The Way of Rest | "The Way" Week 4

Hey, it's so good to have Edmund with us and Grapevine and those of you watching online. And I just want to say thank you for those of you that have been a part of this sermon season we've been in. And remember in week one, I really challenged us. I double dog dared you to try to be in church every single week. And I know we travel. So those of you that are watching or catching up this week, grateful that you're doing that and finding the discipline to do it. I pray that this sermon season has been challenging, but encouraging as we look into the practices of the way. We're not just Christians, we are followers of the way of Jesus. And so every single week we're challenged by the thought of what does that mean? Like what does that mean we do? What do we do if we're followers of the way? And so if you're new to Victory Church, you are here right in the middle of a sermon season. The good news is it's okay. You don't have to catch up before you can join today, but you can go back and watch all those on YouTube, on our website. So we encourage you to do so. Also we have resources for that. So our news director of spiritual formation, Dr. Daniel Davis works really hard every single week to come alongside the notes of my message and then to give you content the following week that you can have a daily devotional on the backs of the message that was shared that weekend. So you can go to victory.church forward slash resources, and you can download that. You can have that every single week. And so it'll have a everyday devotional, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, that goes in conjunction with the practice of that week. All right. So I encourage you to do that.

Hey, if you have your Bibles open with me to the book of Psalm, we're going to go to chapter 127. I'm going to read a passage of scripture that's going to kind of launch us into today's topic of discussion. If you remember kind of our foundational verse every week has been, we've been looking at Luke nine where Jesus says, if you want to be one of my followers, you have to give up your own way, give up your own way and you pick up your cross and you follow. That's kind of our foundational verse today. I want to bring something that will set the stage for where we're going today. So Psalm 127 verse one says this, it says, unless the Lord builds a house, the work of the builders is wasted. Unless the Lord protects the city, guarding it with centuries will do no good. It is useless for you to work so hard from early morning until late at night, anxiously working for food to eat. For God gives rest, say that with me, say rest to his loved ones. And you might be thinking, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, John. Last week we talked about the way we work. Last week we talked about how chef Harrison cooked every meal like he's cooking for King Jesus and anybody else that just happens to be at the table as a benefactor of the work he did for Jesus and how we don't labor as though we're laboring into people. We labor as though we're laboring for the Lord. And you might be thinking, okay, John, you are really swinging the pendulum hard today because last week we walked out going, we got to work hard for Jesus and have excellence for Jesus. And then the very next week I'm going to talk about a sermon on rest. Like, are you bipolar, John? Like what's, what's the problem here? Because I am swinging really hard. I'm swinging the pendulum hard and I'm doing that on purpose. I could have done the way we work at the first and the way we rest at the very end of the

sermon season, but I'm not doing that. I'm putting them right up next to each other. And there's a reason for that, that these are kind of bookends in the way that we live our lives. And the reason I'm doing that is because both of them are a practice of the way. The way we work for Jesus, the way we lean into the things we do on a daily basis is a practice of following Jesus and, not or, and the way we rest is impactful and important in the way that we're following Jesus. And I want to try to thread a really challenging needle today. All right. I love to thread needles when I'm preaching. I like to just try to thread it in a different way that makes you think about it in a more profound way or a more meaningful way than maybe you have before. And here's the needle I want to try to thread. I am not preaching against hard work. Okay. In fact, hard work is vital. You're not going to get very far in life if you don't work hard. Okay. So I'm not, I'm not preaching that. And I'm also at the same time, a sermon on rest is not giving lazy people a Bible verse to live their life by. I'm not doing that either. All right. Well, John preached on rest, so I'm not going to work. Today. Good luck with that one, okay? Call your boss. Well, Pastor John said, you're fired. I'm also, most, I've heard a lot of sermons on rest

and Sabbath, and chances are you have too. Most sermons I've heard on rest and Sabbath really deal with the physical, the mental, right? Like you need to rest. You've been going hard, your body's breaking down, you need to take a rest. And I wouldn't preach against that. It's valid and it's important. But today I'm gonna talk about something that's maybe a little more deeper than that. Something that I think sometimes gets forgotten or never looked at when it comes to rest. Like why did God tell us to rest? I think there's a deeper meaning than just you're tired. A lot of the things that we'll talk about in this sermon season on practices are just practices of the way. This one is very unique because it's not a suggestion. This one is one of the 10 commandments. Pretty wild. And it's funny that it's the one that gets the most ignored. Like most of us haven't murdered anybody, you know? If you have, just keep your head down. We don't wanna know that you've done that before. It's okay, we love you, we're glad you're here. Most of us wouldn't consider adultery, we wouldn't consider cheating. Like those are stealing, those are obvious. But yet one of the 10 commandments, most of us, myself included, ignore quite frequently.

And so I have an addiction. See how quiet it got right there? Oh gosh, is John about to confess and resign? No, calm down, that's okay, it's not. I'm addicted to production. I'm addicted to producing one particular thing, and I'm unique in this probably, but I'm addicted to producing content. I've realized, I realized it probably five or six years ago that I get dopamine hits, the chemical of dopamine. I get a dopamine hit when I create something. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think the Lord designs us and creates us in many ways. Like you may be an electrician and you get a dopamine hit when you twist that last wire and you're like done, you get dopamine hit, you know? My wife, not because she has to, because I love to vacuum, like trust me, I vacuum. My wife gets, this is weird y'all, she gets a dopamine hit when she vacuums. How weird is that? I know, and we all get dopamine hits in different ways. That's not my point. I realized about three or four years ago that every single year I go on a summer break as hopefully some of you do. And I realized that I don't do it very well. And if you came on vacation with me, which you're not invited, but if you did, if you did, you would look at me and be like,

he's resting good. Like I'm good at laying on the beach y'all. I mean, I'm good at it. If I'm wearing the mountains, I'm good. At hiking, I'm good at those things. If you saw me in the natural, you would think I'm resting. Let me tell you something, on the inside, I'm not resting at all. In fact, on the inside, there's a war happening because I have stopped the dopamine hit of producing. And several years ago, the Lord started showing me and teaching me something about rest that was far more impactful than just taking a nap or taking a break as though it was just a physical or a mental thing. I began to realize that if I stopped producing, it's as though I've stopped proving. And God really exposed this in my heart and I wanna get as vulnerable as I can with it. The issue was that it wasn't that I couldn't stop. Like I could stop, like, because Michelle makes me. You know, I stop, I stop. I'm not writing, I'm not doing anything. The problem was whether I could trust God enough to stop feeling like I needed to. Like I need to produce something, I gotta do something. How could I just sit here? I always thought rest was just kind of primarily about take a break, you've worked really hard, you need a vacation, just rest.

And all those things are true. I'm not here to preach against those things. But I wanna approach the idea of rest today from a totally different perspective, from a totally different angle. When I stop producing, whether it's on Fridays, Fridays are my Sabbath, or whether it's once a year that I escape and try to get away, when I stop producing, producing, something starts to churn in me and something starts to surface that I don't like, that I just don't like. And somewhere along the way, this is what the Lord began to show me, that somewhere along the way, I had allowed productivity to become proof of my value. I'm valuable because I produce. I'm a good pastor because I produce. I'm a good citizen because I produce or whatever the case may be. And I begin to associate those two things together and neither of them are bad. I need value and it's okay to produce. The problem was I'd connected the two together and that I'm not valuable unless I produce. And maybe you could understand what I'm saying and I think we all could in some ways and maybe yours isn't producing content, but yours might be your business. You started a small business and you can't sit

and you can't rest. You can't stop thinking about it. You can't stop doing. If you're a student, it may be your grades. You may think that you just have to keep churning, keep going and maybe keeping your house perfect. It may be how much money you make. It might be a ministry. That's the crazy thing. Because it's easy for me to say, well, I'm in ministry. I'm just trying to populate heaven over here. But ask Martha about that. Martha was actually cooking for Jesus and Jesus said, you got it all wrong. You need to look at Mary. Mary has figured it out. You are worried and upset about many things, Martha. You should learn to rest the way that Mary rests at my feet. So we can easily blame things or justify things and this world has a way of quietly convincing us without us realizing it that production equals value. My hard work equals value. The American dream, you know? And for me, every sermon I preached, every book I write, every article I publish, every meeting I led, every goal accomplished, it's evidence that I'm still relevant, that I am still disciplined, you know? And God rips this away from me

and he only does it in certain times and I'll tell you when he does it, it's when I rest. So today, I wanna talk about the way of rest, right? Buckle up. This one, some of the other ones will just be general great practices in scripture, but as I said earlier, this one's a commandment and you see it coming to fruition the most and I'll try to articulate this the best I can. If you go back to the book of Exodus in Exodus chapter five, you see this thing beginning to happen where God is trying to remove a pattern from the Israelites because in Exodus chapter five, the Israelites were still slaves in Egypt, okay? Now, the Israelites' primary job in Egypt was to make bricks. They were building Pharaoh's kingdom and so they grew up, they were established and grew up and were over and over and over again told and told and told that you are only worth what you produce. More bricks, more bricks, more bricks, more bricks and if you don't, there's punishment. If you don't, you'll actually feel the sting of a whip across your back and so they were brainwashed, in a sense, by the culture around them. Hopefully, you're picking up on the parallel there that I have to produce or I'll fall behind and then bad things will happen to me.

And then in one moment, in one moment, in one day, God delivers them out of Egypt. They up and they walk. Now, there's more to the story than that, you should read it but in one day, they march out of Egypt and then it's as if God spends the next 40 years trying to get the Egypt out of them. So, he gets them out of this slavery situation but it takes quite a while to get the slavery out of their heart and God uses the most unlikely tool. That's the crazy thing and I wanna try to show you that I believe the primary tool that God used to get the slavery out of them was rest. What a weird ninja move. God's sneak attack, you know, like of all the things, he said, I command you to rest and they had to be thinking, God, we've been working for hundreds of years without rest and we're fine. But he said, I'm trying to remove something from your heart and Sabbath, what I want you to understand is that rest and Sabbath isn't just about your tired body. It's about your enslaved mind. And God was reprogramming slaves. And I think he might reprogram us too. And what I wanna try to do in the short time I have is to convince you that rest isn't just about rest. Rest is about deprogramming the culture that's trying to penetrate your heart

and reprogram the way we think and rise above the culture that's trying to make us be more and more like them. And none of us are standing in Egypt right now, and none of us have a pharaoh standing over us making bricks but I think there's a pharaoh in every one of us that whispers in our ear and tells us more, more bricks, more money, more influence. Be like the Joneses. If you don't, you're falling behind and you're nobody. You have no worth. You have no value. That's the spirit of pharaoh is what that is. And it looks different in all of us. It might be how much success do I have and how much success do I need to be needed and known and valued. If you're a student, you might say, how do I be more liked at school? You know, it can look different in every one of us depending on what season of life you're in. And it's different bricks but it's the same mentality. It's more bricks and more of this and more of that. And so this one for me of all the practices that we're gonna talk about, this is one of my more difficult ones if I'm just being blunt honest. And so I'm gonna try my best to be very vulnerable with you on what the Lord does and the work that he's done in me. And I just wanna do it through three quick points.

All right, so three things if you're taking notes, write these down. Number one, you need to know about rest. The Bible says that rest reveals what's running you. It reveals. Yes, rest restores. I'm so glad it does. Cause it will restore your soul. It will restore your mind. It will restore. It's good for your biological body. It's a good thing. But what I have found more than anything else is the work the Lord does for me when I rest is it reveals. It exposes things in my heart. And the truth is we're all running. You're running your house. You're running a business. You're running your home. You're running your finances. And we all know you're running your kids everywhere. Like you're just running. Everything is running and running and running. And the pharaohs of Egypt are long gone, but for somehow some way the pharaoh still lingers in our mind. This more and this busy and I gotta do it. And here's what I found in my life. All right, so I'll just get vulnerable. I have found that productivity hides dysfunction.

All right. So if you have dysfunction in your life, in your marriage, in your family, in your finances, most people choose to just stay busy. And just stay, if I just keep producing. Cause if I can keep producing, then I never have to address anything in my life and the dysfunction in my life. Motion, okay, let's say it this way. Motion, your motion or my motion. What I found is that my motion hides my motivation. So I never have to deal with what is motivating me if I just stay in constant motion. And it's easy as a pastor, cause I could tell you that, well, I'm doing it for Jesus. I'm just trying to grow his church. I'm just trying to populate heaven, Lord. But when I stop, something happens and something rests. Rest removes the motion just long enough to reveal the motivation. And that's why I hate resting. But resting is so key, it's so pivotal. So you don't always know why we're running so hard. You will never know we're all running and you will never know why you're running so hard until you stop running. Stop running. And it's in these moments. And that's why I think like Sabbath is mentioned

so much through the entire Bible, Old Testament and New Testament. And after a while, you're like, okay, God, I get it, Sabbath, geez. I think it's more than just resting our body. The Lord is trying to do a deep inner work. And here's what I realized is that when I rest, when I stop, I feel, I feel very unproductive. And I'll sit and on the outside, oh, John's resting. On the inside, I'm like, why? Am I sitting here, there's so much I could be doing, I could conquer the world, I could do this, I could do that, I could do this, I could do that, I could do this, I could do that. And nobody, here's the thing that the Lord showed me this year on my break, is that nobody was asking me to do the things that I felt guilty for not doing. Not one of you emailed me and says, where's your sermon, John? Like I write these articles in my Releter deal, and you know not one person, I didn't write an article for like six weeks, not one person, maybe they're not that good, I don't know, but not one person said, where's our article? And in Pharaoh's scenario, the Bible says that the Pharaoh changed, a new Pharaoh came. Because at one time, the Israelites were in relationship with Egypt, great relationship.

And then it says a new Pharaoh came, and that Pharaoh was afraid that the Jews were growing in such an alarming rate that at some point, they'll try to take us over. And so the Bible tells us, black and white, how the Pharaoh turned them into slaves. It says the Pharaoh appointed taskmasters to give them tasks. And then a few decades passed, and all of a sudden, now they're slaves. And what I realized in my own life is that there are no taskmasters telling me that I need to produce. And then it hit me, I was like, I'm my own taskmaster. Somewhere, at some point, culture, church culture, American culture, something told me, and I came into agreement with a lie, is what I did, that if I don't produce, then I'm not achieving. If I don't produce, then I'm not succeeding. If I don't produce, then I'm not growing. And I did what we all do, is I connected my productivity to my value. And it's a dangerous place to go. It's tricky because we say things like, as long as I'm producing, then I can call it discipline. Well, I'm just a very disciplined person. And if I'm succeeding, then I can call that drive. I'm just really driven, you know? If we're growing, if things are doing well, then I can just put my chest out and say,

well, we have excellence. But what happens when God says, stop? Stop. And for me, maybe not you, for me, when I stop, what the Holy Spirit begins to show me is what I used to call drive. I'm just driven, I'm just disciplined. God's like, ah, you're actually a little insecure. That's what you really are. What I would say, it's excellence. When I stop, God says, it's ego. It's ego. And here's what I love about this. If you're like, oh, I don't know that I wanna hear that from the Lord, I'm good, I'll just keep working. Here's the beauty of this, y'all. The Holy Spirit's a gentleman. It's not shame, not ever when I rest, not one time do I ever feel shame. And if I do, guess what I know? I know that's not the Lord. That's the enemy coming to whisper lies. You should be ashamed of yourself. You're nobody, you're not doing enough, you need to do more. The Holy Spirit's not gonna do that to you. The Holy Spirit's the one that comes and says, hey, John, you're being insecure. You don't have to perform to be loved by your heavenly Father. The perfect example of this, we've talked about this

when we do the orphan heart, orphan spirit, we've talked about when Jesus is baptized, remember this story, Jesus is baptized, he comes up out of the water, the Bible says that the Holy Spirit descended like a dove and landed on him, it says the skies opened up and the Father in heaven said, this is my son. I don't know if that's how God's voice is, but I like to imagine it's like, you know, in whom I'm well pleased. So in one phrase, his heavenly Father gave him identity and intimacy. The mind-blowing part of all this is Jesus hasn't done anything yet. He has not turned the water into wine, he has not healed the lame, he has not raised the dead, he hasn't been crucified, he hasn't, I would think that on Easter morning, God's like, that's my boy, look what he did, I'm so proud of him. His Father looked at him and said, before you ever produce anything, you're accepted, you're my son, and I love you. And yet we all operate the opposite way. I gotta produce, I gotta achieve, I gotta perform, and then maybe, maybe, maybe I'll be accepted. And the truth is, rest isn't some reward you get for finally doing a final good job. Good job, now go on vacation, atta boy, good job. Now go rest, it's not.

Rest is. Rest is a spiritual practice that reminds us, okay, when we rest, what it should do is it reminds us that we're already enough before we ever did anything. And this is why rest is so important. All through the Bible, it talks about the refiner's fire, the refiner's fire, the refiner's fire, and the way they purify precious metals is they heat it up, the impurities rise to the surface, and then they scrape it off, and then they heat it up more, and they rise to the surface, they scrape it off, and then they heat it up more. And it's a parallel for how the Lord works on us, that every day we're getting closer and closer to Jesus. Every day, thank God I'm not what I was yesterday, and I'm gonna be better tomorrow than I was yesterday, so on and so forth. And almost always, we identify the refiner's fire as hard times, and sometimes it is. Sometimes that is the refiner's fire. Sometimes it's like your worst country song ever. My dog died, my wife left me, you know, and we identify the refiner's fire as tough times. I would present to you another refiner's fire is rest. I have found that when I stop, when I cease production, when I cease the churning and burning and all the things is when the Lord points out impurities in me. And then because the Holy Spirit's a gentleman, he doesn't beat him out of me, he just lets them rise to the surface,

and then I'll confess those, and then he is so sweet and so tender. The Bible says that it's the kindness of the Lord that leads us to repentance. And so he'll just lovingly come and scrape that off the top. So what I know is that every time I rest, something new is gonna be surfaced, and I'm okay with it, because next year I'll be a better pastor than I was this year. And this year I'm a better pastor than I was last year. Not because I'm that good, but because the Holy Spirit keeps revealing things to me. And that's kindness, y'all. That's grace. That's grace. Number two is this, number two is rest requires you to rely on God. When you rest, something is going to be required. So Exodus 20, we get the Ten Commandments, okay? Exodus 20, Ten Commandments. And one of those is Sabbath. In fact, he talks more about Sabbath in the Ten Commandments than all the other Ten Commandments combined, if that's not a hint for us. If you go to chapter 16, he begins to, you see the laboratory starting to happen before he ever gives the actual commandment in Exodus 20. You see it coming to fruition in Exodus 16.

It says this, verse four. It says, the Lord said to Moses, I will rain down bread from heaven to you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. Now watch this. In this way, I will test them and see whether they will follow my instruction. You might be able to say, and see whether they will follow my ways. Verse five, on the sixth day, they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other day. It's a simple instruction. Hey, work hard for six days. And this is really hard for the Israelites to lean into, and you have to understand why. It's because for their entire lives, all they have ever been taught was, if you don't produce, Pharaoh will punish you. If you don't produce, you will not be provided for. And then along comes God, and this is God's story is, if you trust me, stop producing. And this has to be just mind-blowing to them. So you want me to stop and just believe that you're gonna provide for me? They've never operated like that in their entire life. And then if you skip down to verse 27,

this is me, all right? Verse 27 is John Chastain. Here we go. Nevertheless, some of those stupid people went out on the seventh day to gather it and found none. I mean, that would be me. I'm waking up on the seventh day. Well, I guess I better get up and go out and get us some grub. And he goes to verse 28. Then the Lord said to Moses, how long will you refuse to keep my commands and my instructions? Bear in mind that the Lord has, oh, the Lord has given you Sabbath. There's another passage that says, Jesus says, Sabbath is for you, not you for the Sabbath. Sabbath is a gift that we just get to go out and pick it up off the ground. ground. That is why on the sixth day he gives you bread for two days. Everyone is to stay where they are, stay where they are, stay where they are on the seventh day. No one is to go out. So the people rested on the seventh day. Sometimes it's easier to trust what I can gather than what God promised for me. So every Sabbath, whatever day your Sabbath is, my Sabbath is a Friday. Every Sabbath is to be a reminder to you that you are no longer a slave. You don't have to produce to be a child of God. We trust the Lord. Resting is a part of learning how to trust the Lord. And the hardest part of rest isn't slowing down. It's trusting that when I slow down, God's still working. God's still working on my behalf. And last but not least, number three, number three is rest returns you to your rightful place. Rest returns you to your rightful place. So go with me to Matthew 11. Matthew 11. This is Jesus in verse 28. It says this, it says, then Jesus said, come to me,

all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. And I used to always read this verse and be like, yeah, hey, if you're busy, if you've been going through some hard times, you know, your worst country song ever, come to Jesus and he's going to make you feel better. Like he's going to give you rest. And I don't know that that's what Jesus is exclusively saying. Because if it was, he would say, hey, come to me and I will give you a nap. If you're weary, come to me and I will give you a vacation. I think there's more to it than that. I think there's this, if you're exhausted from producing and producing and producing and trying to keep up with whatever fabricated lie we've come into agreement with, if you're sick and tired of that, come to me. It's like this invitation. And rest, what rest does is it returns us, it recalibrates us back to our rightful place in King Jesus's lap. Because for me, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I am grinding, producing, conquering, achieving. I am working as though I'm serving King Jesus. And that requires excellence, and it requires hard work, and it requires sweat and tears. But at least once a week, I've got to go back to my rightful place and climb up back in King Jesus's lap and say, but I am not doing any of that out of a necessity for your love. It's a recalibration. Verse 29 says, Jesus says, take my yoke upon you and let me teach you. He's like, let me teach you. I want to teach you, but you won't come back to me. You won't come home to rest and find rest. I want to teach you. He says, I'm humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. So John 15, one more passage. John 15, many of us know this passage well. John 15, five, this is Jesus's words. I want to read fast, because I'm going to get to verse eight. Verse five says, I'm the vine, you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing. If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers. Such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me, just come home. Just come to me. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you. This is to my father's glory. Now listen, let me slow down. That you bear much fruit. Now listen to this, showing yourself to be my disciples. So Jesus is saying, if you want to be one of my followers, if you want to be a follower of the way, you practice the principles of the way. I'm like, yes, okay, what is it? Okay, if you want to be my disciple, you got to bear much fruit. Okay, well, I better get busy. I better get to it. I better get to work. I got to, I got to, I got to

sweat and I just got to work all day every day until morning tonight. No, let's, let's go back to the beginning of the verse five. How do we bear fruit? I'm the vine, you are the branches. If you remain in me, you will bear fruit. So, let me get this straight, Jesus, I just have to be a branch. This is like, this is the ultimate assault on a production-based identity. Like, I don't even know that I like that verse. Surely, to be one of your disciples, I gotta do more than just be a branch and just stay connected to the vine. It's like, if you come to me, I will give you rest. Guess what? The branch still produces fruit. The branch still has effort and has to blossom and has to produce fruit, but it does it from a place of being connected to the vine. And I love, Pastor Oscar always says this, and I love that he says it this way. He's like, you've never walked through a vineyard and heard the branches on the vines, like, grunting, like, oh, we're just trying to produce fruit over here. They just produce fruit because they're connected to the vine. So our challenge, enough content for the day. We're done with content. Our challenge for this week is we're going to practice rest. And I don't know your rhythm. I don't know your life. Some of you are holding down four jobs, trying to keep your head above water, and I wanna be sensitive to that, okay? There are seasons where we just have to go crazy, and you're trying to put food on the table. I'm sensitive to this. So for you, it may be an hour on a Sunday afternoon. It may be two hours. It may be an evening.

It may be, maybe it's a day. Some of you need to take a week. And here's my encouragement to you is get back up, stop, stop. And you're, my immediate, like, temptation when I stop is to fill the silence with something, like, I gotta do something. I gotta listen to a podcast, you know? I gotta get thirsty. I gotta read something. I gotta do something. My encouragement to you is to turn off your phone. Yeah, I know, crazy, huh? Turn off your phone. Turn off your email, even if it's just for an hour, and just be in the presence of God. No catching up. Never say, well, it's, we finally got time to clean out the garage. Let's do it real quick. No, no, stop, stop. That's the practice. And then when we stop, what we're gonna do, we're not just gonna stop and sit there and stare at the wall. We're gonna pay attention to what this might be exposing in me. And let me tell you how it's gonna bubble up, because this is how it bubbles up in me. It bubbles up like almost an anxiousness. Like, you almost feel anxious, because you sit, and you're just like, there's gotta be something. I'm not allowed to do this. There's gotta be something. There's dishes in the sink. I can't just leave them there. Can I get amen, ladies?

Like, if I don't do it, nobody will. Let them sit. Let them sit. Not forever. Calm down. Let them sit. And just watch what starts bubbling up in your heart, and say, Lord, what impurities are you trying to refine? And I want you to ask the Holy Spirit to join you in this endeavor, and say, Holy Spirit Holy Spirit, reveal to me the things in me that I have associated as production equals value. And what work do you want to do in me? And I can tell you this, whatever begins to surface when you stop will tell you something about what's driving you, if you'll pay attention. Okay? The Lord is trying to speak to us. So Sabbath is not just about recovery. Sabbath rest is about diagnosis. He will diagnose you if you'll stop. It'll show you where you're not trusting the Lord. It'll show you where you're getting misidentification, your identity formation. If you resist Pharaoh, your inner Pharaoh, okay? Close your eyes with me for just a moment. Lord, I pray for your children. Teach us. That's what Jesus said in this passage that we just read. He says, come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. The Bible says that you will teach us. You will teach us. So Father, starting tomorrow, as we lean in to this practice of rest, God, I pray that

it would not just be to reduce. to rejuvenate us, it would be to reveal us. So we invite the Holy Spirit, and if you don't want this part, plug your ears. Because we invite the Holy Spirit to come and to reveal the areas of our life where we have tried to become productive and tie that to our value. We're so grateful that you joined us today. At Victory, we pray big prayers to a big God, and we expect big results. If you would like to receive prayer, you can submit a prayer request by visiting victory.church slash pray. If this message or any of our messages have impacted your life, and you would like to partner with us through giving, you can do so at victory.church slash give. Thank you again for joining us. At Victory Church, we live life to the full.