Show notes
So many people in this world are so … tired. Exhausted. And it doesn’t matter how clever you are, how emotionally resilient you or how strong you might be … when you’re tired, you’re just not functioning at your best. When you’re tired, you’re simply not enjoying life. GOD’S IDEAL FOR THEE AND ME Last week on the programme we kicked off a new series of messages called, “O God I Need a Rest,” because this is what so many, many people need – a rest. So many people are tired, too tired, to have quality time with their friends or their family; too tired to be truly part of a faith community; too tired to enjoy life; too tired, well, just too tired. And here’s the funny thing: we just keep on keeping on – same commute, same pressures at work, come home at night exhausted, up the next morning, Friday – weekend, collapse, back on Monday again. We just keep going – we know something is wrong – we know life shouldn’t be like this but it is and that’s it and there’s nothing I can do about it, so I just have to keep on going. I’m trapped on this treadmill that I can’t get off. And you don’t hear too many people talking about this problem either – we know we are all tired, just get on with it. Now I have absolutely nothing against hard work, but where’s the balance; where’s the joy; what’s the point? Today I’d like to share with you that this exhaustion; this tiredness is not God’s plan for our lives. As we saw last week, it says in Psalm 127: It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil, for God gives sleep to those whom he loves. In other words, God wants us to have a rest. That’s why we are talking about rest – a simple straight forward ‘how to’; how to enter into God’s rest – how to live smack, bang in the centre of God’s peace. Last week on the programme we saw that God, after His mighty act of creation, rested and that He thought that, that day of rest was so important that He commanded His people to keep a Sabbath day, set apart for Him. Now He didn’t rest because He was exhausted; He rested to sit back and enjoy His creation. So for God, right up front there, is a simple pattern of work and rest. You and I we need both and actually that wonderful creation; that sense of work and then enjoying this world, that’s something He’s also gifted to us – humanity. See sometimes, we imagine that God’s blessing and His goodness and His whole rest and peace thing can’t possibly be for us. But come and have a look with me at what He did with all He created – let this rock your sock off! Genesis chapter 1, beginning at verse 26: Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the cattle, over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth’. God said, ‘See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.’ And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.’ And so it was. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning on the sixth day. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. (Genesis 2:2-3) There it is! God creates this stunning universe, hands it over for the man and the woman, for you and for me, to enjoy that creation. ‘Here, here, it’s yours, subdue it, till it or farm it, be fruitful, multiply and enjoy.’ See God only rests once He’s created everything and given it away to the people; to the man and the woman – both of them made in His image. That’s the joy He has in His creation. And then in Genesis chapter 2, verse 15: The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and to keep it. And He gives the man a woman to be his wife, his partner and they enjoy this life in the Garden, safe, at rest, working, resting in relationship with God. That was God’s original plan for His people – that He would be their God and that they would be His people – safe and at rest. Now we know that Adam and Eve ruined that and we will look at that later on in the programme but for now let’s just stick with God’s original plan. It was never His plan for us to be out of close relationship and fellowship with Him or with each other. It was never His plan for us to be amid strife and conflict. It was never His plan for us to be carrying around heavy burdens. It was never His plan to see you and me groaning under the burden of a weight that was crushing us. Those things were never, ever His first and His best plan for us. What’s befallen us has done so because Adam and Eve and then you and me, in our turn; we all in our own way, in our own time, have turned our backs on God. As I said, that’s for later. But if you are somehow imagining that God couldn’t possibly bring you peace and rest into your life, then it’s time to think again. Look at what He did – He created the whole universe, handed it over to Adam and Eve; to us, to humanity, to enjoy – both to work and to rest, just as God Himself had done. This is the point I believe God wants us to get today; that right from the very, very, very beginning, His plan was a good one. And here’s the thing: there’s a reason why they call Jesus ‘The Saviour.’ A lot of people wonder to themselves, ‘What could He possibly save me from? I’m not lost, I’m not in trouble,’ and so they conclude they don’t need Jesus. And sadly, let me say, all too often, these are the very same people who are carrying around those heavy burdens. These are the very same people who are being crushed under the yoke of slavery to their sin. That’s why Jesus came; that’s why Jesus said – Matthew chapter 11, beginning at verse 29 – He said: Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, 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. (Matthew 11:29-30) God has heard the cry of His people and He has come to do something about it – that’s His plan for you and for me. BOOTED OUT OF THE GARDEN Every now and then I get to thinking, ‘God, why am I so tired? Why do I have to work so hard?’ I’m sure that’s a thought that’s gone through your mind just once or twice as well. And when we are in the middle of this tiredness and exhaustion, we keep going and we keep going and through our blurry eyes, it seems we see things just from a human perspective – a purely physical and emotional perspective. The fact that sometimes life is just hard work and we are tired – ‘Well, that’s how it is! What alternative do I have? I’ll just keep on going till I drop.’ Right? But tiredness and exhaustion; they’re not just human; they’re not just physical and emotional. There’s a deep spiritual dimension to hard work and exhaustion – a dimension that starts almost at the beginning of time – unless we get that and deal with that, no amount of physical rest is going to bring rest into our lives. Before the break we had a bit of a look at God’s ideal plan for humanity – straight out of Genesis chapters 1 and 2 in the Bible. God made this amazing, utterly stunning creation, the universe; all the stars and the planets and here on earth, the land and the water and the animals and the plants and of course people and He put us, Adam and Eve, into the creation; into the Garden to work it and to enjoy it. See, some people think that the whole working bit didn’t happen until after the fall; after Adam and Eve ate the ‘apple’ that they shouldn’t have eaten. But it’s not true – listen again – Genesis chapter 2, verse 15: The Lord God took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden to till it and keep it. So, there was work and rest, together, making up a perfect existence for Adam and Eve. But we know the story, that Adam and Eve did the one thing that God told them not to do – they ate that ‘apple’ from that one tree that God had forbidden – the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Smack, bang, right in the middle of the Garden. They did what you and I do. God gives us everything He has created and says, ‘Look, here – there you go, enjoy it.’ And He puts boundaries around just this tiny portion of that. He calls that ‘sin’, He sets it off-limits because it will hurt us and tells us not to go there but we go there anyway. Not His plan but He wants to give us a choice to love and obey Him or to reject and disobey Him. And as sure as God made those little green apples, we chose the latter; just like Adam and Eve before us and the moment they did that, everything started to come apart. Even before God showed up to talk to them, they were ashamed in front of one another and they ran and hid from God. And God came and spoke to them and after He dealt with the tempter, the serpent. Have a listen. To the woman He said – this comes from Genesis chapter 3, beginning at verse 16: To the woman he said, ‘I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.’ And to the man he said, ‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return’. (Genesis 3:16-19) So before they rebelled against God, there was work. They tilled and kept the Garden – that literally means they had to do labour in it to work it and look after it. But after the rebellion of Adam and Eve against God, tilling turns to toiling – “… in toil you shall eat of the ground all the days of your life.” The original Hebrew word there means ‘pain, labour, hardship, sorrow, toil’ and in my book, those things lead to exhaustion. Do you see now the spiritual dimension of what’s going on when we are slogging our guts out day after day, when instead of tilling we are toiling. Things only became difficult for the man and the woman when they rebelled against God. That’s why things are tough sometimes in this world – we live on the other side of that. That was never the original plan but toil replaced tilling after humanity rebelled against God. And let me say to you today, still, whenever we rebel against God; whenever we pull in the opposite direction to God; whenever we go to that tiny roped off area called ‘sin’ where He tells us not to go, I can absolutely guarantee that toil will come – and with toil, pain and sorrow and with those, exhaustion. Now you might say to me, ‘Berni, that may well be, but does that mean if I honour God; if I obey God, will my life be a bed of roses? Because that’s what I’ve been doing and it ain’t so?’ And the answer is, ‘No, not always,’ because we live in a world where humanity has rejected God and sometimes, you and I have to live through the consequences of other peoples’ rebellion against God and that hurts. Great! So what, if anything useful, do we learn from God here, about the link between sin and exhaustion? Well, simply this: there are plenty of things out there in this world that you and I have no control over – sickness, disease, wars, riots, economic failures, other peoples’ greed – lots of things out there; things that can impact our lives. Let me tell you something: we do have control over our own sin and we can join hands with God to deal with our own sin and our own rebellion, till we progressively get rid of negative impact of that sin in our lives, we start to discover the rest of God. This is what I have found: there seems to be a power, a power of God, the presence of the Spirit of God in our lives that enables us to deal with the other stuff when we are living our lives in obedience to God. Time and time again I have found that when I am living in obedience to God, then when the difficult things do come from the things out there I can’t control, I’m able to walk through them with a peace and a confidence I just never had before. Sin, my friend, leads to toil. Toil equals pain, sorrow and hardship and that’s what makes us tired – that’s the spiritual dimension; that’s the bad news but after the short break we are going to take a look at the good news. GOD’S REST IS STILL AVAILABLE TO US I have some good news – in fact, I have some fantastic news for you. God knows the problem and He wants to give us a rest and not just any kind of rest – His rest! It’s something that sometimes we don’t expect of God. We have our spirituality over here in this box and over there in that box we have our day-to-day lives. For many people, they never make the connection between their spirituality; their faith in God, on the one hand and their day-to-day lives on the other – between God and life; between God and their tiredness and exhaustion. Well may they exclaim, ‘Oh God, I need a rest!’ But mostly they don’t expect an answer. I want to show you right now that God does have an answer – that He plans to answer us and He wants to deal with our tiredness. This is where the rubber hits the road. Now what we have been talking about is that God’s plan for our lives is a good one and how humanity, you and I, ended up snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory. In a nutshell, Genesis chapter 1, God creates this ammaazzing universe – light, heavens, earth, day, night, oceans, land, plants, animals and you and me – complete splendour in His creation. Have a look around! And then He puts us; you and me in the middle of it all; and gives it away; He gives it to us – everything He’s created. On the seventh day God rested, not because He was exhausted but to enjoy all that He’d done and all that He’d given away to you and me – to delight in that. Then Genesis chapter 2, verse 15, He tells us that we are called to till the land and look after it – there is work and there is rest. God’s perfect plan is a perfect relationship with Him – both working and resting. But … and this is the point that we arrived at earlier, then we blew it – at least Adam and Eve did. They did the one thing that God told them not to do – they ate that ‘apple’ from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and everything from that point; all of God’s good and perfect plan for humanity started to unravel. So we go from a good and perfect plan to toiling and suffering. That’s what happened when humanity rejected God. Look around the world – sin ushered in pain and suffering and toiling and exhaustion. That’s the bad news, but here’s the good news! The good news is that God wants us to experience His rest and that rest, that peace has everything to do with us living in obedience to Him. Have a listen – the writer of the New Testament Book of Hebrews has just gone through a fairly lengthy explanation of how the rebellion of Israel during the Exodus in the wilderness, stopped them from entering God’s rest. Have a read for yourself Hebrews chapter 3. Now let’s pick it up in chapter 4 and listen carefully. Hebrews chapter 4, beginning at verse 1: Therefore, while the promise of entering God’s rest is still open, let us take care that none of us should seem to have failed to reach it. For indeed the good news came to us just as to them; but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened. For we who have believed enter that rest, just as God has said, “As in my anger I swore, ‘They shall not enter my rest,’” though his works were finished at the foundation of the world. For in one place it speaks about the seventh day as follows, “And God rested on the seventh day from all his works.” And again in this place it says, “They shall not enter my rest.” Since therefore it remains open for some to enter it, and those who formerly received the good news failed to enter because of disobedience, again he sets a certain day—“today” – saying through David much later, in the words already quoted, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.” For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not speak later about another day. So then, a Sabbath rest still remains for the people of God; for those who enter God’s rest also cease from their labours as God did from his. Let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one may fall through disobedience such as theirs. (Hebrews 4:1-11) Now, the logic of the writer of this letter of Hebrews uses there makes you and I feel just a bit convoluted. He’s providing an argument that his readers would have understood back in the first century, with their historical mindset. But it’s a little bit more obscure to you and me, here and now. But here’s the gist of what he’s saying: what God is indeed saying to you and me through this passage is that all the Israelite … all of them; hundreds of thousands, perhaps well over a million, who fled from Egypt – all of them, bar two, perished in the desert. They failed to reach the Promised Land after that forty-year exodus. They failed to enter into God’s rest – this land of milk and honey – because of their disobedience. Let that stand as a lesson to you and to me. Disobedience means that we won’t end up in God’s promises and in God’s rest. That’s what the writer of Hebrews is saying here. And the punch line … the whole point of what God is saying to you and me, right here and now, comes in just the last couple of verses – verses 9 and 10 of Hebrews chapter 4: So then, a Sabbath rest still remains for the people of God; for those who enter God’s rest also cease from their labours just as God did from his. Let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one may fall through such disobedience as theirs. God’s plan is for each one of us to know a rest that goes way beyond a day or two off each week … a rest that goes way beyond a week or two of holidays every year. It’s a deep abiding peaceful rest; entering the rest of God; a blessed rest from toil and trouble. The sort of rest that can happen in the middle of the most terrible of life’s storms when we experience a peace that just doesn’t make sense. All the burdens we have been carrying around just lift of our shoulders and we don’t have to worry in this world anymore. This is not me heading off on some flight of fancy, this is exactly what God says to us in His Word. Have a listen. Isaiah chapter 40, beginning at verse 28: Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. (Isaiah 40: 28-31) You see that’s exactly what God promises us – rest, peace, rejuvenation when we come into a loving relationship of obedience with Him. I think this is great news! I mean a fantastic place to finish off this week. And it’s good news that we will be talking a lot more on the programme again next week when we take a look at exactly how to enter into this rest that’s available to God’s people.
