Inspired Work; Inspiring Rest

Someone once said that 95% of life consists of showing up for work.

Now, some might dismiss that comment as overly cynical, but let's take a closer look.

Showing up for work in less than 24 hours, that's where most of us will be at

work, for better or for worse.

Many of us, work is a monotonous, repetitious history,

something that we do over and over and over, go to our workplace,

especially if we're in a factory, we do the same thing over and over and over. We spot the same weld.

We put the same type of product in a box.

We do whatever it is over and over and over and over. It gets bananas.

In fact, it's like the story I heard about, in fact, I don't know if you've

seen this, but you've seen the highway workers alongside the roads.

Well, there's one time we stopped and there was a traffic jam,

and I noticed two guys on the shoulder or on the bank beside the interstate.

There were two guys. One was digging a hole.

It took a shovel, was digging a hole. The other came right back behind them,

put the dirt back in the hole.

They went on, dug a hole, put the dirt back in.

Dug a hole, put the dirt back in. I thought, this is really crazy.

Crazy this is government money at its

best right so we stopped now this

is just a story by the way it's really not true but anyway

we stopped and i went up there and asked what's

the deal one of you digs the hole and the other one just fills it fills it in

he says well yeah but there's really supposed to be three of us but the one

who plants the trees is sick today so sometimes we do work that's just kind

of tedious and monotonous and repetitious and we don't know what we're doing or why we're doing.

A job comprises a huge part of our lives.

Many have written about work and our love-hate relationship with us.

In fact, I'm sure most of us have heard Thomas Edison's famous quote,

genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. You've heard that, right?

But others have written about it. K. Jerome admitted, I like work. It fascinates me.

I can sit and watch it for hours.

Indira Gandhi observed, my grandfather once told me that there are two kinds

of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit.

He told me to try to be in the first group. There's less competition there.

But for all of our attempts to deal with work at a humorous level,

work is a very serious business.

And many of us wrestle with the question, what's the connection between what

I do here in church and what I do in the office? office.

I had a supervising manager at one of the businesses I worked at.

It was known to be a Christian business, and we were dealing with something

particular, and he made the statement to me one time.

He said, Tim, you're going to have to learn to separate your Christianity from the business.

And I said, sir, in all respect, Christianity is who I am. We cannot separate it from the business.

That's who we are, and that's what we're doing. A man once came across these

three workers who were cutting stones from a quarry.

He asked them what they were doing. One replied, I'm cutting stones.

Second one said, I'm earning money. Third one replied, I'm building a grand cathedral.

Most of us are like the first two men. We think of our work in terms of what

we actually do day after day, week after week, or by what we earn or how those wages benefit us.

If the third man's reply seems presumptuous, could it be that he felt an inspiration

in the work that seems foreign to us sometimes?

Don't we oftentimes go to work, go to our places of work and just think that

we're just earning another dollar or in terms of inflation a day, maybe 40 cents?

But really, what are we there for? Our talk this morning, our topic is inspired

work and inspiring rest.

For too many of us, those two terms don't seem to fit together,

or we feel like that much that we do is mundane and repetition and really requires little recognition.

Inspired work, what makes work inspired?

This morning, we're going to look at it. Find a man who discovered and pursued

inspired work. His name was Bezalel, and it's not a common name.

You don't hear it very often. In fact, you only encounter it in our story.

The setting for this conversation is between God and Moses, and it's on Mount

Sinai. We're going to look at this a little bit. We're going to read in a couple parts.

The first part we're going to read in Exodus chapter 31, verses 1 through 11.

Exodus 31:1–11

So if you want to follow along your Bibles, you may do so.

Then the Lord said to Moses, See, I have chosen Bezalel, son of Uri,

the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit

of God, with wisdom, with understanding.

Let me back up. And I have filled him, I need to emphasize this,

I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding,

with knowledge, and with all kinds of skills to make artistic designs for working

gold, silver, and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood,

and to engage in all kinds of crafts.".

Moreover, I have appointed Oholiab, son of Asimach, of the tribe of Dan, to help him.

Also, I have given ability to

all the skilled workers to make everything I have commanded you. Back up.

I have given ability to all of the skilled workers to make everything I have commanded you.

The tent of meeting, the Ark of the Covenant law with the atonement cover on

it, and the other furnishings of the tent, the table and its articles,

the pure gold lampstand and all its accessories,

the altar of incense, the altar of burnt offerings and all its utensils,

the basin with its stands and all of the woven garments,

both the sacred garments for Aaron the priest and the garments for his sons

when they serve as priests and the anointing oil and fragrant incense for the holy place.

They are to make them just as I have So we see in this, it lists out all of

these things that they were supposed to be doing.

Why does God have them list out all of those things that they were supposed to be doing?

God was directing them in all of this. He was telling them exactly what to do.

Even more so, he was giving them the ability to do that.

In Exodus chapter 20, God has given Moses the Ten Commandments and other laws

Exodus 20 · chapter mention

of conduct, and he had just finished giving them detailed instructions for the

construction of the tabernacle,

the tent where the Israelites would offer sacrifices and where God's presence would dwell.

He gave instructions for all the articles to be used within the tabernacle.

Apparently, those things were really important to God.

All of those things were to be made in just the right way.

They had a specific way to be done, just like a machinist has to set the dies

and develop the protocol to cut or manufacture parts to the micron of an inch or a millimeter.

They have to do it to precise measurements to make things work.

That's what God was saying for the tabernacle.

Everything had to be done in just the right way. God told Moses that he had

chosen Bezalel to be his master craftsman and to lead the team that would build these articles.

But God said something very significant about Bezalel as we read in here,

and I emphasized as I read to you.

It says that God filled him with the Spirit of the Lord.

Why would God say that about somebody who's just a mechanic or a craftsman or a tradesman?

God filled him with the Spirit of the Lord. Why did God fill him with the Spirit of the Lord?

Because what he was going to be doing was extremely important.

He filled him with the Spirit because that caused Bezalel's work to be inspired.

His inspired work was enabled by the Spirit of God.

Now, how often when we think we are being filled with Spirit,

do we think of it as something spiritual?

In this case, in the Old Testament, God's Spirit came upon Gideon and Samson

to deliver the Israelites from their oppressors.

Was that spiritual?

No, it was physical. God's Spirit came upon Saul and David to rule over the Israelites

in the book of Acts, the filling of the Spirit, which the apostles experienced

enabled them to preach boldly and perform miracles in order to spread the gospel.

It wasn't, they weren't sitting up there holding a Bible study.

They were proclaiming the word

of God boldly. This same Jesus whom you crucified is both Lord and Christ.

Now we know that all who are Christians and fellow believers and those who follow

Jesus are indwelt by the Holy Spirit at the moment of their new birth.

When you are born again in Christ, the Holy Spirit comes into you because it

is the presence of Christ in you.

And when the presence of Christ comes in you, the work of the Spirit is to move

everything that's not of Christ

out of you, to the point that you become filled with the Holy Spirit.

We see in this that God says that Bezalel was filled with the Spirit of the Lord.

There was no other place for anything else in all of Bezalel,

because he was filled in the Spirit.

But don't we somehow have a harder time believing that God would fill a craftsman

with the Spirit in order to cut hammerwood? would.

That's exactly what God did here. What does this say to us today?

Well, for one thing, it says that the enabling given by God's Spirit is not

just for sharing our faith, or for teaching a Sunday school class,

or for standing up and preaching in front of God's people.

The filling of the Spirit is done for all things, not just for the spiritual

things. It's for all of life.

God wanted the Jewish nation to be a beacon to the surrounding nations.

He He wanted everything that they did to be pointing to God.

God put them in the center of all traffic in the middle of Israel because all

commerce and all of activity went north and south, east and west through Israel.

God put them right there in the center of everything, filled them with his spirit,

and said, now make my disciples.

Their laws were to be models of justice and guarantees of protection for the

weak and the oppressed, and their tabernacle and the articles within it.

Were to be reflections of God's glory and God's beauty.

You want to know how much God wanted Israelites to be an influence in the world around them?

If you look at all of the laws in all of the countries in all of the world.

I mean, I don't know of any laws that say that it's okay to murder, right?

Our laws are based on Judeo-Christian. Where do Judeo-Christian values come?

From God, obviously. seriously God-inspired and God-led.

The craftsmen under Bezalel were to make something beautiful for God.

They weren't just cutting stone.

They weren't just earning a paycheck.

They were building a great tabernacle, a great cathedral, a cathedral that day.

Bezalel's work was to be inspired because it was being done for God. Write that down.

His work was inspired because it was done for God. Now, let me ask you this.

Your work—teaching?

Working in a factory, working in a grocery store? Are you letting your work be inspired by God?

Tell me, what about it? Perhaps you wouldn't exactly call it inspired.

You may not really feel like you're building a beautiful structure for God.

In fact, in your particular situation, you may struggle with feelings that maybe

you're building a monument to something that's wronghearted.

Maybe you're building a monument to somebody else's prophet,

and that may be so. So, but why do you go to work every day at that place?

If you're inspired by God, you're going there to show God's presence in you

to those people around you.

Aren't we supposed to do our everyday jobs and live our everyday life in a state

of being filled with the Holy Spirit?

And yet, so often we go to our jobs in drudgery.

We get lack of recognition. There's office politics.

We kind of hate going in there all of the time. all of these things and more

are the rule, rather the exception of many of our jobs.

Well, perhaps the first thing we need to do is face the facts.

Even though inspired work is enabled by the Spirit, it is still performed in

the world, in the real world, warts and all.

In other words, we are called to do inspired work in a less than inspiring environment.

Now, how many of you can honestly say you go to work every morning thinking,

man, this is an inspired place to work?

Every job has its less than inspiring moments.

So what can we do about it? We can see it as being done for the Lord. We can commit it to Him.

We can make sure that we do the very best we can at our job and not let anything

go slack. Can you answer me this?

What kind of representation of our Lord and Savior would we be if we go to work

with less than an inspired attitude?

If we go to work with the attitude that this is the drudgery,

I have to be here because I'm just earning a paycheck.

Instead, if we are wanting to be an inspiration and a message of Christ,

we go to work with how can I best greet people. I love being at the school.

I love being out there at the high school substituting. I love to be with the students most days.

But you know, there's an excitement to be with people and to allow yourself,

allow the Holy Spirit to use you to minister to others.

Maybe that student just needs a smile. Maybe that student just needs a pat on the back.

Maybe that student needs somebody to go to their softball game.

Maybe that person at work who comes in three minutes late because their car

wouldn't start coming into work with a grumbling attitude.

Attitude maybe they just need us to say, man, I am so glad you're here today.

It is so wonderful to see you. I hope everything's going okay. If not, we'll make it.

Wouldn't it be great if we were an inspiration to those around us as much as God is inspiring us?

Think about it. For those of us who are Christians, we have the added motivation

and privilege that we are doing things for God. Now, those things that we don't normally do.

They might take less inspired elements of our work, but yet they help us along

the way to do those inspired work.

So we can see from the examples of Bezalel that the Spirit enables us to perform

inspired work even in the less than inspired world. Now, that's part of the story.

Inspired work, we all know that. We've heard that over and over and over.

Do it as you would for the Lord.

We should remind ourselves that every morning. But the other part of this is

there's an inspiring rest that comes in there. That's the other side of the story.

So let's look at that. We don't really know a lot about it today, do we?

We are a leisure-oriented culture, but we don't know how to rest.

When we take a vacation, it's two weeks of too much and too hectic and too fast and too too many miles,

coming home when we're too short of a paycheck, and we think that's vacation.

We work at our vacations, don't we? We work at our times off.

When I take a vacation, it's like I've got conference business coming all the time.

You know, there's sometimes you just want to shut up. One of the best vacations

we've ever had, Nancy and I've ever had, we went on a cruise,

2016, seven-day cruise with some other family, some other couples,

and I could have purchased the cell phone package to be able to get all my messages

on that, but I didn't because it was high, expensive.

I thought, you know, if they really, if there's an emergency,

they can get a hold of the company, and they can get a hold of me on the ship if it was really there.

Oh, my goodness, a whole week without my cell phone and.

It was, hmm, it was unnerving, but it was beautiful.

Sometimes we need to have those times to just simply rest, inspiring rest.

We are in a day and age that we have gone digital on everything.

Why have we gone digital?

So we can get more done. It doesn't make sense. We get more done.

It's not supposed to, it's supposed to make things easier for us,

but what it does is just allows us to do more with our time.

By the way, at the end of the cruise, when we got back to the dock,

at the time, on the cell phone I had, I had my notification for my text messages.

I had my notification, it was called Ricochet.

So when I got back to the dock and we're sitting there in the waiting area of

the boat to get off, I turn that on and it goes.

Bunch of ricochets going back and

forth and people were diving on the well no not really but anyway

i had 400 and some messages on my

phone and probably well i won't tell you who all sent messages but probably

only a few of them were necessary but anyway it was kind of an interesting time

but we we do that don't we we fill our days full of all kinds of stuff and when

it comes to take an inspiring rest, we don't do it.

We don't know how to relax.

We don't know how to rest. We are a leisure-oriented culture,

but we don't know how to rest.

We even live our rest at breakneck speed.

What does it mean to rest? More importantly, how can we receive inspiring rest?

That's the subject of the next part of our passage, Exodus chapter 31,

Exodus 31:12–17

verses 12 through 17. Then the Lord said to Moses, Say to the Israelites,

You must observe my Sabbaths.

This will be a sign between me and you for the generations to come,

so you may know that I am the Lord who makes you holy.

Observe the Sabbath, because it is holy to you.

Anyone who desecrates it is to be put to death. Those who do any work on that

day must be cut off from their people.

For six days' work is to be done, but the seventh day is the day of Sabbath rest, holy to the Lord.

Whoever does any work on the Sabbath day is to be sanctioned with a $50 fine.

No, what? Put to death. Oh, my.

Israelites are to observe the Sabbath, celebrating it for the generations to

come as a lasting covenant.

It will be a sign between me and the Israelites forever, for in six days the

Lord made the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed.

So it's no coincidence that the commandment concerning the Sabbath is the final

one that God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai. and why is it there,

and why is there such emphasis on a Sabbath rest?

God himself rested after his work of creation.

We serve a God who models for us what he expects us to do and to be.

He was a God who rested. God's call here in Exodus chapter 31 is to observe a day of rest.

Exodus 31 · chapter mention

It's not a new commandment. It's been there all along. It's been there from the beginning.

Gordon MacDonald, in his book, Titled, Ordering the Private World Comments on

This, he says, Does God indeed need to rest? Of course not.

But did God choose to rest? Yes.

Why? Because God subjected creation to a rhythm of rest and work that he revealed

by observing the rhythm himself as a precedent for everything else and everyone else.

God gave us that precedent. He didn't need the rest.

Rest in fact some of what god did during his day of rest was to look and see

what had been created and see how wonderfully it was put together and now i've

created man in my own image let's just stand back and rest and watch what happens.

So the first thing to realize about rest is that it was part of God's plan from the very beginning.

And that brings us to the second part. Rest is something we really need.

It was a command to do, and it was something that we really needed.

Just as we were created to work, we were created to rest.

The rhythm of work and of rest from work is an essential part of being human.

We ignore it at our own peril. we are

marvelous creations capable of incredible

achievements but we are at

the same time highly fragile and easily damaged

by misuse to ignore god's intended rhythms of rest and work is like ignoring

the manufacturer's instructions for any piece of fine machinery in fact if you

study everybody the mechanical age,

the industrial age, if you study in of that, if you look at all of industry

and factories and everything else, you might not be aware of this,

but practically every business I know, every factory I know,

schedules downtime for their machinery.

Their machinery is not made to handle 24-7 work, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

The machines even need to have a time of rest, a time to sit back and cool down

and get some oil and be, and be.

Preventive maintenance done on them. There needs to be a time of rest even for machines.

For instance, a Ferrari will perform beautifully on a winding highway up in

Tennessee. Wouldn't that be fun?

But just try taking it farther up the mountains on the off-road terrain on the

logging trails and see how far you're going to get.

The Ferrari engineers designed the car with minimum ground clearance to hug

the road. They never designed it to go into the backlands.

God has created us with certain tolerances and limitations, we need to read

the manual, the operator's manual, and see what it says about how we were created

and what we were created to be.

Most people know that it's crucial to realize that rest is more than just putting

your feet up after a hard day at work.

Physical rest is essential, of course. We need a break from our physical labors.

But true Sabbath really means much more.

Gordon McDonald goes on to say in that same book, he says, Since we have not

understood that rest is a necessity, we have perverted its meaning,

substituting for the rest that God first demonstrated things called leisure or amusement.

Leisure and amusement may be enjoyable, but they are to be the inner world of

the individual like cotton candy is to the justice system.

It's not necessary. what we really need to

do is simply rest we need to

recuperate rest is a the Sabbath is a period of time set apart and set aside

from work that allows us to interpret that work and to bring meaning to it we

need to ask questions like when we have our day of rest we need to ask questions

like what does this all mean,

why am I doing what I do? Who am I working for?

What do I really believe? When we sit in our day of rest, instead of trying

to find all kinds of entertainment to do, which is still fun,

but again, as I said, it's often not rest.

We need to reflect and react. I think God probably stood back at the end of

that seventh day and thought, boy, there's some really cool stuff out there.

I wonder who made that. What does this all mean?

And it gives us the opportunity to affirm our desire to serve the Lord,

and the true sense of true Sabbath rest involves stopping to look in three directions.

By looking backward, we see what's been done in the past week.

We put meaning into our work. We see what it's meant to do. We see what we've accomplished.

By looking inward to where we are at the present, we gain perspective of who we are and whose we are.

And by looking forward to what we desire to be in the future,

we gain direction and motivation based on where God has had me in the past and where he has me now.

What does he want me to do? And who does he want me to be?

And how best can I reflect his glory and his presence to me?

A final quote from Cord MacDonald, most of us think of resting as something

we do after our work is done, done.

But Sabbath is not something that happens after. It may, in fact,

be something that is pursued before.

If we assume that this rest comes only after work is complete,

many of us are in trouble, for we have jobs where the work is never ended.

And that, in part, is why some of us are rarely—some of us rarely take time to rest.

We never finish our work. We do not think to take the time of restful Sabbath peace and restoration.

We do not rest because our work is done. We rest because God commanded it and

created us to have a need for it.

God created us to have a need to shut down once in a while.

And I say that to myself more than anything. I was talking with the superintendent a few weeks ago.

I had an annual interview with him that pastors all do. I think I passed,

but anyway, we were talking about this, the Sabbath day rest.

And he says, how are you doing on that Sabbath day rest thing?

I said, well, superintendent, probably about as good as you. He laughed.

Yeah, we need to do better at that. And so we've kind of coveted with each other.

We're going to be setting that, making sure that we set that time apart.

Sometimes it may only be half a day here and there or a few hours,

but we need to have those times to just shut down and reflect on what has happened,

who we are, and what God is wanting us to do.

We're going to be granting our superintendent a sabbatical here in a,

well, probably toward the end of the year, time where he can take time to be

a way to first just unwind for the first week or two.

And then he's going to be looking at where have we been, who are we, and where are we going?

So his sabbatical is not completely a time of rest.

It's going to be a time of work, but it's going to be a time of reflective work

in the power of the Holy Spirit to see where we are going in the future for us.

But there remains the hard part, actually setting aside time to do that.

No generation in history has had so many choices given to them as how they can

spend their non-working time or waste it.

So it's up to us to make wise decisions. We need to carve out a time for rest.

We need to carve out a time for study in the Scripture.

We need to carve out a time where we can spend time alone with God in prayer.

But that is tough is it not i mean if you're like me and i was talking to somebody who,

hadn't had any sleep oh yeah hadn't had any sleep for i mean have you ever gone

well last night was one if you've gone to bed lay down in bed and your mind

is still going 180 miles an hour.

In rest, it's hard to shut down, isn't it? And some of those times we just need

to get up, get the Word of God in our hand, listen to some good music for a

little bit, and just let it all shut down.

If you have children, you know that life is never dull.

If you know a single parent, maybe you could step alongside them and help them

and give them a time of rest while you take care of their children.

Pursuing Sabbath rest is not easy, but it's necessary. Our culture's fanatic pursuit of leisure.

Let me say that again. Our culture's fanatic pursuit of leisure.

That's like an oxymoron, right?

Our fanatic pursuit of leisure has left all of us restless, and we will continue

to be restless until we find a way to rest in God.

Only one of the three stonemasons in our story was doing inspired work.

Bezalel was doing inspired work. He was inspired. He was the Holy Spirit. Let me ask you this.

Are you doing inspired work? Is your work, are you filled with the Holy Spirit

when you are doing your work, when you are teaching at school,

when you're leading the choir,

when you're gym class, when you're at the grocery store stocking shelves?

Are you filled with the Holy Spirit?

Are you presenting yourself as a workman worthy of the praise?

Are you one who is giving evidence of Christ in everything that you do?

And then, at the end of that, are you resting and reflecting on what God has done through you?

You know, the Israelites were very good about reciting the things that God had

done for them and through them throughout all of their time,

from the Dead Sea to the wandering in the wilderness to conquering of the nations. God has done this.

Or how much we do that. Hebrews chapter 4 verses 9 through 16 says this,

Hebrews 4:9–16

There remains then a Sabbath rest for the people of God.

For anyone who enters God's rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from his.

Let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will fall

by following their example of disobedience.

Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has gone through the heavens,

Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess.

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses,

but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are,

yet was without sin, let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence,

so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

Jesus, himself from the people many times, went into a lonely place to spend time with the Father.

And if Jesus, the Son of God, had to do that, how much more do we?

Scripture says this, remember the Sabbath day, and it says keep it holy,

but remember the Sabbath day and keep it for holy things and holy pursuit and holy rest.

It doesn't just mean taking a Sunday afternoon nap, although those are wonderful.

Never used to like them as a kid, hated them. But you know, sometimes we just

need to have those times of rest,

those times where we are pursuing holy things, just casually and intently pursuing

holy things and seeking that holy day of rest,

inspiring rest from our inspired work. Would you stand with me and pray?

Heavenly Father, as we read these scriptures, you have called Bezalel and all

of us, you have told us that Bezalel was filled with the Holy Spirit so that

he could be an inspired craftsman.

Father, you have filled us and are filling us with your Holy Spirit.

You have come into us as the very presence of Christ.

When we give our heart to you and give our lives to you, and Father,

we ask that you would continue to build yourself in us, grow your presence in

us, and remove anything that is not of Christ.

Transform us by the renewing of our minds. Father, we pray that everything that

we do would be pleasing to you.

But Father, more importantly, we ask that you would make our work inspired by

you so that we may be an inspiration to others.

And we ask that you would give us inspired rest. Help us to set those times

to be apart with you. In Jesus' name, amen.