God’s Gift of Rest (Exodus 20:8-11)
Some time ago, a Tacoma, Washington, newspaper carried the story of Tattoo the basset hound. Tattoo didn’t intend to go for an evening run, but when his owner shut the dog’s leash in the car door and took off for a drive with Tattoo still outside the vehicle, he had no choice.
Motorcycle officer Terry Filbert noticed a passing vehicle with something dragging behind it. He said it was “the basset hound picking [up his feet] and putting them down as fast as he could.” He chased the car to a stop. Tattoo was rescued, but not before the dog had reached a speed of 20 to 25 miles an hour, rolling over several times. (John Ortberg, LeadershipJournal.net, 7-11-02)
I don’t know about you, but I feel like Tattoo sometimes – picking my days up and putting them down as fast as I can; rolling over several times; & in desperate need of rescue.
It’s life in America today. In a recent study reported by USA Today, 68% of Americans say they need more fun; 67% say they need a long vacation; 66% say they often feel stressed; 60% say they feel their time is crunched; 51% say they want less work and more play; 49% say they feel pressured to succeed; & 48% feel overwhelmed. (Lori Joseph and Bob Laird, “Americans Working Too Hard,” USA Today Snapshots; source: Hilton Generational Time Survey of 1,220 adults in January 2001)
If you feel overwhelmed, then you’re in good company today. That’s the feeling of nearly half of all Americans.
Gordon Dahl put it well when he said, “Most middle-class Americans tend to worship their work, to work at their play, and to play at their worship. As a result, their meanings and values are distorted. Their relationships disintegrate faster than they can keep them in repair, and their life-styles resemble a cast of characters in search of a plot.”
If all that is true, and I’m afraid it is, then what is the cure? How can we bring our lives back into balance so that we’re not overwhelmed anymore? How can we get some perspective in our lives so that they have some meaning and value? How can we learn to enjoy life again in the midst of our hurried days?
Well, the answer is quite simple, and it’s found in one of the 10 commandments. If you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn with me to
Exodus 20, Exodus 20, where we have God’s remedy for a hurried, hollow existence. Exodus 20, starting at vs.8 (read to vs.11)
Do you want God’s blessing on your harried life? Then the answer is quite simple – take one day off in seven. Stop working one full day every week. Put a day of rest in your weekly schedule.
Now, in the Old Testament context, that day was Saturday, the 7th
day of the week. In the New Testament, that day became Sunday, the 1st day of the week, in celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
It is very clear from the Scriptures that Jesus arose from the dead on the first day of the week. Matthew 28:1 says it was “after the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week.” Literally, it was “after the week at dawn on the first of the week.”
After His resurrection, Jesus established a pattern of meeting with His disciples on the first day of the week on at least four different occasions (Matt. 28:9; Luke 24:18–34; John 20:19–23, 26).
And the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended on the church for the very first time, was also a Sunday, the first day of the week (Acts 2:1; Lev. 23:15-16).
Now, when the believers in the first century began meeting together, they met every day in the temple courts and from house to house (Acts 2:46). But by the end of the book of Acts, we see them coming together to “break bread” on the first day of the week (Acts 20:7), as well as to take up their collections (1 Corinthians 16:2).
During that time, there was a controversy in the early church about the day of worship. Some Jewish believers in Jesus wanted to keep it on Saturday. Some Gentile believers in Jesus were worshipping on Sunday. &
The Jewish believers were judging the Gentile believers, accusing them of violating God’s law and not being true believers.
Well, the Apostle Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, makes it very clear when he writes to a Gentile church, “Do not let anyone judge you…with regard to…a Sabbath day” (Colossians 2:16). In other words, the specific day of worship and rest is NOT the important thing to God. The important thing is that we DO set aside regular times of worship and rest. As a pastor, Saturday’s and Sunday’s are busy days for me, so I have decided to set aside Friday’s as my “day of rest.”
The specific day is not important, but the principle of regular, weekly times of rest is.
You say, “Phil, I don’t have time to take a whole day off every
week. I’ve got too much to do. I can’t afford it.” Well, I’d say to you, “You can’t afford NOT to.” If you want to gain real perspective for your life and work, and ultimately be more productive, you can’t afford NOT to take a day off every week.
I encourage you. Give it a try over the next few months and see if you don’t GAIN PERSPECTIVE as you pattern your life after God Himself. See if you don’t FIND TRUE MEANING TO YOUR EXISTENCE as you focus on God, your Creator and Redeemer.
You see, when we take some time off, we have an opportunity to remember that God is our Creator. We remember that God is the one who has put it all together.
Verse 11 tells us to cease our labor one day in seven, “for in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day.”
Now, God didn’t rest because He was tired. He’s the omnipotent God! No. He stopped working, because He was done! There is a sense of finality and victory here. God accomplished what He had set out to do, and He wants us to have that same sense of accomplishment every week by patterning our work week after His own.
If we keep going and going and going without ever taking a break, we have no chance to stop and appreciate our work. We have no chance to put it all in perspective. But if we take the time to stop every once in a while, we can celebrate what God has accomplished through us and
enjoy life a whole lot more.
Jim Cote, in his book, Man of Influence, talks about the time when he was seven or eight. At that time, his family lived next to a boarded-up school where he and his brothers and sisters took turns pushing the merry-go-round in the playground for their friends. They’d climb on and grab the rails, and they’d run alongside as fast as they could, pushing.
The bigger kids relished the thrill of hanging out beyond the platform to experience maximum Gs. The smaller ones were taught to quit crying by slowly working toward the center pole. The closer you got, the more stability you enjoyed.
“This is an important principle,” Jim Cote says. “The faster your life goes, the more focused you must be on your center if you’re to survive and thrive.” And that center should be God, but we often neglect him.
Due to the exhilaration of our ride or sheer panic from its velocity, we hang on for dear life but never catch our breath. It’s time we realign our activities around the security of that perfect center, drawing closer to Him. (Jim Cote, Man of Influence, IVP, 2001) You see…
We must get away from our hectic lives at the circumference every once in a while. & We must make a conscious effort to move toward our center on a weekly basis. Otherwise, we’ll lose all perspective and end up
“flying off the handle,” destroying our lives and our relationships in the process.
Barbara Brown Taylor says, “Some of us have made an idol of exhaustion. The only time we know we have done enough is when we are running on empty and when the ones we love most are the ones we see the least. When we lie down to sleep at night, we offer our full appointment calendars to God in lieu of prayer, believing that God – who is as busy as we are – will surely understand. (Barbara Brown Taylor, “Divine Subtraction,” The Christian Century, 11-3-99)
No! God is NOT as busy as most of us are. He set the pattern at creation – work six days, rest one. Besides, you and I are not in charge. The universe does NOT revolve around us; it revolves around God, our Creator. He is the one who put it all together and
continues to hold it all together. God is in charge here, so we really can take a break every once in a while.
Believe it or not, our world will not fall apart if we stop working for a day. In fact, we’ll find our world coming together a whole lot better as we stop to acknowledge God’s sovereign control in our lives every week.
That’s what Sabbath keeping is all about – periodic stops to acknowledge God’s sovereign control over His creation. He is in charge, not us. So take a day off every week. Stop working one day in seven. It gives us an opportunity to remember that God is our Sovereign Creator.
More than that, it gives us an opportunity to remember that God is our Redeemer, as well. God is our Emancipator, our Liberator. God is the one who sets us free.
In Deuteronomy 5, where the 10 commandments are repeated, it says in verse 15, “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.”
The observance of Sabbath was an opportunity for God’s people to remember that God had set them free from slavery. & That’s our opportunity today!
When we stop working one day in seven, we remember that life is good, that it is not all work and no play. When we periodically cease from our labor, we remember that we are no longer slaves. We remember that God, our Redeemer, has set us free from the tyranny of our slave drivers, whether those drivers be someone else or our own selves.
Sometimes, we are our own worst enemy, driving ourselves into the ground, because we think it all depends on us. Well, God has set us free from all that. We don’t have to live in bondage to that kind of tyranny anymore.
Just a few years ago, Maria Brunner of Poing, Germany, looked forward to some time behind bars. Her husband was unemployed, so she supported their three young children by cleaning other people’s houses.
Even without a job, her husband managed to run up quite a number of unpaid parking tickets. The bill totaled nearly $5,000. Mr. Brunner kept the tickets a secret from his wife, but as the owner of the vehicle, she was responsible. Maria could not pay the fine, and unless her husband came up with the money, she would have to spend three months in jail.
Maria’s reaction? “I’ve had enough of scraping a living for the family,” she said. “As long as I get food and a hot shower every day, I don’t mind being sent to jail. I can finally get some rest and relaxation.” She looked forward to the break from her “lazy husband” and “demanding children.”
Police reported that when they went to arrest Maria, “she seemed really happy to see us… and repeatedly thanked us for arresting her.” While most people taken into custody hide their heads in shame, Maria “smiled and waved as she was driven off to jail.” (Family of the Week, www.timesonline.co.uk, 5-15-05)
My friends, we don’t have to go to jail to find some rest and relaxation. We can do it simply by taking a day off every week.
Eugene Peterson says, “We must “quit rushing through the streets long enough to become aware that there is more to life than our little self-help enterprises.” Then he quotes Baron von Hugel who said, “Nothing was ever accomplished in a stampede.”
We can’t keep going and going and going and expect to accomplish anything meaningful in life. So take a day off every week and gain perspective, remembering that God is your Creator and Redeemer.
Furthermore, take a day off every week, and BE MORE PRODUCTIVE. Take a day off every week and ACCOMPLISH MORE, NOT LESS. Take a day off every week and EXPERIENCE GOD’S BLESSINGS ON YOUR LIFE!
Exodus 20:11 says, “The Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” He made it special and unique. God didn’t give us a day off to make us miserable. NO! He gave us a day off, because He knew it would be a blessing to us, a special treat.
It certainly was a blessing to the children of Israel just coming out of Egypt. They were used to slave labor, seven days a week. Now, God says, “Take a day off every week!” It must have been like heavenly music to their ears, like telling a child he must eat candy.
The problem is: religious leaders over the years added so many rules and regulations to the Sabbath; it became a burden rather than a joy. By the time we get to Jesus’ day, religious leaders had specified 39 classes of activities that were forbidden on the Sabbath, with six subsidiary prohibitions in each (TDNT). That made 234 rules to follow just on the Sabbath. For example, tying knots in general was forbidden, but not those that could be loosened with one hand. Or a person could not carry enough ink to write two letters of the alphabet (A. B. du Toit, The New Testament Millieu).
The rules and regulations became so ridiculous, that when Jesus and his disciples walked through a wheat field on a Sabbath, the religious leaders complained, because some of the disciples had picked one head of grain each. Jesus countered, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27).
God made the Sabbath for us! He intended it to be a blessing, not a burden, so we don’t want to get legalistic with it all. We don’t need to be adding all kinds of rules and regulations to it.
All God wants us to do is take a break from our regular work each week and do what refreshes and re-creates us. You see, that’s what true recreation is all about. It is a re-creation of our bodies and our souls after they have been broken down by six days of hard labor. It’s absolutely necessary if we’re going to accomplish all that God has called us to do.
There is an old story about two men who were hired to clear a field of trees. Each one was going to be paid according to the number of trees he cut down.
Bill wanted the day to be profitable, so he grunted and sweated, swinging his axe relentlessly. Ed, on the other hand, seemed to be working about half as fast. He even took a rest and sat off to the side for a few minutes. Bill kept chopping away until every muscle and tendon in his body was screaming.
At the end of the day, Bill was terribly sore, but Ed was smiling and telling jokes. Amazingly, Ed had cut down more trees! Bill said, “I noticed you sitting while I worked without a break. How’d you outwork me?”
Ed smiled. “Did you notice I was sharpening my axe while I was sitting?” (Stand Firm, June 2000, p.13)
We all need a day each week to “sharpen the ax.” We all need some time off so we can strengthen ourselves for the task ahead. It actually makes us more productive, not less. But if we don’t take regular time off, then we only end up doing more harm than good.
In The Twenty Four Hour Society, Martin Moore-Ede says our most notorious industrial accidents in recent years – Exxon Valdez, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl – they all occurred in the middle of the night… In the Challenger space shuttle disaster, key NASA officials made the ill-fated decision to go ahead with the launch after working twenty hours straight and getting only two to three hours of sleep the night before. Their error in judgment cost the lives of seven astronauts and nearly killed the U.S. space program.
We ignore our need for rest and renewal at the peril of others and ourselves. (Martin Moore-Ede, The Twenty Four Hour Society, Circadian Information, 1993)
In 2005, a team in the Netherlands worked with meticulous effort to break the world record for falling dominoes. To accomplish the feat, they needed to set up over four million dominoes.
Their painstaking labor came within inches of destruction when, after a long day of setting up the plastic rectangles, one of the team members left a window open. A sparrow flew in and knocked down approximately 25,000 dominoes.
The reason all the dominoes did not fall is interesting. The organizers placed 750 built-in gaps intermittently throughout the succession of dominoes. The intentional gaps were a safety device, allowing enough space for a domino to fall without knocking over the ones behind it. This way, any accidental domino-knocking would be contained and would not totally devastate their efforts. (Sparrow Nearly Ruins Record for Dominoes, www.news.yahoo.com, 11-14-05)
We too need to put intentional gaps in our labor, so we don’t end up totally devastating our efforts. We need to take weekly breaks, so we don’t end up destroying ourselves and those we love the most in the process.
Take a day off every week, and gain some perspective. Take a day off every week, and be more productive.
I like the way Albert Schweitzer once put it, “If your soul has no Sunday, it becomes an orphan.” So take a day off every week and give your soul a home.
Note: Most of the illustrations come from www.PreachingToday.com.
