Rest-ology (Part 1)

Rest in Christ Versus the Restlessness of the Wicked

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, �But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn�t for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we�re called by the Divine Trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here�s our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry. Mike Abendroth here. I�m just getting all these theological acumen buttons tuned up. Good that you�re listening. Thank you for that. We don�t ask for money.

I guess we have asked for money before. I think I�ve said, �If you�re a millionaire, give. There are a few people giving on Patreon, so we thank you for that. But I ask instead that you tell your friends about No Compromise Radio.

I think this is going on eight years. Maybe we�ve finished eight years. I can�t keep track anymore. I�ve gotten some good emails lately. �Mike, keep going. And so, sometimes easier said than done. It�s supposed to snow like eight inches tomorrow.

In real time, it is December 8th-ish or so, and so we�re going to talk a little bit about a biblical subject today on No Compromise Radio. Done some great interviews lately. I don�t mean my interviewing skills are great.

The way you should interview is just basically ask people questions and let them hang themselves. Just kidding. Let them run with the answers, and I just kind of lead it a little bit. But on shows like this, I have no one to interview, so you need to hear from me.

I�ve been preaching through Hebrews, the book of Hebrews, and it�s been one of those really life-changing experiences for me. I know that�s probably clich� to say, but I�m glad I waited until I was older in life.

I�m 57 now. I feel younger, although my back feels not so young. I go to have an MRI on Monday in New York City for the prostate cancer. Thank you for praying. Hopefully, it�s gone. Kind of the checkup.

I probably have to do this kind of thing for the next two years. I feel good, generally. I�m just tired. My back hurts today, but that�s not related, hopefully, but a lot of other people have it worse than I do.

I�ve also received some emails from some of you regarding encouragement and also your own struggles with cancer. I�ve said it before, if you are a man with prostate cancer and you want someone to talk to, I�m sure I don�t know as much as I think I know, but I�m an expert in this sense.

I used to sell prostate biopsy guns, so I know what they do. I have prostate cancer. Hopefully, it�s gone by now. I�ve done lots of research on photon, proton, brachytherapy, da Vinci, open prostatectomies, and the list goes on.

If you want someone to talk to, I�ll be glad to talk with you. For the subject today, we�re talking about rest. That�s something we all need, right, is rest. If you Google rest, how to get rest, you find some interesting things.

Here�s a few. Pop a CD into your music player. What�s a CD? Pop a reel-to-reel into your tape player. Eject the 8-track tape. My dad had that 8-track tape player in the car. They have the Book of the Month Club.

I think it was 8-tracks. You get 7 free, and then you�ve got to buy 2 per year or whatever. He had the crazy things. He had from Willie Nelson to, I don�t know, maybe one of the kids ordered Captain and Tennille or something.

It was awful. You can�t just go back to the song you want. You have to play through the entire thing. That was the bad part about it. I think my friend Wayne had Rush 2112 or something like that. How about rest?

Well, you put on headphones, close your eyes, sip a cup of hot tea sweetened with some honey. That�s how you should get rest, according to Esther Sternberg, a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health.

Someone says her name�s Jill Murphy Long. She wrote a book called Permission to Nap. I ain�t got no permission to nap. Block out 20 minutes for a mini-spa treatment. You massage your own hands with lavender or sage scented lotion.

Wow. Okay. Here�s a way to get rest. It says don�t take a vacation. It�s hardly relaxing. Gallup Poll, 54 of vacationers say they returned home feeling more stressed out and tired than before they left.

Take a vacation. They say call upon your memories of high school physics class and make Newton�s first law of motion your creed. Any object at rest tends to stay at rest. How do you get rest? As I Googled, I found exercise.

It says it might seem counterintuitive, but exercise is proven to make your rest not only more rewarding, but actually more restful. What if I think about that Sominux commercial? Take Sominux and sleep, deep and restful, sleep, sleep, sleep, Sominux, take Sominux.

Avoid sleeping in. Take an ice bath. Okay. Then it says take a warm bath. I guess you take the warm bath after the ice bath. The ice bath, you grab three bags of ice from a convenience store, fill the bathtub halfway with cold water, pour the ice in, then jump in.

I think I'd rather try aromatherapy. That would be a way to relax. I have not tried that, but maybe it would help my mood. Then the last one we use, even though I've got more for the show, is practice not thinking.

Those are three words. There are no commas, there are no abbreviations, no R-E, no E-T-C, no diphons, no M-dashes, no N-dashes, no grammatical markers of any kind. Practice not thinking. Practice.

We're talking about practice not thinking. Practice not thinking. Practice not thinking. Practice not thinking. Thinking practice, not thinking practice. Well, one thing we know for sure, here's my segue, ready?

While rest is often elusive in the temporal world, it is hard to find in the physical world. It can be found in the spiritual world. Yes, it is elusive for those outside of Christ, but there is rest found in Christ Jesus.

Yeah, but you say, I thought there's a saying that goes something like this, there's no rest for the wicked. Well, the phrase comes from Isaiah chapter 57. It was first printed in English in the Miles Coverdale Bible, 1535.

But I will read the ESV. But the wicked are like the tossing sea, for it cannot be quiet. For its waters toss up mire and dirt. There is no peace, says my God, for the wicked. And ultimately, we know that's true because the wicked, those who are not forgiven, will have no rest in hell, and there will be eternal torment for those thrown into the lake of fire.

It's kind of sad these days that this whole concept of there's no peace for the wicked, it's kind of used for comedy now, a comic effect, and it goes even back to Little Orphan Annie cartoons in 1933.

No peace for the wicked. No rest for the wicked. But it's interesting. Yes, in fact, wicked people can have spiritual rest and peace with God because of the Lord Jesus Christ. Yes, without the mediating work of Jesus, there's no rest for the wicked, no peace for the wicked.

But when there's work done by another, Jesus the representative and substitute, the risen Savior, when He does the work, we receive that benefit of His accomplished work through by faith alone. And now we don't have to work for our salvation, after all, good thing, because it would have required perfection, do this and live.

And we have no longer to strain, running hither and thither, pell-mell, we can rest. The toil, the drudge, the grind has ceased, and we can rest in Christ Jesus. You don't have to try to figure out how is God pleased, by what means is God pleased, how many works do we have to do to please God?

There's rest. And the book of Hebrews talks a lot about rest. I like to call it, one of its themes is restology, the study of rest. How often do we study rest? Not very often. Israel, as a nation, is in the wilderness, and they fail to enter into physical, temporal, actual rest, right, because they were not believing.

They fail through unbelief. Then the writer of Hebrews is talking to these people who are tempted to go back to Judaism, and they say, you know what? This author says, rather, to them, don't stop believing, because there's a greater rest involved.

This is spiritual rest. We're not talking about Israel in the wilderness, we're talking about you with your sin. Jesus is the high priest, and He has opened up the sanctuary, and you need to enter by rest.

No, you need to enter by faith, and then you get rest. And He moved from chapter 3 to chapter 4, and it's kind of like from dark to light, because chapter 4 in Hebrews is really showing forth that believers have assured rest.

If you believe, you can have the rest. And if you look at chapter 4, it says, the promise of entering His rest, verse 1. Verse 3, they shall not enter my rest. Verse 4, God rested. Verse 5, they shall not enter my rest.

Verse 8, if Joshua had given them rest. Verse 9, there remains a Sabbath rest. Verse 10, whoever has entered God's rest. And then verse 11, therefore, let us therefore strive to enter that rest. You have a promised rest for believers in Christ Jesus.

It's God's rest. You persevere with faith, there is rest for you. Entering into God's spiritual rest. It says in chapter 4, verse 1, therefore, while the promise of entering His rest still stands, right, you're alive, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it.

It's a big deal. You want to enter into God's rest. You want to believe. You want to have your sins forgiven. You want to be justified, reconciled. The wrath of God propitiated because of the works of Christ Jesus, entering into rest.

And there's this promise that this is still, there's still an open door, as it were, for you if you're alive. There's no second opportunity later. But now, today, to use the language of Hebrews, you have rest available.

Now, in Hebrews 3 and 4, the word rest is used for different things. I've probably said this on the show before. It could be the rest that I alluded to earlier or directly stated earlier that it is getting into the promised land physically, real land.

It could be salvation rest. That's what's happening in chapter 4, verse 1. It could be God resting from creation. That's in verse 4. And it could be the ultimate rest when a Christian goes to heaven. That's chapter 4, verses 10 and 11.

And so, right now, we're talking about salvation as rest, something that you cease from trying to gain or earn by your works and religious ceremonies and duties. What he's not saying is, you know what, everything in life is going to go well for you on earth if you come to Christ.

Well, it wasn't for these people in the book of Hebrews. It doesn't for us. In this world, you will have tribulation, John 16, 33, Jesus said. But in terms of rest, peace with God, you have that. You cease from your own labors and efforts, and you trust in the work of Christ Jesus And what he did as a human, right, the God-man, and what he did, ultimately, as he obeyed the law and then led up to the cross and died on the cross, both his active, we say, and passive obedience.

Rest. You will be hassled in life, and you will have troubles in life, but before God, you have rest. Peace with God. To be settled with that, to enter God's rest, and that's what he's talking about in Hebrews chapter 4.

Come to Me for Rest

Well, when I think of Hebrews chapter 4 and rest, I think about what's really the most popular, and I understand why it's so popular, a discussion of spiritual rest, and it's in Matthew chapter 11 with the same Greek root word.

The Greek word is not exactly the same, but the root word is the same, and it's talking about rest. This is the most well-known, beloved verse in the Bible that talks about rest, and you know that verse, don't you?

You love that verse, don't you? I do. Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. That's better than aromatherapy. That's better than not going on vacation when we went to Europe this year for two months.

So I've got myself and my wife, Haley is 25, Maddie is 18, Gracie is 16, so they all flew with me. I had to get them out of classes and all this kind of stuff. So they flew with me, and then Luke, my son, 21, he was in LA at the Master's University College, and then I had to get him out there, and then we had to meet.

And we were staying, we went to London first, and then we were down in Germany, and then we went to Rome, and then we went to Switzerland, and then we went to Berlin, and then we went to France and Paris, and then Normandy, and then back over to Berlin, and then back down into Wittenberg for the conference.

And then Luke had to fly home through Switzerland. We had to get back up to London to fly from Heathrow. I mean, it was crazy, 60 days, and we didn't, I didn't have money for hotels, because the money I had was for, it was the kids inheritance.

The way the Abendross travel is this way. I can figure out how to get us there and to provide food, but we don't go out to dinner a lot, and we're going to stay with, you know, basically Master's Seminary alums.

And since I teach at the European Bible Training Center, students, if they like a good grade, then they put us up. Well, I've got us into those grades, that's true. But that's a lot of planning. That's a lot of non-rest, I can tell you that.

When everything's all booked, and you're like, okay, can we make that connecting flight and everything else? Okay, I've got to go do this and passports, five different expiration dates, six different expiration dates on the passports.

How do we get from here to there? What about the luggage? Oh, man, the luggage. I might as well just move over there with all the stuff we're taking. Wow. Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Well, we're talking about spiritual rest. If you're a Christian, I want to remind you of this rest. If you're not a Christian, there's rest for you. You need to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. What does the Bible say about rest?

Now with Matthew 11, it's more impressive when you see the context. That is to say, Matthew 11, 28 is more impressive, it's more impactful, it's more biblical in the sense that you can see what's going on, and you see the development of what goes on.

With Jesus in Matthew 11. And one of my favorite things to do is talk about what Jesus has said or done, so we're going to do that. Matthew, of course, when you think a big picture, Jesus is the king, Israel's king, everyone's king, and he's been talking about John the Baptist, and if you move to chapter 11, verse 16, here's what the text says.

But to what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to their playmates. We played the flute for you, but you did not dance. We sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.

For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, he has a demon. The son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, look at him, a glutton and a friend of sinners. Actually, they said a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.

Yet wisdom, Jesus said, is justified by her deeds. Jesus is dealing with this generation, and it is an unsatisfied generation. So Jesus is on the earth, and he's talking about these people, and they're childish.

Children aren't satisfied very easily. Children are selfish. Children are stubborn. Children want their own way. And the crowds that were following Jesus with their religious leaders, the ones who have rejected Jesus, who have rejected John the Baptist, Jesus said, you know what?

You're childish. Now, sometimes Jesus talks about childlike faith, but this is childish faith. This is no faith at all, in other words. They are fickle, and they don't want to do what Jesus is saying.

He gives a little illustration of children, then, in the marketplace. And they're in the agora. They're in the center of community life, and you can just imagine, you bring your kids to work, and you've got to sell things there in the middle of the market, and the kids play games.

Kind of fascinating that Jesus would have watched children playing games, because he knows what these children do. And he's dealing with this generation that, really, nothing's good enough for them. They don't like the way Jesus teaches.

They don't like the way John teaches. They don't like the way anybody teaches, except those that put the weight of the law on them, these false teachers, Pharisees and scribes and hypocrites, and these people are like spoiled brats.

We'll do it our way, we'll determine what righteousness is, don't tell us what to do, we will not have this man, either John or Jesus, rule over us. And Jesus says, you know, these are people that say no to everything.

They're like a group of children who are playing in the marketplace. And what did they play? Well, if you go to a park today, or a town square, or someplace, what do children play? Well, maybe it's soccer, maybe it's hacky sack, hippy sack.

When I was a kid, we would play, I don't know, dumb Nebraska games, Red Rover, Red Rover, send that skinny guy right over. And we always had some kind of big guy, you know, the train, he could just plow through the Red Rover, people.

Go for the weakest link, y 'all. We play Red Light, Green Light. We play Simon Says, Ring Around the Roses we played. And when I got a little older, though, I think we played Batman a lot, Lone Ranger.

I think we played that sometimes, it's hard, you didn't have a horse. Tarzan, Tarzan was easy, see, because Batman you needed a mask of some sort, or some cape, right? Lone Ranger, you'd need the horse.

The cool thing about Tarzan, you just needed to have a swimsuit. We just had those little Speedos back in those days, so it looked pretty Tarzan-ish. And a little knife, that's all you needed, a knife and swimsuits.

That's it. You could play Tarzan. Well, back in these days, these people played games. These children did, and the games were wedding and funeral. Why? Well, number one, because Tarzan hadn't been invented yet.

Fred, that one was for you. Fred, where's all those donations coming from again? I thought you were supposed to siphon some donations over here, your own monies. They played wedding and funeral. And the first game was wedding.

Now here's what's happening. I'm just looking at the clock and we're out of time. How do you play wedding and funeral? What's that like? I mean, is that play like doctor? I'm going to play doctor and nurse and you get your leg hurt and we're going to fix it or something.

We'll find out next time on No Compromise Radio. Because we're talking about rest and talking about Matthew 11 and how Jesus gives rest. Aren't you glad? Aren't you glad there's rest and you don't, I mean, aromatherapy is fine and massages are fine and lilacs are fine.

I'm trying to think how I like to get rest. If I need to get rest, it's usually mental rest. And so I'll just go off on a three hour bike ride. That's how I get rest. Now my body's tired, but I like how I feel afterwards.

So I think that's actually a legitimate way is to exercise. If you want to order some books, many books on Amazon, some Kindles are on there available as well out of the six NoCo books. If you want sexual fidelity or things that go bump in the church, you can always order those online.

The insider scoop is always, if you buy two sexual fidelity, we send you things that go bump in the church for free. Just say NoCo Special. That's all you have to do. The NoCo Special. If you want to follow us on Twitter, I have my little Twitter screeds here and there.

And that's at NoCo Radio. There's a Facebook as well. I only interact with that as I post things on Hootsuite, which then drops things into Facebook and Twitter at the same time. Not too much interaction with that.

Info at NoCompromiseRadio .com.

Ministry Information and Closing Details

No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life-transforming power of God's Word through verse-by-verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.