Work in the Balance

Big Idea: This week we will be exploring how work must be perfectly balanced with God-honoring cycles of rest if it is going to flourish. We must Shabbat regularly to look backwards at what God has done and look forward to our moment of ultimate rest. Consider the cycles of work and rest God prescribed for Israel to remember who they were submitted to in upward righteousness.

Briefly recap last three weeks

First two weeks were the theological pillars of work

Last week we took those theological pillars and put them to work in a new vision for work. Hopefully you have been engaging in the Expedition Group curriculum to work out some of the practical details about work...

Can’t talk about work without talking about rest as well. As we are going to see:

Work without rest leads to slavery, idolatry, and the inevitable destruction of the very thing we are working for.

I am an abysmal failure at this bit…my authority comes from the Bible not some moral high ground…that’s always the truth its just perhaps more evident to me because of how poorly I get this subject.

So when I have an issue like this that I am studying for myself, here is how I do that. I want to go back to the very first instance that we see this thing and track its evolution over time, how it grows and develops, how different generations in the Bible deal with the subject, and only then can we really get an idea for what the Bible is trying to communicate to us about the subject....so…that’s what we are going to do with the idea of rest from our work. We are going to start at the beginning and track the evolution of this concept over the course of scripture and see what it teaches us.

Before do that, we have to talk about the number 7.

In the Bible, the number seven denotes completeness, fullness, and/or perfection.

If we are going to begin looking at rest we have to start at the very first occurrence in the Bible. So if you have your Bibles, open up to Genesis chapter 1.

Genesis 1:31 NASB95

31 God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

Explain the pattern that God uses for the first six days (do the over and over bit…)

God Creates - Evening & Morning - The X Day

But then, on day seven, something changes.

**As a side not, remember that our additions of chapters and verse numbers are a much later addition…this is all one stream of thought… ***

Genesis 2:1–4 NASB95

1 Thus the heavens and the earth were completed, and all their hosts. 2 By the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. 3 Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made. 4 This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven.

This is the seventh day and on this day, God’s work of creation is brought to its completion and fullness. It is perfect and as it should be. And did you notice what was missing? The pattern. There was no “evening and morning the seventh day” language here. This is like the day of no end.

For God there is perfect rest from his work for forever. This is called God’s rest.

Here is the deal…this verse has about a thousand different implications because it is the root of just about everything we know about rest. You are going to see this verse repeated multiple times just today as the Biblical authors reach back to this verse to support the reasoning for their instructions about rest.

But because we are looking an the evolution of rest over time in the Bible let’s just take what we have in this verse and the verses that precede it and make an observation.

Do the made in his image bit…

Just as we were created for work, we were created to balance our work with rest.

A note about that word rest we see in this verse.

The Hebrew word used here for rest is Shabbat which literally means to stop.

That is namely to cease activity. God did not rest because He was tired and he did not rest by popping up the feet of his recliner. God rested by stopping because his work was completed and perfect. God entered into that seventh day unending rest.

Here is the problem though for us…there is evening and there is morning…BOOM…it’s Monday morning again and time to go clock back in to work. And yet, we were created to balance our work with rest. Now, I know that’s a statement you were probably prepared to hear coming into church but can we just stop and consider how radically profound it is…I didn’t say complicated…I said profound.

Do stay at home mom/dad time off bit…

Do more rank = less pay in the military bit…

Let me just tell you my own failings on this…Danielle literally has to book us time away from Yelm in order for me to not work. I will work myself into the ground. And what is really crazy is that the longer I go without rest, the worse my quality of work gets and the harder I have to work just to maintain the same quality of work that I have had in the past. And the cycle just gets worse and worse and worse. If you go long enough, pretty soon, the mind and the body begin to suffer and we just begin to unravel in every facet of our lives without proper rest.

Don’t think just because you and I aren’t clocked in at work that we are resting. How many of you can take a vacation and come home more tired and stressed out than when they left?

Here is the idea really simply put. Do you know what margins are? Margins are the places out of bounds on a piece of paper. God has given us this life with six beautiful glorious days that he has intended to fill with work, and family, and sporting events…stuff…and all that stuff is actually really good. God looked at us and how he had created us as workers and the he looked at the work he created for us to do and God called it all very good in fact. But, God also created our lives to have margins where work and striving cease.

We will talk about the purpose and what it should look like here in a moment but some of us just need to bask in that truth for a few moments… there is a time where we are to shabbat… stop. You have to reckon with that. You say yeah but I’ve already said I would do _____blank______. Or we’ve already committed to ___blank____. And to that I say I realize that and still yet, you have to reckon with the fact that you are created for balanced work and rest.

Just because everything in our culture is pushing us towards and normalizing the evaporation of our margins doesn’t mean that we as Jesus’ followers are going to be normal. Just because the pace of our lives seem to speed up every year. More is expected of you, and your kids with every passing year. Do more with less. Learn more earlier. Make bigger career choices and life impacting decisions earlier in life (head start and brain grey matter bit…)

Everybody wants to fight now days. Well you wanna fight for something that matters, how about we fight this. How about we refuse to buy the lie that if we just evaporate our margins for the sake of progress that we will get ahead. How about we stop buying the lie that if we don’t forsake rest we and our kids are going to somehow miss out. If we don’t attend fifteen million different sports, work 65 hours a week, and hoard our vacation days like its the last vacation we are ever going to take, then we are going to get left behind.

The reality is that God has an incredible purpose in rest. That is actually the next step in the evolution of rest in the Bible. For the rest of the book of Genesis we hear nothing about this shabbat or rest from work. We get a worldwide flood, the tower of Babel, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, 400 years enslaved in Egypt, and the ten plagues and a Red Sea crossing before we get our next evolution in work.

Here is the story:

Exodus 16:4–5 NASB95

4 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a day’s portion every day, that I may test them, whether or not they will walk in My instruction. 5 “On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather daily.”

God is about to test the Israelites every single day with a 40 year object lesson using the most fundamental thing of food to show them the importance of rest and why it is so important that we rest. Did you notice in verse four that the manna is a test that they get a chance to fail or pass every single day?

Here is the basis of the test…we have to look a little further down to see where the whole rest and work thing comes into play. Picking up in verse 16:

EXPLAIN AS YOU GO ALONG

Exodus 16:16–30 NASB95

16 “This is what the Lord has commanded, ‘Gather of it every man as much as he should eat; you shall take an omer apiece according to the number of persons each of you has in his tent.’ ” 17 The sons of Israel did so, and some gathered much and some little. 18 When they measured it with an omer, he who had gathered much had no excess, and he who had gathered little had no lack; every man gathered as much as he should eat. 19 Moses said to them, “Let no man leave any of it until morning.” 20 But they did not listen to Moses, and some left part of it until morning, and it bred worms and became foul; and Moses was angry with them. 21 They gathered it morning by morning, every man as much as he should eat; but when the sun grew hot, it would melt. 22 Now on the sixth day they gathered twice as much bread, two omers for each one. When all the leaders of the congregation came and told Moses, 23 then he said to them, “This is what the Lord meant: Tomorrow is a sabbath observance, a holy sabbath to the Lord. Bake what you will bake and boil what you will boil, and all that is left over put aside to be kept until morning.” 24 So they put it aside until morning, as Moses had ordered, and it did not become foul nor was there any worm in it. 25 Moses said, “Eat it today, for today is a sabbath to the Lord; today you will not find it in the field. 26 “Six days you shall gather it, but on the seventh day, the sabbath, there will be none.” 27 It came about on the seventh day that some of the people went out to gather, but they found none. 28 Then the Lord said to Moses, “How long do you refuse to keep My commandments and My instructions? 29 “See, the Lord has given you the sabbath; therefore He gives you bread for two days on the sixth day. Remain every man in his place; let no man go out of his place on the seventh day.” 30 So the people rested on the seventh day.

God is giving the Israelites a 40 year object lesson so that they can answer two questions:

Do you trust me? & Who provides for you?

Do the funny bit along with this…pretend to be the Israelites picking up manna as God asks these questions...

The sabbath rest becomes a moment where we stop and realign our heart to understand who we trust and who ultimately provides for us.

This is God’s purpose for our rest.

What’s wild is that the object lesson ended the moment the Israelites walked into the promised land. They had to then trust that God was going to provide the promised land by winning the battles for them. But God didn’t want them to forget the purpose of the Sabbath rest so what’s awesome is He extends its:

Every seventh year was supposed to be a Sabbath year. A year where they did not work the land but just ate off of what naturally grew there. It was an opportunity for everyone to be fed equally by allowing God to provide for them.

Leviticus 25:2–6 NASB95

2 “Speak to the sons of Israel and say to them, ‘When you come into the land which I shall give you, then the land shall have a sabbath to the Lord. 3 ‘Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyard and gather in its crop, 4 but during the seventh year the land shall have a sabbath rest, a sabbath to the Lord; you shall not sow your field nor prune your vineyard. 5 ‘Your harvest’s aftergrowth you shall not reap, and your grapes of untrimmed vines you shall not gather; the land shall have a sabbatical year. 6 ‘All of you shall have the sabbath products of the land for food; yourself, and your male and female slaves, and your hired man and your foreign resident, those who live as aliens with you.

And check this out, every seventh set of seven or the end of the 49th year was to be what is known as the year of Jubilee. It is just a little further down in that same chapter but is a little more than we have time to read today. Everything from the seventh year applies, so no sowing or reaping, but along with this, you also have to cancel all debts, free all slaves, and return any of the land back to its previous owners.

And if you think about it for very long, you realize that it isn’t going to work out well for any economy that operates this way. If we all just stop providing for ourselves by not sowing crops and not collecting on the debts owed to us, we are going to be ruined. And God says only if it was up to you to support yourself in the first place. Do you trust me God says? Who provides for you God says?

Listen to how that chapter ends:

Leviticus 25:20–22 NASB95

20 ‘But if you say, “What are we going to eat on the seventh year if we do not sow or gather in our crops?” 21 then I will so order My blessing for you in the sixth year that it will bring forth the crop for three years. 22 ‘When you are sowing the eighth year, you can still eat old things from the crop, eating the old until the ninth year when its crop comes in.

God says, do you trust me? Who provides for you? And you reply yeah but God you aren’t here working this job, you aren’t here clocking in every morning, you aren’t the one sweating it out for every dollar.

Listen to me really closely...To which God replies even the breath in your lungs needed to cast that insult (which is exactly what we do every time we evaporate the margin in our lives to work instead of rest) even the breath in our lungs needed to cast that insults is constantly being put there and sustained by God. Explain...

Now, we are going to move through these next few rather quickly.

The next evolution in the idea of the Sabbath rest comes in the big Ten:

Exodus 20:8–11 NASB95

8 “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9 “Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. 11 “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the 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.

…only things we have a really hard time with make it onto the big 10 list…explain...

And so we see that the Sabbath day is meant to be kept holy. Holiness isn’t about morality. Holiness is about being separate. Set apart. Holiness can be about morality in that someones morality can be set apart from other’s morality. At it’s roots though, holiness is about otherness. The idea is that this day set apart and special from the other days. There are margins that keep this day of rest separate from the working days that we don’t allow to be contaminated with work in any way.

The idea is that we must approach rest with regularity and intentionality if we are going to do it well.

What are the rhythms your family engages in that you can adapt to rest and remembrance? In Israel even today Shabbat begins at sundown on Friday and lasts until Sundown on Saturday. Every single Shabbat begins with a Shabbat dinner where families and friends get together to kick off their day of rest with a moment of intentional celebration and remembrance of who God is and how He has provided for yet another week.

I am not going to go much further on that point though because you are going to explore it with your expedition group this week.

The next evolution of work comes in the book of Leviticus where God prescribes seven different moments of stopping during the year. God institutes the passover, the feast of unleavened bread, the feast of weeks, the feast of trumpets, the day of atonement, and the feast of booths.

While the purpose of all of these were significant and different in their own right the idea for all of them was the same:

To look backwards and draw strength as we trust God for what He has done and to draw strength as we look forward in hope to what God will do.

The feasts and festivals are broken down into three spring feasts and four fall feasts. The three spring feasts were completely fulfilled in Jesus’ first coming and yet the fall feasts were only partially fulfilled which means that we still have something to look forward to.

Let me give you an example:

Explain backwards and forwards of Passover fulfilled in Jesus...

Explain backwards and forwards of Feast of Booths that will one day be fulfilled in God’s coming kingdom…explain the looking forward.

We should regularly and intentionally look backwards at all the places God has showed up and sustained us in the wilderness as we look forward in the hope of His coming Kingdom. That should sustain us and our faithfulness now as we realign our hearts away from the idolatry of work and towards the truth that God is our trustworthy provider and sustainer.

Next, we see that:

Rest isn’t an option.

Leviticus 26 tells about what will happen if we don’t rest.

Here is a little sampling:

Leviticus 26:16 NASB95

16 I, in turn, will do this to you: I will appoint over you a sudden terror, consumption and fever that will waste away the eyes and cause the soul to pine away; also, you will sow your seed uselessly, for your enemies will eat it up.

And

Leviticus 26:20 NASB95

20 ‘Your strength will be spent uselessly, for your land will not yield its produce and the trees of the land will not yield their fruit.

And look at how he concludes this warning:

Leviticus 26:32–35 NASB95

32 ‘I will make the land desolate so that your enemies who settle in it will be appalled over it. 33 ‘You, however, I will scatter among the nations and will draw out a sword after you, as your land becomes desolate and your cities become waste. 34 ‘Then the land will enjoy its sabbaths all the days of the desolation, while you are in your enemies’ land; then the land will rest and enjoy its sabbaths. 35 ‘All the days of its desolation it will observe the rest which it did not observe on your sabbaths, while you were living on it.

Listen to me really closely. God created you for rest. God also created the world around us to benefit from our rest.

Our work is most blessed when we rest appropriately.

If you fail to rest, God will exact it from you.

Explain that they never observed a jubilee or a sabbath year and that they never even observed a passover (according to the story of the young king). Explain with passion...

Because they failed to trust God for their provision. Their hearts were carried away in idolatry as they trusted in the work of their own hands. And so God carried them into exile to let the land rest and to teach them who they relied on and who actually sustains and provides for them.

Rest is not an option. In fact, the harder we work and try to provide and sustain ourselves. The more we become convinced that we are the one responsible for our prosperity the more our work shrivels and dies on the vine. And there comes a point in that process where if you are a child of God, He will realign your heart as he exacts rest from you if you won’t do it willingly.

Alright I could camp there for a long time but thankfully we have Expedition groups to begin working out the particulars of what that looks like practically.

Our final two evolution's of work:

I think it is fascinating how Jesus begins His public ministry. Basically all accounts say that Jesus was first baptized by John the baptist and then Jesus went almost immediately out to the wilderness to be tempted by Satan for 40 days. And after that, Jesus’ public ministry begins. Each of the Gospel accounts record something a little differently for how Jesus’ public ministry begins after his time in the wilderness but look at how Luke starts Jesus’ ministry:

EXPLAIN AS YOU GO ALONG:

Luke 4:15–21 NASB95

15 And He began teaching in their synagogues and was praised by all. 16 And He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up; and as was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath, and stood up to read. 17 And the book of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him. And He opened the book and found the place where it was written, 18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, Because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, And recovery of sight to the blind, To set free those who are oppressed, 19 To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.” 20 And He closed the book, gave it back to the attendant and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on Him. 21 And He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

That favorable year of the Lord is the jubilee year.

Do God’s rest is the seventh day rest without end. This is the rest that we were intended to enjoy from the beginning that we broke but that Jesus was now restoring through his life, ministry, death, and resurrection. Jesus is restoring the path to enter into God’s rest for all of us.

True REST is found in Jesus as we trust him to provide salvation from our broken sinfulness through his sacrificial WORK on our behalf.

And this leads us to the final evolution of rest:

Let me read the words of the author of Hebrews because they are mind blowing:

Hebrews 4:1–7 NASB95

1 Therefore, let us fear if, while a promise remains of entering His rest, any one of you may seem to have come short of it. 2 For indeed we have had good news preached to us, just as they also; but the word they heard did not profit them, because it was not united by faith in those who heard. 3 For we who have believed enter that rest, just as He has said, “As I swore in My wrath, They shall not enter My rest,” although His works were finished from the foundation of the world. 4 For He has said somewhere concerning the seventh day: “And God rested on the seventh day from all His works”; 5 and again in this passage, “They shall not enter My rest.” 6 Therefore, since it remains for some to enter it, and those who formerly had good news preached to them failed to enter because of disobedience, 7 He again fixes a certain day, “Today,” saying through David after so long a time just as has been said before, “Today if you hear His voice, Do not harden your hearts.”

Let me explain what is happening here:

Because we were created for work, God also created us to balance that work with rest.

Your work will never be what it is supposed to be apart from entering into God’s rest through the work of Jesus on your behalf.

You will never experience the purpose, the joy, and the beauty that God intended for your work so long as you fail to rest in God through a relationship with Jesus. In fact, the longer we strive to make something through our work apart from God, the more we end up destroying the very thing we are working towards.

I believe this leads us to end in a couple of places but either way, we have to answer this question:

Have you come to rest in Jesus regularly and intentionally?

Give invitation to enter God’s rest through the Gospel for the unsaved. TODAY IF YOU HEAR HIS VOICE, DO NOT HARDEN YOUR HEART…ENTER INTO GODS REST BY TRUSTING IN JESUS

Give an invitation for people to begin a rhythm of Sabbath with their family and tell them that we will be working that out in our groups.