The BluePrint - Rest comes First

Hey, how many television stations did you have?

Six?

Two?

You're from Canada, they don't have TV in Canada.

I have six or seven.

You had six or seven?

You were in the prairies, okay.

All right, did they have Little House on the Prairie on TV in the prairie?

No.

No?

All right.

Who else?

How many stations did you have?

Five?

Twenty-four?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, you were, you were, you know, you're a millennial, so you know, like I think, something

interesting about our generations is that the older you are, the chances are the fewer

stations you had.

And if you are younger and you had a few stations, your family either budgeted really well and

chose that this just isn't money we're going to waste on lots of stations, or maybe you

were, you know, lower income, and you were like it just wasn't something that was available

to you.

And I don't know if I know for sure.

I'd have to ask my dad how many we actually had.

I feel like we had like 18-ish.

I mean, sometimes we'd have like the basic cable and sometimes we wouldn't.

Who remembers, if you're from here locally, who remembers, I think it was Channel 2, HBO

would have like a one month free every now and again.

Yeah, or we can, and they have Fraggle Rock on HBO.

And it'd be like, oh my gosh, we get to watch Fraggle Rock.

This is awesome.

I really don't actually remember how many we had.

And but I do remember this.

Some stations, tell me if this is true.

Maybe I'm remembering it wrong.

Some stations would just go black at a certain time of the night.

Right?

They would just stop.

And I don't know if that's because they just didn't have advertisers to pay for it or they

just had run out of interesting things to show.

And I don't know if they still do that now.

I honestly would have no idea because I don't watch anything on regular television anymore.

Anyone watch regular television?

A handful of us watch regular television.

But I would have no idea because everything that I watch, I stream.

Right?

Most of us probably stream something in one way or another.

Everything is just always on.

It's just always on.

There's no such thing as missing something anymore.

You can pause and come back.

I remind my kids of that sometimes.

When I ask them to do something, they're like, but I'm watching.

You can pause it.

You can pause and come back to it.

And you can do that as many times as you want.

You don't have to time your bathroom breaks with the commercial breaks of the show that

you're watching.

Some of my friends over here have no idea what that's about.

But we grew up in an era, man, where if you wanted to see, actually NBC called their Thursday

night stuff must see TV.

Because once it showed, you had to wait forever for a rerun of something.

It wasn't online somewhere.

And it took them years before they would ever even put anything out in any other format.

Nowadays, you don't even have to make sure that the DVR is programmed.

And for the youngins, a DVR is a digital video recorder.

The most popular version was called a TiVo.

And you could use it to kind of like a VCR to record television onto a hard drive.

A VCR was a machine that would record TV onto a big cassette tape.

A cassette tape?

Think of all of the technology that we have run through and created just so that we wouldn't

miss an episode of Night Court.

I don't know what comes next.

I don't know what comes after streaming because it seems like the pinnacle of it, the most

on demand unless it's streaming directly to our brains.

Because now we can be under our covers in our bed in a place of rest in doom scroll

for hours.

We can binge watch an entire season of Golden Girls.

Our heads are on our pillows, but our brains are in the cloud.

And I don't think that we do this because we crave entertainment.

I think it's because we just don't know how to stop.

Physically, mentally, emotionally, fiscally, rest comes hard to us humans.

For example, in the US, in a country that has no national mandatory or guaranteed paid

vacation guidelines, half of us don't use all the vacation days that we have earned.

A third of us don't use any of them.

We don't know how to stop, how to rest.

And I think that Christians, Jesus followers, are meant to lead the way in rest.

I think the first page of discipleship is rest because rest isn't what we earn from

Jesus.

It is a gift and an invitation that we receive through Jesus.

Rest has to come first because life flows from rest.

Work is a byproduct or product of rest and life.

So let's actually look at some scriptures because we don't want to build on the sand

of Greg's opinions.

We want to see what Jesus said and how God has been weaving rest through the story for

thousands of years.

Now, similar to last week, instead of standing, I'm actually going to be referencing a lot

of scriptures throughout.

And so I'm going to go ahead and pray.

But if you want to have your Bibles ready for different references, I'll tell you what

they are throughout.

All right, let's pray.

God of every tribe, every tongue, every color, every nation, God of rest, we pray that you

would show us something true about you today.

Whatever you have for us to learn, I pray that it would stick, that it would become

a part of the framework of our faith, that we would become more like your son, Jesus.

Amen.

All right, so if you have your Bible and you want to turn there, I'm actually going to

go all the way back to the beginning, okay?

I'll go back to Genesis, Genesis 1.

I'm going to start in verse 26.

It says this, then God said, let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness.

And verse 27, so God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God, he created

them, male and female, he created them.

Verse 28, God blessed them and said to them, be fruitful and increase in number, fill the

earth and subdue it.

Rule over the fish and the sea and the birds and the sky and over every living creature

that moves on the ground.

Verse 31, God saw all that he had made and it was very good.

And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

Genesis 2 verse 1, thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array.

Genesis 2:1

By the seventh day, God finished the work he had been doing.

So on the seventh day, he rested from all his work.

Okay, so let's review.

This describes humans being created on which day?

You can say it out loud.

Day six.

Yeah.

And on day six, they're even given purpose.

They're given a job to do, right?

You heard that?

Be fruitful, multiply, rule over the fish and animals.

But then something fascinating happens.

It says that the day ends.

Gives them this is what you're going to do and then the day ends.

In my mind, I don't know about you, but all the things that he gave them were not one-day

jobs.

Yeah.

It's also something curious about when the day ends.

Let me read that again with your ears open.

Ready?

God saw all that had been made and it was very good.

And there was evening and there was morning the sixth day.

Says there was evening and there was morning on the sixth day.

What sticks out?

Anything?

You don't have to say it out loud, but be thinking about it.

It's okay if you have no idea what I'm talking about because we live in 2022 and most of

us, if not all of us, we don't tend to think through things with the Hebrew lens.

Okay?

We're reading from what's called the Hebrew Bible.

We're reading from what we call, would call the Old Testament, the Older Testament.

But everything written in that part of the Bible is written through a Hebrew lens.

It says that the day begins in the evening and ends after there was morning of the day.

See, we think of a day beginning in the morning, right?

We think, oh, the alarm went off.

My day has begun.

We think of the sun has come up and so this is something new and a day ending at night

when we go to bed.

But tradition tells us the Hebrew day doesn't begin when the sun comes up.

A new day begins in the evening when the sun has gone down.

Stay with me, okay?

Stay with me.

God creates them, gives them a glimpse of their future, does that on day six.

Just as they were surely standing in awe, try to put yourself in their shoes.

You are newly created, you're brand new, and you have this God that's going, oh, hey, check

out all this cool stuff that I made.

Check out what I'm going to have you do.

Look what you're going to get to do.

Just as they're surely standing in awe, amped up with possibility.

I'm going to switch mics because my headset mic's going dead.

And they're seeing all this for the first time, right?

Just then, it says that day six ends.

Day seven begins and then what?

God rests.

We have to ask ourselves, as God begins to rest on the evening before what we would have

thought of as day seven, did God sit by and watch them begin to work in the dark?

Or did God invite them into the evening rest of day seven?

Now, if you were Jewish and reading this, your answer is almost surely rest because

there's something hidden in that word for rest.

When it says God rested, that word is Shabbat, the English word Sabbath.

And it's the very first time that that word is used in scripture, but in Judaism, it's

still a deeply meaningful word.

It's a spiritual practice.

It's a cultural belief that is relevant to this day.

This week, when the sun goes down on day six, Friday night, until the daytime has ended

on day seven Saturday, it will be Sabbath for millions of Jews around the world, no

matter the time zone, no matter the country.

It will be a time of rest because of this word, not just because Sabbath shows up in

the Ten Commandments later, but because resting with God is the first thing humans do.

This is meant to show us that rest is important and has been available to us from the beginning.

Before we work, not so that we can work.

That is so foreign to us.

It is so backwards to our post-enlightenment brains that rest comes first.

We do not work to rest.

We rest so that we live.

Rabbi and Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel said the Sabbath, day of rest, as a day of abstaining

from toil is not for the purpose of recovering one's lost strength and becoming fit for

the forthcoming labor.

The Sabbath is a day for the sake of life.

Rest is not a reward for work, and rest is not simply to ready us for work.

Rest is a gift that enables life.

So the God who needed no rest chose to rest, chose to Sabbath so that we could, so that

we would know from the beginning that this is our example, that we can rest.

Rest comes first.

Now, if you fast forward in the scriptures to the next time that the word Shabbat shows

up.

It has been more than 2,000 years by the next time that this word shows up.

In that, literally, you could read into that a little bit and go, okay, well, between here

and there is all the time that sin has been ravaging the world.

Eventually the Israelites, they are enslaved in Egypt.

It's not until Exodus chapter 5 that we see the word Shabbat again.

Exodus 5 · chapter mention

And it's not God that says it.

Exodus 5, what happens is that God has called Moses and told Moses, I need you to go and

free my people.

I've heard their cry.

It's time for you to go and free them, okay?

Exodus 5 is the first face-off between Moses and Pharaoh.

He says, you have to let these people go out and worship God.

And Pharaoh says this, Exodus 5, 5, look, the people of the land are many now and you make

them rest from their labor.

That word rest is the word Sabbath.

Pharaoh is angry because God has sent Moses to have his people Sabbath.

God has sent his people to rest.

So what does Pharaoh do?

Anyone that's familiar with this story?

Immediately after this, he punishes the people and makes their work even harder because they

Sabbath, because they rested.

Slave drivers hate rest.

They will want to punish you for slowing them down.

We don't need to punish ourselves.

Some of us, maybe most of us, in one way or another, have a little Pharaoh on our shoulder.

In our ear, in the back of our head, always telling us that we haven't done enough, we

haven't worked long enough, we haven't made enough, we haven't accomplished enough with

our life just yet.

We rest and then we punish ourselves by working even harder.

But God knows the purposes that he has for us.

In Genesis, he wasn't afraid that they would get behind if they took rest.

God was not afraid that they would get behind on the purpose that he had given them if they

rested.

And today, God isn't your Pharaoh, demanding that you get back to work.

God invites you into rest that leads to life.

Rest is a proclamation of freedom.

Getting to rest makes you an abolitionist to say, I will not be enslaved to this anymore.

Now it's only after all of this, after the people have escaped their slavery by the power

of God, that then they're given Sabbath as a command that the seventh day they must rest,

which is honestly a brilliant reversal.

It's fascinating because for hundreds of years, the Israelites had been commanded to work.

And now God is saying, you are no longer commanded in that way to work, but now you are actually

commanded to rest.

They'd gone hundreds of years without permission to rest, and now God is going, no, you have

to.

You have to rest.

Of course, the first step of the blueprint of discipleship that we're talking about here

isn't specifically the concept of Sabbath as much as it is the concept that God gives

us rest.

And it's specifically not about the legalism of having to do something in a specific way

the same day off every single week at the same time.

It's about the rest that God offers us, period.

Rest from an unhealthy tyranny of work and from an unhealthy life pattern.

And I'll tell you why.

For one, the Bible writer Paul encourages us.

He says, we don't need to get stuck in a legalism about which day is our day of rest.

In Colossians 2.16, he says this, therefore, do not let anyone judge you by what you eat,

drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a new moon celebration, or a Sabbath day.

Why, he says, because these are a shadow of the things that were to come.

The reality, however, is found in Christ.

He's not saying don't rest.

He's saying you can be flexible in your freedom because the depth and reality of your rest

is actually found in Jesus, not a specific day.

And so then we should ask, well, what did Jesus say?

Right?

Matthew 11.28, if you want to turn that, you can.

Matthew 11, we're going to be in 11 and 12 for just a minute here.

Matthew 11.28, one of my favorite verses.

Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart.

You will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

When Scott read that verse, I was like, you have no idea how prescient that is for today.

Now to be clear, when Jesus says rest in this passage, this isn't the same word.

He's not saying, and I will give you Sabbath.

This word means to refresh.

It means to give repose or exemption from labor.

Jesus is calling out to the tired, to the people trudged down by the rules, to the people

crushed under life.

Come to me.

I have rest for you.

I will give you Sabbath from the weight of this yoke that you carry.

And again, like Genesis, there's something that isn't obvious to us because we don't

see things with the Hebrew lens, right?

When he says, take my yoke, when he said that he would cut the string of the yoke, take

my yoke, my yoke is easy, my burden is light, the yoke that he's talking about, it's a

Jewish metaphor for all the religious rules.

In first century Palestine, Israel, if they were talking about all the law altogether,

they called it the yoke of the law.

So Jesus is saying, he wants to give them rest from the weight of the commands, to reframe

how they understood their religious laws by inviting them to practice rest with him.

While he doesn't use the word Sabbath rest in this verse, he does in the very next verse.

12 verse 1.

At that time, Jesus went through the grain fields on this Sabbath.

His disciples were hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat them.

When the Pharisees saw this, they said to him, look, your disciples are doing what is

unlawful in the Sabbath.

But Jesus corrects them.

He reforms, he reframes Sabbath and rest together.

He says for the son of man, that's the way he referred to himself, the son of man is

Lord of the Sabbath.

He says, I am the leader of this day of rest.

In Mark 12, chapter 2, 27, he says, then Jesus said to them, the Sabbath was made to meet

the needs of the people.

Listen to that.

The Sabbath was created to meet the needs of the people and not people meet the requirements

of the Sabbath.

He's saying Sabbath and rest, as it turns out, is not a rule for us to follow.

Rest is a gift that we receive as we follow him.

In the beginning, God gave us rest.

When God saw that we needed it to be written in stone, he literally carved Sabbath into

a tablet of the 10 commandments and made it a command.

And then Jesus, this is fascinating, takes these hearts of stone and performs a brilliant

reversal once again.

He takes what had to be written in stone and he turns it back into flesh called Jesus.

He says, I am the Lord of the Sabbath.

I am your rest.

I am the one that gives you rest.

Your rules are not what find you rested and ready for life.

I am.

Last thing as I close up, I just want to point to John 13.

Because last week I said each of these eight themes can be found in John 13 through 17,

this last kind of sermon lesson that he's giving his disciples.

John 13 on the night that Jesus was betrayed now for the sticklers and theologians in the

room.

Now it doesn't say that specifically in John 13.

In John 13, John for whatever reason does not record them sharing the Eucharist for

the Passover meal that night.

But he does then say that this is the night that he's betrayed.

And all the other gospels describe that the night that he's betrayed is the night that

they sat down for the Eucharist.

And so we put the two together and we know that that's what's happening here.

John 13, this night, they sit down to a meal that we know to be the Eucharist.

And before that meal, it says that he put a towel around his waist and began to wash

the feet of his disciples.

This was something that servants were meant to do.

The disciples recline.

Because back then tables were low to the ground.

You sat on the ground and you reclined, kind of like Lionel Richie on the cover of one

of his albums.

You shared a meal together.

He goes around and he washes the dirt off all of their feet.

They recline.

He serves.

But not everybody at the table was ready to rest and to receive what Jesus was giving.

It says, 13 verse 6, he came to Simon Peter who asked him, Lord, are you going to wash

my feet?

Jesus replied, you do not realize what I am doing, but later you will understand.

Never shall you wash my feet.

Said like a true worker, said like a true person that doesn't know how to receive rest.

Never will you do that for me, Peter told him.

Jesus answered, unless I wash you, you have no part with me.

Listen, rest is not taken.

Rest is not earned.

Rest is received.

Rest is not a sign.

And actually, rest is a sign and a symbol of what we are becoming a part of and who we

are becoming a part of because rest is found in a person, not a day, in a person.

His name is Jesus.

I hope that today we can see that the first step of discipleship is rest because rest

means receiving Jesus, saying I will put down my way, I will put down my, no, you can't

do this for me, God, but if you do not let me serve you, if you do not rest, if you do

not sit back and let me give to you, today here, God wants you to receive rest because

he wants you to receive him.

Because rest is not a day.

He is a person.

Let us pray.

God, thank you for the way that you're working in our community and I pray that today for

some people that have heard this for the very first time that you would encourage them that

they can receive your rest.

The tension can be released.

God, I pray that you would help each of us in the midst of our busy lives doing important

things, that we would find the time to rest and think on you, and you would lead us into

life.

That life would lead to meaningful work.

Amen.