A Better Way Wk3: Justin Huibregtse | September 27th, 2026 |

My name is Justin.

I'm the senior pastor here, and we are in week three of a better way series.

And it's all about, you know, is there a better way that we can live our lives?

You know, we we know that there is, there are, uh, there, that we have to remember the ancient ways and not the ways of the world that, you know, kind of push us towards their agenda and their focus and their pace.

So we started in uh in week one talking about scripture and how we are supposed to delight in scripture.

And then last week we talked a little bit about fasting and how we are supposed to surrender our our earthly desires, our fleshly nature to God so that we can experience Him more and lessen that noise that's in our lives.

And today we're talking about Sabbath and rest.

And uh and rest as the resistance to the pace of this world.

So if you brought your Bibles today, we're gonna be in the book of Exodus, which is a book written uh by Moses.

It's about Moses and it has Moses in it, but we're gonna be in the book of Exodus today.

So Exodus 20, and I need a little bit of help.

Uh I need to know that you guys are following along with me.

So when you get to Exodus 20 in your scriptures, in your Bibles, I want you to say word, okay?

So that would that way I know.

So tell me when you're there, say word, okay?

All right, awesome.

Thank you.

See, you guys know how to do that.

Word, we're here.

Okay.

It says Exodus chapter 20, verse 8.

Exodus 20:8

Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.

Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.

On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates.

For in six days the Lord made heaven and 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.

Especially one word in particular Rest.

Not collapse or not, you know, uh scrolling until you lose track of time, not sitting on the couch while you're mentally answering emails, uh, talking about the word rest because it's very foreign to our modern ears.

Okay?

And you know, rest is fascinating, is that God does not introduce rest here in Exodus as an optional lifestyle upgrade.

It's not, you know, rest isn't uh isn't a an isn't a life hack here.

It is an actual command that we are supposed to live by.

He commands it.

And you know, as I was reading the scriptures this week about rest and diving into it, I I once again discovered I'm not really good at it.

You know, this is coming from somebody who you know rests while vacationing at Disney.

And uh and that that's not restful, by the way.

Uh, you know, but but I I will have to say this because she gave me permission to do this.

I love my wife very dearly.

You know that.

Um she gave me the the opportunity to tell you that she is not a very good rester.

She's not a good she's not a restful person.

We can have all of our chores marked off our list, nothing on the agenda for the rest of the day.

We don't have, you know, our our kids are playing together or on their own, and she will find something to do.

She will vacuum again, she will clean the bathroom again, she will, you know, for some reason uh rearrange the the refrigerator and be like, oh yeah, this is exactly what I need to do.

So, you know, and I'll say, You're making me anxious just walking around here and a little bit guilty too that I'm not helping.

So you know that that's how that's how she is.

She that's how she responds to rest.

Um, and it's hard for her.

Then you have you your phone.

And you know, you can be you can be lying, you know, you horizontally on your phone thinking that you're resting, uh, but you're you're but you're actually busy.

You got six arguments going on in a couple different threads.

You you're on group chats, you're uh you're you're you know in the emails, and then you're also watching a video about a guy restoring a barn in Vermont for some reason.

And and then and then you know there's there's just a lot of things going on.

Uh you're you're you're you you wanted to know about a thousand different things, and 20 minutes later you think, wow, I feel not that well rested.

And then then, parents, this gets even more interesting.

You may enter a sacred rhythm of rest in your lives, but your children have not quite entered that covenant with you.

Amen.

And you're you're trying to sit quietly before the Lord, and someone asks, Dad, where is the tape?

And for some reason, the tape always gets misplaced in our house.

Our kids tape stuff together, they tape things on walls, and you know, so where's the tape?

I don't know where it is.

And apparently nobody does.

So we we picture a peaceful day when the house is clean and food is ready and it's nice and quiet and cozy and nobody needs anything.

That isn't always what Sabbath is.

The question uh we have to ask about Sabbath is not, can I create the perfect day?

The question is, can I trust God enough to stop?

Sabbath is not about escaping responsibility, it is about refusing to let responsibility become our master.

So our culture says, you know, more, faster, produce, achieve, respond immediately, stay available.

And you know, you add homework and sports and school events and church and work and laundry and groceries, and somehow you need two dozen cupcakes by the next morning.

And the cultural definition of a successful day can quietly become how much can I fit into this day?

How much more can I do?

I checked off everything off my checklist, but I'm gonna add in about four extra things to do.

So, you know, are you controlling your calendar or is it controlling you?

Because our world has a pace and it is forming us.

And that's not necessarily how God defines a full life.

Psalm 127 says, it is vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil.

For he gives to his beloved sleep.

That verse is almost offensive to our productivity culture.

Because Scripture says you can be very busy and still be living in vain.

You can rise early, go to bed late, work constantly, feel important, and still be driven by anxious toil.

Busyness cannot make us feel important if we are letting it dominate our lives.

You know, we we uh we're we're we're more about that identity of having that busyness in us.

And we're making ourselves less available to what God wants for us.

And some of us would never say, I do not trust God, but we live like everything depends on us.

If I stop, something will fall apart.

If I don't answer, somebody will be disappointed.

If I don't keep pushing, we'll fall behind.

And Sabbath confronts that because Sabbath says, for one day, I will stop acting like the universe requires my constant supervision.

You are important, but you are not indispensable.

And that is good news.

Because Sabbath begins before sin ever enters the world.

Uh keep your keep your finger in Exodus 20.

We're going to come back to it, and go to Genesis 2.

That is in the beginning of the Bible.

So when you are there, say word.

Word.

Awesome.

Here we go.

It says Genesis 2, verse 1.

Genesis 2:1

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the hosts of them.

And on the seventh day, God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done.

So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.

You are not misreading that.

That is actually what the scriptures say, and repeats itself a lot because we need to get this idea of rest into us.

Notice where the Sabbath comes from.

It is not introduced after burnout.

It is not a consequence of sin.

That before sin entered the world, there was rest for us.

But God builds with this rhythm into creation itself.

Work, rest, work, rest.

And God does not rest because he is tired.

Isaiah 40 says that.

He does not grow faint or grow weary.

We sing about that.

So in Genesis 2, God is not saying, Wow, creation really took it out of me today.

I'm pretty exhausted.

I gotta rest.

God rests because the work is complete.

Not because he's tired.

He stops, he delights and sets the day apart.

And then he invites humanity into that rhythm.

Here's what's fascinating that Adam's first full day of existence was not a workday.

It was a Sabbath day.

Humanity begins with receiving before achieving.

So before humanity ever worked for God, humanity rested in what God had already done.

That is the order of grace.

And we keep reversing it.

We say, you know, I'll rest when everything is done.

When that list is, when that checklist is done and completed, then I will rest.

And God says, learn to rest because you trust me with what remains undone.

That is very different.

God is in the business of getting things done.

We need to leave some for him to do.

So back to Exodus 20.

We remember that it says, Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.

And he anchors the Sabbath in creation because in Exodus, Sabbath is all about creation.

Sabbath is all about creation.

God worked six days.

God rested on the seventh.

His people then are to enter into that rhythm as well.

But then something interesting happens.

Because we know that they're in the story of Israel and the Hebrews that they were put into slavery.

They were in Egypt.

And then they're taken out of Egypt.

And then they're given the commandment in Deuteronomy.

Raise your hand if you thought Deuteronomy was going to be preached on today.

None of you.

Great.

Awesome.

Well go there.

Go there.

Deuteronomy 5.

It's just a few chapter or a few books ahead.

In chapter 5, starting in verse 12.

When you're there, say word.

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 to the Lord your God.

On it you shall do 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 livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates, that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you.

Now here's the here's what's really cool.

You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.

Therefore, the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath holy.

So we need to remember what is happening here when he's talking about being reached out to and saved from Egypt.

In Exodus, Sabbath is commanded because God created.

In Deuteronomy, we read that Sabbath exists because God delivered.

So we have creation and redemption.

And that second reason for redemption is huge because Israel spent generations and generations and generations in Egypt, enslaved by them, where they were put to work.

And all their worth was their output.

Make more bricks, make more stuff, build these things, do this work, do this.

And so that's what they were, that's what they were known for.

They were slaves.

A slave worked when Pharaoh said work, produce bricks, and a slave did not have control of their own schedule or get to stop working.

Then God rescues Israel out of Egypt with a mighty hand and outstretched arm.

He takes them out of there and says, Now you are free.

And one of the first things I'm going to command you to do is to stop.

Pharaoh is not your master anymore.

Sabbath is the rhythm of people who know that they are no longer slaves.

But we still live in a world where the voice of Pharaoh still exists.

You know, our phones, our calendars, our careers, kids' activities, other people's expectations, and even our own ambition can sound a lot like Pharaoh.

More productivity, more bricks, more output.

And when we take that Sabbath, when we take that time to rest in him, we proclaim: I do not belong to Pharaoh.

I belong to God.

I do not belong to my phone.

I belong to God.

I don't belong to my career.

I don't belong to these relationships.

I don't belong to this identity.

I belong to God.

Rest becomes resistance when the world tells you your worth is your productivity.

So we rest to go against what the world wants.

We stop working and rest in God so that we can show the world that we're different.

We belong to somebody else.

So Sabbath, then, is not holy laziness.

Okay?

I will tell you that.

Maybe some of you are hearing, okay, thanks, Pastor Justin.

Fantastic.

The Bible has finally justified my Sunday nap.

You know, maybe, okay, maybe.

But biblical Sabbath is not laziness.

Again, back to Exodus 20.

Six days shall you labor and do all your work.

So that means the command includes both.

Work faithfully, rest faithfully.

Scripture has no category for worshiping productivity.

It also has no category for celebrating laziness.

Proverbs 6 talks about how the sluggard, the slothful person, needs to consider the work of the ant, someone who is much smaller than humans.

And then Colossians 3 says, whatever you do, work heartily as for the Lord and not for men.

So when you're working, you're working for God.

When you're there, when you're when you are doing work, you are not working for anybody else other than the God of the universe.

Following Christ honors work.

But precisely because work is good, we must not let work become our God.

Sabbath does not make work less important.

It keeps work from becoming our ultimate thing that we do.

So God says, you know, work six, stop one.

Why?

Because you need a weekly reminder.

Sometimes daily, but at least a weekly reminder that your job is not your identity.

Your productivity is not your righteousness.

Your paycheck is not your security.

Your usefulness is not your value.

You are a person who is loved by God, who is pursued by Him, who sent His Son to die for you, to shed His blood for you.

You are a person who is filled with the Holy Spirit to work.

But you are a person before you are a producer.

You need to remember that on the Sabbath days.

So Jesus then rescues us and rescues the Sabbath from legalism.

By the time that Jesus arrives on this earth, the Sabbath has accumulated layers and layers of religious rules.

And Jesus repeatedly clashes with religious leaders over it.

He says in Mark 2, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.

Around the time of Jesus, there were 39 extra rules having to deal with the Sabbath.

Just so that people could feel like they were getting closer to God, so they could win that favor.

I'm going to add these rules because there's not enough rules already.

I'm going to add these rules because if I don't work, then where's my identity?

Where am I at?

I've lost it.

So I need to work during my Sabbath to get closer to God while I'm supposed to be resting and resting in Him.

Sabbath is not another command to perform perfectly, it is an invitation to stop performing.

So Jesus himself, he lived with a different pace.

In the book of Luke, it says that Jesus, he would withdraw to a desolate place and pray.

We're going to talk a little bit more about that in a few weeks.

But it says that he would withdraw, which means that he would do it often.

He would do this more than once.

It was a rhythm for him.

Mark 6 says that come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while.

And Jesus says this to his disciples in the middle of his ministry, in the middle of his busyness.

Following me along with Matthew chapter 11.

Matthew 11 · chapter mention

You might want to highlight this one.

This one's a good one to highlight.

Matthew chapter 11, verse 28.

Matthew 11:28

When you're there, say word.

Matthew 28.

It's the first gospel in the New Testament.

When you're there, say word.

Word.

Here we go.

Come to me.

I'm going to ask for some participation in this as well.

Come to me, all who are labor, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Jesus is not calling us toward frantic following.

Where all we have to do is just follow these rules.

He is calling us toward a life yoked to him, where he is taking on all of this work for us and giving us rest.

If Jesus could stop and rest for a while, all at the same time saving the world, I can probably stop answering an email for at least one day.

Amen.

Anyone else have that problem where you're working, you're still you're still going?

You know, I do that, I do that often, and I want to respond.

I want to, I want to, you know, not feel like I'm I'm letting someone else down.

So I just want to, I want to I want to give more time to those things.

And so because sometimes our busyness, you know, can be displayed as faithfulness, and that's just not true.

Sometimes it is anxiety wearing a ministry badge.

So, you know, there's Martha and Mary and the anxiety of many things.

Uh Luke 10 talks about uh Martha and she is serving Jesus or is uh is serving Jesus and the serving is good.

You know, it's it's it's okay to serve is a good thing.

But verse 40 says, Martha was distracted with much serving.

Much serving.

And Jesus tells her, Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary.

That's what her sister Mary was doing.

Being at Jesus' feet, dwelling with him, resting with him.

Jesus does not criticize service, he addresses the anxious service that's there.

That's an important distinction because you can do the right things with a soul that is coming apart.

You can serve your family and resent them at the same time.

You can serve at church and become bitter.

You can work hard and secretly believe everything depends on you.

Life is not necessarily a faithful life.

Sometimes, you know, when we take that rest, when we slow down and actually listen and have things turned off, when we stop, all the things that we're outrunning tend to catch up with us.

Our anxiety, our sadness, our fears, our loneliness, our need for control.

And maybe that is why we resist that silence so much.

So that noise is easier to bear.

We don't have to deal with our own stuff if we just keep noise coming to us.

So what could Sabbath look like for a busy family?

This is where I want to get extremely practical for us.

You know, because saying, take a Sabbath to a family with three kids in activities sounds, you know, as practical as saying, hey, you know what, why don't you join a monastery?

You know, it's it's have you considered moving there because it's going to keep you away from everything else?

So do not begin with a fantasy.

Begin with a rhythm.

And remember, Sabbath is not primarily a day of rules.

It is a day set apart to stop, rest, delight, and worship.

Stopping for a defined period of time, the ordinary work.

You know, that might mean no work email, no checking slack, no administration, no major projects, no schoolwork.

Kids, I'm saying do your schoolwork.

Just you know, take a rest from it too.

And honestly, maybe no, I'm just catching up.

Just stopping right there.

Because getting caught up is just a mythology.

There will always be more.

Ecclesiastes 3 reminds us, there is a season.

Maybe that's the birds.

I don't know.

Some of you don't get that because that's a bird song.

For every season, you know.

Turn, turn, turn.

Bingo.

You guys got it.

Yeah.

Either way, there is a time to work, and there is a time to stop.

And then we need to rest.

Do things that actually restore you.

Sleep.

If you want to write that down that your pastor's telling you to sleep, it's okay.

You can do that.

Sleep.

Nap.

Sit, read, walk, go outside, eat slowly.

And parents, maybe you need to trade off.

You know, one parent gets an hour, then the other does.

Because Sabbath with children still contains children.

Amen.

Your eight-year-old will not say, Father, I perceive that you have entered sacred rest, and I'm going to leave you alone for one hour and I'm going to occupy my own time.

They don't do that.

They're going to ask you where the tape is.

Okay?

So make Sabbath realistic.

Delight.

Isaiah 58 calls Sabbath a delight.

What gives life to your family?

A meal, coffee, a walk by the lake, a movie, reading, fishing, going outside, dessert, friends, laughter, board games.

We're a big board game family.

And in fact, if if you do like board games, we're actually going to have a board game night here this Friday, 6.30.

Bring your board games.

I promise you, no gambling, okay?

Or I'm going to implore you no gambling.

But we're going to have a game night here, 6 30 this Friday.

Come hang up with us.

For our family, we delight in cabins and getting away out in nature.

We also delight in food where we're eating what we like and then we're laughing and we're telling each other funny stories and poking fun of each other and stuff like that.

We also, for some reason, love Disney, which, if you haven't been there in five years, it's not all that restful.

But it but it is something that we delight in together.

And for some reason, we also delight in water parks.

So let me say this.

If that's either of your families, I will pray with you after the service that we can do that together.

But Sabbath should remind us that God is good.

James 1.17 says, every good gift and every perfect gift is from above.

Enjoying God's gifts can itself become worship, then.

But it doesn't mean that we skip out on Sundays.

It doesn't mean we skip out on youth group or coming together.

This is what keeps Sabbath from simply being a day off.

We should be gathering with the church, opening scripture, praying, singing, talking about what God is doing.

Psalm 92 is actually titled A Song for Sabbath.

And it begins, it is good to give thanks to the Lord.

Sabbath, then, recenters us on God and Jesus and what he did for us.

This is way bigger than just a weekly schedule, a weekly rhythm.

Because Sabbath points somewhere that we can never get ourselves.

Sabbath ultimately points to Jesus.

Hebrews 4 says, so then there remains a Sabbath, a Sabbath rest for the people of God.

For whoever has entered God's rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.

Trying to justify ourselves, trying to prove ourselves, trying to build an identity, trying to outrun guilt, trying to save ourselves.

And the gospel says, stop.

Just like we talked about for Sabbath, stop.

Jesus has done for you what you could never do.

He lived the righteousness that you could not live.

He carried the sin and falling short of the glory of God to the cross.

He died the death that you deserved, and on the cross declared, it is finished.

Finished.

Complete.

Paid.

Then he rose again.

And because of Jesus, salvation is not work harder until God accepts you.

Salvation is trust, the finished, complete, and paid work of Jesus Christ.

He does not say, Come to me once you get your life organized.

Come to me once you become religious.

Come to me once you have proven yourself.

He says, Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

So maybe today you've spent your entire life trying to prove that you are enough, that you're good enough, successful enough, productive enough, religious enough, but you cannot work your way into peace with God.

Jesus did the work already.

Turn from sin.

Trust in him, receive his grace, and rest your entire weight on what Christ has done for you.

Christianity and following Jesus begins when you stop trying to save yourself and rest in the Savior who already finished the work.

So you all should have received a little half sheet of paper with some, I'll call it homework, okay?

Work you do at home, okay?

Let's call it that.

And it's it's to help you because we know that if you don't kind of plan this out, if you don't uh write things down, if you're not, if you're not doing that, you're probably gonna forget about it.

If you look at your calendar one year from now, one year from now, there's very likely nothing on that calendar.

And so you're not gonna do anything on that day until there is more in that calendar.

So put something like this, this challenge of asking when will you stop?

What will you stop doing?

How are you going to delight together?

And write it down so that you can put that plan into action of what rest will actually look like.

If our homes learned how to stop together, if children could see that our value does not come from our constant activity, if our neighbors could see families who are present, our church could worship with a place from a that is a complete trust instead of exhaustion.

So this week, you know, take that, take that time to trust in Him, to give that up, to trust in that Sabbath day, in that Sabbath rest.

The world will continue going, I promise you.

So the worship team is going to come back up here.

And as we know that we we struggle with this stuff.

We struggle with with making a you know a restful day, a Sabbath day.

It's difficult for us.

So we have to take the name of Jesus and the powerful name of Jesus and speak into our restful days, our restful time.

Because we have to understand that that it's only through him that we get to actually rest, that we get to have that enslavement of sin taken off of us.

That burden is carried by him, and we can actually rest in him.

So we're gonna sing about that today.

How we speak the name of Jesus in all the darkness over our families, over our lives, because he is light and he is life, and he is life everlasting.

Let's pray.

Father God, teach us this week to work faithfully and also to rest faithfully.

Free us from that anxious toil of getting more done, of adding more to our list, of keeping us from resting in you.

Take away that anxiety from my friends here today, from myself, that we can finally rest in you.

As we speak the name of your Son, Jesus, into our restful lives, we proclaim that victory.

That sin is defeated, that death is defeated.

That because of that blood that was shed for us, we can rest fully.

We don't have to be defined by our busyness.

We don't have to be defined by how well we accomplish.

We can be defined by our accomplishment, that we know who you are, and that's all we need.

So we speak your precious name into our lives, into our families' lives, so that we can know you better, that we can make you known, that we can grow deep together, we can stand together, and show your goodness to the world.

Holy Spirit, guide us as we understand how we are supposed to move into this restful period.

We thank you, God.

We love you.

Amen.