Exodus: The Rhythmic Practice of Rest

So there is a practice being communicated in these verses in Exodus 23, 10 through 12.

It's a practice that basically affects everything we do.

It's a practice that can affect everything we do.

It affects how we think about ourselves and how we think about God and how we relate with our family.

It affects how we react to things, how we react to really good and great things in our life.

It affects how we react to horrible and difficult things in our lives.

And when we ignore this practice that God just keeps mentioning in the scriptures, when we ignore this, somehow we become less of who God has proclaimed us to be.

Not that we become less in actuality, but we become less of who we know ourselves to be.

Because we're not reminding ourselves of who we already are.

And so we can easily become frantic, we become anxious, we become fearful.

But when we embrace this, when we embrace what God's talking about in these verses and where these verses take us, and we'll see where they take us.

When we embrace this, we begin to see ourselves clearer, we see who God is clear and who God is proclaiming us to be clear.

It helps us to deal with issues and difficult things and our lives and stuff that comes up.

And here's what happens is we begin to be able to catch our breaths.

Begin.

And here's the practice.

It's right there in the text.

Let the land lie fallow.

That's the practice.

For us to be able and to be people who begin to let the land lie fallow.

Here's what that means.

I'll reread a few verses as we work our way through it.

Exodus 23, 10 through 11.

For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield, but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, that the poor of your people may eat, and what they leave the beasts of the field may eat, you shall do likewise with your vineyard and with your olive orchard.

So in the ancient world, right, no different than today, imagine how difficult this would have been in an agricultural society to let your land lie fallow for a year.

Right?

I mean the temptation would be just like just to keep working the land, just keep working it, keep working it.

But what God knows is to keep working the land without letting it lie fallow means that the nutrients would never replenish itself and the land could never come back to serve you for the other six.

And so you see this rhythm develop.

Six and one, six and one, six and one, six and one.

I mean, it's just like today.

I mean, it feels so absurd at times to stop and to rest.

But unless you stop and rest, there's no replenishing of yourself, and then your heart and your mind and your creativity and your thoughts and your energy can never serve yourself.

And so we get a practice even for ourselves of six and one, six and one, six and one, six and one.

And this is what keeps coming up in Exodus as we've been looking at it, as we this practice keeps coming up.

And these people's story, this is a people's story, right?

If you've been with us or the 20 sermons or so in Exodus, is that it's a story about liberation.

Right?

And it's been a story about people who are in slavery and they've been liberated, and so it's a story about liberation, and then we get this practice of the Sabbath that keeps coming up throughout the text.

And what God is talking to them about, teaching them about is about a different way of life.

And it's a reminder for them, a weekly reminder, a yearly reminder.

It's a reminder that they don't have to be enslaved to production.

That we are more than producers.

We are children to a father, we are creatures to a creator, and to forget this identity is to actually forget everything that means anything.

And then any production you do have will be tainted.

Alright, so let's think about it this way.

Sam's gonna come up, Sam's gonna come back up.

Uh, and he's gonna play a song, and let's just do this.

First one to recognize the song.

This is a song everybody knows.

Everybody knows this song, everybody in this room knows this song.

He's gonna play this song, and whoever knows it, just yell out the name of the song.

And uh, because we're such a merit-based church, uh, I have a gift card,$5 Starbucks gift card.

We want to reward you and your great production uh in this game.

So Sam's gonna play the song.

First one, who knows?

Just you just yell it out.

Okay?

Ready?

Ready?

Okay.

It was it.

Oh, Josh T.

Okay, Sam, play it, play it in the normal rhythm.

Okay, thank you, Sam.

All right, good job, Josh.

Right?

Most of us didn't recognize it, right?

Uh, because when the rhythm is off, it just doesn't work.

I I used to have a friend who who he would give out his phone number like this, uh four four five-028-605.

You're like, what?

That's like a bank account.

I'm not sure.

445-028-605.

Yeah, that's my phone.

That actually is my phone number.

If you need to call me, that's my phone number, 445-028-605.

Right?

When the rhythm is off, right?

404-502-8605.

And now you go, oh yeah, yeah, that's a phone number.

Right?

Because when the rhythm is off, it just doesn't work.

And so this text is talking about letting the land lie fallow, six and one, six and one, six and one.

And then you get verse twelve.

He goes further into it, six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall rest, six and one, that your ox and your donkey may have rest, and the son of your servant woman and the alien may be refreshed.

All right, so there's this great quote uh found in the New York Times, an old article in the New York Times by a writer Judith Schulovitz, and she's writing about her journey for rest.

It's written back in 2003, and I don't think that our culture in New York or here has gotten any better since then.

And here's what she writes: it's in your handout.

My mood would darken until by Saturday afternoon I'd be unresponsive and morose.

My normal routine, which involved brunch with friends and swapping tales of misadventure and the relentless quest for romance and professional success, made me feel impossibly restless.

I started spending Saturdays by myself.

After a while, I got lonely and did something that as a teenager, profoundly put off by her religious education, I could never have imagined wanting to do.

I began dropping in on a nearby synagogue.

It was only much later that I developed a theory about my condition.

I was suffering from the lack of a Sabbath.

There is ample evidence that our relationship to work is out of whack.

Ours is a society that pegs status to overachievement.

We can't help admiring workaholics.

Let me argue instead on behalf of an institution that has kept work workaholic workalism.

Workaholism.

Sorry, I did not practice before.

In reasonable, I did not work very hard on reading this quote, apparently.

In reasonable check for thousands of years.

Most people mistakenly believe that all you have to do to stop working is not work.

The inventors of the Sabbath understood that it was much more complicated undertaking.

You cannot downshift casually and easily.

This is why the Puritan and Jewish Sabbaths were so exactingly intentional.

The rules did not exist to torture the faithful.

They were meant to communicate the insight that interrupting the ceaseless round of striving requires a surprisingly strenuous act of will, one that has to be bolstered by habit as well as by social sanction.

Okay, so two points to guide our thoughts on this.

So there's a lady who's lived secular life, tied in with Jewish life, and she's recognizing there's a problem in our culture, she's recognizing a problem in herself, and that she needs rest on a weekly basis.

Okay, here's how it starts to relate into us.

Two points to guide our thoughts.

Number one, it's not just about a day.

Right, so we have some freedom here.

It's not just about a day, it's about rhythmic practice.

That's point number one.

Number two, it's not just about a practice, but it's about a position.

So, first point, it's not just about a day, but it's about rhythmic practice.

Let the land lie fallow so yourself and your animals and your people may be refreshed.

That word refresh means to take a breath.

Right?

I mean, do you ever just your like your studies, your homework, your uh your job, the emails, the next thing, the house, the kids, the dishes, the yard, uh, the expectations, and you just go, oh, if I could just catch my breath.

If I could just be refreshed.

So this text is about these people releasing the land for a year, so that the land could come back and produce for them, and then it becomes about them as people learning to release a day so that they will be ready the next day to go and to produce, so that the land is not depleted over time, and so that they are not depleted over time.

So they had to prepare for this, right?

I mean, to think about the land issue, like every seventh year that you just wouldn't farm.

I mean, you'd have to prepare for this, you have to save for this, you'd have to be ready for this.

And I think for us it says something about the fact that you know it it takes some thought for us to have rest.

It takes some intentionality.

I mean, it takes something for us to just put our phones somewhere where we just don't constantly see them because inevitably all of us we're gonna pick them back up.

I even said to Christy this week, I said, you know, I've I've discovered the one way I can take a break from my phone, and that is if it's not on me.

It's the only way.

The only way.

Even if it's on me and I turn it off, I'm gonna turn it back on.

The only way I get a break from it is if it's physically not on me.

It takes some intentionality to sit or to walk, to seemingly do nothing.

Right?

I was reading some about Sabbath rest this week, and one of the things it said is uh do nothing and to be willing to make nothing happen.

And we don't like we don't like that.

That's very difficult for us to be okay for a period of time where we make nothing happen.

Because we think that that's lazy.

And if you did every day, it would be.

But actually, there's a lot going on in that nothingness because everything starts to surface.

Your gratitude to your family, your gratitude to the Lord, your appreciation, your ability or inability to exist in that moment because your anxieties start to come up and your fears start to come up, and so what do you do?

You're gonna go to cover it with production.

But really, we have to learn how to feel it and to bring it to the Lord and to let the Spirit comfort us and teach us who we really are.

I read this morning, uh, Brendan Manning quote, my deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ, and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.

And we have to have some moments where we just do nothing to remember that.

Beyond the job and beyond the chores and beyond the workouts and beyond the homework, but you just remember who you are in the Lord.

As God's beloved, completely at rest, and Jesus' work is enough for you, and it's okay for a period of time, a day, an evening, whatever works out for you, it's okay for you to make nothing happen.

Richard Swinson, who's an MD, he's a doctor, he wrote this great book years ago called Margin.

I think it's sold as like 750,000 copies.

It's sold in the secular world, it's sold in the Christian world.

Uh he goes through lots of medical data and he ties it into kind of cultural data and then also biblical references, and it's a it's a book about margin.

How do you get more space in your life?

And here's a quote, it's in your handout.

We must have some room to breathe.

We need freedom to think and permission to heal.

Our relationships are being starved to death by velocity.

No one has the time to listen, let alone love.

Our children lay wounded on the ground, run over by our high speed good intentions.

Is God now pro-exhaustion?

Does he lead people beside the still waters anymore?

Who plundered those wide open spaces of the past, and how can we get them back?

There are no fallow lands for our emotions to lie down and rest in.

We even see in Jesus' life, don't we?

I mean, we see it repeatedly in Jesus' life, where he is ministering, he's healing, he's teaching, and then what does he do?

He pulls away.

Pulls away into solitude, into silence.

Maybe he's by himself, or maybe he's with his small group of friends, his disciples, and then what does he do?

He goes back out, he ministers, he heals, he's working, and then he pulls away again.

We see this rhythm with him, a rhythmic practice.

Listen, we don't rest because all of the work is done.

We rest because the work will never be done.

We don't take a rest from emails because you finished all your emails.

We rest from emails because you will never be finished with all of your emails.

And it's in that margin and in that fallow where breathing begins and we find comfort and we find peace and we're reminded of who we are in the Lord.

And God can begin to break through our busyness and some of our idols because all that starts to surface.

The fuller my life has become, the more I need practices of rest.

My days just work better, better.

I'm in a better rhythm and a better place where at some point in the morning I pause.

And it doesn't have to be a legalistic 30 minutes.

It literally can be a five minutes of quiet.

Or I just stop and I remember.

And it's before I open my laptop, or maybe it's in my car before I walk into the gym.

But I just pause.

Just remember.

Take a few breaths.

Pray.

Maybe read one little verse.

Maybe for you it's even earlier in the morning, what I prefer.

Maybe it's in the quiet of the night.

Maybe it's uh you like to read lots of scripture, maybe you like to read just a little bit.

I don't know.

I'm not gonna get legalistic on you on what it looks like, but I do know that we have to find a rhythm.

I've also found that I need something weekly.

I need a weekly rhythm.

I need a day where I really try to not have my phone on me.

I I I need a couple times of the week where I get into the woods where I leave.

I used to, so I used to go on these prayer walks in the woods and I would take my phone with me.

Because I would like to take little notes.

Like, you know, if I get inspired by something for the sermon, you know, I take these notes in my phone, and what I realized is that before long, I I would like to I would check my email while I was out there in the woods.

You're like, this is ridiculous.

But I also have a thing called a you know pen and paper, and this would serve the same purpose.

And so I began to leave my phone in the car, and I noticed it just an unbelievable significant difference in my relief, and just the fact that nobody could reach me, and I could not go back into my email or my text and get back into that.

But I would, I was sort of just for an hour, I was away from it.

And then I'd get back in my truck and I was like flooded with all the new thoughts and the things to do, right?

Because there's something about the break that is healthy for us.

Letting the land lie fallow, eliminating hurry.

Is anybody with me?

Anyone going, oh yes, I want to breathe that in.

I want, I want to breathe that in.

So, pastor and author Tim Keller, he breaks it down this way to think about how what does that look like?

Possibly it could look like this.

He says, and this is in your handout.

He says, Well, there's contemplative rest.

So there's prayer and meditation and devotion and scripture reading and prayer walks.

Uh, and this is focused on listening to God, solitude and silence, contemplative rest.

Then there's recreational rest.

Just have fun, right?

That's good.

We need that.

Eugene Peterson, who's a pastor and an author, he says, when he talks about Sabbath rest, he just calls it praying and playing.

So you want to think about rest, praying and playing.

Just figure that out for your life, praying and playing, and you're going to you're going to be tapping into rest.

And then Keller goes on and adds this third one of aesthetic rest.

And he says, get surrounded by God's creation and also by creativity.

We're wired differently.

For some of you walking in the woods, you're just like, I don't understand that, you know, ticks and stuff, and I don't want.

You know, for me, that's it.

For some of you, you're like, if I could walk through an art museum, that would be unbelievable.

Right?

And for me, I'm bored to death.

Like, I don't want to walk through an art museum.

I I want to walk through the woods, right?

That's fine.

You walk through the art museum, I'll walk through the woods.

My wife, she wants to walk through anthropology.

That's what she wants to do.

Any other women in here, you're like, out Sabbath rest of walking through anthropology is unbelievable.

Everybody husbands don't always like it.

Don't always end up great at the end of that, right?

But you have to, it's just for whatever, whatever works for you in that, in that rest, contemplative, recreational, aesthetic.

Okay, I just gave a lot of sort of like rhythmic practice, what you should do, a little bit of a principle, practices.

But let's be honest, none of us are perfect.

None of us will uphold a practice like this perfectly.

Um, some of us are horrible at this, really bad.

Really, really addicted to work, really addicted to productivity.

And then all of us, on some level, are bad at this.

We're definitely imperfect before it.

Now, fortunately, what's fantastic about this is that this is not just about a principle and a practice.

This points us to something much deeper.

And this is this point number two.

It's not just about a practice, but about a position.

So, yes, doing these things would be great practices for our lives, but they remind us of our position that is sealed whether we do the practices or not.

And that's incredibly relieving.

It actually makes me want to do the practice more.

Did you get that?

See, we should do the practice, and the practice helps us remember a position of our belovedness before God that's already sealed, already handled, whether we do the practices or not, and that truth actually motivates me, inspires me to want to do the practice again, even when I fail at it.

See, it points us to something deeper, and this is this position.

See, the Sabbath points us to true inner freedom, that we don't have to be a slave to production anymore.

For these people, they were making bricks.

Remember this?

Brick by brick by brick by brick, they were making bricks.

The idea that they could take a day off, unbelievable liberation for them.

The idea that we can take a day off, unbelievable liberation for us.

Now the idea that you don't have to base your value or your justification or your righteousness or your forgiveness on your work, incredible, unbelievable liberation for us.

And the gospel stories, we keep seeing Jesus break legalistic Sabbath rules.

The practices these guys had developed and said, okay, now you really got to do.

These aren't suggestions, these are actually you've got to do them to uphold your story.

Standing before God, and Jesus starts to break them, and then the Pharisees, they don't like this, and they start to threaten him and question him.

And then he says, Well, hey, hey guys, uh, man was not made for the Sabbath, Sabbath was made for man.

So Jesus is saying, Hey, Sabbath rest is made to help man.

So we're not legalistically holding these rules.

And then he says, I'm the Lord of the Sabbath.

Here's what he's saying when he says that.

He says, Sabbath principle, Sabbath practices, they're there to point to me.

They're not there for you to legalistically follow for self-improvement.

They're primarily there to point to my work.

And that means that our work, even our ability to practice the Sabbath in whatever form works for us, even that, it's there to help us end up at Jesus' work.

Because we're relieved of our work.

We're at rest.

We have forever Sabbath, whatever day.

Our hearts are relieved of needing to rely on our work.

So that word refreshed, Exodus 23, 12, that word refreshed, to be breathed upon.

Maybe you're here and you're worn out or hurt.

Or you keep thinking the thing will happen and the thing just never happens.

Can't quite catch your breath.

You're struggling with peace.

We were at a funeral yesterday with a handful of you were there at a funeral yesterday for a friend of ours who died of cancer.

It was our age.

And there's this great story in Ezekiel, where the prophet sees this valley of dry bones.

And all these dry bones.

He said, What is this?

And God begins to speak to him, and God says, Prophesy over the dry bones.

He says, Come, come, wind, breath.

And flesh begins to come upon these dry bones, and the dry bones walk again.

There's life again.

And we keep seeing this imagery throughout the scriptures, right?

Whether it's at Pentecost and the wind of the Holy Spirit comes, or whether it's in the gospels with the leavened bread, and we see that within the bread there's space, there's breath, which is life.

Haven't you been looking for breath that can finally bring some rest?

It won't be a to-do list.

It won't even be practicing a Sabbath rest.

It will be Jesus.

His work, the cross and the resurrection is enough for you.

So may you find your rhythmic practice of the Sabbath so that you will know and remember your forever position of His belovedness because of Jesus' work for you.

And may you fall more in love with Jesus and His work for you, and may the Spirit of God breathe over you.

Let's pray together.

God, we come before you without our acts together.

When it comes to relying on work, productivity, justifying ourselves with what we produce, we really love that.

We're pretty addicted to that, God.

That's an idol for us.

God, we come before you and we say, we would love to have rest from that.

Help us to establish some rhythm within our life to remember that you have set us free from needing to rely on our work.

But your work and your grace toward us is enough.

The sufficiency of Jesus' blood is enough.

Thank you for your love toward us.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.