Rest-You Need It

Opening

When I was in college, I was married, I had two daughters, I was working full time as a worship pastor and I was taking 18 credit hours in a worship arts and biblical counseling double major. On top of that, I auditioned for the elite worship team named SpiritWing at my school for scholarship money. I was a part of the team, but we traveled 23 our of the 32 weekends of the school year. So along with my church job, I also spent a few weekends waking up at 3am to be at school by 3:30 to loud our trailer of equipment and instruments to go sing at a Baptist church 50 minutes away and do two services. Then we’d come back to school, unload and then go home. That was my 12-15 hour Sunday on a day that was supposed to be my slow down day. There was not a time during this season that I wasn’t running on full tilt. Up at 6, down at midnight or 1. And did mention that I had tiny daughters? I was basically awake 24/7 for 3 years. During that time, I basically lived from break to break. Fall break. Thanksgiving break. Christmas break. Spring break. Summer. Repeat.

I had this pair of sweatpants that I considered my vacation pants. Whenever I limped into a break, I would come home, change into my vacation pants and proceed to not move until it was time for me to return to school. It was my chance to recharge. To get renewed for another run. Me and my PS2…honestly it was me and my daughters’ V-Tech V-Smile with those weird spelling games with the chickens. But that was my rest time. That was when I shut it all down and rested for just a while. I was 28 and I was running myself HARD. But you know, I was young and I just kept pushing because that’s what I was supposed to do.

I was fully bought into the hype that I needed to always be moving. Always be busy. Never stop. I’m young, I can fight through. I’ll sleep when I’m dead. Because sin nature tells us that we have to keep up. We have to make ourselves stand out so we can be seen and accepted and get the chances to advance. Let me remind you that it was my desire to be a worship pastor. The goal was to be able to show that I could run hard and compromise everything for the sake of being the best leader I could be for the church. The church needed to see that I cared more about being successful than taking care of myself and my family. Think about that for a second. My goal was to show the CHURCH that I cared more about the CHURCH than my FAMILY. It doesn’t make sense, yet that’s what a whole crop of students was pushing for. Be the best writer, planner, singer, musician, organizer, discipler, meeting attendee, face of the church, voice of the church, right hand man to the pastor, so on and so forth. Run myself into the ground for someone who led in example of how to rest and care for yourself...

Finding comfort and rest was so super important to me because I was running very hard all the time. Comfort is something that we crave, something that we search for. We look for comfortable clothes and shoes. We want a couch to be comfortable. We want our bed to be comfortable. When we buy cars we want a comfortable ride. Many times we equate Christianity with comfort. And we go to great lengths to make sure that our Christian lives are comfortable.

The thing is, God provides some comfort, but it doesn’t really look like what we are looking for most times. It is rarely instant comfort. As people who are always looking for instant gratification, it can be difficult to wait for what God has prepared for us. But the refreshment that he has for us is so much better than anything that this world can provide. Tonight and over the course of this weekend, we want to provide you with some thoughts and ideas about what it means to rest in God and his promises for us. While we do that, we will look at what He actually promises us and how to make the most of it.

Into the Text

Tonight we are going to be looking at Isaiah chapter 40.