Rebellious Rejuvenation

NOTE: The manuscript is only lightly edited and may contain spelling or grammatical errors, as well as possibly deviating from the actual audio of the final sermon delivery. Quote with caution.

 It's interesting to see the various internal contrasts arising from preaching different messages. There are some messages where you confront things in others that you have overcome in yourself. There are some messages where you engage things in others that you are currently working on. Then there are messages where God forces you to confront things you are absolutely terrible at. This is one such message. Hence, it may be all over the place ( a tad rambly, if you will); for that, I ask for grace.

On a scale of one to 10, if we were to rate ourselves (1 being way too lazy and 10 being way too busy), how would you rate your daily routine? As the drivel of life goes this way and that way, as you find yourself going about your day, I am confident that you are either convicted one way or the other, where you either don't work hard enough or you work too hard. You either slave away into the wee hours of the night staring at a computer screen, or you slave away at doing nothing. If laziness were a full-time sport, you'd be an olympian. And I guarantee you land in one of these camps, even if you've only dipped a pinky toe into their waters.

I, for one, am in the camp of those who work too hard. I'm in the camp where my favorite saying is, "I'll get all the sleep I need when I am dead. A third of my life is past me, and I don't have time to sit around doing bugger all. That's wasteful. If something isn't filling that slot in the calendar, fill it. Life's too short!" For the longest time, I genuinely believed this wasn't just a good mindset for me, but that this was the Christian mindset! The grindset mindset, if you will. Lay your life down for Christ! It's not burnout. It's burning brightly for the Lord! 

I was blind to the fact that I was getting so busy doing the things I felt God wanted me to do that I forgot that I needed to spend time with him to be who He wanted me to be. That's, more or less, my thesis for today. What we never stop to recognize is how we spend our time affects our relationship with others and, more importantly, our relationship with God. To consider the benefit behind what I've come to deem  Rebellious Rejuvenation.

This fourth word from God deals with something that it is probably safe to say we all struggle with, and that is intentional rest. The fourth commandment comes with some fascinating commentary because, while it's found in verse 8, for the following three verses, we are told why this commandment is so consequential. There's intriguing commentary in that because there is no other commandment, not one single one of the other nine, that gets the same level of attention. Even the prohibition on idolatry, which I will note is the second command, thus one of the more prominent commands, does not have as much commentary as God's command regarding the Sabbath. Perhaps we ought to pay closer attention?

It is a command rooted in creation order, a day of rest ordained by God, as verses 9 through 11 demonstrate. God did not just create a world. God did not just assemble the stars in the sky. God did not just tell the planets which way they should rotate and set the earth on its axis. God did not just create water, plants, animals, and people. God also created a day of rest. And in Genesis 2:3, we read that "He blessed this seventh day and declared it holy. For on it, He rested from all His work of creation."

Now, tempting as it may be to address the question of God resting, I'm not going to indulge that tangent today. I think it's sufficient to say that God does not do this because He requires rest, as some ignorant atheists might assert in order to challenge the idea of God's omnipotence. Instead, God models for us what His desire is for our fruition. The context of the opening chapters of Genesis leads us to believe that God's rest was a deliberate cessation of work rather than a collapsing of one's form in exhaustion. When the work was done, and it was perfect, He rested, modeling for us what the rhythm of our lives should entail. He desires for us to work hard and then to rest. So much so that even amidst creating the world, He modeled this rhythm to us. He teaches at this moment that for the sake of abundant life, yes, you will work, but you must also recognize the essential need for rest.

This is the establishment of the sabbath rhythm: A day when we are to experience a cessation of work so that we can rest and, in doing so, reflect on the God who wasn't so consumed with His work that He refused to take a break. 6 days you work and 1 day you rest. This is the rhythm God establishes at the beginning of everything. "Remember the sabbath," He says. "Remember what you've always known to be true, but you're forgotten. I established this rhythm at the beginning of the world." Thus, the natural revelation and subsequent command, "On the seventh day, you will rest."

The Dreadful Importance of the Sabbath

 Now, if you're anything like me, you have difficulty taking a break. I know that will only apply to some listening to me. There are others for whom taking excessive breaks is your rule of thumb, and I'll get to you in a second. But if you're anything like me, you push yourself to the brink until you have literally nothing else in your body, every vestige of your energy is shot, and you have not even a teeny-tiny thimble of adrenaline to lean on. You spend your one day off a week in a tired, exhausted funk, taking half the day to sleep just to try and futilely recover what little energy you can get back so that you can go back into the next week and do it all over again.

For these types, I invite you to contemplate what I've been mulling over this week: This 4th command might elude your obedience, perhaps because you misunderstand its importance. Actually, the difficulty with many commands is that we might not see their significance. But with the 4th command particularly, we might justify ourselves, lying to ourselves, and say that we are working ourselves to the bone to the glory of God. Am I not supposed to live as a sacrifice? God needs energizer bunnies for the kingdom, not meandering sloths! At least, that's what I've told myself.

But is God more honored with our seven days of work or with our six days of work? That is the question that humanity has struggled with time and time again. I argue that it is as relevant to our two-sided coin of younger generations today as it was to the former Hebrew slaves. I say a two-sided coin because you've got the workaholics obsessed with the grind on one side. Working 60, 70, 80 hours a week to get a leg up in the world. On the other side of the coin, the aforementioned neolithic sloths incapable of much else but the bare minimum effort at work and the maximum effort at lounging around the house doing nothing. This command challenges both, and both forget just as quickly as the Israelites would forget.

In fact, if you read in Deuteronomy 5:15, a mere four decades after receiving these commands, Israel had to be assembled to be reminded of these commands once again. And what they had to be reminded of was the importance of the Sabbath day. Moses tells the people, 

 "Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out of there with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. That is why the LORD your God has commanded you to keep the Sabbath day."

God brings His people out of slavery to give them rest, but it doesn't take long for them to drift back into the habits of slavery. To a slave, a day of rest is an insane proposition. A day of rest is a dream that vanishes on waking. To even get one day off was indeed a great blessing. Imagine forgetting such a gift! You may be too quick to judge Israel's forgetfulness, but take a moment and remind yourself how often you are steeped in forgetfulness.

God reminds His people, "You will work as My promised people, but you won't work like you are slaves." How often do we drift into slavery ourselves, speaking both metaphorically in the way we backslide into sinfulness and also in the very tangible way we enslave ourselves to ruts?

How many of you are enslaved to your jobs? How many of you are enslaved to your routines? How many of you find that rest is a foreign idea? And there are many reasons why rest eludes us. But one of the two primary reasons is because either we are working too hard or working too hard at being lazy. Both are wickedness in God's eyes.

To further emphasize why I believe this command from the Lord is so vital, I should emphasize how dreadfully important breaking the Sabbath was to Israel. That, I believe, will help you do a double-take before putting whatever ideas of the Sabbath you want upon this command. Because I think what we've done is we've crudely boiled this command down to, "Go to church if you have the energy, go and take your day and do whatever you want, make sure you enjoy some leisure from time to time, and voilà, you've fulfilled the commandment." That reveals quite an unserious grasp of this serious command. 

How weighty was the Sabbath to the Hebrews? Dreadfully so. In Exodus 35:2, Moses tells the people,  "For six days work is to be done, but on the seventh day you are to have a holy day, a Sabbath of complete rest to the LORD. Anyone who does work on it must be executed."

You can look in your Bibles if you think I'm making that up. The punishment for working on this sacred day was death. For good reason! God's wrath is great when His commands are broken! Nehemiah, when rebuilding Jerusalem, admonishes nobles of Judah in Nehemiah 13 for breaking the Sabbath, saying,

 "What is this evil you are doing—profaning the Sabbath day? Didn't your ancestors do the same, so that our God brought all this disaster on us and on this city? And now you are rekindling his anger against Israel by profaning the Sabbath!"

-Nehemiah 13:17-18

As we saw last week, God takes it seriously when we profane his name. Is it such a leap to assume God takes it seriously when we profane His Sabbath? I bring this up because some commandments are mistakenly given greater weight than others. I think universally, Christians will agree that 'Do not murder' is a good command. But many of those same Christians will say, 'Well if you break the Sabbath commandment, it's not as serious as murdering someone.' This week, my question is, "Genuinely, why do you think that?" Why is it more important to not murder someone than to observe the Sabbath? Why? The Sabbath is clearly consequential to God. Why isn't it to you?

We make the mistake of ignoring some commandments because they don't seem like a big deal compared to others; "What's the big deal? What's the big deal if I break this fourth command?" By the end of this sermon, I pray I've revealed the seriousness of us potentially ignoring this revelation from the Lord. But a good starting point, for now, is to understand how serious it was to God's people that He brought out of Egypt. For them, Sabbath was a matter of life and death. Maybe it ought to be for us as well?

Principles & Laws

 Now, let me back it up a moment because we need to address something before I get all, "I'm gonna call everyone out and pray God convicts their very souls" on you. A question I preached in the very first lesson of this series-the ten misconceptions about the Ten Commandments; The question of the New Testament convictions and Christians and their relationship with Old Testament law. The principle that confuses people is how the people of Jesus relate to God's law. 

If you aren't familiar with the Bible, Jesus, and God's law, it can often seem like Christians are being arbitrary with what rules they do and do not follow. Some of this is lousy Christianity, some of this is that some laws apply, and some don't. There's a difference between universally applicable laws and laws for a particular time and specific people.

So yes, some things in God's law, we dismiss entirely. Like it says we shouldn't still eat pork. Does that still bind us? No, because Jesus fulfilled that aspect of the law. So, when you eat a bite of bacon today at brunch, be sure to say, "Thank you, Jesus!" And the people of God said, "Amen!" But the Ten Commandments are part of what's still in effect, alongside the implications they inherently carry. Every single one of these Ten Words finds confirming verses in the New Testament, even if the specific applications might shift. "Do not make idols!" for instance. We may not make wooden idols, but we create idols nonetheless, and idolatry is condemned for any follower of the Lord in any age.

No one thinks God is okay with stealing. No one thinks it's okay to lie about stealing or that God is okay with killing people who saw you steal. (Boy howdy, that mall theft escalated quickly!) We would vehemently agree God does not support any of that. But if I were to step forward and say God is equally not okay with you ignoring His command to take a weekly day of rest, usually with the taciturn implication that such resting includes attending church weekly, then suddenly there's pushback. "God fulfilled the law! So what if I do a little bit of work on this day? So what if I didn't go to church this week? So, what?"

I am not preaching this from a position of excellence. I find that I fully agree with that statement. The "So what?" It echoed in my mind as I put this all together over the week. So what? What does it matter? I'm still relaxing. I'm just, you know, relaxing while tangentially getting other work done. But that's where the Holy Spirit is convicting me lately, where I'm getting the impression that I don't get to pick and choose which of these commands are still in effect and which are not based on which ones are easier for me to adhere to and which are not.

Once again, I think we can lay much of the fault for this at the feet of faulty evangelicals. I think we get too comfortable stripping away the idea that God commands His people to do certain things and instead say silly things like, "Well, it's all just about the principle and how the principle is applied to us today." The problem is there are very few specific instances where that works in Scripture. But that's what we do with the Sabbath. We spiritualize it by turning it into a mere principle: "If you just make sure you find some time, maybe an hour, to be alone with God, then you're honoring the Sabbath. Just an hour or two of your time." Brothers and sisters, that would be the same as if you took any other command and tried to apply its principle that same way. Let's go back to murder. Well, if you stab someone in the arm, it's not lethal, so you don't really have to worry about the fact that you missed their heart, right? You listened to the principle instead of the command, so you're good, right? That is complete babbling buffoonery. And yet, because we think this command is lesser, we use the same type of logic, and it's utterly nonsensical.

We need to get back to a place where we recognize that  Many of God's commands are still in place and cannot be relegated to mere ignorable principles. When you treat His word in this willy-nilly fashion, you risk conveniently overlooking what God's Word seeks to undo in you so that He can remake you in His image. I, for one, lean towards assuming a law is still in effect unless a specific text proves otherwise. Better to run the risk of being too lawful instead of running the risk of being too libertine. Just my opinion, though.

The Rhythm of Rest

What's not merely opinion is what I realized this week that started to frighten me a little bit: That in our overworked, frenetic schedules which possess us, or our sedentary lifestyles where we spend our days with no physical activity or significant work, either way we are killing ourselves. Our minds are slowly shutting down; our ability to think critically and process information clearly is dying. Our creativity is going out the window, and our bodies are giving up. It is such things that God knows about the bodies He created. It is with this in mind that He ordains a day of rest.

 If all the other nine commands are good for you, this one is no exception. Crucially, we should remember that while the command is still in effect, the context may change. The Hebrew word for Sabbath literally means "cessation from work." The root word means "to desist, to cease, to leave, to put away, to put down, to cause to rest, or to still." There's a challenging phrase. When was the last time you were still?

God made our world and our bodies to function on a repeating schedule. To eat every three to four hours, to sleep every 24 hours. God created seasons where there is a time for harvesting food and a time for planting new crops. Every single thing in creation operates at a steady rhythm and pace. When these rhythms are interrupted, things don't work well. When you plant at the wrong time, the harvest fails. When you harvest too early, you harvest poorly. Your health declines when you don't sleep for eight hours. When you don't eat properly, and you're not exercising, your body begins to rebel against you.

God has designed us in such a way that we need to operate in a rhythm that is conducive to a healthy lifestyle. And one of the main things He has done and has revealed to us that will be most beneficial to a healthy rhythm in our lifestyle is that one-seventh of our time is spent resting, reflecting, and refocusing on Him. To take a sabbath.

As New Testament believers, we don't explicitly call it a Sabbath day. We ignore all the silly debates about which day it should be. Technically, according to tradition, it should be Saturday. Of course, Christ rose on sunday. We celebrate Sunday as the Lord's Day, our, for lack of a better phrase, our version of Sabbath. On this day, we gather to remind ourselves of all our King did, is doing, and will do. We celebrate His coming return, break bread, and worship together, and then we return home to continue our day of rest. For some, the Lord's Day is a day of joyful ministry work; thus, another day becomes their Sabbath.

We deliberately infuse our week with this rhythm because the scriptures remind us too. We consecrate a day to the Lord. We do this not because we must but because we can. Because we believe this rhythm keeps reminding us who God is and who we aren't. We aren't tyrannically regarding the specific day, as others might be, but we keep an open hand towards people's consciences. As Paul said,

"One person judges one day to be more important than another day. Someone else judges every day to be the same. Let each one be fully convinced in his own mind."

-Romans 14:5

 "... don't let anyone judge you in regard to food and drink or in the matter of a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day. These are a shadow of what was to come; the substance is Christ."

-Colossians 2:16–17

"A shadow of what was to come." Celebrate it on Sunday, or don't. The specific sabbath day was merely an echo of what was to come in Christ. A single day of rest points to that glorious day when we step into our ultimate rest. (See Hebrews 4, as I don't have the time to unpack that fully.) All I can say is that all Sabbaths (or what we'd equivocate to Sabbaths) are meant as a glimpse of the wondrous eternal Sabbath to come.

Oh, dear Christians. Just imagine the wondrous glory of the new heavens and the new earth. Imagine, all my fellow workaholics, doing the exact same work but without exhaustion. Or without the bitter understanding that all you're doing will one day pass away. Instead, you realize you're building a kingdom. You're stepping into your role as God's reflectors of God's image into creation. Our rhythm of rest reminds us of the rest we ultimately receive in Christ and Christ alone. We rest from our efforts as a reminder to our souls that we are not sustained on our own, but we are sustained by Christ alone.

In her book '10 Words to Live By', Jen Wilkins says it this way:  "More than the deliberate cessation of work for the purpose of decompressing, Sabbath is the deliberate cessation of any activity that might reinforce my belief in my self-sufficiency. In contrast to cultural ideas of rest marked by self-care, Sabbath rest is marked by self-denial."

This day of rest reminds you of many things, fellow Christians. It reminds you that you don't work for your salvation. You don't live out of your strength. Without rest, you will eventually dry up and wither away. There is no surviving persecution without rest. There's no finding joy in your labor without rest. There's no living in hope during the trials without rest. If rest eludes you, everything in your life eventually becomes meaningless drudgery. That is not what God wants for any of us.

Obeying this command helps us remember and cast our minds on the One who has ultimately done all the work necessary to make us acceptable to God. Only Jesus can do the work that was required to make us right with God. Only Jesus can do the impossible work of perfect obedience to God and all His requirements. Only Jesus can do the impossible task of taking our sin-soaked rags and clothing us with righteousness. Only Jesus can give us true rest.

The Sabbath encourages us to cast our minds on the One who worked on our behalf and encourages us to rest in His work. Cast our minds forward to the great Sabbath we will enjoy in the world to come when we rest and worship in the presence of God. When we obey God's command to observe the Sabbath, we find we have time to truly enjoy the work of Christ and look forward to the life to come.

Some Implications

 Now, let us get into some implications. As I said, the precise application of this law will change, but the principle is very much in effect. Six days you work, one day you rest. My goal here is not to be Pharisaical, that is, not to be a Pharisee and morph this beautiful gift of rest from the Lord into a burden upon your shoulders. I don't want to add restrictions on top of what God's Word explicitly commands. That was not my goal.

God created the Sabbath not intending to burden you but to help you. Under the Mosaic law, the Israelites were torn away from their grueling slave labor and commanded to take a full day of rest every week. That is a beautiful gift, a reminder that God must rejuvenate you. In a world given to overworking, you must rejuvenate.

If the first commandment dealt with having no other gods, the second commandment dealt with not having any idols, and the third commandment teaches us not to misuse our words. The fourth commandment now instructs us not to misuse our time; To purposely integrate God into the rhythm of our lives. We are reminded that time is the most precious resource in our hands, and it is ultimately finite, like the sand in an hourglass ever sifting, ever decreasing.

So then we are pressed with three options:  to either waste this time or to anxiously grab at the sand as it flies through our hands, trying desperately to do whatever we can with the time we are given, which ironically is also a waste of time. To waste time trying to regain our time, waste time by wasting time, or, the third option , we can give that time to God. We recognize the ever-persistent march of time, and rather than being given to hopelessness and existential crises, we instead rise above it all. And we are given peace by letting go of one full day and giving it to the Lord, knowing He can do more with six days than we could ever dream of doing with seven.

"Remember the Sabbath day," God says. "Take this day and do as I commanded: cease your work, refocus on Me." The Western church is in serious jeopardy of misrepresenting God with how we use our time. And I think this is one of the more scathing indictments of the American church today, how cavalier in the misuse of their time they've become: To make God a mere addition to our lives rather than the center of everything. That's a flouting of the very first command. Does God have all your heart, or is your heart given to idols? Do you force God into your viewpoints, or does God challenge you fundamentally? These are different ways you will look at it, manifesting in what we discussed today: the Sunday service.

 As I said mere moments ago, I'm not about to get uber-religious on you and legalistic and force you to do something out of religious obligation. I'm only asking you to consider how far the church has fallen when it comes to gathering on the Lord's Day.

It begins with making church something that you get to choose, your specific flavor of. You get to cherry-pick the type of messages you hear. You get to choose the kind of worship you listen to. You get to select the exact flavor of theology that fits your specific preferences.

And well, then arises the age of digital media. Now, you don't even have to enter the church building to go to church. We can watch the service in our jammies. We don't even have to watch our local churches. We could pick the most charismatic speaker with the most followers. "He or she makes me feel really good. I'm totally not forsaking the coming together of the saints."

All of that leads us to where we are now. Why would we even bother observing the Lord's Day with any sort of reliability or frequency when we can get so many other things done on Sunday? We've drifted from strict observance to laissez-faire observance to soon (I fear) no observance at all.

Henceforth, there's a principle that I'm trying to instill in you, which was planted by my parents. My father did what he could. He made a couple of mistakes, but forcing his kids to go to Sunday service once a week every week was not one of his mistakes. I'm forever grateful for that. The one reason you couldn't be in church on Sunday in my household is that you were bedridden. You had to be dying, and even then, they probably would try to lug your body into the car trunk so they could pray over you at the church. "They say lay hands on the sick, and they'll recover so... heeve!"

I remember I told them I had a homecoming dance, it would get out at a super late time, like midnight or something like that, and their one response was, "That's fine, make sure you're in church on Sunday. We don't care if you're tired. We don't care if you didn't get much sleep last night. Even if you fall asleep in the pew, you will be in service." And I can't tell you just how influential that's been in my life. That God is not a mere addition to our lives. He is the centerpiece. He gets this day, period. On this day, on Sunday, we cease from our labor. We go, we gather with the saints, we worship, we celebrate, and we rest. We are rejuvenated in the Lord.

I'm not trying to be overtly religious. I'm not trying to be a Pharisee. I'm reminding you of why I host this every single week for you guys: Because this is super critical to the betterment and the empowerment of the Christian life. When we miss out on this and believe that this is optional, we start to drift into wondering whether other things necessary to the Christian life are optional.

I begin to think of my future kids and younger generations who might step in under my ministry. And if I ever treat the Lord's Day as optional, I can guarantee you they will also treat it as optional, if they don't completely abandon faith altogether. A quote that keeps making its rounds on Christian social media pages reads:  "Parents who treat the church as optional should not be surprised when their children end up treating Jesus as unnecessary." 

This is where I'm heading with the vision of my future ministry to my congregants and my family. God is not a mere addition to our lives. God has established a day that we cease from our labors and rest in Him, that we worship, and that our well-being is stoked.

I'm not being harsh when I say that Sunday should be the centerpiece of your week; That the Lord's Day, the gathering of the saints, and the deliberate ceasing of work to the glory of God will set apart the Christians in a post-Christendom world. What a rebellious maneuver when everyone else is working themselves to the bone, when everyone else is disregarding this day and doing their own things, still working or pleasuring themselves or engaging in leisure that is ultimately not relaxing. How rebellious to deliberately set some time aside for the Lord, to gather with people and find rest in Him.

 As I read in the scriptures today in Mark, 'The Sabbath was created for man, not man for the Sabbath.' God gave us this gift. We were not created for this gift. The original intent was a reminder of where your strength comes from. Is that how you treat this command?

Work Hard, Play Hard, Seek the Lord

With the implications out of the way, let me quickly go over three ways Christians implement this command, this revelation, into their lives.

Number one is to  work hard. We have a two-day weekend in America, and this is a blessing. The whole concept of a weekend is a Western invention. This concept is certainly not universal in our world today and would have been a completely insane proposition to a pre-modern agrarian society.

As I look at how other people work throughout the scriptures and how much work is mentioned in the scriptures, are people too lazy when it comes to their weeks? I, for one, don't take a two-day weekend. I push myself for six days and then rest for one. I take one day off and am very protective of that day. It's Monday. I turn off my phone. The only person who can reach me is my wife, who will tell you sometimes it isn't easy to do so. I'm very protective of that day as the one day when I rest in the Lord.

Knowing that's my personal weekly rhythm, let me say flat out that rest is only rest when you have worked hard. We've gotten to a point as a society where we are so inadequate in stewarding our time that we practically need two days off. Now they're even talking about fighting for a three-day weekend, and I can guarantee it's not because we need a three-day weekend but because people have gotten so bad at relaxing and resting.

And I'll say this: it's not always because people are overworking themselves. Some people are, but most people are not. Most people are lazy. And ironically, laziness makes us restless. We've got endless ways to distract ourselves as we get home: immediately lounge on the couch and start scrolling through social media, flip on the TV and start binging another show, turn on the video game console, and start playing six hours of games.

We've gotten very good at leisurely activities, and we've gotten terrible at true restfulness. In a world fraught with distractions, a world filled with endless quibbling and clamoring devices desperate to wrench our attention away from the things God wants for our lives, we've gotten so good at distracting ourselves to make it feel like we're resting. We've done so well at taking lazy days or being lazy at certain key parts of our days, yet we completely miss out on what actually gives us rest and rejuvenates us.

Mainly, let me challenge people for whom this might be true. If you don't work your butt off for six days, the seventh day will only be filled with anxiety for what you've left unaccomplished.  When you value unearned release over merited respite, rest will never rejuvenate you. You will always be weary. You will always need stimulants to keep yourself going. To deliberately integrate the Sabbath into your life requires that you work hard first because if you haven't worked hard, then all a Sabbath will be is just another restless day.

To balance myself, I find it prudent to tack on something to the 1st implementation of this command in our lives (implementation 1.5, if you will): "Work hard  ...but not too hard." Work hard, but not too hard. Now, I need to redirect my attention to my fellow workaholics. Take a break, or break. Jesus regularly fasted and rested alone. This discipline afforded him the ability to perform signs and wonders that required fasting and praying because he was already prepared from his times of doing so beforehand. (You can see Matthew 17:21 for that.)

When I began, and this is only a recent development, so I confess I might not be the best at it, but here's what I've seen that works. When I began to deliberately refocus my efforts so that I had one day when I ceased labor, I realized I had to budget my time differently. I had to rearrange much of my schedule. Suddenly, I couldn't put off certain deadlines until the last minute; I had to get them done ASAP. Suddenly, certain obligations, household chores, and phone calls couldn't wait until whenever. I chose to get to them promptly, and they ended up getting taken care of quicker and more efficiently. I became ultimately more productive, and there's something a workaholic is going to love hearing - productivity. That's the keyword. By prioritizing that day when everything ceases, I've had to rethink my entire weekly schedule. And it's made me wildly productive.

Like any other resource, time is precious and must be budgeted and planned. When we have a budget and a plan for our finances, we're prepared and more liberated to spend freely. When we budget our time, we are more free to truly rest on a Sabbath because we have worked diligently the other days of the week.

To my fellow workaholics, just like the lazy, crazy folks are wrong with how they choose to go about budgeting their time, we too are deficient in budgeting it. We need to be more deliberate about not burning ourselves out. Ceasing a whole 24 hours of work seems like a lot until you rearrange your life accordingly.

Application number two:  play hard. I remember an interaction I had with a homeless man two weeks ago. I asked him what his plans were for the day, curious about what drove this young man. Without hesitation, he began to list off multiple activities, but you quickly noticed that none of the activities constituted anything remotely resembling a plan. He said, "Oh, I don't know, meet some people, wander the city a bit, experience life." That's a direct quote from that gentleman.

It got me thinking about the lack of a trajectory in this man's life and how his lack of a deliberate plan kept him in a place where his life would ultimately have no meaning. It got me thinking about our own lives and how often we don't plan our days. An unplanned day always goes nowhere and always reaps no benefits. As the famous aphorism goes, 'Failure to plan is planning for failure.' Work hard, yes, but now we have to figure out how to rest well because too many people are just taking their day off and doing nothing. That's not exactly what God had in mind for you.

Go outside, take a walk, read a book, spend time with your family, grow a garden, learn a skill. As long as it's not working (that is, draining you of physical, mental, or spiritual energy), then do it. But too many people take their days and do nothing and then wonder why doing nothing reaps them no benefits. Even when we're trying to rest, technology, social media, entertainment - all these things try to distract us from refocusing on God's activity in our lives. For the sake of resting, I ask you what might you need to put down on a Sabbath to enable yourself to enter into true rest? True rest doesn’t mean doing nothing. It actually requires a lot of planning and preparation to partake in rest.

Third and foremost implementation:  Seek the Lord. This has been a challenging sermon to preach because it has many branching issues. You could probably preach a whole series on Sabbath rest, and it doesn't help that I am not the best person at resting. That's me being 100% honest with you right now. In the interest of full transparency, I am not a good rester; I get fidgety quickly. I must do things; it's just my nature. It was instilled in me as a boy, yet the more I seek the Lord, the more I realize that one full day of deliberate cessation from work does more for my life than seven days of effort. As I said before, it reminds me of my lack of self-sufficiency. When I take control of all seven of my days and pretend that I'm the one in charge of them, that's when I start to break. That's when I start to burn out. But when I release control and give it all over to God, that's when I begin to flourish.

And too many of us are operating not on Sabbath strength but on stimulant strength. You know what I mean? You meet these people and see them, even on Sunday mornings, with grumpy, tired faces, saying, "Don't talk to me until I've had my coffee." To which I go, "My brother in Christ, are you telling me that you're literally a horrible person to be around unless you're under the effects of drugs?" We are a caffeinated, sometimes sedated, and over-medicated generation, and I'm getting tired of pretending it's a good thing.

By all means, I'm not saying that coffee is from the devil. Not in a million years; I love my happy bean juice. What I'm saying is, I wonder if we got too comfortable with attempting to do this life in our strength, and then we found it wasn't working, so we substituted what only God can do for what caffeine (or other products) can do. It's a small example, but it points to a bigger problem: where does your strength come from?

 Part of why we deliberately meet every Sunday is a reminder of where our strength comes from. That's why we preach the word while we worship, break bread together, and commune together - where our strength comes from is displayed in these moments. And it's nothing short of rebellious because people either don't work hard enough or work too hard. Christians will do both. We will work the hardest, and we will play the hardest because at the center point of all of our lives is Christ alone, our trustworthy source of strength. And that shows the whole world what truly rejuvenates.

I pray you will take these principles, these implications, these laws; I pray that you will seriously begin to evaluate how you glorify God with your time or how perhaps there have been moments in your life that you dishonor Him with your time. I pray this reflection process is fruitful for you and reminds you how much you need Jesus in your life.

Work hard, play hard, seek the Lord. 

Let us pray.