Well, again, good morning, everybody. It's good to be together on this festive day of rest, isn't it? All right. Well, let me just open us up in a word of prayer while we're finding our seats. Father, we thank you as we gather today on this day that you've set apart to worship you and to fellowship together and to meet with you. Father, we thank you for this time. We pray that this Sunday school class would be a blessing to people here and that we'd be able to learn from your word as you teach us. about the priority of rest in our life and that we would become good stewards of the time in our life and that rest time as well. Father, we ask that you would open our minds up to your word so that we can hear from you. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. Yeah, so we're in week nine of our series on stewardship. This one's about God's purposes for rest. Last week, we talked about God's purposes for our stewardship of time. You all remember what a steward is, right? a manager, someone who takes care of what's been given to him or her. We are stewards of everything that God gives to us. Last time we looked at how to steward our time, that was, if you remember, what are the best ways to steward our time? Trusting God, loving others, wisely prioritizing our time, and then just even accepting our limits in the way that we steward our time. We can't do everything. We can't even do many things. But God is able to do that. So this time we're going to focus on God's purpose for us in resting. That's maybe a new idea for you. There's a good reason for this. It's rest where we really deal with that question is who owns my time? Much of the time we're scurrying around doing things that we have to do, right? And we just say we have to do those things. We have to work. We have to commute, many of us. We have to work at home. We have to clean. Those things we have to do. And those things we do, yes, indeed, we do have to do those. But when it comes to rest, we really do find times in our day when we really have to steward that for the Lord. Every minute we have is a trust from God. When it comes to rest, sometimes we resist that a little bit because we may think of rest, and this is the question on the top of your sheet here. Yeah, I mean definitely when it comes to rest, we might think about Well, rest is really, that is really me time. I mean, there's a lot of time during the day when I just have to do all these things. Is rest really me time? Well, if you look at the purpose of rest that's suggested here, the purpose of rest is to recharge us for the real work that God gives us to do. What do you think of that? How do you reflect on that? Is that your view of rest? Is there something wrong with that? There's a clue. It says, what's wrong with this statement? Any ideas? It makes it sound like that's not something God gave us to do. Right, right. It makes it sound like God doesn't want us to rest. Or to rest so that we can do what he gave us to do, but he committed us to rest like the Sabbath star. Right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's exactly it. So basically, rest is part of the real work that God gives us to do. In looking and preparing for this study, it's very clear that a person without work cannot become a real person. At the same time, a person without rest cannot become really what God wants him or her to be either. Both are critically important, rest and work. So yeah, it's a very important theme, very critical to rest. We often applaud people who are hard workers, right? We say, he's a really hard worker. Do we look at someone who really knows how to use their rest well and say, he's a really good rester, or he really does the right thing with the rest? We should look at both of those things. Too often, we think maybe you're suspicious of rest. Do you think there's something suspect about rest, maybe? Or it's a time of non-productivity? Usually, when you think about productivity economically, it's work versus time. And if you're taking time out, is that productive? Isn't human existence, some people think it's just a matter of mere functioning. As if we're meat machines and we just have to keep producing. As if we're a cog in some kind of a giant wheel or running the term is the rat race, the rats on those little Hamster wheels, yeah, thank you. The hamster race, yeah. Do you think people today are losing their capability for true rest? Well, I hope we can put this in some right perspective today. There was a famous quote from Augustine where he wrote about our longing for rest and fulfillment when he said, to God, this was a prayer, you have made us for yourself and our heart is restless until it finds rest in you. So we're going to look at, first of all, we're going to look at what the Bible says about rest, all the different parts about rest from the scriptures. And then without foundation in place, we'll look at God's purposes for rest in our lives. And then we'll look at our stewardship of rest. So let's start with the Bible in this. Well, where's the first place in the Bible that we read about rest? creation. Exactly. Genesis 2, it says, Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, this is verse 1, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation. So we can learn some things here. First of all, God completed His work of creation. Six days and everything was perfect and very good. And He completed that work. The seventh day you see is not like the sixth. It has no end actually. The seventh day is a day that goes on. The other days it says there was evening, there was morning, this day. On the seventh day it went on. It's eternal. And you can see that even when God rests on the seventh day, he's still working, right? He's working through providence and in all of the things that he's working out in his world and in our lives, he's still working. So as he's resting from creation and there's no creation happening anymore, he's still working. So rest sometimes is just a change from one kind of work to another type of work. So we'll see in this, as we study through the scriptures, we'll see how God has always been wanting to share his rest with his people. We're going to start, and this kind of is a bit of a Bible, kind of a summary through the scriptures. You know, in the next chapter, after the fall of man, God did promise a Savior who would come and strike the devil dead and destroy all the devil's works. In chapter 12 of Genesis, that's when God He begins to create a culture and an ethnicity with one people, right? You know where that started. He called Abraham, and he just made to Abraham these earth-shattering and universe-shattering promises that he's going to become a great nation and that all families on earth will be blessed through him, especially and only through the seed of Abraham, who is going to grow up in this nation, our Lord Jesus Christ. Later in Exodus, God shows how He redeems His people from slavery. In our time, it's slavery from sin, but in the book of Exodus, He took them out of slavery in Egypt. And where was He going to bring them? To a land where they could have rest. Yeah, the promised land of Canaan. And when he's there, he's going to govern them with good laws, including the Sabbath, which regulates and commands them to take this rest. So in this land of Canaan, there would eventually come a Savior, who's the seed of Abraham, and he would make this stunning claim himself. He said, the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. And that's really a staggering claim deity by the Lord Jesus Christ, isn't it? That He's Lord of the Sabbath. He is Lord and our God. So rest. The next major appearance we have is in the book of Exodus after Genesis. And here God commands the idea of a Sabbath rest. Exodus is not the first time this appears. It does appear in the book of Genesis. The Hebrew word for Sabbath is sabbat, and it means to stop or to cease. So we normally think of a Sabbath rest as something that happens once a week, right? But Israel had a Sabbath for the Day of Atonement. They even had Sabbath years. Even the year of Jubilee was like a, every 50 years, it was like a Sabbath of Sabbath of years. So this amazing number 7 just keeps appearing in the law that God gave to Israel to regulate their use of time. So we're gonna look at some of the reasons why the Sabbath was important, but not just why it was important, why it is still important for us today. So just, if I use the word was, also think of is. The Sabbath is very important for us today. It is a command of God. It was a command and is a sign of God's covenant with his people. So he called them out of Egypt. He gave them this law, the fourth commandment. And it was a sign of his covenant. It shows that his people are different from all the nations around them who did not carry this out. It's also interesting to note that the two times that the Ten Commandments are given in the Book of Exodus and the Deuteronomy, a different reason for the Sabbath is given. In Exodus 20 it says, in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. So here it talks about how God rested in creation and the implication is He wants us to share in His rest. And in the book of Deuteronomy it's a little different. He said, you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore, the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day. So here Israel had to keep the Sabbath because it reminded them that God had delivered them from their slavery in Egypt and was taking them to this promised land. The Ten Commandments are a moral law that encapsulate for us what God calls us to do. They are an absolute guide to life. We studied when we were in the Orthodox Baptist Catechism, we had a section where we went through all of the Ten Commandments. They are duties for us. They are delightful duties. God gives them to us as commands, but when we practice them, our lives get far better. These kind of commands also restrain sin in our lives, and they do drive us for our need for the Savior, because we fall so short of them. In Exodus 31, it says, he gave to Moses, that is the Lord, when he had finished speaking with him on Mount Sinai, the two tablets of the testimony, tablets of stone written with the finger of God. So the finger of God just shows God's immediate work in giving these moral commands to his people. The finger of God, that's when, you also see that when Moses was foiling the magicians of Egypt, when he was talking to Pharaoh, and they said, this is the finger of God, when they saw how God was immediately working. And also, Jesus Christ, in his ministry, when he was casting out demons, he said, the demons are being cast out by the finger of God. That's a theme that goes throughout scripture. So the Sabbath was more than a ceremonial law for Israel because the Sabbath predates the ceremonies. God gave all these laws to Moses about the tabernacle and the priesthood and all the sacrifices. Those are the ceremonial laws that are truly and completely fulfilled in Jesus Christ. The Sabbath actually predated that. There's only one thing that could change the day. As you know, in the Old Testament, it was the sixth day of the week, the last day of the week. Now we practice the first day of the week. Anybody knows what that one thing is that could change that day that God set so firm in the Old Testament? Yeah, the resurrection of the son of God. God can change. There's a continuity with the Old Testament and a slight discontinuity there because God made everything new in the resurrection. So we read in the book of Revelation chapter one, this is when John is in the spirit on the Lord's day. And that term is used, the Lord's day. A better translation is the lordly day, the royal day, the day that belongs to the Lord. So for Israel, none of these reasons for resting on the Sabbath was meant to be a ceasing of all activity. And it's the same way for us. They're stopping one kind of work, which is their mundane work of agriculture and the like. But this is a day that we can stop that and tend to this work of worship that God has for us. If we didn't, if we just stayed in bed on the Sabbath, we wouldn't work the way that God wants us to work here, which is a work of fellowship and worship. You know, the word liturgy, that's something we call our order of service. That literally means in Greek, the people's work. So that's what we do on the Sabbath is we go and worship the Lord. The Sabbath for Israel, they had songs that were to be sung on the Sabbath. And this is just a day where they remembered the creation and their deliverance from Egypt. God blessed those who observed it. He blesses those today who observe his Sabbath. And it was to be a joy for God's people then and now. Then and now, the Sabbath has not been obsoleted. If you ever talk to a hiring manager and you're interested in taking a new job, you want to know the benefits, right? At some point, maybe not your first conversation. Don't do that. When you're talking about the benefits, you want to know, if it's a salary job, how many vacation days do I get per year? Well, God gives us a holiday every week, right? Every single week, he gives us a holiday, a holy day, the Sabbath. So that's a great benefit. So God was delivering his people from slavery, and he brought them into the promised land. And that was a kind of rest, rest from their enemies, rest from tyrant nations like Egypt with Pharaoh. In Deuteronomy 12, he said, So this came in the promised land. And his plan for his people there was to enter into that rest. And by the way, God also gave them other rests called the feasts. where three times a year they were to assemble all the people of Israel to the place that God had set for them, that's what it says in Deuteronomy, gather together for the Feast of the Passover, the Feast of Weeks, the Feast of Booths. This was going to be giant celebration in Israel where they all came together. They'd gather there as we looked at the Psalms of Ascent with our preaching last year. You know, they would all go up together in pilgrimage going up to the place that God said eventually he said Jerusalem to be that place. They sing songs like, Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together as they went up there. That was a big people movement in Israel. It was a literal vacation, right? They left. They vacated their homes. They got together for this time of celebration. Well, as you may know, the people who were in the desert failed to reach the promised land. And that was because of their unbelief. Psalm 95 talks about this. This is actually quoted in the New Testament. This is something that God wants us to know, but in Psalm 95 it says, today if you hear his voice, do not harden your heart as they did at Meribah and Massah in the desert. Their fathers tested and tried him because even though they saw what God did, and they were not able to enter that rest due to their rebellion. So Israel had a spotty track record at best at having rest in their land. They fell into that cycle of they were doing well. They got complacent. They fell into idolatry. They cried out to the Lord. The Lord saved them with a deliverer, and he gave them blessing again. And that blessing went back to blessing and prosperity and complacency. So that was the cycle of Israel. And so they really never won rest in the promised land that lasted very long. Hebrews 4.8 says, for if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on. So then there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God's rest has also rested from his works as God did from his. So there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. When the Lord Jesus Christ came, he came to give that final rest to his people. His famous words are in Matthew 11, 28, when he said, come to me, you know this right, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. It's through faith in Jesus Christ that we rely on His work. He did work for us so that we can rest. That's central to the gospel message. So it's just amazing to see how this concept of rest just keeps coming through and through scripture. Rest is as vital to our lives as work. So Hebrews 4.3 says, we who have believed enter that rest. So we come to know this kind of security in Jesus Christ when we come into a right relationship with God through Him. It even speaks in the book of Revelation of a future rest. It says, blessed indeed says the spirit that they may, these are those who die in the Lord, that they may rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them. So basically, we see God's rest from Genesis to Revelation. And that's great for for us to know this. There's just one more theme in scripture we want to look at before we move on. And that's kind of the theme that goes through it. It's the theme of physical rest that we get. So that involves sleep, for example. Sleep just shows us our difference from God, that we're not like God. I know when I was a young man, sometimes a long time ago, I was just a little bit angry that I had to sleep. But, yeah, it's just a reality. We all have to do that. The Psalms just contain sleeping in so many places where it says, you know, I lie down and sleep in peace, for the Lord sustains me. The Lord God in Israel, though, He doesn't slumber or sleep like we have to. We all have to do that. The Lord grants sleep to those He loves. So basically, at the end of the day, our security is not with our circumstances. We trust in the Lord. We trust that as we sleep, God will sustain us and care for us until we wake the next morning. So our main takeaways from this scripture overview is that rest in the Bible is mainly about having a right relationship with God and being reconciled to Him. For those people who persisted in unbelief, it actually says God's wrath rests on them. But if we live by faith in Jesus, his spirit rests on us. So we shouldn't just think about rest in the Lord's day as being rest for us, but they really point to a greater rest that God has for us. Secondly, resting in the Bible isn't just a matter of ceasing our activity and just laying back and doing nothing. It's changing our activity to something else. We move on to doing other things in our rest time, not just sitting on a cloud. Finally, rest in the Bible shows us more of who God is and the way we are. We are so different from God. We need physical rest to recover. Definitely in the sense of the question on your handout, we do need to recharge our batteries through rest, as we'll get to in this next section on the purpose of rest. So we need to Think about how everything we do is a stewardship from God, including our time, including our rest. So the rest that we all, I trust, had last night was a blessing from Him. It belonged to Him. The time you'll spend playing some game with each other, that's time that He gives you as well. We're all His stewards. Someday we'll have to give an account for our stewardship. Ephesians 5.16, we looked at that last week. Make the best use of your time. With the older translation, redeem the time for the days are evil. So what are some reasons that it's good to rest? Well, first of all, rest does help us to get recharged for other types of labor. It's very helpful and necessary. According to the book, The Gulag Archipelago, one of the worst tortures in Soviet Russia was simply sleep deprivation. The goal was to break the prisoner psychologically and physically by doing that. At that point, they would be willing to sign almost any confession, no matter how fabricated. This is what the author of that wrote. These interrogations went on for weeks, sometimes months. The main method was simple, not to let the prisoner sleep. You stand there swaying while they keep asking the same questions. After three days without sleep, your legs turn to cotton, your head swims, and you're ready to confess to anything. And I know there are many of us here who actually do struggle with sleep insomnia. I would just say I'm sorry for that and I would pray for you that the Lord would sustain you through that. I know that's a very difficult thing. So sleep does help us rejuvenate so we can be productive again. It also shows our dependence on God. As we looked at in Psalm 121, my help comes from the Lord. He who keeps Israel will never slumber or sleep. It just shows that God doesn't need us to do his work. I don't know if you've read articles about these new CEOs who somehow sleep five hours a night, and so they can be productive the other, I don't know, 19 or whatever. God accomplishes far more than we can do when we sleep. And it's just, even when you see the Sabbath, I mean, when we put our work down, you know, our crops still grow if we're farmers, our sheep can still eat. I mean, there's an amazing amount of productivity in this world that God maintains even as we sleep. Even our limitations are a gift from God, even when you look at our service for Him. As Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians, I will boast about my weaknesses, right? I will boast more gladly in my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ will rest on me." Oh, there we see rest again. So the power of Christ rests on people who are weak. Isaiah says, God does not grow faint or weary. He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might, he increases strength. Even the youth shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall fall exhausted, but they who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength. So I know in our area, there's a lot of people who do the opposite. They resent, maybe resent the need for sleep. Productivity is the catch word for so many people. We try to burn the candle at both ends, and sometimes it just becomes only with great reluctance that some stumble into bed each evening. And a lot of people feel guilty for resting. So if you're the person who feels like that, just think about what the scriptures say. It really encourages us to think differently about rest and how important rest is. And we'll talk about some of those reasons just in a few minutes here. The Lord Jesus said, who of you by being anxious can add even a single hour to your life? So we can joyfully accept our limitations and trust in God through that. A third thing is that rest encourages us to enjoy God. What is the chief end of man? Chief goal of man? To enjoy God, to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. That's the Westminster Catechism. So that's what we're doing right now. Rest helps us to delight in the goodness of God, and it allows us to set aside time from our daily work. Just like we're doing today, we're going to corporate worship. Rest throughout this day, we remind ourselves of God's truth, and our spirits are refreshed today. On Sunday, we sometimes do these works. They're called traditionally the works of mercy and necessity. Christ told us about if someone's ox falls into a ditch on a Sabbath, you pull it up. That's the same thing for us today. We do works of mercy to other people and the works of necessity that we simply have to do on Sunday to get through the day. But it is a day of rest and worship. Is Sunday your favorite day of the week? I'll just ask that question. Anyone? Or do you love Monday? No? OK. Why is it your favorite day of the week if it is? Because I get to rest. Because you get to rest. Great. Yeah. And we worship the Lord, yeah. Yeah, I can't say that I keep this Sabbath or keep Sunday as well as I should. And, you know, I'm a beginner at this, but I mean this is a wonderful day to meet together with our brothers and sisters, to worship the Lord, to hear Yeah, to hear preaching that's prepared for us, to sit at the Lord's table together in His presence, and the rest of the day to fellowship, meditate on His Word. This is a glorious day, and it comes up every week. That's our holiday that comes up every week from the Lord. So there's other things we can do to enjoy God in our rest. We can do a lot of things, even in our leisure time, that glorify God. And I think there's a verse that we've also quoted in this section. This is 1 Timothy 4, 4, where the Apostle Paul says, everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving. Did you get that? Everything God has created is good, and we can enjoy it. as long as it's received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God in prayer. So nothing's to be rejected in God's world. In rest, sometimes we can It's great to be amazed at things. If we study things or talk with others, we can learn new things. Even if we can't apprehend them completely or comprehend them, at least we can learn about things and have the sense of wonder that sometimes just escapes us if work is all we do all the time. So there's things like walking, taking a walk. I know many of you love to take walks or go hiking in the mountains, even going to a music concert or some kind of fun celebration. All of these things God uses in our lives to enjoy him and enjoy each other. And that's our fourth topic on what rest does for us. It helps us to build relationships with others. Definitely work does that as well, but also rest. So, yeah, I don't know. For men, I don't know how many of you proposed to your wives when you were turning a wrench in the workshop or something like that. So, I mean, God gives us a lot of times of rest, which enables us to develop relationships with each other. The daily meal is a great time of rest where we sit down together and enjoy the food and each other. So rest is a time for others and a time for God. We just can't function without work and without rest. So just for a couple of evaluation questions at the end here. we can evaluate our rest together. There are good and better ways to use that time that we take for rest. We can ask ourselves a couple of questions. First of all, are there any areas that we rest in that may be leading us into sin or tempting us? The Lord said, pray, lead us not into temptation. We should not let ourselves get led into that. Even if the activity isn't sinful, is there something that we do with our rest time that are kind of on the edge, something that might cause our conscience to twinge a little bit or just Something that we wouldn't want to share with other people. Maybe it's something that's kind of a rest thing that is intrinsically non-social. I look at that. By the way, I don't think gambling is a good thing to do during our leisure time. But if you watch people who are running a slot machine, it is just a completely internal, habit of just doing the same thing over and over again. It seems completely antisocial. So not to say that there are some things we can do alone that are really restful as well, but we should definitely make time for other people. And that last question on your handout, you'll see it says, is this activity the most God-glorifying way to steward my time? I would hope that we could do the most God-glorifying thing. Let's just say, is it a God-glorifying thing? I don't want us to get into absolute introspection about, is this the best thing we can possibly do with our time? But that should kind of be what we're striving for. Is what I'm doing in rest, is it leading me to, is it helping me increase my sense of wonder in the Lord and commune with Him and with other people, get to know other people and develop relationships? So we should be looking at our money and our work time and our rest time. All of these things are stewardships from the Lord. This is a wonderful day to meet together. I'm so glad that we had this time to talk about stewardship of rest. Are there any pressing questions or comments that anyone would have today? Yeah, Jeanette. It's occurred to me that culturally there's a big push always to be open to 24-7, but how God has blessed companies like Chick-fil-A or Hobby Lobby who've closed on Sundays. They're very successful and I really think that is from from the Lord to give evidence to the culture that he is to be honored. So I think the US got out of that at some point. Maybe there's still places that have that. But yeah, that's understanding that this is one day in seven that is a special day. You probably heard that some other countries wanting to be more metric. They tried a 10-day work week. I think that was in the Soviet era. That failed. There's something amazing about that number seven. It's like a large prime number. And it's not in nature. There's no natural way to keep, I mean, we have months that kind of follow the moon. We have years which follow the orbit of the earth around the sun. We have days which are, all these things are natural timekeepers. The seven is just a unique number that God has given us. Anything else? Yeah. I just wanted to say that Pastor Ray's book on the Sabbath is really, really good for someone who is kind of, tends to be very legalistic and kind of, The Lass on the Prairie, the Sundays where you just sit still the whole time. That book was really freeing and educational. Very good point. Yeah, I did want to mention that. We may have them in the library. I'm not sure. Does anybody know where those books are? We had quite a selection of them. Celebrating the Sabbath by Pastor Ray is a very good book on the Sabbath. I could not cover that in any detail today. Thank you. Anybody else? All right, well, let's prepare for worship together. Lord, we thank you for this day, and it is a great blessing, Father, that we have this day to consider the eternal rest that we have with you. And Lord, we do look forward to that day when we rest from our labors, the arduous labors in this sinful world, and we come to that eternal shore where we rest with our Lord Jesus Christ forever. And Father, that rest will be a rest of worship and of, I'm sure we will have other ways of doing other things in worship and praising you for all eternity. Lord, we pray that that would be a part of our lives now. Lord, I pray for those here who are struggling with the idea of rest. Maybe they have a hard time getting rest and sleep due to various Concerns. Lord, you tell us that we ought not to be concerned about anything. Lord, we are anxious. We admit that freely and a lot of those anxieties are part of living in this world. But Lord, we do pray that we would be filled with a peace that passes understanding. so that we can rest better in you, even in the midst of this life. So Lord, I pray that as we go to worship, we will go to that people's work of liturgy as we praise you and receive from you your blessings. We pray these things in Christ's name. Amen.