Meaningful Rest

Well, hey, thank you for joining us for a different kind of weekend. If you're not in the St. Louis area, we've had some weather come through, and just because of that, in the spirit of keeping everybody safe, we've decided to not meet in person this weekend. But I am so thankful for the technology that allows us to gather and worship and pray and open up God's Word and hear from Him. So we're going to keep going in this Base Camp series, and I'm excited to walk through another really important and practical tool that will help us grow in our relationship with Jesus, because that's what Jesus is offering each of us. Whether you're skeptical or doubting or worried, stressed, maybe you feel worn down, or maybe you're so ready to worship you can't even stand it, wherever you are, Jesus says, come to me and take this next step in your relationship with me. Now there are a lot of things in life that keep us from taking those steps. Maybe you're thinking about those right now. Well, can I give you one of mine? Busyness. Sometimes I just feel too busy to take a step, and I think that's true for many of us. We look at our calendars, we look at our deadlines, we think about all the activities and the responsibilities, and before you know it, we start to feel tired, anxious, burdened, or maybe, maybe you're at home right now, and you're sitting by the fire, and you're all comfy and cozy, and you're thinking, burdened, Ben, what do you mean by burdened? I'm not burdened. Well, what I've found in life is that regardless of how we feel in a certain season, at one point or another, things will happen, and the tiredness will come, and the exhaustion will come, and if we're not proactive about something that Jesus says in the book of Matthew, I think it's going to come back to hurt us in the long run. So, we're going to go to the Gospel of Matthew. There's a promise here that I think is just so, so important for us. You'll find it in Matthew chapter 11. Jesus says, come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

You see, that's the Jesus we're going to meet with today. Regardless of how you feel right now, whether you're burdened or not, that's the Jesus who wants to meet with you. So I'll tell you what, no matter where you're joining us from, why don't we pray right now, and let's ask him to show up and speak to us. Will you pray with me? Jesus, I am thankful for your presence. I am thankful that you are at work. I am thankful for your word, that it is trustworthy and true, and you use these truths to speak to us today. So God, no matter where we are in our walk with you, I'm asking, just show us that next step to take in our journey, and I'm praying that as we do it, we'll learn a little bit more about what it means to be refreshed by you, and experience your goodness and your grace. We ask all of this in the name of Jesus, our Savior, amen. So Jesus invites us to go to him and rest, and if we're honest, we need it. Regardless of how you feel right now, at one point or another, we're going to need this rest. And what's interesting is the stats back this up, and what they show is we're not just tired or weary, we're actually burnt out. The Barna Research Group years back, they did a study, and what they found is these feelings of burnout, they're actually present in every single demographic. So I want to make sure I get these numbers right. 37% of boomers admit to feeling burnt out. More than half of Generation X reports to feeling moderately burnt out. A third of them say they're extremely stressed, or 51% of Millennials or Gen Zs say they're highly stressed. They talk about this constant fear of failure that they have. The peak stress age, like the time in your life where you are the most stressed, it used to be somewhere in your 40s.

Guess where it is now, 25, 25 years old. And there's a whole lot of people watching this right now thinking, yep, that sounds about right. And what I love about Jesus is he doesn't ignore our stress. He doesn't look the other way. He doesn't pat us on the back and say, suck it up, you got this. No. Jesus says, for those of us who feel stressed or worried or burdened, Jesus says, come to me, and you will find rest, even in a fast-moving world, even if you don't think you need it. And the Bible has a word for that kind of rest. It's actually the tool we're going to be talking about today, Sabbath. Jesus wants you to experience Sabbath rest. But what does that actually mean? Because for some of us, we might have grown up in an environment where this idea of Sabbath was weaponized. Like maybe, maybe it was a legalistic sort of thing where you had to wear really uncomfortable clothes and spend hours at church and Sabbath just became a list of a bunch of things you weren't allowed to do. Or maybe, maybe you do look at your calendar and Sabbath sure sounds nice, but these days with everything you have going on, it feels like a pipe dream. Or maybe, maybe you're one of the many joining us who are new, new to faith, still asking questions, and you have no idea what I even mean by this word Sabbath. So let's, let's define it. Sabbath is any activity that God uses to breathe life back into you, to sustain you, to restore you. That's Sabbath rest. And what you do to rest will look different depending on how you're wired, depending on the season of life you're in, or your circumstances. But one thing is true for all of us. Jesus, he longs to refresh us. And this rhythm of work and rest, it actually shows up all throughout scripture. It's woven into the very fabric of creation itself. So way back in the beginning, and I mean the beginning, we see God at work. He speaks the cosmos into existence. He, he creates this world. He creates creatures to then populate this world. And then the culmination, the climax of that creative work was us. You and me, men and women, those who uniquely bear the image of God. And then it says that on the seventh day, God rests. Now, just so we're clear,

God's not tired. He didn't need a break, which I think is really important for those of us who don't really feel like we need a break. Because even though God wasn't tired, he still models this rhythm of work and rest that I think is the antidote to the hurry, and the anxiety, and the burnout that we might feel from time to time. So God works, and then God rests. And he invites us, his image bearers, into that same rhythm. So in Genesis, after God creates everything, he puts man in the garden, and he gives man a job to do. He says, work it and keep it. In other words, work it or take care of it. One way to translate the Hebrew there is to cultivate and steward this world. That is a part of our job as image bearers. We are called by God to work in and with his creation. That is the foundation of our calling. We use our gifts, and our talents, and our personalities to make a difference in this world for God's glory, and making things just a little bit better along the way by the power of his Holy Spirit. And that covers every single area of our life. It includes our jobs. Like your occupation right now is a part of this calling on your life to work in and with creation. And what that means is you're not just a doctor, or a bus driver, or a store clerk, or a computer programmer, or a parent, or a student. No, if you follow Jesus, you do those things. But then you take Jesus's way of doing things. You carry his presence into every space you inhabit. And that work, just so we're clear, it's not limited to a traditional nine-to-five job. Stay-at-home parents, that's work. Students juggling schoolwork, and homework, and all the extracurricular stuff, that's work. Even right now, if you find yourself unemployed, the act of looking for a job in and of itself can turn into a job itself. That is work. And no matter what you do, through all that, Jesus, he wants you to bring his way of doing things into those spaces, both inside and outside of the walls of the church. You learn to live, and love, and serve like him, which is one of the reasons why we're so passionate about our serve and outreach teams at The Crossing. Because they're not the only time you're going to love, and serve others, and act like Jesus. That's happening everywhere you go, seven days a week. But they are a great first step to learn what that looks like. Because when you brew coffee to make people feel welcome, when you tell a little one about Jesus and Kids Crossing, when you pray with a high school student on Wednesday nights, when you help people park their cards, or work behind the scenes, pulling off everything that happens on the weekend, or if you, with our outreach teams, go into our city to begin to spread the hope and the message of Jesus. in this city and say that we're for you

and that God is for you, when you do those things, you begin to learn, one, that this is part of what we were made for, but also Jesus, he begins to show up and change you. He begins to make you different from the inside out, and then you begin to develop relationships with people along the way. You link arms with them. You learn what it's like to live life together. This is a picture of what it's like to serve and begin to learn how we carry these ideas into our jobs and into where we go. So if you have any questions about that, you can come talk to us, come to the bullpen, come to the connection point, email pastors at the Crossing Dot Church. You can hop on our calendar page and just see all the different ways that we have to serve and all those opportunities. But the point is, we work, and as we do that, God begins to work in us, and in response to that, we begin to see everything we do as an opportunity to bring him glory. And with that mindset, everything we do is an opportunity to worship because we're doing it for him. So work, and all that it means is a part of following Jesus. This is a part of how we grow as disciples, but we don't want the work that we do to get in the way of who we're doing the work for.

And that's why Jesus says, don't work yourself in the ground. Remember the Sabbath, come follow me. That's why we see that in Genesis. That's why we see that commanded in the Ten Commandments. That's why Jesus himself says, come to me and you will find the rest you crave. So let's pause and talk about this because as we've already said, rest in our world today, because it's so fast-paced, it's a lot easier said than done. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to turn to the people you're watching this with and ask a question. And if you're watching by yourself, maybe text a friend your answer to this question, or maybe write it down so you can keep thinking about it, keep praying about it, email us about it. But here's the question. What makes it difficult for you to rest? So talk to each other, and we'll be back going here in just a bit. All right, so these questions during the message are just such perfect times for us to really think about what we're studying and applying it to our lives. So in the spirit of that, I invited my friend Judy, who's one of our pastors, and she's gonna jump in on this conversation. So let's do that.

Let's just, Judy, let's start with that question. What makes it difficult for you to Sabbath? For me, I love my job, get my job done. When I go home, there is this to-do list in my brain. Nobody's putting pressure on me to do the to-do list, but I have it in my brain. I have to do this. I have to do the laundry. I have to do this. That to-do list, whether real or imaginary, is the thing that keeps my brain from wanting to Sabbath. So your brain can't even go into rest time. Correct, like until I check things off, I feel like I can't Sabbath. Once again, no one's putting the pressure on me. Yeah, but still, you're coming to this with a to-do list, with a checkbox mentality, which in a lot of ways can really make what should be rest turn into work. Correct. Which goes against what Jesus says back in that chapter in Matthew. Because when he talks about this rest that he wants us to experience, he says that his yoke is easy and his burden is light. Now, that word yoke was just a fancy way for Jewish teachers in the first century to talk about how they approached and began to apply God's law to their lives. And every teacher had a yoke,

but not all yokes were created equal. In fact, sometimes they were burdensome. The Pharisees' yoke, that was a heavy yoke. If you're new to church, the Pharisees were part of Jesus' greatest opposition to his earthly ministry, and they had a way of approaching the law and applying it that involved stacking up these man-made rules and regulations. They were super smart and super religious, so almost their smartness overtook them, and their smartness made them layer on rules and rules and rules and rules, and we do that, too. We just can't blame the Pharisees. We do that, too. We can find ourselves thinking, people have to do it our way, or this is what it looks like, which we'll get to that in a minute, but by one count, there were dozens of restrictions around Sabbath that the Pharisees made. From anything from you couldn't pick grain on the Sabbath, even if you were starving. There were limits to how much you could really help somebody or heal somebody if someone was sick. Scholars, they estimate 39 different categories of work, which detailed how far you could walk before it became work. What could you carry? How heavy could that object be? And they began to come up with this system that kept people from working. Got it. So just so we're clear, the Pharisees came up with a system of work that kept people from working. So to try not to work, they created more work for people to do. And before you know it, those people were working and not working.

That is exhausting. I feel burdened just by saying that sentence. And really, that whole approach to Sabbath, it completely misses the point. Because Sabbath was never really about not doing something. Sabbath was about doing those things that gave you rest. And those things are related. Sometimes you have to stop doing to do those things, but they're different. So Sabbath, it's more than just stop working and twiddling your thumbs and doing nothing. Sabbath is about proactively and regularly going to God, experiencing his presence, allowing him to breathe life into you. And that's when we begin to experience this rest in Jesus. And that's what you just said. Your definition was when God breathes life into you. Yeah, yeah. So if the way of the Pharisees, if their yoke's not going to cut it, and we also don't just want to ignore Sabbath altogether because Jesus commands it, God models it for us, how do we keep moving forward? What are some practical ways, some handles that we can hang on to when it comes to Sabbath? And for me, the first one that comes to mind, and it's the obvious one, but I think that's a good place to start a lot of the time, is prayer. We go to God and ask him. I mean, if you think about it, if he's the creator of life, if he's the author of my life and your life, he's going to know better than anyone what it looks like for me to rest based on how he's wired me. And, Jude, we were talking about a framework that we've been using at this church for a long time that's just so, so helpful. If you're seeking Jesus, just checking out the claims of Christianity, one of the greatest benefits of surrendering your life to Jesus, once you say, I give, would you lead my life? The Holy Spirit comes in, and then God wires you in a way to connect with him. And it's not the same for everybody. One of the neatest things is. My way is different than your way.

Yeah, yeah. There's two resources I want to give you. If this interests you and you're like, ooh, I wonder how the Lord has wired me to connect with him, that is, how do I Sabbath with God? Yeah, yeah. There's a book, a workbook, you can actually get it. It's called An Ordinary Day with Jesus, written by John Ortberg and Ruth Haley Barton, and also another, a book called Sacred Pathways by Gary Thomas. These are two ways that you can figure out, how has the Lord uniquely wired me to connect with him? Because once you do it, that's when Sabbath comes to life. So, like, with Ortberg and Barton, they'll say things like, some of us were wired to experience him by being in creation. God is not creation. He created creation. But some of you are listening right now going, oh, when I'm outside, I experience God. When I see a mountain, a rainbow, a cloud, I experience God. Others of you, it's worship music. You know the minute a song comes on, something changes in your heart and you experience God. It can be the Bible. A lot of you go, I experience God the most when I read his word. Others, it's with people. Some of you are wired, God's breathed into you to rest through interactions with people. Where others, it's the silence and the solitude. For me, the first time I went through this, Ben, I went through and the Lord very clearly, worship is a main one for me. But the other big one is running. You know me. And deep water running. Something, I encounter God the best. He speaks to me, convicts me, draws me close to him when I'm running. What's yours, by the way? So me, I'm very much a relationship guy.

So being with community, being in people, that's part of how God kind of. You're a musician. Yeah. Is music a part of yours? Kind of, but I did it for so long that it started to feel like work. Oh, interesting. Okay. That's really good for me to hear that it's different because I've always. been an indoor kid, so like, if people are like, you have to get outside, or you have to, Judy, if you said you have to run, because that's what I do, really what we're doing is getting into kind of a legalistic mindset. And that's another handle for us to think about, because when it comes to Sabbath, we need to resist legalism. To say it another way, don't be like a Pharisee. I mean, it's kind of just what we were talking about, recognizing that what works for you might not work for me, and what works for me might not work for someone else. So we don't want to fall into the trap of thinking that everyone else has to rest or Sabbath exactly how we do, because when we do that, it becomes, you know, instead of this rest and this life-giving experience with God, it becomes these rigid rules that almost squeeze the life out of us. Correct. And if you're wondering, ooh, am I doing that right now? Legalism, if you hear yourself saying the words, I have to, instead of I want to, or I long to. Or I get to, the fact that we get to. So like, I long to run, because I experience God when I run. It's not, I have to go for a run. So part of it, I would say, if you're trying to figure this out, a lot of it, if you're engaging in something and your blood pressure goes down, and it comes naturally to you, and you feel God's presence, that's probably your pathway to connect with Him, which should be a part of your Sabbath, because you should want to do it, not have to do it. Those things that give us life, we should want to prioritize them because they give us life, which is not true when we get all legalistic about Sabbath. So what do you think happens to our hearts when we have that legalistic, more Pharisee approach, where everyone has to rest exactly like I do? Can I tell you how it happens for me? Yeah. If, especially the intellectual route,

when I hear people who connect with God best through scripture, they'll go, I spent two hours in the Word, I encountered Jesus. I can get very jealous, guilt, guilt and shame. I should be like them. I'm a pastor. And if there's guilt and shame, I have to stop and go, wait, wait, wait, that's not the voice of God. That's the voice of the evil one. And the voice of God is conviction. But not guilt or shame. Not condemnation. And I have to stop myself. I go, no, no, no, no. That's how we wired them. But I have to figure out how has He wired me. And it's His kindness that leads to repentance, not any feelings of guilt or shame. Kind of going the other way, sometimes we feel shame. I know when I've kind of fallen into that legalistic trap, it can lead to pride. Suddenly, I got it all figured out. When it comes to Sabbath, I'm the expert. Everyone should learn from me. And pride is always, always, always one of the greatest obstacles to spiritual life and growing and growing our relationships with Jesus. So with all of that then, this last handle, I think is, it's just so practical. But this idea of we have to be intentional and be realistic. Really, what that means is we need to choose whether, depending on how we're wired, we choose something to Sabbath that's doable and achievable. So there's a bunch of options, a bunch of right answers. But planning one night a month on your calendar to do that hobby that you know gives you life that you don't think you have time to do. Hey, can I back up for two seconds? Yeah. When you set something too high for yourself, the guilt and shame checks in, and then you stop doing it. So that's what I love when you said be realistic about it and set the bar. That's where even I love that we're doing the first five because for a lot of people where this is very new, it's doable. Yeah, it's doable. It's doable. And it's just an easy first step for people that are brand new to this. Yeah. And it's so helpful too. It's been so good for me to have these words from the Psalms on my mind and on my heart as I move throughout my week. It's just such a proactive way that we can talk about rest and Sabbath. But for me, you and I, both of our days are off on Friday. And when it comes to Sabbath, we're both pretty protective of our Fridays. Like if there's an emergency, I'll step in. But my Fridays, I do everything possible to protect it and then engage in my spiritual pathways, how he's wired me. So I run, I worship, I do all those things that breathe life into me. For my husband, it's cooking. For a friend of ours, a pastor here, once a month, he goes fishing. He comes back from fishing, a day of fishing, and he's a whole new guy again.

I have a friend that will intentionally on their days off sew and create with their hands. So it's really important to everything you said to do it, because when we do it, we experience God's presence, and that's when the Sabbath comes in. Yeah, and really, that's what I love about all of these Base Camp tools that were covered in this series, is that they're not really at all about how perfectly you do them. They're about who you're doing them for. And really, that's why we started with those words from Jesus about coming to him, because it really is all about him and letting him breathe life into us. And when we begin to drop whatever burdens we're carrying at his feet, whether we realize we need to or not, when we do that, we find that his way really is better, and that is the antidote to the hurry, to the anxiety, the stress, and the burnout that we feel, and that's where we find the peace and the purpose and the hope that comes from following Jesus. And it all starts with going to him. So, as we head for home, I'd love to end this just with those words of Jesus ringing in our ears. So, would you mind reading them, and then go ahead and pray for us as we begin? It would be my honor. Matthew 11, verses 28 through 30. Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened,

and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Oh, Lord, you proactively wrote Sabbath into your plan for us. It's supposed to be a life-giving practice, a base camp tool, to help us do this journey with you and those around us in a healthy way. Reveal to each one of us how you have specifically wired us to connect with you. Help us figure out those practices and rhythms that allow your spirit to breathe life back into us. Lord, may none of us neglect the crucial practice of Sabbath. Thank you for looking out for us. Thank you for wiring us to connect with you. Give us the courage now to embrace Sabbath, because we know only in you will we truly find rest. In the name of Jesus, I pray, amen. Amen.