel ourselves with garbage and then we go to lunch. We eat. Come back from lunch. We get back to work. At some point, you start to slow down.

You begin to, three or four in the afternoon, your body's like, well, I'm done. You're like, oh, no, you're not. If you're like me, you drink more coffee. Some of you, it's another Mountain Dew. Some of you all go get a Diet Coke from a gas station that's the size of my newborn infant. We go home.

We're wired. We're kind of exhausted from the day, but we can't calm down. We can't slow our minds. We can't stop thinking about things. Our phone's still going off. Work's still hanging over our heads.

We've got all these issues that are going in our minds, and so the best thing we can come up with is we'll turn the TV up loud enough to drown out the noise. We think maybe watching TV will calm us down, but it doesn't because it's just a bunch of stressful stuff shining in our face, so then maybe we decide we're going to lay in bed. We'll go to sleep, but some of us can't sleep, so we're using our phone to flip through Twitter or Facebook, and have you ever noticed if you do this long enough, you don't even read. You just start kind of looking at the pictures, and your brain, you start going faster and faster, and you're only reading half of a sentence, and then you're just moving on, and we wonder why we all have ADHD, and we're twitchy.

We're sticking iPads in the hands of two-year-olds and being like, here, pay attention to this, and every single one of us is losing our minds, so you've been laying in bed with a phone in your hand, which is the equivalent of shining a flashlight in your eyes. Like, that's going to help you sleep, and then eventually we take an Ambien, drink some Zequil, fall asleep, so we can get up and start again. We are over-busy, over-anxious. We don't know how to rest. I talk with a lot of pastors, and I know that even for really committed Christians, many of them, not all of them, but many of them, only gathering at the church one to two times a month, even though they would say they're devout, they love Jesus, and some of that has to do with the fact that we've lost the Sabbath.

We've lost this day of rest, and it's not just a day of rest, but he says that this is a, the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God, that it's a rest towards God. That we're supposed to stop and aim ourselves towards God. You see, without work, you'll only be able to achieve unfulfilling frivolity, unfulfilling fun, unfulfilling leisure. It'll be like eating a bag of potato chips for dinner. It's salty, it's sweet, but then it doesn't feel right. It's not weighty enough.

And so that for those of us who have rejected the idea of work, existence is too light, and it's unfulfilling. But without rest, all you'll have is unending toil. Joy and color will drain from life. You see, we were designed for life-giving labor and soul-satisfying rest. Both a rejection of work into laziness and slothfulness, which we'll talk about next week, or a rejection of rest is a form of self-sufficiency and self-glorification. We are, in our pattern of work and rest, sinning and in need of repentance.

And some of us have so self-glorified and so grown into self-sufficiency that we claim to be Christians, but we practice as if we are not because we are unable to rest in the finished work of Christ and in the fact that He rules sovereignly over the universe so that you can go lay down, you can take a nap, you can put your feet up, you can close your computer, and the world will continue to move. And some of us have begun to live as if the whole point of existence is our own comfort, our own enjoyment, that everything is meant to terminate on us, that our satisfaction, our fun, is the point of everything so that we have rejected the weight that God has placed on us to serve those around us and help keep the world moving and to reign and have dominion over the world as He taught us in Genesis so that we've rejected this idea and we have glorified ourselves well beyond our position. And when it comes to our approach to work and to rest, we're sinners who need to repent. But we need to repent and enjoy Christ.

You see, this is a Sabbath. It's a rest to the Lord. We have labor unto the Lord and we have rest unto the Lord. You see, Jesus used to get into it with the Pharisees all the time. They would argue with Him all the time. If you read the New Testament, you'll see a lot of places where it goes on a Sabbath day and it tells a story and then it says on another Sabbath and it tells a story and it says on another Sabbath.

And the reason it jumps from Sabbath to Sabbath to Sabbath is that these were some of the times that Jesus was butting heads with the Pharisees. The Pharisees were a strict sect of those who practiced Judaism and they were very strict when it came to Sabbath regulations. They were very strict as to what it meant to practice the Sabbath. What was work? What wasn't work? How far could you walk?

How much could you do? And Jesus is constantly getting into it with them because they're trying to over practice the legality of the law and they're missing the point of it. So in this conversation with them, and this will be up on the screen, it's found in Mark 2, verse 27 and 28. Jesus says this. He's in an argument with them over the Sabbath and he said to them, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath. This idea of a weekly rest, this idea of you taking time to stop is a gift. It does not rule over you to hem you in, to cause you harm. It is a gift. It was made for you. We were not designed to be able to move at the pace we're moving.

If we were to right now, if everybody just had to stand up and we all just had to run, just run as far as you can go. I know some of us, we'd make it to the parking lot and you'd be like, okay, I'm done. You might light up a cigarette and just have a seat. Other of us would go a little bit further. Some of you that are like, oh, I think right now I could probably run a marathon. We're so proud of you.

We saw your sticker. But all of us eventually would shut down. Our bodies would force us to stop. And for many of us, we are higher capacity. You feel like you can handle the weight of this. You feel like you can go without rest and you feel like you can just muscle through.

And the truth is, at some point, your body will shut you down. And the Sabbath was made for you. And the Sabbath was made for me. That it's a gift from God to us that we might rest because he is good and he is sovereign. He has set the slaves free. Jesus doesn't just say the Sabbath was made for man.

He says, I am the Lord of the Sabbath. He calls himself the Son of Man. He says, the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath. So what it means is that as we find the Sabbath, we find the Lord of the Sabbath, Christ. That in the Sabbath, we not only receive this good gift, but we received Christ. That we run to Jesus.

That we get more of Jesus in resting because he's the Lord of it. He doesn't say he's gotten rid of it. He says he's all about it. He's the king over it. You see, we believe that Jesus Christ came and that he did the work. That we are saved by good works, but it's Christ's works, not ours.

That when he was on the cross and he said, it is finished, that meant that forever the slaves have been set free and that we can rest. That we've been set free from our eternal slavery to our sin and our guilt and the weight of the law that bears down on us. So that in Christ, we can be free. That's why he says, all you who are weary and heavy laden, come to me and I will give you rest. You see, Jesus is the Lord of rest and our hope is that in this series, as we begin to learn about work, we learn how to work unto him that we might enjoy him, but then we begin to have a good balance of work followed by healthy rest that we would work hard and rest well, that we would have life-giving work and soul-satisfying rest.

You see, many of us have downtime, but it's not rest. The best we muster is laziness, distraction, escape, when we lost the ability to rest in the Lord and unto the Lord that we might be soul-satisfied. That we might be filled back up. So our hope in this series is that we would learn how to work and we would learn how to rest and that we would all have a healthy pattern of joy-filled life in Christ. We believe that Christians ought to be some of the hardest working and some of the best resting. That we ought to know more than anybody how to rest, how to enjoy life, and that we might get a lot of life and joy out of our work knowing that all of our labor is to the Lord.

As for today, the question is, where do I need to work then? Have I rejected God's good design for me that I might labor, that I might work, that I might be productive? Have I thrown that off? Have I glorified myself in my comfort that you might run to Christ asking for forgiveness and asking for His help? Have you so over-elevated your self-sufficiency so as to lose Christ? So overvalued your productivity, your work, so as to push Him away, so as to reject God that you've lost the ability to rest?

We ask that you would repent. I run to Jesus, the Lord of rest, that He might give you rest in the gospel.