The Risk of Rest

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Don Filcek; Genesis 3:17-19 The Risk of Rest

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You are listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. I'm Don Felsick.
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I'm the lead pastor here, and I want to welcome you to Recast Church. Glad that you're here. I'm grateful for the way that God brings us together in community as a church family.
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He's designed us internally with a need for community, a need for togetherness, and I've been richly blessed by my connection with all of you over the years.
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Some of you, I recognize, have been around here for a long time, and then some of you are newer here, and I'm just getting to know you, but I just love the richness of the way that God brings us together.
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All of us are on a journey together towards God, right? That's part of the reason that we're here, and I take for granted that your very presence here is indicative of the fact that God is working on you in a way that is drawing you in and drawing you closer, and that you at least hunger for that, and you want that.
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We're in the middle of a three -part series on rest, and I'm just going to continue on. I think the great thing about God's Word is that it's good for all of us, not just a particular
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Mother's Day message, but moms need to hear this, and dads need to hear this, and grandparents need to hear this, and kids need to hear this, so we're just going to keep continuing on in God's Word here in this series on rest.
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In this series, I'm following the big picture of the story of all of history. Some of you might not be aware that the
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Bible has a plot. Did you guys know that? It has a plot from beginning to end, and despite the fact that we might not think of it that way, you think of New Testament letters and Old Testament history and the prophets and all of this stuff, it actually has a flow.
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It's really awesome that all of these various authors over centuries wrote these various books, and they come together in a way that tells a story, and it's a story of God's work in human history.
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It follows creation, and then fall, and then redemption, and so many of our movies follow that same story arc because it's the real story.
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It's the true story that God created it all good, and it begins in a good, idyllic setting, but we broke it all by rebelling against him.
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The enemy shows up in the middle, and you start to get this tension in the story, and yet there is
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God the hero sending forth his hero, Jesus Christ, to fix it and to remedy it and fix it, and so isn't that like our stories?
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Isn't that like our movies? Isn't that often the plot of our favorite novels? There's a good thing that is broken that needs to be fixed, and a hero comes and saves the day, and this morning we're considering the call to rest in the flow of that story.
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Last week, looking at the good creation that God had made, last week there was a call to rest, and we're going to look at it this week through the lens of the fall.
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The fact of the matter is when we consider rest, when we consider God's call to rest last week, hopefully you've wrestled with that a little bit this past week, but now we're going to carry forward the harder part of it.
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Work has become sweat and toil for us, and we know that. Scarcity has crept up on us.
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Our gardens fill with weeds. Our business ventures are risky. Our hearts are constantly being called even to the abuse of rest, and the work of our lives can often, if we're being honest, feel like futility.
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You finish one load of laundry, and there's another one, and then you finish a load of laundry, and then there's another one, and it just keeps going in cycles.
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How many of you just have, at least at some point, noticed the monotony of work? Have you noticed it?
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Okay, somebody says, come on, preach it. It's like, here we go. That's true. We know it.
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This is not a pick -me -up message, and you're going, Mother's Day, Don, really? But I think that you'll see by the end there's encouragement toward faith in it.
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It's a message that will remind us of what is real as we continue to consider His call to rest on our lives.
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And, man, maybe some of the moms in the room really need to take this on and just consider what it is to wrestle with and to be called to rest in a real world with diapers and loads of laundry and all kinds of difficulty and going back to work and just all of the things.
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My point today is simply this. God's call to us doesn't come to us in a vacuum.
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When God's call comes to us to rest, it doesn't come into a place of ease. It comes to us in a world full of risk through sin.
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Weeds, thieves, temptations, the promise of a quick buck, blisters, and futility all haunt our work even as God tells us to chill out one day out of every seven.
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While He calls us to do that, is He crazy? How can we rest in a fallen world like the one in which we live, this very world where there's all of this risk involved?
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And I hope this message serves to remind us that obedience to God's will and to God's call, particularly to rest, will require faith.
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To respond to the call to rest will require of you that you trust
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Him. It won't come naturally. There's not a single person in this room that this is going to come easy to.
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The work six days, labor hard for six days, some will be challenged on that front and then others on the side of resting for one day.
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And Scripture highlights for us the way that the fall has impacted our work. So let's open our
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Bibles or your devices to Genesis chapter three, verses 17 through 19, a shorter passage.
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I am going to reference a handful of the Proverbs throughout, but we're not going to read that here. I'll have those up on the screen for you later.
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But we're going to read Genesis three, starting in verse 17, together, recast
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God's holy word to us, what He desires to communicate to us in our gathering. Genesis 3, 17 says,
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And to Adam, he said, because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which
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I commanded you, you shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground because of you.
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In pain, you shall eat of it all the days of your life, thorns and thistles that shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the plants of the field.
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By the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread till you return to the ground. For out of it you were taken, for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
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Let's pray as the band comes to lead us in worship. Father, we thank you for the truth of your word that identifies where we live.
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It doesn't paint some kind of a fanciful fantasy world of mythology where everything is just running smooth and clicking great for your people, and for those who honor you, everything is just going to be easy and light.
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But it paints for us a fallen world, the world in which we now live, the place that we have been brought to.
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Father, I pray that you would help us to make sense of the call to rest in a world like this and to trust you by faith that the things that you call us to are good.
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They are right. They are healthy. They are helpful. That you love us.
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I pray that you would help us all to identify your goodness as revealed in the cross of Christ, as revealed in the sacrifice that's been made on our behalf.
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Father, let that be the thing that informs us most that you sent forth your son to die on the cross, to redeem us, to rescue us from our broken fallenness.
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That leads us to believe that you are good, so when you issue a command like rest one day out of every seven, we say you're good.
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So what you ask of us is not a burden, but is meant for our delight and meant for our joy and meant for goodness.
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Father, I pray that you would help us right now to shed the worries and the concerns and the stresses and the toil and the monotony of this past week, and now step before your throne in worship.
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Let those things fall away and let your glory and your goodness shine in our minds and in our hearts as we sing these songs to you.
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You are worthy. You are good. You are kind. You are awesome. And you are redeemer.
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We thank you for all of these things in Jesus' name. I encourage you to get comfortable and keep your
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Bibles open to Genesis 3, starting in verse 17, 17 through 19, and we'll jump right in.
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We need a little context, and if you missed last week's message, I would encourage you to go back and listen to that maybe sometime this week to get to that call to rest that God gave us.
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But remember that God created the world good. It's really important for us to remember that when we're encountering, well, really life, but especially the words of God through the
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Bible. He placed the first man and woman into the garden and gave them a responsibility to cultivate, subdue, multiply, and increase in dominion over all of His world.
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Now all of that comes before the fall, and many of us in our attitudes might think of work as a result of the fall, like, oh, we got to work hard because the world is broken.
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But that's not the case. The cadence of one day of rest and six days of work predates the fall.
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We are made as productive, advancing creatures. Even as fallen people, we've advanced.
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I mean, think about with sin on our shoulders, we have still, by the image of God, advanced from the wheel to the smartphone.
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How many of you know there's a lot of steps in between those two? There's a lot of things that have happened between there. Have you ever considered that everything that was needed in order to make an iPhone existed within the earth at the time of Adam and Eve?
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It was all in there. It was all in there. At the time of Moses, it was all in there. The laws of physics, the raw materials.
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All we needed was to pool and deepen our understanding and knowledge to eventually make an iPhone, and now we mass produce them, and they're in our pockets.
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I point this out to somebody, say that God delighted to plant within this world the potential for advancement.
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He didn't issue Adam and Eve their own iPhones at the start. He gave them some trees, a garden, and some food, and we've made cruise liners, jumbo jets, and Go -Gurt, and even the
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Mariah Carey Christmas album. I guess we win some and lose some, right?
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Some are called advances, some are not. We are made to work, are we not?
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We're made to work. I offended some of you with that. I saw it on your faces. You're like, I love Mariah Carey. I love me some
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Christmas album. Not me so much. But we're made to work, and that work is before the fall.
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It predates the fall, and so does the call to a cadence of rest.
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Before anyone had sinned, before the curse of sin and death took hold, there was work and rest.
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And God Himself was our model for all of that in the way that He created in six days and rested on the seventh.
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We saw that last week, and so now we come to the fall. And our relationship towards work and rest has never been the same since.
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Adam and Eve took from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the fruit that God forbade them to eat in no uncertain terms.
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They are immediately made aware of a new sensation. They have a new experience, something they've never experienced before, guilt and shame.
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They've never experienced that before. A new feeling. What is this? I feel gross inside. I feel dirty.
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I feel filthy. I feel stained. I feel broken. Guilt and shame. And they hide themselves from God, but He's the best of finders, and they don't hide very well to begin with.
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And when He catches them, He declares to them the consequences of their rebellion against Him in curses to the serpent, curses to the woman, curses to the man.
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And for our purpose this morning, we're zeroing in on the word of God of curse to the man. He has already cursed the serpent.
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He has already cursed the woman earlier in chapter 3. But we begin in verse 17 of Genesis 3.
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God speaking to Adam, the longest of the three curses. Adam listened to the voice.
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It says here in verse 17, he listened to the voice of his wife and ate from the forbidden tree. And God reminds
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Adam halfway through verse 17 that He had given them an explicit command. You shall not eat of it.
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God, the creator, saying to His creation, don't eat this. Don't eat the fruit of this tree.
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And many times we miss the rest of the garden, right? Like how dare He prohibit something when He had given everything else?
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He had given over abundance. But just don't do this one thing. And we know they did it.
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They ate it. And now the ground is cursed because of Adam's sin of rebellion against the law of God.
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The curse is explained by a brief description of what has changed for us now. It will take pain and effort to obtain food from the ground.
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Futility and pain and toil and scarcity. Those are all implicitly introduced in verses 17 and 18.
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All the days of our life, all the days of our lives will be defined by pain as we wander this world.
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And this is not at all to say that we won't have good days. How many of you would raise your hand and testify that you've had some good days on this planet?
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There have been some good days, so praise God for that. And further, many of us, if we're honest with ourselves, we don't have significant dangers in our line of work anymore.
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I'm reminded of the office episode where Michael Scott makes it a competition between the office and the warehouse as to which is more dangerous.
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Some of you will get that and some of you won't, but it's humorous because the truth is that most of our jobs are not filled with the pain of sweat and toil.
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And most of us don't have the risk of getting our arm caught in a baler, right? But they're filled with obstacles, right?
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They're filled with futility. Our lives, in all honesty, regardless of the nature of our work, be it an office job or delivering packages or teaching little kids, our lives are and our work is filled with obstacles, with futility.
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And often, if we're quite honest, it's waking up to that alarm every morning and it's monotony. It's the same thing over and over again.
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It's just the same types of things. And some of you even have a great variety in your work and there's still a futility that settles on us.
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When God introduces thorns and thistles in verse 18 and introduces a ground that is now an agent working against humanity, the created order now against humanity.
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The ground will not be a neutral place of our work. Earth is not a neutral place.
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Did you notice that? Probably noticed that significantly this past week. The earth is not a safe place.
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And here's the thing. You go, well, at least I'm safe on my couch. You sit there and you don't get up, you die.
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Did you know that? It's entropy. Entropy, a big fancy word that means that things move towards a lesser state of energy.
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You won't survive if you sit still long enough. Our work in this incursed place will often be a fight against the world around us to get ahead.
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I believe that thorns and thistles are exemplary of the many ways our work has been cursed by the fall.
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Although they're real, there's real thorns and thistles. What he's pointing out is that the earth is not for us any longer.
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It isn't just weeds, but it's a constant sense of scarcity, a constant sense of need, a constant sense that we are set and that our feet are set on a slope of life that is greased and it slopes towards poverty, death, and destruction.
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How's that for a pick -me -up message? But you know what I mean. You know what happened in the fall.
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As a matter of fact, I would suggest to you that everybody in this room that's old enough to have to provide for yourself, you feel what
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I mean. You're feeling this text. Every single one of us has an impending sense that we're just a few wrong decisions away from calamity.
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Do you feel it? We have this sense in our minds that most of us feel like we're just barely hanging on, even if that's a factually silly feeling.
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Even if your bank account says something different than that, you still feel it, and you just need a little more, just a little more to cushion against poverty and problem, right?
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Many of us feel that way. This is where I want to insert the main premise of the sermon this morning.
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Rest in this context seems silly. Rest in this context is risky.
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There it is. Rest in this context is risky. Rest in a world set against us where the ground produces thorns and thistles while we sleep.
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What kind of a world do we live in, church? The book of Proverbs tells us a little short story to remind us what kind of world we live in.
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Here's a little short story, says Solomon, Proverbs 24, 30 through 34. You can jot that down, and I would really commend it to you.
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Maybe study it this week or look into it, but it's up on the screen for you. You don't have to go over there, but Proverbs 24, 30 through 34 says this,
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I, this is Solomon the writer, I passed by the field of a sluggard, by the vineyard of a man lacking sense, and behold, and behold, check this out, behold, it was all overgrown with thorns.
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The ground was covered with nettles, and its stone wall was broken down. Then I saw and considered it, and I looked and received instruction.
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A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man.
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A little bit of rest. We live in a world, says the wisest man to live, he says, we live in a world where we're told that a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and ah -ha, poverty is on you like a robber, and want is mugging you like an armed man.
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I think we all feel that way. We all feel like, man, if I were to take one day and seven to rest, where's that going to go?
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What did the slugger do to make his vineyard go bad? What did he do? Why would he be out there sowing weeds among his vines like that?
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Why would he break down his own walls that surrounded his vineyard? He didn't.
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He just ceased working. Ooh, who was that?
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He just stopped working. But wait a second, church.
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I thought God was calling us all to a little bit of time to cease working, right? Didn't you hear that call last week? We talked about that call last week.
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Go back and listen to that message to hear the very clear, clear call of God to a little bit of rest.
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He is indeed in His Word calling us all to faith, to trust
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Him, trust Him in this risky world with one day and seven of rest.
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God is not ignorant of the risks of rest in this cursed world, and yet the call still remains to us.
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Can you hear that call, church? Six days you have to do your labor, but remember the
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Sabbath day and keep it holy. Back to Genesis 3 .19
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here as we've had an opportunity to kind of see a vision of what kind of world we live in. We go back to 3 .19, there will be labor and there will be death, the curse to Adam.
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What I can only assume was joyful work for the man and woman in the garden becomes toil and labor and sweat of the brow kind of work.
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It becomes hard. It becomes difficult. It becomes taxing. While they were maintaining a garden before the fall, there's a foreshadowing to them about them getting kicked out of the garden.
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With a new place, they are told that they will get their food. Where did they get their food prior to this?
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In a garden. How many of you know that it's a little less work to pick a fruit off of a tree, but it says they're going to start getting their food from the plants of the field.
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I wonder if Adam and Eve knew what that word meant yet. What's a field? What's a field?
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They've only lived in a garden. What's a field? They're going to find out soon enough. The field is going to be the very place that they're going to have to, with their own hands and tools, break up the ground to produce their sustenance.
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That kind of field. Where prior to this, they got their food out of a garden, an orchard.
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Now, hands and tools, stony ground, thorns, thistles.
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It's going to be work to get the world to do what you want it to do. And then you die.
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I believe that verse 19 is saying that work will be increasingly futile. So when
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I hear the younger generation around me, when I hear this younger generation asking the question, why do we have to work so hard for so little?
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I'm not crazy critical of them. I'm not that worried. I'm not that bent out of shape about their cries.
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Why do we have to work so hard for so little? What it reminds me of is the reality of the world into which we've been born.
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This is the world we get, not the world we want. It's how you deal with it, right? You got to deal with it.
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You got to face it head on, but it's true. It's the world. For our entire history since the fall, it's been a case of you either work or you die.
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And I would just suggest to you, I'm not going to get far down this road, but it's been only a recent phenomenon with the super abundance of capitalism that we've developed a new class of people who can live and not work.
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But yeah, I would say both the sentiment of the, why do we have to work so hard for so little? And the, if you don't work, you shouldn't be able to eat.
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Somewhere along that whole spectrum, both are explained here in this text in clarity.
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A rebellion against our God brought scarcity, toil, hard labor for minimal returns and futility to all because the end of nearly every economic adage is, and then you die.
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That's the way economic memes end. And then you die. You work your fingers through the bone and then you die.
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You ruin your back and then you die. You save for a nest egg and then you die. You plan for retirement and then you die.
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Over all of this discussion about work, rest, risk, and futility stands the book of Ecclesiastes.
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In that book, Solomon smacks us with wave after wave of the futility of work under the sun.
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We work only to give it to the next generation that has no respect for how much work and toil it took to get it.
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And I bring up Ecclesiastes to grant us some perspective. Work and labor is futile in a world without God, but there's the catch.
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Without God. Our culture is taking work less seriously and leaning more into another argument of Ecclesiastes where we're trying another experiment because work hasn't quite satisfied us.
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So now let's go over to entertainment and pleasure and try that. And do you see our culture shifting from Solomon's attempt in Ecclesiastes to find his meaning in his work?
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Now our very culture is saying, let's find our meaning in our entertainment and see how that works. You see, we all try the same things that Solomon tried to make sense of the futility of life in a fallen world.
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Our culture tried hard work with God and we produce an amazing era of advancement. No doubt.
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Now our culture has tried a generation of hard work without God and we've hit up against the issue of futility.
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And now I fear we're going to try a generation of less work and more entertainment without God. And Solomon has already tried it and he's told us how it works.
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And he reports back that it's all futility without God. But here's why
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I'm talking about futility in regard to rest. The pathway to breaking away from futility, church, is service to your maker.
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It is service to God. How can we do the same thing day in and day out? Just as one load of laundry is folded, the next one needs to be started.
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Just as one diaper is changed, you've got to change another one. Just as you file that report, another one is due.
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Just as you launch that product, they are on you about the next one.
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I start writing my next sermon hours after I deliver this one. Tomorrow morning I'll wake up and I'll start over again.
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But if we see these cycles of work as God's, then we also ought to be able to add into the cycle he has given us, into that cycle, a day of rest.
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His cycle, his idea, his purpose for our lives.
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It's not that God makes sense of our lives just merely in that one day of rest. He is equally giving us meaning and significance in the routines of the other six days of work.
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Not merely living for the weekend, but rather all of our time lived for God.
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Our work for him in his world's six days, our rest in him one day. Our work for him in his world's six days, our rest in him one day.
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Our work for him in his world's six days, our rest in him one day. Do you see the cadence? For him, for him, for him.
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Please don't hear me insinuating that there I solved it, there I fixed it. Pressure is still on us due to the curse.
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So simply stating that we do what we do for God and we rest for God, it doesn't always solve the problem. There are real weeds, there are real obstacles to our productivity.
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We must face this boldly, head on. There are real temptations to lethargy. Our hearts will be drawn into hedonism, to workaholism, or even despair within the monotonous routines of our lives.
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But I am suggesting that faith and trust in God is the only hope for us as we toil in a sin -cursed world.
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The ground is not our friend. The animals don't do my chores like Cinderella. Tornadoes tear through communities, earthquakes devastate, famines decimate crops in already impoverished nations.
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And so let me land our first risk of rest with one technical word. The risk of rest in this world is entropy.
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Things break down to increase states of uselessness. They move towards states of less energy and less power.
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Over the years, I've watched a literal vineyard be taken over by nature right here in Matawan behind Rob and Kerry Knold's home.
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Nobody planted weeds and trees and shrubs in there. Entropy is just doing what it does.
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And when they have us over and we look out, we increasingly see that place no longer looking like a vineyard, but looking more like just a mess.
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Nobody's maintaining it. Nobody's taking care of it. What happens? What would happen to your yard if you didn't do anything?
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End up with all kinds of critters living in there and who knows what. And then the neighbors are calling on you and then they're going to come and mow it for you and charge you for it or something.
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I don't know. So, so listen, Recast, because here is the one big idea coming at you. You must arrest your common sense in order to rest one day in seven.
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You must arrest your common sense in order to rest one day in seven. You will not arrive at Sabbath resting by observing nature.
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Nature isn't going to lead you there. It's the revelation of God. It's his call and heeding his call that's going to lead you there.
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You won't stumble on Sabbath rest by any natural pull. Entropy is real and it makes rest truly risky in this world.
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And further, you will be tempted to take Sabbath rest too far. That's the second temptation.
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The second risk of rest is laziness or lethargy or sloth or whatever word you like to use for that.
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So many of the Proverbs warn against a further risk. The second one is over -applied rest.
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So not only does entropy make resting risky in a world where things must fall apart and weeds grow up and all of that, but many of our hearts will be drawn into the sins of laziness and sloth.
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Proverbs 20, 13 highlights this for us. Should be up on the screen here in a second. But love not sleep, love not sleep, lest you come to poverty.
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Open your eyes and you will have plenty of bread. One of the risks of rest is that we'll fall in love with it.
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Beyond the bounds that God gives to us, we will fall in love with rest. Loving sleep is a recipe for poverty and I think we all know that one day in seven is a good cadence.
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We hear talk and some of you maybe have heard rumors, maybe some of you have delighted your hearts in the rumors of the new four -day workweek.
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Maybe even, I don't even know, maybe some of your employers are toying with that. The new four -day workweek is likely not as healthy as we might think for those given to sloth or laziness, but I want to be sure you hear me that I'm not against that.
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I think many of us in this room would handle a four -day workweek just fine because the other couple of days you would fill with volunteer work or a side hustle or something.
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Many of us would stay busy. We'd find things to do and maybe even more to the point, things that would be honoring to God, but for many, we need the structure to keep diligently serving
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God in our labors because we would use those two days for a whole lot more Netflix or a whole lot more video games or a whole lot more just me.
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So beware of loving rest too much, church, and I think that rest extends to many forms of entertainment.
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I just mentioned Netflix, video games, movies, doom scrolling. We know the gravitational pull of screens on our lives right now, and I think there's a love of leisure that is increasingly out of whack in our culture.
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Do you guys feel it? Do you see it? Yep, it's there. This fallen world is not a friend of anyone seeking to live
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God's way. The moment you and your family sit down to seriously try to apply a day of rest, something's going to break.
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Something is going to come up at work that needs your attention immediately. Common sense will pull at your heart and your mind, warring against God's way of Sabbath resting.
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So the world isn't your friend in this endeavor, but neither is your heart. Your heart is not your friend when it comes to Sabbath resting because every single one of us in this room is either pulled to one extreme of never resting or the opposite temptation to sloth.
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Our hearts are not balanced without the truth of God telling us what balance looks like. I know it's funny to say one of the risks of rest is loving it too much, to falling in love with it too much.
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So how are we to respond to God's call to rest in this fallen and busted world?
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The first thing that I want to commend to you as encouragement is trust Him by faith.
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God has called us all to this cadence of dependent trust in Him. Six days of work, one day of rest.
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Six days of work, one day of rest. Come up with a plan to practice a day of rest for yourself or for your family.
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Let others work this out between themselves and God. You're not here making a rule for the church, but make a plan and trust
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Him with your rest. Believe that God has your best interest in mind in this.
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The second, although it might be a stretch, I say this as a gentle suggestion to us all. Since entropy is a reality, since things break down, since things fall apart, and they will just by sitting in your garage, as you know that, something sitting in your garage just falls apart.
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It will rust. And entropy is a reality that will often pull us into work.
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It would be wise to consider our relationship, church, ooh, this is a sacred cow in our culture, our relationship with stuff.
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What is your relationship with stuff? Every boat owned is a boat that must be maintained.
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I'm not saying don't own a boat, but I'm saying you know the work. You know what it takes. Every boat owned is a boat that must be maintained.
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But also so is every weed whip, every leaf blower, every car, every acre, every room in my house, every
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TV, every grill. I think you're getting the picture. Everything that we own is on a state of falling apart.
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It needs to be maintained. And we are a culture of affluence. Affluence. And we, man, of all people know how to accumulate stuff.
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They bring it right to my door. I just get home from work and there's stuff there. How did that get there?
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Right? Boxes and stuff show up and it's like, wow, sometimes I don't even know what I'm opening. You know what
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I mean? It's like, oh, the kids ordered that. A quiet and simple life, a quiet and simple life is the opposite of a cluttered and extravagant life.
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You feel it? And some of us, if we're just honest, are leading a fairly cluttered and extravagant life.
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And I would say, man, I think this one in seven rest is enhanced by leading a quiet and simple life.
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I don't know who this is speaking to, but maybe some of us need to clean house. Maybe we need to pause and consider in the busyness of our lives and that that busyness is brought on ourselves by our own purchasing.
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Maybe there's some of us that that's what God wants to hit you with today. I don't know. Maybe we're all nailing this.
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Maybe everybody in the room and I'm just speaking to the air, but maybe there's some of us that need to grasp this and consider and think about the way that our stuff is driving our time, the way our stuff is leading us.
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And it has us. We don't have it. The third thing is do what you do for God.
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Do what you do for God. And speaking for the relationship of rest, work, and the fall, we come up against futility, scarcity, and monotony in your work and in your rest.
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Look up to the God who has employed you in His world for His purposes. I want to just remind you of something, and I find deep encouragement in this this week.
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I didn't sign up to be here. Neither did you. I don't mean here in church. I mean on this planet.
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You didn't like say, yeah, I'd like to go on my birth date and go to earth. Do you guys get what
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I'm saying in that? You didn't ask to be here, but you are. And you are here for simply one astonishing fact.
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God wanted you here. I find encouragement in that because as I get to know
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God in the pages of Scripture and it's for His grace and for His glory and for His honor that He's placed me here.
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He's placed you here for His purposes, for His glory, for His honor.
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And He's got a role for you. He's got work for you. Delight in Him. Worship Him.
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Live for Him. Six days of work doing your labor for Him. And one day resting and praying and playing with Him.
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God is gracious. He is kind. He is good. And He is working out His mercy in the world through His people.
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We know His love for us not ultimately through His call to rest, although that is kind of Him to call us to a day of rest.
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But we really know it through His call to ultimate rest found in His Son. That's where we see the greatest kindness of God.
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We will land this series next week on a sermon about that ultimate rest. But for now, we land this message considering the work
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He has done for us by sacrificing Himself on the cross for our sins. And that's where we must land this morning.
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He is the one we live for. He is the one we work for. And He is the one we are called to rest for.
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So if you've asked Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior and you're at peace with your brothers and sisters here, I encourage you to come to the tables to remember the body of Christ broken for us.
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And remember the blood of Christ bled out on the cross for us. He bought us there by His precious blood.
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He showed us love there by the work He did for us. No Sabbath rest here in this world is going to satisfy the longing of our souls for rest.
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We live as broken people in a broken place, and I think we all know in our own hearts even our broken motives.
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But as we come to communion together, we remember the hope of a rest to come. Jesus has been sent to reverse the effects of the fall over us.
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Entropy, futility, despair, sloth, scarcity, sin, and death will all be shown the door at the return of our
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Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And the end of the risk of rest will be the subject for next week's sermon.
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But for today and for this week, let's go, let's take on the call to rest with eyes wide open to a fallen world that is not our friend in this goal.
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The world's not going to help you do this, but God in His strength will. Let's pray. Father, I thank
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You so much for the reality that settles on us in a text like this where we see the brokenness and it echoes in our heart what we already know to be true, what we see in our own hearts and in the world around us, a world that is not friendly towards Your call, a world that is not friendly towards the things that You desire of us.
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In our own hearts, bristling at the thought of a day of rest or bristling at the thought of six days of hard work, whatever it is that we're put together, it just doesn't quite match up with the things that You desire of us.
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And so Father, I pray that You would bring all of us more and increasingly in line with all of that.
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And Father, I recognize that there's all different kinds of walks of life in this room, that there are mothers of young children here in this room, and that's a distinct and unique challenge, especially when it comes to a day of rest.
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There are people whose employers are not at all agreeable to them taking a day of rest.
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There are people who just a whole host of things, the business doesn't survive if they take a day of rest.
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There's just all kinds of thoughts that swirl in our mind. Father, I pray that You would lead us to a balanced understanding of the truth of this word, not legalistically leaning into this, not by law, but by Your kindness and Your goodness, by Your love poured out on us at the cross.
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And Father, I pray as we get in these lines and we have an opportunity to reflect on what You have done for us,
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I pray that this would be a unifying thing as we go to these tables, not just private, isolated little communion services for ourselves, but we would lift up our eyes and acknowledge that there are others in this room who love
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You and are desiring to honor You, who are equally called to this call to rest. And Father, that You would make us a people who love