2020: A Year of Celebration!

The Priority of Rest!

Key Verses:  Matthew 11:28-30; 12:1-16 & Hebrews 4:1-11

One of our big 7 words at FBC is “Rest”. These 7 big words are what our church considers priorities of Jesus and essential marks of the people of God. Today, we are going to talk about the one of seven words that no other church in America, that I know of, has prioritized for their ministries like we have here at FBC: REST!

Just like with last week’s big word “follow”, this week’s big word of “rest” is a word that has lost its biblical meaning in contemporary culture. Therefore, we are going to chase after the depth of Jesus’ promise and priority for our life by examining the rest motif of Scripture. We are going to start with Jesus’ words then learn from two illustrations from His life. Next, we are going to press into the origins of the concept and Old Covenant usage and finally bring it closure with a New Testament admonition to be diligent to enter God’s rest.

Apart from this kind of biblical study, we are left with a very watered-down cultural understanding that falls so far short of Jesus’ intent that even if you sincerely wanted to obey you couldn’t and would fall into either extreme of a legalistic sabbath-day observance (like the Pharisees) or a sinful permissiveness as found in most  American churches.

We are being invited to walk in the ways of Jesus by living according to His priorities!

“Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”

We looked at this last week and saw that the context of this passage is in Jesus’ invitation to follow Him in Christian discipleship. Jesus was calling a Jewish people who were living unfaithful lives to God, just like the people in Jeremiah’s time were before the sacking of Jerusalem in 586 BC and the 70-year Babylonian exile.

Today, we are going to focus on Jesus’ one word promise: REST! Rest is a major theme throughout the Bible. Listen to this quick overview of Jesus’ promise of rest:

It includes peace of mind and heart, and relief from uncertainty and anxiety. It is a deep refreshment that enables a person to go back to his or her tasks with renewed strength and energy. It is relief from sin and guilt, and from striving after salvation. It is an eschatological rest, and reflects the language of Jeremiah 6:16, but it is also a present reality. This “rest” is a proper fellowship with God. It is not idleness or inaction, but the contentment and full life that come from knowing and living by the truth which God’s Son reveals. It is eternal, eschatological salvation by faith. It speaks of a refreshing and fulfillment that looks forward to the eschatological Sabbath.^[1]

This is what Jesus is promising you! Better than a rocker on the front porch, or a weekend off, or a vacation to one of America’s many meccas of entertainment, or even retirement! Wow! This is a really BIG promise!

Now, let’s take the second step in our study and watch the two back-to-back illustrations of this rest from Jesus’ ministry life. Watch Jesus at work in Matthew 12:1-16, immediately after He gives His famous promise of rest:

At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath [the Jewish day of rest], and His disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat. But when the Pharisees saw this, they said to Him, “Look, Your disciples do what is not lawful to do on a Sabbath.” But He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he became hungry, he and his companions, how he entered the house of God, and they ate the consecrated bread, which was not lawful for him to eat nor for those with him, but for the priests alone? “Or have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent? “But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here. “But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire compassion, and not a sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent. “For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” Departing from there, He went into their synagogue. And a man was there whose hand was withered. And they questioned Jesus, asking, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?”—so that they might accuse Him. And He said to them, “What man is there among you who has a sheep, and if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will he not take hold of it and lift it out? “How much more valuable then is a man than a sheep! So then, it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.” Then He said to the man, “Stretch out your hand!” He stretched it out, and it was restored to normal, like the other. But the Pharisees went out and conspired against Him, as to how they might destroy Him. But Jesus, aware of this, withdrew from there. Many followed Him, and He healed them all, and warned them not to tell who He was.

I invite you to really pay attention to how Jesus worked on the Sabbath. He did not reduce nor remove it; Jesus reformed and fulfilled the Sabbath! Jesus emphasized His authority as the “Lord of the Sabbath” (Mt. 12:8). In fact, Matthew intentionally placed these two sabbath stories immediately after Jesus’ invitation to find rest in Him. The literary proximity has theological implications, which we are about to look at.

Jesus’ actions on that sabbath in Matthew 12 were not in rebellion to the original sabbath commandment as given in Exodus 20:8-11 and Deuteronomy 5:12-15, but they were a scathing rebuke of the religious leaders’ perversion of God’s heart. Jesus was all about this one thing: returning people to the heart of God!

This leads us to our third step in our study of FBC’s big word of REST: to explore the biblical origins of Jesus’ promise of rest, rooted in the Old Testament Sabbath command.

The fourth commandment of the Ten Commandments is God’s command “to CEASE”, which is what the word sabbath means. Exodus 20:8-11 is grounded in the creation motif of Genesis, stating,

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy [italics added]. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the 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 [italics added].

Thus the heavens and the earth were completed, and all their hosts. By the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it [italics added], because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.

God sanctified, made holy, the seventh day because it was the day that He rested to delight in His completed work. As one scholar points out from the original Hebrew language, “The Sabbath day is a holy day. Interestingly, the only thing God deems as qadosh, or ‘holy,’ in the creation story is the Sabbath day.”^[2]

This was the first intent of the fourth commandment: the Sabbath command is to cease from your own striving in order to rest in God’s delight of His completed work. It is a separation from your own capabilities in order to remember His ability. As another Christian author explains, “Keeping the Sabbath day constantly reminds us that Yahweh is to be pre-eminent in our lives.”^[3]

Submission to the command to cease facilitates the “habitual practice” of resting in God one day per week, as it fuels the rhythm of prioritizing God as pre-eminent in each and every day. Jesus’ promise and priority of rest is rooted in rich theology. It is yoked in the hālakh of God—the habitual lifestyle choices of covenant faithfulness!

If you are not resting, then your life is out of control! We are good at pointing the inverse of this out to people who don’t work—we are a culture infatuated with our own self-efficacy and capabilities! That is proving to be our downfall because our culture has uprooted itself from resting in God’s sovereign grace! Truly, rest is all about learning to work in God’s rhythm of grace; to work from rest, which is faith and trust in God!

Sabbath is about submission to God’s Sovereign Rule over us because, unlike the Lord’s finished work at creation, human work is always incomplete. I can always justify work!  Gordon MacDonald wrote, “We do not rest because our work is done; we rest because God commanded it and created us to have a need for it.”^[4]

People are called to a deeper trust in God by ceasing from their own efforts to make this life work out for them the way they want it to. It is surrender; it is a means of grace. All of humanity’s work, as from the Garden, was to flow from the divine wellspring of God’s grace, just as our good works are to flow from faith. Both are essential, but the order is critical—faith always comes before works! We are saved by grace through faith!  

From the very beginning, humanity’s first experience was not to work for rest, but work from rest. Choosing not to walk in this intended rhythm demonstrates a fundamental disbelief in, and rebellion against, a most fundamental of our Christian doctrines from Ephesians 2:8-9, “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.”

The rest motif of the Old Testament teaches that humanity serves not only the God of creation, but also the God of salvation, who delights in rescuing His people from slavery. The second giving of the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy came with a different motive clause for the Sabbath command. Deuteronomy 5:12-15 explains,

Observe the sabbath day to keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant or your ox or your donkey or any of your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you, so that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you. You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out of there by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to observe the sabbath day.

The exodus of God’s people from Pharaoh’s oppressive lordship in Egypt renewed the purpose of the fourth commandment, anchoring it in God’s redemptive work. Rest is an act of divine justice between God and humanity that we are called to participate in every week, between men and women!

God’s people had forgotten how to trust Him because of living under the heavy burden of an oppressive regime. God desired for His people to taste and see that they could trust their God to provide for them by the work of His hand, rather than by the works of their own hands and the sweat of their own brows.

How far humanity had fallen from Eden, to so fundamentally distrust the good gifts that came from the hand of the God who created them and delivered them. Sabbath was a day to declare divine deliverance from slavery. God rescued them so that they could enter into His rest, as they were created to do. It is freedom!

The Exodus became an early foreshadowing of the rest that was to come through Jesus Christ. Jesus demonstrated a true observance of this deliverance motif of the sabbath in Luke 13:10-17, when He declared His motivation for violating the Pharisees’ legalistic rules of sabbath observance:

You hypocrites, does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the stall and lead him away to water him? And this woman, a daughter of Abraham as she is, whom Satan has bound for eighteen long years, should she not have been released from this bond on the Sabbath day?

The religious leaders of Jesus’ day had forgotten—not their own rules added to the Sabbath command, but the true intent behind its observance—divine deliverance! In upholding their own rules about sabbath they had created a new yoke of slavery, instead of commemorating the shattering of the heavy yoke of Pharaoh’s slavery.

Once again, just as the Israelites in Egypt had forgotten, the people Jesus was teaching had forgotten how to trust God because of living under the heavy burden of an oppressive regime. In fact, it was this very religious “heavy-burden” that Jesus came to take off of God’s people. Jesus promised a one word solution to lift these “heavy burdens”: REST! 

Sabbath is an active resistance against the oppressive regimes of this world, animated by the forces of evil who refuse to give up any claim for their rule over man, even though Jesus has rightfully reclaimed us!

Have God’s people forgotten again from what He has saved us? Are we once again living under an oppressive regime and don’t even realize that we are slaves to the same demonic principality that led Pharaoh to enslave an entire people group of over a million people just so he can build more storage facilities for more of his stuff?

If we can’t rest from our unfinished work, then have we truly found rest in Jesus’ finished work?

This bring us to our final step in our learning journey for today and a clear admonition of the New Testament for you to work hard at entering the rest of God. Hebrews 4:9–11 is critical; it informs and instructs,

So there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For the one who has entered His rest has himself also rested from his works, as God did from His. Therefore let us be diligent to enter that rest [italics added], so that no one will fall, through following the same example of disobedience.

Rest is the hardest and most important work you will ever do! Because Sabbath has always been about trust, and in that trust, the living out of covenant faithfulness. As Pastor Ken preached recently, “True rest is trust!”

Jesus Christ is the rest His original Jewish audience had been awaiting, but did not recognize. Jesus Christ is the rest this world desperately needs, but is too loud and busy to recognize, even well-intentioned religious people!

(Due to personnel being on vacation, there may be a week or 2 delay)

You can listen to the message here:

This Message Video can be viewed HERE.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] David Abernathy, An Exegetical Summary of Matthew 1–16, Exegetical Summaries, 412–413.

[2] A. J. Swoboda, Subversive Sabbath: The Surprising Power of Rest in a Nonstop World, 12.

[3] Marva J. Dawn, Keeping the Sabbath Wholly: easing, Resting, Embracing, Feasting, 141.

[4] Gordon MacDonald, Ordering Your Private World, 174.