The Importance of Rest

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Rest in Scripture and God’s Design for Human Limits

Well welcome to The Wrap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rappaport. This will be a shorter version of our usual Wrap Report. I will be alone. My cohort bud will not be with me. And this will be a little bit of a more personal one.

I don't do this often, but there are times in life where we need to discuss things and let you guys know, who are regular listeners, what's going on in my life and keep you informed, also requesting your prayers.

Before we get into some of that, I want to talk about the importance of rest. The reality is, when we look at Scripture, we see that rest is throughout Scripture. We see that very beginning of the Bible, in Genesis, we see that God created for six days.

On the seventh, He rested. He rested from the work He was doing. And that became something that was for us to follow. That we would work six days, rest once. So one out of seven days was meant for a day of rest.

Now, throughout history, we've seen people that try to tamper with that. We've seen in Communism, where they tried to make a 10-day work week and it didn't work. They actually found that it was most effective for working six days and resting on one.

Even within atheistic countries, where they want to promote Communism, they realize that the most effective way is to allow people to rest one out of seven days. The need for rest is something that, well, for some of us, it's hard to do.

But God has seen fit and created us in such a way that we need rest. Not only one out of seven days, but we see throughout the Old Testament that rest is a common theme. The fact that God would say that the land needed rest.

One out of seven years. You'll see a pattern here. And so one out of every seven years would be a Sabbath year. Now Sabbath just means seventh. And so the seventh day is a day of rest. The seventh year is a year of rest.

So you'd give the land a rest. It would be a year of restitution. Even if you had someone who was a slave, they would be set free. There was all kinds of things that we'd see in the Old Testament that is a resting, a time of peace, a time of no work.

And so it was supposed to be a time to trust in God, depend upon God. So we see that we have one out of seven days we should be resting. One out of seven years in the Old Testament they should rest. They even had on the Sabbath year, seven out of seven.

So in other words, they would have out of these seven year periods, you'd have one out of those years that was the Jubilee. It was the seventh of the seven year cycles. Was a Jubilee year. It was a year of celebration, a year of special rest.

And we think about eternity as described often as the eternal rest. But what does it mean when Christ said he was the Sabbath, meaning he was the rest? And speaking of the future, what does it mean to rest?

We often think that to rest is to kick back and just watch TV, just do nothing. Is that really what resting is? Well, resting has more than that. It's really to rest on the Lord, to depend upon the Lord, to trust in him for all things.

It is also to have a time where we allow our body to be able to rejuvenate. Let in the case of the land, let the land rejuvenate. Now we understand what it did in those early years when it came to agriculture.

And the reason for allowing the land to rest for one year out of seven was the same reason we have farmers today that move their crops around. Because if you keep planting the same crop in the same area, it's not going to be good for the soil.

And so you end up seeing there that God knowing what man did not, that the land needs a time of rest, a time to rejuvenate. We satisfy that nowadays by moving crops around. However, what you end up seeing is that we are designed for rest.

Some of us are not good at that. Maybe you are. I'm not one that's good with rest. I'm not good with downtime. And this past year has been a time where I have been going nonstop. I have been working about 120 to 130 hours a week, been working seven days a week between all the responsibilities that I have at the ministry.

I've been took up this past year, the pulpit ministry at my church and been doing the primary preaching at the church and counseling and been part of one of the elders and other things that I end up doing throughout the week, family time as well.

And all of this, when you put it together, I had no downtime. I had this year, some of you know that I moved and there was a time when I moved where the move was quite stressful and my blood pressure had gone up, was given medicine and that brought it down.

The stress that that had was a time where it took rest. It took time away that was needed. The unfortunate thing that we have nowadays is with COVID is there's not you can't get away. You can't go on vacations, really.

It's hard to get away and rest. But that's not just the rest that we need is a vacation. Many of us think of that as rest. And it is. It can be where we can get away from what we do in our everyday life to just get away and be alone.

Unfortunately for me, for many years, I really haven't had that kind of vacation. For me, for many years, my vacation is traveling and speaking somewhere and maybe going and doing some sightseeing or something afterwards for a day or something.

I really don't rest. Most of my time away is traveling to preach and teach. And I've lived that way for many years. Many of you know that I don't sleep very much. And that has always allowed me to do more than most people.

It allows me more time to read and produce things. However, all of those things have caught up to me. This year of stress, the year of constantly going without any time down, downtime, without any rest has caught up to me.

Even on the medication, my blood pressure has been has had stabilized, unfortunately, at 170 over 110. Now, those of you who know that know that that is dangerous levels. That is very bad to end to be constant at that is not good.

And I've been trying everything I can to bring that down. One of the things that you end up seeing with this is that we need to rest. I was not. And this is a thing where, you know, I think maybe is a bad illustration.

But you see that when we in the Old Testament, when the Israelites refused to let the land rest for 70, 70 year periods to 70 of those seven year Sabbaths, they did not allow the land to rest. So for for that period of time, that 490 years because of that, Israel was going to punish them to to to judge them.

And that judgment was going to be that this wicked, evil nation, the Babylonians, would come in and be used by God to be a judge. He was going to use this wicked nation to judge over Israel. And in that judgment, they would be captives of the Babylonians for 70 years.

Now, he said that after those 70 years, Israel will be purged of their idolatry. And they were. You end up seeing, though, is that God took this Sabbath rest serious. The Israelites did not. And there's ways that God will chastise his own people when they don't take his commands serious.

Well, for Israel, that chastisement came in the way of 70 years of of captivity by the nation of Babylon. For me, it took a different toll. My blood pressure has been skyrocketed. And for those reasons, I've had to start making massive changes in my life because the medicine is not working.

I need to rest. Some of you know that I canceled the hundredth episode of Apologetics Live, the other podcast I do. I hated to do that. We had a lot of great guests lined up and unfortunately, one of the guests, Justin Peters, won't be able to make it because we moved it to the next week.

It seems like maybe Phil Johnson might be able to. But we had a lot of guests lined up. I didn't want to cancel. I'm the type of person that never wants to stop doing so. I want to do my best for you all that listen.

I don't ever want to cancel on you. I never want to not record for you. I don't want to ever not do something that benefits you listeners. If there's anything that I can do to help you on your walk with Christ, that's what I want to do.

The problem is I wanted to do that all the time with everybody. And that was the problem. I never rested. My body started to have problems because of that. And before that, we have long term problems.

My wife and I decided there's some things we have to do. I didn't do Apologetics Live. I'm taking four days where we have decided that this podcast, I've had a couple of meetings, two meetings and that's it, only because I could not cancel them.

But other than that, I've canceled everything. This podcast is going to be a shorter one. So it's not all the prep that I usually would do and getting with Bud and going through everything. I'm trying to take four days to just rest, to get into the Word of God, pray.

And that's the majority of how I'm spending these days. But from Thursday night until Monday night, I plan on resting, not going anywhere, but just spending time with God, which is the other component of rest that we often forget of.

When we think about rest, we often think that what it is, is us just having a time away of doing the work that we typically do. That's true. That's part of what we speak of with rest. But it's also more than that.

Think about what it took for a farmer to rest one year out of seven to say, OK, I'm not going to have a crop this year. When you depend on that for a living, you pretend you depend on that for your food.

You have to store those other six years to prepare for that seventh. This is no different than when the Israelites were in the wilderness and God would rain manna down from heaven, bread from heaven, and they would collect it on six days, but they were not collected on the seventh.

They had to save it for the seventh. That day was separate. And that separation was to separate that day for devotion to God. It doesn't mean we don't do any work and we don't do anything. Obviously, if you're a pastor, Sunday is a busy day.

But it's the devotion aspect that's often forgotten when it comes to rest. See, not only do we need a day to set aside of not doing our work, but we need a day set aside devoted to God so that we'd focus on that.

We need to have a weeks-long devotion to God. We're studying his word where Sunday, that day that we celebrate as that Sabbath rest, would be the climax. That day that we would look at as a day of rest for us, the Lord's day, that's the climax of a weeks-long worship.

When you're busy working 120, 130 hours a week, it does make it hard to, when you consider, think about the fact that there's only 168 hours in the week and I'm spending 120 to 130 of them busy doing work.

And now we have, what, 38, 48 hours left. Now, granted, I don't sleep as much as many of you. So if you're sleeping eight hours a day, seven days a week, you need 56 hours just for sleeping. I don't do that.

But there's still many hours needed for that. And then there's hours needed with my wife. And eating dinner and lunch and breakfast with her is not really spending time with her. And so you add all that up, I really had no time for rest.

I had no time just to get away from the study of God's word for preparing podcasts, writing books, teaching, preaching, sermons for Sunday, all of that. That was my devotions. I didn't have time to sit and spend an hour a day like I used to.

It caught up to me. It caught up to me and it caught up to my health. And so I'm spending four days just resting. Why do I bring this to you? Well, one, for prayer. I do covet your prayers. I'm asking that you would pray for my health.

Many have been asking me what's going on because I canceled the Apologetics Live. And for many, that's very unusual for me to cancel anything. And that struck many. And many have contacted me and asked me about the fact that I canceled.

Are you OK? People thought I was dying. I'm not dying yet. I'm on the process. We all are. But it is something that I had to take serious. I had to recognize that I wasn't resting my body and I needed to do that.

So one, I'm asking for prayer. Two, I'm realizing there's times when we got to make changes in our life. We have to change things so that we are not so busy. So we do set a time a time for rest to not only let our body rest, but also to rest in devotion to God, to depend upon God, to trust that God knows better than us.

And if God wants, he's going to produce just as much work from Striving for Eternity as we always have if that's what he wants. And he's just going to somehow make my mind work better, to be able to think faster and get things done quicker.

I don't know. The reality is I have to trust that God is going to do that. The problem we often have, and we don't often think about it, but many of us, we tend to think that we have to produce everything.

We have to do everything. I always think of the quote from Martin Luther that he'd pray for two hours a day unless he had a busy day. On busy days, he prayed three hours. That's foreign for many of us.

But why would Luther do that? Because he understood that on the busier days, he needed to depend upon God more. You and I need to depend upon God more. And so what I want to challenge each of us with is set aside time for, for real rest, not watching TV or even reading a good book.

That may not be enough. Really just setting time aside where you're devoted to God. Now it might be reading a good book depends on what the book is. Is that book going to be something where you can relax?

You're away from what you do in your, your daily work, but it is also incorporating and bringing in an aspect where you're devoting yourself to God. You're thinking about the things of God. You're depending upon God.

That is at a time of devotion and worship. That's what I want to encourage you. I'm going to do something I haven't done in many, many years. I'm actually not going to go to church this Sunday. That seems strange.

Why? Because I'm going to set aside these days for rest. Now before some of you argue that I'm forsaking the, the assembly together, I have almost never missed church. The, the, I made it, I went to church after I got married.

I made it to church after my children were born. So I've never missed church. By God's providence, I was planning one day to miss church because I was going to run a marathon. Marathon, they usually have them on Sundays and I, it was going to be the first marathon I was going to be able to run.

It turns out that I had food poisoning that night, spent the night in the hospital and still made it to church. I literally went right from the hospital where I had been up all night to make it to church because church is that important to me.

But even at church, it's not always a time where, you know, you're talking to people, you're doing things and I need to bring my blood pressure down. So I'm taking four days where I'm planning not to leave the house.

I'm sitting here. I'm trying to do everything I can to just read God's word, to pray, to relax, to bring the blood pressure down and really to rest in the Lord. And so a shorter podcast, but an encouragement to you, please take the advice, learn from my mistake.

Don't keep going 24 hours a day. Don't keep going nonstop. You can ask my bride. She would tell you that I unfortunately never stopped going. I've been doing it for 50 years, more than 50 years. Well, I guess less than that because when I was a child, I wasn't going this much.

So for 40 some years, I've been going nonstop. Since I was a teenager, I have been not sleeping, working all the time. It hasn't been good. I love my wife. I love my bride so much that I'm willing to make changes in my life because I want to be here for her.

Be granted, to be honest with you, I'd love to be in heaven and be with my Lord and Savior. That's what I'd love more. I feel like Paul sometimes when he says in Philippians that he actually says death is the better thing because in death he gets to be with Christ.

But it's better to minister for you. And for that reason, Paul says it's better that he's here. It's better that he would stay on earth, which is foreign. You know, many people, when they think of that passage that I'm referring to with Paul, they think about the fact that they say to live, for me to live in Christ is gain.

And that's what they focus on as verse Philippians 121. But when you read the context there, let me just read this to give you the idea. For me to live is Christ and to die is gain. But if I am to live in the flesh, this will mean fruitful labor for me.

And I do not know which to choose, but I am hard pressed between both decisions. Having the desire to depart and be with Christ, that is very much better. Yet to remain on in the flesh is more necessary for your sake.

Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all for your progress and joy in the faith. I feel like Paul that way many times. That word hard pressed there, that in that verse it talks, it's a Greek word used for when they bring a cattle to slaughter.

What they'd have is with the cattle to not harm or damage the meat of the cattle. They would have these two guardrails that would be wide at one end and get to a point that they're so narrow and where they'd walk the cattle down and the cattle unknowingly would walk it, get tighter and tighter and tighter.

And the idea is that the cattle would get wedged in, wedged in so it can't move to the right or the left so that they could then cut its throat and slaughter it. And so that's the idea that Paul says here.

He is wedged in between wanting death. And that's the thing most people miss. They think to live is Christ, but to die is gain. And that's how many people would read that. But Paul is saying to live is Christ, but to die is gain.

You see the emphasis difference. He says that to depart and be with Christ is very much better. That's the real reward. But to be on earth, there's ministry to do, to remain on in the flesh is necessary for your sake.

I need to take care of myself as you need to take care of yourself, to take care of what God has given us, to be good stewards of our body for the sake, for the purpose that we would be useful to God while on earth.

I need to care for my bride and be here for her. And for that reason, I'm going to be making some changes. It may mean that I don't, I'm not able to produce as much as I do for Striving for Eternity. We have a big agenda this year.

I plan to try to complete my book on the deity of Christ this year and have it ready for G3 in October. That's a big goal. It's still a lot of work to do. But at the same time, I have to temper that and not push too hard.

I need to make sure that I set aside time to rest. You do too. So I ask for your prayers. I ask that you consider to learn from my mistakes. Don't push yourself too much. Push yourself as hard as God will allow your body to go.

But know that God also wants you to rest. I used to jokingly say, when people would say that we need sleep, I'd always say, I can sleep when I'm dead. That always was my motto. I can sleep when I'm dead.

I'm going to push on as hard as I can in this life. But I've had to come to terms with the fact that God doesn't always want us pushing on as hard as we can go. He wants us to push on as hard as we can go with rest.

And so with that, I'm going to take a rest. It doesn't mean I'm going to stop recording. Bud and I plan to be back next week. But I just wanted to let you know that for many who have been wondering what's been going on, you've seen my social media posts.

You can follow me on Gab. That's where I'm moving most of my stuff over to is Gab. You can find me at Andrew Rappaport. But that's where I'm headed to, most of my stuff there. And a lot of people were concerned there.

People had been contacting me thinking I was dying. So I wanted to let you know, no, I'm not dying. But it was quite serious. It was sustained. My blood pressure right now has come down. It's to roughly 140s over 90s.

It's better, but nowhere near what it should be at the 120s over 80. So for that reason, we're going to continue to let you guys continue the giveaway that we had from last week with Ray Rhodes, where we are going to be giving away three copies of his new book, Yours Till Heaven, The Untold Love Story of Charles and Susie Spurgeon.

Great book, great love story, something you'd want to get. If you want to win a free copy, all you have to do is give us a review. Just go to our podcast, wherever you're listening. And if you can't find where, some podcast apps don't make it really easy.

And so if you go to the show notes, I have a link. But if you need, you can just go to lovethepodcast .com slash rap report, and rap is with two p's. So it's lovethepodcast .com slash rap report. R-A-P-P-R-E-P-O-R-T.

Just go there, leave us a review, and just so we know what email address to contact you with, let us know you sent the review. Email us at info at strivingforeternity .org. That's info at strivingforeternity .org.

We'll be back next week with a regular podcast. Look forward to the 100th anniversary this Thursday of, or the 100th episode of Apologetics Live. We'll have some special guests on there talking about the importance of apologetics.

I will say that we may next week address the issues that have come out about Ravi Zacharias, things that many people were upset with me when I told them this years ago. This was known, it was not a secret.

We may address those things now that it has been public and confirmed. And we might address that as well on Apologetics Live with the team there. So, that's what's going on. We're glad that you guys keep plugging in.

This is something we do for you. If you find value in this podcast, in the ministry at Striving for Eternity, at the ministry at Christian Podcast Community, I want to encourage you to consider supporting us.

We need your support. With COVID, things have been down. We've lost quite a bit, and so we could use support. If you would like to support us, just go to strivingforeternity .org/. You can support us monthly, which helps us with our monthly expenses, or you could support us with a one-time gift.

But whatever you could do, we'd greatly appreciate it. We thank you for everything. And that's a wrap.

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