Genesis: The Grace of Doing Nothing

Well, you may be seated.

So this morning we are going to continue to dig our way and work our way through Genesis chapters 1 through 3.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

So we had six days of creation, and then we get day seven.

Now, in each day of creation through Genesis 1, it's sort of building.

Each day builds upon the day before it, and then day six hits, and it's the greatest day yet, because humanity is created.

You are created.

And there's another day.

Another day comes, so it's standard reason that day seven would be even greater, because every day is built upon the one before it, and it's got better and greater and greater, and day six is this great climax, but there's day seven, so it's standard reason he's going to create something even greater.

But he doesn't, does he?

He rests.

God rests.

And so we get Genesis 2, 1 through 3, which Sam just read for us.

My mother-in-law lost her phone last week.

We know that feeling.

Maybe you've lost it for five minutes and that felt bad.

And then maybe it was 30 minutes or a couple hours and that was really bad.

Well, she lost it and it's been gone for a week.

And so she lost it and she thinks it's in her house.

It had 4% charge left.

And you know what that feels like in general when you have 4% charge left.

You don't feel good about your whole life at all.

She has 4% left when she loses it, so we know what this means.

It means by the time she has searched for it and then goes to GPS track it, the phone's dead, so you can't GPS track it.

So she puts a bounty out on her phone.

Anyone who wants to come to her house, I think all of y'all are welcome.

Anybody who wants to come to her house is$100 if you find her phone.

And so my oldest daughter yesterday, she spent an hour or two looking for it, and still nothing.

Nobody has found it.

The bounty's still out there.

And so I asked my mother-in-law yesterday afternoon, I said, hey, uh, what has it been like to not have your phone?

And so she gave me, well, she's like, well, you know, it at first it was horrible.

Like she said, at first, and we know that feeling.

She said, it was just, I was anxious, you know, I was just anxiety, and I just searched everywhere, up and down.

I was really going through where was I at?

What did I do?

Where could I place it?

Just going through it all.

And I searched for a whole day, and it was horrible.

And then I've just came to the realization, like, I can't find it.

Like, sort of, it's gonna have to find me, it's gonna have to show up.

And then she said the rest of the week was, and you can guess it, wonderful heaven.

Right?

Right.

Of course it was.

Of course it was.

She said that what happened the rest of the week is everything became consolidated into certain places.

She would get home and she would make phone calls.

She would leave her house and run her errands.

She would get somewhere else and do something else, but everything wasn't on her all the time.

Like, what would it feel like if your phone's not attached to you all the time?

This is a good question when it comes to this idea of Sabbath rest.

Because we have such a great privilege, right?

To have something in our pocket that can do so much, and yet it can stand in between us in so much at times.

Yesterday was my Sabbath, so naturally we did the opposite of what I'm going to tell you to do on Sabbath.

Uh, we woke up and we decided we were gonna clean out our garage attic closets, and so we did that, and then we posted it on the Let Go app, which is like, I guess, the more modern uh Craigslist, which is a more modern garage sale, basically, is what that is.

And so basically, what it means on my Sabbath, yesterday, the day of rest for me, I we worked in the morning, and then I had to have my phone on me all day long because I need to be negotiating with Connie and Wayne and these different people I don't know who show high interest in my belongings, and they actually aren't that all interested at all.

But I have to be ready, gotta be ready to negotiate with them the whole day.

And so I think later in the day, and I'm I'm at my brother-in-law's house, and we're seeing their new house, and we're swimming with family, and I think I'm swimming, but really I'm working.

Because I gotta check my phone to check the let go out.

And then once you're checking your phone, you might as well check your email, right?

Just in case.

Just in case something pops up.

You might as well.

You're already there.

You know the feeling.

There's so many things to check, right?

I mean, there's just so much to do on it.

It's so incredible.

Every meaningful document our church has ever produced, I can get to on my phone.

That's incredible.

Right?

We can communicate with people across the world.

We can review our banking and our investments, we can work on projects, we can research, we can look at the pricing of housing in neighborhoods we will never live in.

You can look at pictures of people doing things, and you don't really care about these people because you hadn't seen them in 20 years, but you are really investing time in these pictures.

And all of it is with us all of the time.

Of course it's hard to live present with each other.

Of course it's hard to just sit in a restaurant and observe.

Of course it's hard to get bored on your back porch and fall asleep.

Of course it is.

Right?

And that's my point.

My point is not that phones are evil, although obviously I have a little bit of a slant there, but how can you, how can I just breathe and exist and not work when your source of production is always in your pocket.

It's just so close.

And so I can't talk about Sabbath rest without talking about your phone.

A few points to guide us.

Let's start kind of big and kind of whittle our way down.

Point number one, God wanted to rest.

I mean, I look at this text, I read it, I think, this is amazing.

Six days of production.

I mean, really big, incredible creation, imagination.

This is unbelievable.

And then you get to day seven, he could have created something else.

What he could have created, I don't even know.

But he could have come up with it, something, I don't know what it could have been, but he wanted, he didn't need to rest.

He didn't need it.

He wanted to.

That's just point number one.

When he could have merrily, without any energy depletion, kept on creating, even then, God wanted to rest.

Point number two, you have ontological value before you have functional value.

You have ontological value before you have functional value.

That's a really fancy way to say that means your being has value before your doingness.

Your beingness has value before you're doing this.

Work hadn't shown up yet on the picture here.

We hadn't got work yet.

You'll get work in a little bit.

We'll get to work later on.

Work will come into the picture, but not yet.

You are created and valued out of this Trinity, this paracresis, which we looked at two weeks ago, the dance of love.

You're created out of that, and you are created and valued before we are given work.

So this means you are beloved and valued before you produce a single thing.

Now that's something to sink our beingness into.

So you have ontological value before you have functional value.

Point number three, in the goodness and the grace of God, you can take regular time to not produce and not create.

In the goodness and grace of God, you can take regular time to not produce and not create.

Now, the idea of God resting came in Genesis.

The idea of us resting in a rhythm came in Exodus.

Probably you remember the story.

God's people were in Egypt and they were enslaved and they're making bricks.

They make bricks every day.

So in the hot sun, they just produced bricks.

They had quotas every day to wake up, make a certain amount of bricks every single day.

The next day, make more bricks.

The next day, make more bricks.

Spend your whole life making bricks.

This is what your life was about.

Eventually, through Moses, these people, God's people, are taken out of Egypt into the wilderness, and then God says, Hey, take a day a week, take a day a week, do nothing.

Just don't do anything.

I know you've been making bricks every day, your entire life, but I want you to take one day a week and just don't do a single thing.

Take a walk, take a nap, read, spend time with people.

That's what I want you to do.

You are the beloved apart from your work.

And it's good for us to remember that.

Now, what's interesting in that Exodus story is they couldn't do it, right?

There's a group of people, they couldn't do it.

They worked on the day they were supposed to rest.

They couldn't resist it.

Why would they do that?

They were given permission to not work, and still they worked.

Why would they do that?

Well, the same reason why we do it, right?

The same reason we can't resist it.

It's just that feeling to just to clear a few more emails, to work on the project just a little bit, to clean out a little bit more, but to do nothing.

To do nothing.

Like to just be with people and to play games, and to take a walk, and then take a nap, and then read, and then watch a movie, and then take another nap?

Like to do that?

Like two naps in a day?

Like really going for it?

Like that?

Could you do that?

Like the thing that we think would be so easy is actually really hard for us.

Because when I'm producing, I think I matter more.

When I'm producing, I think I matter more.

And if I stop, and if I stop, I'm not sure if I really believe the thing God is trying to teach me with Sabbath rest, which is I have mattered to him the entire time.

Before work was even invented, I mattered.

This is why in Mark 2, 27, when Jesus talks about the Sabbath, he says, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, meaning Sabbath was made for us, to give to us.

Jesus is saying, Sabbath rest isn't for us to be something for him.

Like, oh, you know, I'll fulfill this command, I'll be something for God.

No, no, no.

This is something for us.

This is this great gift for us, for our human experience.

Something we need.

Eugene Peterson, uh great pastor and author, he wrote, did the translation of the message Bible.

Here's what he says.

When we realized, he's talking about him and his wife, when we realized that the command to keep a Sabbath is one of the most repeated in Scripture and yet the most ignored in our culture, we had to readjust radically the way we were living.

No other decision has made as much difference in our lives across the board.

It has impacted our marriage, children, church life, friendships, writing, the works.

Sabbath keeping shifted our attention from what we were doing for God to what God was doing for us.

It's interesting that science has actually picked up on this goodness of rest.

There's a New York Times article called Relax.

You'll get more done.

Listen to this paragraph.

You'll love this probably.

Don't send it to your boss tomorrow morning.

Here's what it says: more and more of us find ourselves unable to juggle overwhelming demands and maintain a seemingly unsustainable pace.

Paradoxically, the best way to get more done may be to spend more time doing less.

A new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal, including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, long sleeping hours, more time away from the office, and longer, more frequent vacations, boosts productivity, job performance, and of course, health.

So again, that's relax, you'll get more done.

New York Times, you just get the link, email it to your boss tomorrow morning.

I'm sure it'll go very, very well for your job.

But it's true.

Like even the science is showing that it's true.

And what it means is Ted down the hall, who's like working the really long hours, like the macho hours, like the unneeded hours, he could be the most inefficient, just non-producing, no creativity in his job, employee in the place, and Janet, who leaves at 4:30 every afternoon to go get her kids and spend time with her family, and she doesn't reply to emails on the weekend, she could be the best person in the company.

And it's true.

Now you might say, great, there's still laundry to be taken care of.

Like it, like to carve out a day, a week.

You know, there's still laundry to be taken care of, there's errands to run, there's emails do have to be answered.

You don't understand my job, you don't understand how my job works.

Great.

I know that.

I know that.

My life has that.

This isn't this isn't about forming a legalistic rule and then feel bad about it.

I mean, then we'd just be trading one way of work for another way of work.

This is not about a phone being evil, it's not about your kid playing soccer on Sunday, or you need to go by the office to do something on Sunday, or you need to work on your schoolwork on Sunday.

It's not about any of that sort of legalism.

This is about intentionality toward rhythmic rest over and over and over and over again in your life.

It's you saying, I will intentionally, because it's important to me and it matters to my soul and to the soul of my family, I will intentionally put in my life a plan for rhythmic rest.

A few months ago, my mentor he asked me, he said, Hey, what do you do for fun?

I said, Oh, I work in the yard.

He said, No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Um you have to work in the yard.

I said, well, I don't have to, like I'll do other stuff, you know, like I'll install like, you know, some perennials and some annuals, and you know, I'll do he said, no, no, no, that's still stuff you feel like you need to do.

He said, let me rephrase.

What do you do that doesn't have to be done?

Don't know.

Still don't know.

What do you do to rest?

What do you do to play?

See, in a normal rhythm in life, God wants us just to lay it all down.

Like to have time where you're not like, oh, the purpose of this is da da da da.

Like, no, no, no.

The purpose of this is for me to do nothing.

That's the purpose of this day, is to do nothing.

And I will fill it with nothing.

That's rest.

Point number four.

The gift of the Sabbath points us to the God of Sabbath.

That's the that's the most important thing about Sabbath.

The gift of the Sabbath, and it is a gift for us to for us to take on.

I mean, this is a gift.

The gift of the Sabbath points us to the God of Sabbath.

Hebrews 4, a chapter about Jesus, Hebrews 4, 9 and 10.

So then there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God.

And this is now using Sabbath as this beautiful, wonderful metaphor, and say, hey, this was all about us pointing us to see that Jesus is our true rest.

Verse 10, for whoever has entered God's rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.

So Christy and I were married 13 years ago.

When we got married, up until that point, I had known her for, I don't know, probably 10 years before that.

I'd worked for her father for several years, and so I'd been around the family for a long time.

We dated for a couple years.

Every time we went out to eat, her dad treated us to dinner.

When we got married, I thought it was time to be a little grown-up.

You know, it's time to grown up, 25 years old, got married, so it's time for a grown-up conversation.

And so we went out to eat with her parents.

We're leaving the restaurant, we're walking to the car, and I say, hey, Frankie, I just want to let you know you always treat.

That's incredible.

We are so grateful that you always treat us.

I just want to let you know, you know, anytime you want us to pay for ourselves, you know, we're we're happy to pay for ourselves.

And he looks at me with the gracious wisdom of an older man to a young guy, and he just says, if I go broke, I'll let you know.

And he kept walking.

And it was a little funny.

It was a little funny.

Um I felt very young at that moment.

Very small.

And he kept walking.

Now, why why did why did I feel compelled to even say this to him whom I'm pretty sure, I was pretty sure he was not going to accept it anyways?

But why was I compelled to this?

Right?

Maybe you know this feeling to be compelled to say something like this.

Was it because I didn't want him to feel obligated?

Right?

I think a little bit.

I didn't want him to feel obligated, like he started something.

I don't want him to feel obligated that because he started it and became a pattern, like then he's obligated for this forever.

Like a little bit.

Um maybe I didn't want him to think us entitled.

I think a little bit.

I don't want us to be entitled because of gifts toward us, and so I want to make sure that was clear a little bit, but you know, there's there's this other part about it, and it is very humbling to receive a gift that does not end.

It is very humbling just to keep receiving.

You will eventually start to look for a little bit of work.

Just a little payback.

How can I pay it back?

God did all this for you.

What are you gonna do for him?

Just a little bit of payback.

Because you're going, could Jesus really be that sufficient for my guilt and shame?

Like, could he really be that sufficient for my righteousness that I don't have to like build up my own righteousness report and sort of present it to him every once in a while?

I mean, is he that sufficient?

Is the rest, is the Sabbath rest of Jesus that real?

Could God actually love me in my ontological value, in my beingness, before I perform, before I produce, before I create?

And does he love me?

And do I have full value as a beloved child of his when I don't produce anything?

Can I actually, in the grace of God, form a life?

Because it is your life, by the way.

You get to choose how you spend your days.

Can you form a life that has rest as a normal part of it?

To take a Sabbath day, a Sabbath afternoon, a Sabbath week, all to mirror the Sabbath rest you live in all the hours of your entire day, and that you can just turn it all off.

And that you have learned in the freedom of Jesus, you can turn it all off because your value is in Jesus, in Jesus alone.

So, my brothers and sisters, all the acceptance you ever needed, all the acceptance you're ever looking for, and all of your work and production, all of it, all of it has always been there from the very beginning, as you were created in the prayer Croesus, the Trinity, and you are redeemed in the work of Jesus.

Let's pray together.

God, thank you for your work for us.

Thank you that you have loved us from the beginning.

Forgive us for trying to pay you back for suffering for a gift.

May our lives be a reaction, a reflection, a mirror of this great gift of grace and value and love that you have given us.

But may we be free from trying to justify ourselves.

May we be free from trying to use our work and production in this world to feel like we matter.

Help us up as a great gift.

The great grace to know in Jesus we always matter.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.