Genesis 3:17-19 The Risk of Rest

You are listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan.

I'm Don Felsick, I'm the lead pastor here, and I wanna 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. 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.

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, and all of us are on a journey together towards God, right?

Like, 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.

The Story of Creation, Fall, and Redemption

We're in the middle of a three-part series on rest, and I'm just gonna continue on. I think the great thing about God's word is that it's good for all of us, not just a particular 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 gonna keep continuing on in God's word here in this series on rest, and in this series, I'm following the big picture of the story of all of history.

So some of you might not be aware that the 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, like, New Testament letters and Old Testament history, and the prophets, and all of this stuff, it actually has a flow, and 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.

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, 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, you know, the enemy shows up in the middle, and you start to get this tension in the story, and yet there is 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?

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.

Last week, looking at the good creation that God had made, last week, there was a call to rest, and we're gonna look at it this week through the lens of the fall. 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 gonna carry forward the harder part of it.

Work has become sweat and toil for us, and we know that. Scarcity has crept up on us. 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, right?

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, and how many of you just have, at least at some point, noticed the monotony of work?

Have you noticed it? Okay, somebody says, come on, preach it. Right, it's like, here we go. That's true, we know it. This is not a pick-me-up message. 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.

It's a message that will remind us of what is real as we continue to consider His call to rest on our lives, 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, and my point today is simply this.

God's call to us doesn't come to us in a vacuum. 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. 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.

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, 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.

To respond to the call to rest will require of you that you trust Him. It won't come naturally. There's not a single person in this room that this is gonna come easy to. 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.

And Scripture highlights for us the way that the fall has impacted our work. So let's open our Bibles or your devices to Genesis chapter three, verses 17 through 19, a shorter passage. I am gonna reference a handful of the Proverbs throughout, but we're not gonna read that here.

I'll have those up on the screen for you later. But we're gonna read Genesis three, starting in verse 17 together, recast God's holy word to us, what He desires to communicate to us in our gathering. Genesis 3, 17 says, and to Adam he said, because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it.

Cursed is the ground because of you. In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the plants of the field. 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. 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. 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 gonna be easy and light, but it paints for us a fallen world, the world in which we now live, the place that we have been brought to. 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.

They are right. They are healthy. They are helpful. That you love us. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

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. You are worthy. You are good. You are kind. You are awesome. And you are redeemer.

We thank you for all of these things in Jesus' name.

I'll encourage you to get comfortable.

And keep your Bibles open to Genesis three, starting in verse 17, 17 through 19.

And we'll jump right in.

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. 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 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.

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 gotta work hard because the world is broken. But that's not the case. The cadence of one day of rest and six days of work predates the fall.

We are made as productive, advancing creatures. Even as fallen people, we've advanced. I mean, think about with sin on our shoulders, we have still, by the image of God, advanced from the wheel to the smartphone.

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?

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. 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.

I point this out to simply say that God delighted to plant within this world the potential for advancement. 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 Mariah Carey Christmas album.

I guess we win some and lose some, right? Some are called advances, some are not. We are made to work, are we not? 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 Christmas album.

Not me so much. But we're made to work, and that work is before the fall. It predates the fall, and so does the call to a cadence of rest. Before anyone had sinned, before the curse of sin and death took hold, there was work and rest, and God himself was our model for all of that in the way that he created in six days and rested on the seventh.

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. 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, and they are immediately made aware of a new sensation.

They have a new experience,.

Something they've never experienced before.

Guilt and shame.

They've never experienced that before. A new feeling. What is this? I feel gross inside. I feel dirty. 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, 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, 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. He has already cursed the woman earlier in chapter three, but we begin in verse 17 of Genesis three, God speaking to Adam, the longest of the three curses. Adam listened to the voice.

It says here in verse 17, he listened to the voice of his wife and ate from the forbidden tree, and God reminds Adam halfway through verse 17 that he had given them an explicit command. You shall not eat of it.

God, the creator, saying to his creation, don't eat this, don't eat the fruit of this tree, and many times we miss the rest of the garden, right? Like how dare he prohibit something.

When he had given everything else? He had given over abundance,.

But just don't do this one thing, and we know they did it.

They ate it.

And now the ground is cursed because of Adam's sin of rebellion against the law of God. 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, futility and pain and toil and scarcity.

Those are all implicitly introduced in verses 17 and 18. All the days of our life, all the days of our lives will be defined by pain as we wander this world, 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? 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.

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. 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, and most of us don't have the risk of getting our arm caught in a baler, right?

So, but they're filled with obstacles, right? 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, 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. 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. 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, the ground will not be a neutral place of our work.

Earth is not a neutral place. Did you notice that? Probably noticed that significantly this past week. The earth is not a safe place. 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. Did you know that? It's just, it's entropy. Entropy, a big fancy word that means that things move towards a lesser state of energy. 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. I believe that thorns and thistles are exemplary of the many ways our work has been cursed by the fall. 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. 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.

How's that for a pick-me-up message? But you know what I mean. You know what happened in the fall. 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 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. Do you feel it? Like 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.

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? Many of us feel that way.

This is where I want to insert the main premise of the sermon this morning. Rest, in this context, seems silly. Rest, in this context, is risky.

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. 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.

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. 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. I, this is Solomon, the writer, I pass 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.

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. 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.

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.

I think we all feel that way. We all feel like, man, if I were to take one day and seven to rest, whew, where's that gonna go? 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? Why would he break down his own walls that surrounded his vineyard?

He didn't.

He just ceased working.

Ooh, who was that?

He just stopped working. But wait a second, church. 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.

Go back and listen to that message to hear the very clear, clear call of God to a little bit of rest. He is indeed, in his word, calling us all to faith, to trust him, trust him in this risky world with one day and seven of rest.

God is not ignorant of the risks of rest in this cursed world, and yet the call still remains to us. Can you hear that call, church? Six days you have to do your labor, but remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.

Back to Genesis 3 .19 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. 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.

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. With a new place, they are told that they will get their food.

Well, where did they get their food prior to this?

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 gonna start getting their food from the plants of the field. I wonder if Adam and Eve knew what that word meant yet.

What's a field? What's a field?

They've only lived in a garden.

What's a field?

They're gonna 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. That kind of field.

Where prior to this, they got their food out of a garden.

An orchard.

Now, hands and tools. Stony ground, thorns, thistles. It's gonna be work to get the world to do what you want it to do. And then you die. I believe that verse 19 is saying that work will be increasingly futile.

So when 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? I'm not crazy critical of them. I'm not that worried.

I'm not that bent out of shape about their cries. 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. This is the world we get, not the world we want.

It's how you deal with it, right? You gotta deal with it. You gotta 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.

And I would just suggest to you, I'm not gonna 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.

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, somewhere along that whole spectrum, both are explained here in this text in clarity. 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.

That's the way economic memes end. And then you die. You work your fingers to the bone and then you die. 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.

Over all of this discussion about work, rest, risk and futility stands the book of Ecclesiastes. In that book, Solomon smacks us with wave after wave of the futility of work under the sun. 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.

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, 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.

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? 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. Our culture tried hard work with God and we produce an amazing era of advancement, no doubt.

Now our culture has tried a generation of hard work without God and we've hit up.

Against the issue of futility.

And now I fear we're gonna 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. And he reports back that it's all futility without God.

But here's why I'm talking about futility in regard to rest. The pathway to breaking away from futility, church, is service to your maker. 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 just as one diaper is changed, you gotta change another one. Just as you file that report, another one is due. Just as you launch that product, they are on you about the next one.

I start writing my next sermon hours after I deliver this one. Tomorrow morning I'll wake up and I'll start over again. 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.

His cycle, his idea, his purpose for our lives. 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.

Not merely living for the weekend, but rather all of our time lived for God. Our work for him, in his world, six days. Our rest in him, one day. Our work for him, in his world, six days. Our rest in him, one day.

Our work for him, in his world, six days. Our rest in him, one day. Do you see the cadence? For him, for him, for him. Please don't hear me insinuating that, there I solved it, there I fixed it. Pressure is still on us due to the curse.

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. 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. But I am suggesting that faith and trust in God is the only hope for us as we toil in a sin-cursed world.

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. And so let me land our first risk of rest with one technical word.

The risk of rest in this world is entropy. Things break down to increase states of uselessness. They move towards states of less energy and less power. Over the years, I've watched a literal vineyard be taken over by nature right here in Matawan behind Rob and Carrie Knoll's home.

Nobody planted weeds and trees and shrubs in there. Entropy is just doing what it does. 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.

Nobody's maintaining it. Nobody's taking care of it.

What happens?

What would happen to your yard if you didn't do anything? You 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 gonna come and mow it for you and charge you for it or something.

I don't know. 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. You must arrest your common sense in order to rest one day in seven.

You will not arrive at Sabbath resting by observing nature. Nature isn't gonna lead you there. It's the revelation of God. It's his call and heeding his call that's gonna lead you there. You won't stumble on Sabbath rest by any natural pull.

Entropy is real and it makes rest truly risky in this world. And further, you will be tempted to take Sabbath rest too far.

That's the second temptation.

The second risk of rest is laziness or lethargy or sloth or whatever word you like to use for that. So many of the Proverbs warn against a further risk. The second one is over-applied rest. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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 work week.

Maybe even, I don't even know,.

Maybe some of your employers are toying with that. The new four-day work week is likely not as healthy as we might think for those given to sloth or laziness. But I wanna be sure you hear me that I'm not against that.

I think many of us in this room would handle a four-day work week just fine because the other couple of days, you would fill with volunteer work or a side hustle or something. I mean, 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 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.

So beware of loving rest too much, church. And I think that rest extends to many forms of entertainment. I just mentioned that 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. 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 God's way. The moment you and your family sit down to seriously try to apply a day of rest, something's gonna break. Something is gonna 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. 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.

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. So how are we to respond to God's call to rest in this fallen and busted world?

The first thing that I wanna commend to you as encouragement is trust Him by faith. God has called us all to this cadence of dependent trust in Him. Six days of work, one day of rest. 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. 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 Him with your rest.

Believe that God has your best interest in mind in this. 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. It will rust. And entropy is a reality that will often pull us into work. It would be wise to consider our relationship, church. Ooh, this is a sacred cow in our culture.

Our relationship with stuff.

What is your relationship with stuff?

Every boat owned is a boat that must be maintained. 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. But also so is every weed whip, every leaf blower, every car, every acre, every room in my house, every TV, every grill.

I think you're getting the picture. Everything that we own is on a state of falling apart. It needs to be maintained. And we are a culture of affluence. And we, man, of all people know how to accumulate stuff.

They bring it right to my door. I just get home from work and there's stuff there. How did that get there? Boxes and stuff show up and it's like wow. Sometimes I don't even know what I'm opening.

You know what 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. You feel it? And some of us, if we're just honest, are leading a fairly cluttered and extravagant life.

And I would say man, I think this one in seven rest is enhanced by leading a quiet and simple life.

I don't know who this is speaking to,.