The news coverage is nonstop. Twenty-four hours a day, we can find the latest information, gossip, analysis, and arguments about why Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump (or Gary Johnson or Jill Stein) should or should not be our next President. One presidential debate took place earlier this week; two more will follow in the next month. As a nation, we can hardly contain our excitement – not to mention our hopes, our disillusionment, our fears, and our anger – about this whole process.
Honestly, I have grown weary of this political season. As I scrolled through my Facebook timeline last night, I saw nothing but aggressive, one-sided posts (supporting either major candidate). I saw people arguing angrily with their friends about one issue or another. I saw memes and jokes that belittled one candidate or another. I saw long, thoughtful articles explaining why we should all vote for one candidate or another.
My soul finds rest in God alone; my salvation comes from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will never be shaken. (Psalm 62:1-2 NIV)
Everyone needs rest. Whether it takes the form of a weekend getaway, a vacation to a distant location, or simply a weeknight at home with no responsibilities, everyone needs rest. Often, we work so hard that we overlook one of the most important responsibilities we have: to take care of ourselves.
By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done. (Genesis 2:2-3 NIV)
The creation story is a wonderful narrative describing God’s relationship to his creation. Many people will emphasize different parts of the story (or, really, the stories – there are two different creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2!). You may remember that God rested on the seventh day, thus setting the example for us that we should rest from our work as well. As Jesus said in Mark 2:23-28, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (NIV). In other words, we do not rest in order to please God by our obedience, but we rest in order to take care of ourselves – because God desires to take care of us in this way.
photo by CC Chapman
Earlier this week, I did something rather unusual for me: I took a three-hour nap. In the afternoon, after a full morning, I came home and slept. And I slept hard. You have to understand, I am not a napper; normally, even on Sunday afternoons, I am awake all through the daytime. The last period of my life when I regularly took naps was kindergarten! So when I laid down to take a nap and woke up three hours later – with a pretty foggy post-nap brain – I realized I had needed that rest.
We spend a lot of time and energy in the church on serving other people, donating goods and resources, running errands for people, loving, caring, giving, befriending, helping, … on and on and on. And this is all worthwhile, because our call as the church is to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything [Jesus] has commanded [us]” (Matthew 28:19-20 NIV). Christian faith is not idle faith. We are interested in seeing the kingdom of God grow in our midst, and sharing Christ with others – in a multitude of ways – is crucial to that work.
Yet we must take care of our bodies and souls, as well. It is just as important for us to allow the kingdom of God to grow within ourselves as it is to introduce other people to Jesus. For through our personal transformation, others will see the power of God to change lives – namely, our own. When we are healthy, then we can communicate the message of Christ clearly and appropriately. My three-hour nap enabled me to function well through the rest of the week – not just physically but spiritually as well.
Friends, remember to care for your own selves in the coming weeks and months. Find regular opportunities for Sabbath rest. And then, once you have rested up, resume the outward work of the kingdom of God.
When was your last vacation? When was the last time you “got away from it all,” even for a short period of time? Do you make a habit of taking time away from your regular responsibilities so that you can be refreshed and renewed?
Tara and I spent last week in Indianapolis making improvements to our house – mostly kitchen upgrades and yard work, although we hired a local contractor to work on other parts of the house for us. This was a new experience for me; I’ve never done a kitchen remodel project before. But I learned a lot, and thankfully we completed the project before we came back north – except for a small drip in the kitchen sink’s plumbing. (Don’t worry; we’re getting that fixed by a skilled friend soon.)
That’s what I did on my vacation. Some vacation, huh?! Honestly, though, it was refreshing for me to work on this project with my father and my father-in-law. You might think that we came home exhausted from the work, and to some extent that is true. But truthfully I took that week as an opportunity to relax my mind and my spirit, to enjoy the manual labor, and to see a dream take shape before my eyes.
How important it is for us to find rest for our souls in the Lord! Our lives can be full of pain and hardship; some of us know that more clearly than others. Yet God asks us to rest in him in all circumstances. He invites us to trust his ability to strengthen us for the tasks to which he calls us. He promises to walk alongside us and to provide meaning and hope in the situations which we feel are most meaningless and hopeless.
Psalm 90, the only psalm attributed to Moses, speaks about how the Lord is our dwelling place and is so powerful, just, and righteous that we cannot stand before him in our own strength. This psalm concludes with these words:
Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days. Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, for as many years as we have seen trouble. May your deeds be shown to your servants, your splendor to their children. May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us; establish the work of our hands for us— yes, establish the work of our hands. (Psalm 90:14-17 NIV)
When was your last vacation? Have you recently stepped away from the daily grind and asked God to bless the work of your hands?
Vacations are wonderful, aren’t they? You might be aware that Tara and I were away last week on a vacation of our own – that’s why there was no article posted here during that week. We had not been away from our everyday responsibilities (except for a few days during the Christmas season) since moving to Midland last August. We were ready to take a break!
When was the last time you took a step back from your responsibilities and allowed yourself to relax?
It doesn’t take a full-blown vacation to keep us healthy and sane. In fact, we live in such a luxurious culture that many of us actually can walk away from work, home, and responsibilities for several days at a time – and our little corners of the world keep on spinning. We truly are blessed to live in such a time that does not require every waking minute to be spent on productive tasks.
For centuries upon centuries, the Lord has been encouraging his people to take a break every now and then. Actually, his design was for us to take a break once a week. The concept of the Sabbath, or the seventh-day rest period, is extremely old; our biblical tradition says that even God himself rested after six days’ worth of creation. If God chooses to rest after a full work week, who are we to press on non-stop?
There is a danger here, though, for us to become like the Pharisees and require ourselves, our communities, and our entire culture to avoid any semblance of work on our Sabbath day (which, for Christians, is Sunday in honor of the day of Christ’s resurrection).
Jesus himself warns us about this tendency in Mark 2:27 – “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (NIV). This verse comes in the context of a challenge from the Pharisees that Jesus and his disciples were disobeying the Sabbath by picking heads of grain to munch on. Jesus reframes how we think about the Sabbath: instead of avoiding work one day a week because we want to please God by keeping the law, we should incorporate a regular period of rest into our lives for the sake of our health and well-being. If observing this period of rest means we pick some heads of grain instead of cooking a five-course meal, then so be it!
How do you observe the Sabbath? When was the last time you saw a break in the action? What would it take for you to step away from your responsibilities (but not from the Lord!) for a day or two? When will you do that next?
Have you ever stopped to wonder – in the sense of being amazed – at how the Lord provides rest for his people in all circumstances? Surely our life situations are not always restful, and we might expect Christians enduring persecution in various parts of the world to wish for a little more rest every now and then. But I truly believe that the experience of spiritual rest is crucial for our health as followers of Christ.
In one of Jesus’s well-known teachings, he said:
Come to me, all 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. (Matthew 11:28-30, NIV)
These three verses fit into a larger context of teachings in which Jesus is challenging the status quo of “normal” religion. The people wanted to see signs and wonders, but they were unwilling to hear the message of repentance and kingdom citizenship. The Pharisees wanted to require church attendance and obedience to the law, but they were unwilling to understand how grace is more important than legalism. And in the middle of all this, Jesus calls his disciples to come to him and find rest for their souls. How amazing indeed!
I wonder – in the sense of being curious – how many people in today’s world are wishing for a little rest for their souls. And I wonder how many of them are unwilling to darken the doorstep of any church because they feel it won’t provide them with the space to find that rest. Brothers and sisters, our work as disciples of Christ should be oriented toward providing rest and refreshment to the weary, offering opportunities to encounter the Lord, making a safe place available for people to hear God’s truth. Jesus did so without compromising his radical message: that true forgiveness, healing, and eternal life are available only through believing in him. We can do the same!
Notice, though, that this rest is for our souls, not for our bodies. We find spiritual rest in the Lord, and we reach out to others to bring them into this rest. But we cannot stop there; there is much work to be done! This is, I believe, the truth of Jesus’s teaching: we can find rest for our souls in any circumstance, even the most challenging, even the most stressful. Many believers throughout the centuries have endured physical persecution while maintaining an incredible spiritual calmness. Today, the church grows the fastest where the message of Christ is dangerous and prohibited. Rest for our souls is the internal foundation from which we perform the work of the gospel.
I pray that you will find rest in all of life’s circumstances. And I pray that you will share that rest with those around you who are in similar (or even worse) circumstances. In a prophetic passage denouncing the Israelites for their unbelief, Jeremiah wrote these words:
This is what the LORD says: ‘Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.’ (Jeremiah 6:16a, NIV)
May your journey follow a similar path this week, and in the weeks to come!
