Well, good morning. My name is Tim. I'm the pastor here. It's great to see you guys this morning.
I love it that you guys are here. I see some new faces and I met some new people walking in. I know that's a big deal to step into a church on a Sunday, especially one that meets in a school. I know it's kind of different.
So we're glad that you're here. We'd love to answer any questions that you may have today. We are in the second part of the series on Sabbath rest. And it's fitting that we're in the series on rest because my allergies have been getting to me this whole week.
And so if you can already tell, I'm gonna be a little bit more low-key today because I just need to be. My voice and my nose if you want some funny things. And so just bear with me on that. But hey, we're gonna be still and quieter today.
I'm not gonna be as loud and yelling at you. And so that should be a good rest for all of us, let's be honest. But we are spending four weeks in the fourth commandment. And we'll be in X's 20 as we just read.
And so grab a Bible. If you didn't already, there should be one right around you. Search one on your phone. Biblegateway.com is a great one.
Search an app. I want you to look at God's Word with your own eyes this morning. As you get there, I want to as well invite you to something after the service. Cash mentioned it at the beginning of the service, but we're a church that's a little over two years old.
And so we're always taking first steps, it seems like. And one of those first steps is our covenant membership class. It's a two part class this Sunday, next Sunday, right after the service in the media center. If you don't know where that is, it's right across that courtyard where you drop off kids.
We're gonna tear everything down in here, tear down kids a little bit, restituate some tables. And we're gonna have our very first membership class and talk about who we are, what we do as a church and how you can be involved and committed in that. And so we try to remove every obstacle. And so we did it right after the service so as to not conflict with schedules during the week.
We have childcare provided. So if you have kids, you can check them out, feed them. We have lunch provided. You can feed them and then put them back in.
And even if you're new with this, maybe some of you, I don't know if I'm ready, I'm just checking out this church. The membership class doesn't make you a member. There's a few steps in the process, but it really just allows you to explore what membership really is, what covenant membership. We're gonna talk about what that means and how you can be plugged into what God is doing here.
We say it all the time, we want more for you than just attending a church on a Sunday. That's just a conference. We're inviting you into a church family that God is building here. And so this will be a first step for you in that process and you get to eat free lunch.
So if I didn't convince you already, maybe that will. Exodus chapter 20, let's get into this on rest. Just to catch you up, if this is your first time with us last week, we talked about why rest. We said it's because first it's important to God.
The rest is not a suggestion. It's a command. You look at the 10 commandments, Nicole actually just read through them all. The 10 commandments God commands us to rest.
It's not something that we'll just think about. Maybe we'll get to. We probably should do for our health and to gain a healthy balance in life. No, it's a commandment from God.
It's really important to God that we rest. But it's even more than that. It's a rhythm that God set up from the beginning of time. That God created us to rest.
He set up the rhythm. He not only set it up, but he shows us how it works. That in Genesis, we read about God creating everything in six days. And then on the seventh day, he rested himself.
Not because he was tired, not because the Grand Canyon put him out. He rested because he wanted to show us a rhythm of rest. That this is how life should work. And so the first reason why we rest, why we spend four weeks on one commandment, is because it's important to God that we rest.
But the second reason we talked about last week, why rest, is because we don't know how to do this. We just look at your life, you look at our culture, and we are more distracted and busy than ever before. We don't know how to rest. I mentioned that I tried to look for books on rest.
And I found a few and they're actually really good. Talk to me later. I'd love to recommend them to you. But it took me a while to find books on rest.
Now I had no trouble finding books on how to be a better parent, on how to be a better spouse, and on how to be a better friend, on how to do more. But it was hard to find books on rest because we don't know how to do this. And so that's why we're looking at this. That's why I rest.
And today we're going to talk about what is Sabbath rest. So what does Sabbath rest mean? What does it involve? We're going to look at three phrases in this passage in Exodus 20.
We're going to pull three points from these phrases. If you take notes, you should have got a bulletin when you walked in. There's a place, if you open it up to the middle, you can take notes, write these three points down. We're going to look at that Sabbath rest.
What it is is to stop, to set apart, and to surrender. To stop, set apart, and surrender. So first, to stop. Let's look at our first phrase, verse eight.
We see it. Look at the text with me. You see this phrase, remember the Sabbath day. So that word Sabbath comes from this Hebrew word, which is Shabbat.
Everybody say Shabbat with me. Shabbat. It's kind of fun to say. It literally means to stop or to cease from work.
To rest, right? That's where we get this word Sabbath. And it's interesting if you look at this commandment, and you look at all the 10 commandments, maybe some of you, even if you're new to the faith or new to Christianity or new to church, you've seen the 10 commandments, you've heard of the 10 commandments, maybe you even memorized them growing up, even if you weren't a believer in Jesus. And if you actually pay attention to the 10 commandments, what's interesting about the fourth one, the Sabbath commandment, is it's the longest out of all 10.
Have you ever noticed that? The most time and attention given out of all the commandments is to stop. To simply stop, to rest. And not only that, it's not only the longest, it's unique.
That if you look at specifically your King James Bible, you'll see some thou shalt's. Thou shalt not, right? Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not covet.
That shall not lie. Thou shalt honor your father and mother. But the fourth commandment is unique, isn't it? But it starts out with remember the Sabbath day.
Now, why is that? Why is so much attention? Why is so much length? Why is so much uniqueness of remember this day given to the fourth commandment?
Why is that? It's really simple, comparatively, to the other commands, right? It's simply stop, rest, cease from work. That's the command.
Why gives so much attention to this? Listen, I think it's primarily two reasons. Because God knew how hard it would be for us to actually do this. And God knew how easy it would be for us to forget to do this.
So he gives time to explain, this is what it means to stop. Because it's going to be hard for you to do this. This is how you need to remember it, because you will forget to do this. And so God lays that out that the command of Sabbath rest is to stop.
And it's really important to God. It should be to us as well. That's what rest is, biblically. This was true for the Israelites and Exodus.
They had to remember this command. And they had to get some explanation about this command. Remember, the whole story of the book of Exodus is primarily God taking that Israelites who had been a generational slavery and rescuing them out of that and setting them free to be his people, to be marked now not by slavery, but by freedom and rest. And so that's the whole point of the 10 commandments.
Maybe you've thought before, why do we have to have so many rules in the Bible? Well, if you look at the broader story of what's going on here, these are people that Israelites who have been enslaved for generations. They are slaves. Their parents had been slaves.
Their grandparents had been slaves. It's in their very DNA. And so they didn't know how to be God's people marked by freedom and rest. They had no precedent for that.
They couldn't look at mom and dad and think, well, this is how they rested. This is how they honored their father and mother. This is how they didn't lie or covet. God had to show these people a way, a rhythm to live.
And a big piece of that rhythm is rest. You think about slavery. You don't get a day off, right? You think about slavery specifically in that day, they would make bricks every day to build for Pharaoh.
Have you seen one of the movies on the Exodus? Hopefully not the last one with Christom Baal. That one was horrible. But even if you saw that one, you would get the idea that they're building over and over, making bricks over and over to work for this guy who's leading them in Pharaoh.
And they never took a rest. So all they knew was every day, wake up, work, grind, make these bricks, build for someone else. And they didn't know what it looked like to rest. So it's really fascinating when you think about it.
God is showing the Israelites how to do something they've never done before. You think about that? And listen, we're different, right? We're in a different context.
We haven't been in that kind of slavery. But I believe for many of us in this room, many of us in our world that God is trying to show us how to do something we've never done before. Then we're not enslaved to Pharaoh, but we're enslaved to busyness. We're enslaved to multitasking, to distraction, to work, to approval.
A lot of us in this room, if we would just be transparent for a moment, we're enslaved to that. And I believe you check your phone every five minutes. Your phone will tell you you have an email, but it's why you scroll down and you make it wind back up and tell you again, right? It's why 10 minutes later you make it tell you again.
It's why you look at social media and you think, I wish I was going on that vacation. Maybe I should post something that looks amazing. Because we have this sense in us, this enslavement to busyness, to be known, to be heard from, to work, to grind, to let people know we exist. And a lot of us, if we're honest, we walk in here today feeling that.
And that brings stress, that brings a sense of overwhelming, it brings a sense of emptiness. Even if you hear and you know Jesus, you're not experiencing this shabbat, this rest. We don't know how to do it. And we've been enslaved much like the Israelites for generations.
And no one's ever really taught you how to rest. How many of you grew up in the church? Maybe you've just been coming to church for a little while. And you've heard sermons on how to do more, on how to confess more, on how to attend church more, on how to get your act together as a parent, as a friend, as a spouse.
But no one's ever taught you how to rest. And listen, this is key because God set us up to rest. It's his rhythm. Like it's his plan for you to set you free.
Just like the Israelites were set free from slavery in Egypt. He is wanting to set you free from slavery to busyness and work and approval. It's God's plan for you. We don't talk about it enough, but it's incredibly important.
Because many of us don't know what this looks like because we've never experienced it. We know that by some phrases that we use that are pretty common. Phrases like 24-7. Standing the midnight ole, all hands on deck, show me the money.
It's Rod Tidwell from Jerry McGuire. Arizona Cardinals, right? Kind of? You got to know that?
We have phrases, right? We celebrate. Working hard, grinding hard, never taking a rest. That's part of our American culture.
We exalt busyness, distraction, multitasking. We have phrases that symbolize that. Now work is good. We said that last week, you see it in this text.
The very first thing he says right after he says, remember the Sabbath is you work six days. You labor just in case you didn't know what work meant. He's labor that got creative work to be a good thing, but he also created us to rest. And you see our problem is not that we just work too much, but that we just work on multiple different things all the time.
I read an article that talked about this. It called it Weeger. Have you heard of this? We combine work with leisure.
Weeger, right? And so we never actually rest because of that. If you think about it, and I do this as well, when I'm doing some work, check an email. I also click over to NFL.com and see who the cow was just picked in the draft.
Then I move back over to email and writing my sermon or doing something else or planning an event. And then I check social media. And you see what happens in that. And scientists have done research on our brains when we multitask like that is we never actually rest.
So we have things like Weeger. We have new words to describe our issues. We don't know how to just stop and to rest. It's part of our culture.
And so we'll do things like drink coffee or unicorn frappuccinos, apparently. That's a whole other sermon. But we'll drink coffee and we'll drive. We'll drink coffee and we'll drive and we'll talk on the phone.
We'll drink coffee or unicorn frappuccino. And we'll drive and we'll talk on the phone and we'll tell Siri to set up an appointment for us to pick up our kids on early release day. It's completely hypothetical. We eat and take pictures of what we're eating.
While we scroll through pictures of what other people are eating on social media. We rarely do one thing much less stop from doing everything. And then we are really good at doing multiple things, keeping ourselves busy, never actually resting. And so God takes the most lengthy time, gives the most attention out of all these difficult commandments, honor your father and mother, don't covet, don't lie, don't commit adultery.
Those aren't easy explanations either. But God gives the most explanation to the most simple. He says stop, stop. And this is what that means.
And this is why you need to remember that. Because he knew how much we would forget it. Because he knew even in our culture today how easy it would be to be enslaved, to busyness, distraction and approval. Just like it was for the Israelites to go back to slavery to Pharaoh.
And so we need to pay attention to this first component of rest. It's to stop. It's simple, but so difficult. Our second component is this.
It's to set apart. Look at verse 9 with me. Verse 9 says to keep it holy. Remember the Sabbath day?
And keep it holy. We see that again in verse 11. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. That word holy means to set apart unto God.
To set apart, to set aside. This is going to be sacred unto God. And so the Sabbath day isn't just about stopping and doing nothing. It's about setting it apart unto God.
That's the second component of what it means to rest. And in this text specifically, we see that we should set apart a whole day unto God. We see it four times in these four verses. It says Sabbath day.
And so one day out of the week should be separate unto God from all the other days. And so many of us, I got this question last week and it's a good question. So what day is it? What day do we stop and set apart unto God?
We need to get that right if we're looking at this text in the Old Testament. Well, first we need to fast forward to the New Testament. Remember we have the whole of Scripture. We have 66 books, 40 plus authors over 1500 years.
That all of it's a shadow assigned pointing to Jesus. And so we take the book of Exodus. We take the 10 commandments and we fast forward to the New Testament to see how Jesus ultimately shows us what these really mean. And I want to show you two things about how Jesus sets apart the Sabbath.
Two things. Matthew 12 verse 8. The first one Jesus says he's Lord over the Sabbath. And so who created the Sabbath?
Jesus. Yeah, our Lord Jesus. That Jesus has been there from the very beginning. That he wasn't just born into a man that he was there from the very beginning existing from all time.
And Jesus was there when this idea of creating the Sabbath came about. So he's Lord over the Sabbath. He rules over the Sabbath. But not only that, Matthew 5 17 tells us that Jesus fulfills the law.
And so he fulfills the Sabbath and he fulfills every other command in the law. So how does he do that? If you keep reading in Matthew chapter 5, you'll read it another time. Jesus gives us several examples.
I'm just going to give you two. One of those examples is adultery. That Jesus says even if you lust after a woman in your heart, you've committed adultery. That he talks about murder.
And he says, if you stay angry at a brother, you don't have to murder somebody physically. But if you just stay angry, if you hold on to bitterness in your head and heart against your brother and you don't ever let that go and you don't ever forgive, he says you're judged just as if you had committed murder. Here's two key words for you. How does the law work?
How does Jesus fulfill the law? He shows us the true meaning and intent behind the law. So maybe you've wondered that. How does the freedom that we have in Jesus, how does that coincide with the law?
Jesus says, I haven't come to abolish the law but to fulfill it. And what we see in those examples of adultery, of anger and murder is that Jesus shows us the true meaning and intent behind the law. And so the law is still a good thing. It reveals sin in our lives.
It shows us our need for Jesus. But what Jesus does, he comes along and says, hey, here's the ultimate purpose of this. And so we see that in the Sabbath as well. And so you just look at the gospels, you read all the time the Pharisees were cracking on Jesus about the Sabbath, right?
I mean, they were always given Jesus a hard time about the Sabbath. Why? Because Jesus healed on the Sabbath. He taught on the Sabbath.
He celebrated on the Sabbath. He fed the hungry on the Sabbath. You see what had happened is this law was given to be a blessing, to be a gift, to rest. And then over time religious leaders came in and they multiplied the law.
They added to the law. And they said, well, actually, really, it doesn't just mean you stop and you set it aside unto God. You got to add all these other things. And if you do any one of those things, then you are not following the Sabbath.
And so Jesus shows up, God in the flesh, Lord of the Sabbath, and you have some people criticizing Jesus for what it means to Sabbath. And Jesus shows them time and time again, he shows us what the full intent, what the full meaning is of rest. And the reality is, as we look at the whole of the New Testament, what the full meaning and intent of Sabbath is, is Jesus. That Jesus is our ultimate rest.
Read through the book of Hebrews. It's almost the whole of Hebrews is pointing to this truth, that Jesus is our rest. That because of what Jesus sacrificed on the cross, that he died of death in our place for our sin, for our approval, our sin, our business, our distraction, Jesus took that upon himself at the cross to set us free, to redeem us, and to give us freedom and rest. That Jesus does that.
And so he's the ultimate meaning and intent behind the Sabbath. But the goal of the Sabbath is not a religious practice. It's the person of God himself. And so listen, what day is it?
Pick a day. Pick a day. Because really the ultimate purpose is finding rest in Jesus. But if you know Jesus, if you've placed your faith in the one who has fulfilled every law in every command perfectly, then you rest in him, not just one day a week, but every single day, you rest in his finished work on the cross.
That's what's available to us. That's the gift, the blessing of the Sabbath. And so we can look at days. We can look at the Old Testament days.
We see that they rested on the seventh day, which in the Jewish calendar would be Saturday. So maybe you have some Jewish friends and they still rest on Saturday. It's a really big deal to them. You fast forward again to the New Testament.
We believe that Jesus came in and he fulfilled all of that and set us free. And so what happened in church history is early on, we began to celebrate Sunday as Sabbath as well, a day unto the Lord. We call it the Lord's day. I grew up in the Bible Belt of East Texas and I would always hear Sunday is the Lord's day.
And honestly, I just thought that was Bible Belt like jargon with an accent. But really it comes from the idea that Jesus resurrected on the first day of the week. We just celebrated that over Easter, right? That Jesus rose from the dead, defeating sin, death and the great, fulfilling everything through the resurrection on the first day of the week, that Sunday.
And so we began to celebrate the Sabbath as the Lord's day on Sunday. And so if you celebrate on Saturday, if you celebrate on Sunday, I'm not going to give you a hard time about that, but you need to pick a day. We can rest every day, but you're still wired for this. And so you need to pick a day.
The principle is still important. Even though the practice may change a little bit, the principle is still important. The administration of it may change, but the concept still remains. God made us to rest.
We get the glory, the beauty of resting every day, what Jesus has accomplished on the cross. But we also set aside a specific day to rest. So here's what that looks like in my life. It's a little tricky for me because I don't know if you know this, but I kind of work on Sunday.
And so I would love to just attend church with my family on Sunday mornings and spend the rest of the day just worshiping unto God. And part of it is I do that. Part of it is my wife. And I sit down here and we worship together.
We drop our kids off. We set aside this day unto the Lord. But I'll be lying if I said it's always restful for me, right? And we have different events going on.
We have AC that doesn't work sometimes. In our school, we have lots of things that go into setting up this day and planning that goes on all through the week. And Saturday night for me is I prepare and finalize the sermon. And so I'll be lying if I said this is always my rest.
And so what we do as a family is we take Saturday morning and we designate that time. We stop and we set it aside unto God. And then we take Sunday afternoon. And we try not to fill it with busyness or distraction.
And we stop and we set it aside unto God. So we combine two half days because I'm pastor and I'm we. You don't have to do that. You can take Saturday, Sunday, Monday if you take off Monday, whatever you want to do.
But you set it apart unto God. You see what's amazing about the Pharisees in the New Testament is they give Jesus a hard time for the Sabbath is they miss the point of it all. The point is finding rest in Jesus, the one who created the Sabbath. And they have Jesus, God in the flesh walking amongst them.
And instead of resting in Jesus and coming to Jesus to worship Jesus, they criticize Jesus. So they stopped, they set it apart, but they missed the ultimate point of that. And sometimes I do that. Like in our Saturday morning, in our Sunday afternoon, a lot of times we'll break out the Jesus story about Bible or thoughts to make your heart sing and one of our other great Bibles for our kids and we'll re-through it with them, the action Bible and we'll re-through it with them.
And we have three kids, almost eight, almost five and almost two and two days. And so what happens is sometimes we stop, we set apart sometime unto God. And then we just get crazy. So many kids are wrestling over little stuffed animals that we have literally like I think a thousand of and they're wrestling for the one as we're trying to set apart some time unto God.
And so what happens as dad, pastor, I get involved in that and I'm like kids, listen, we are going to stop. We are going to set aside this time to worship God and you're going to do it whether you like it or not. So restful, right? Such the meaning of Sabbath rest.
No, right? Like I get frustrated. I miss the point just like the Pharisees. You see, we give the Pharisees such a hard time but we do this as well, don't we?
We add things to what God intended. We multiply things. I want things to look a certain way and I miss the whole point which is Jesus and finding rest in Jesus that if you are hurt, the Sabbath rest that we find in Jesus is meant to heal your hurt. That if you are in sin, the Sabbath rest that we find fulfilled in Jesus is meant to cause you to confess before a good and gracious God and receive forgiveness for your sin.
That if you are overworked running a fast pace because that's all we know in our society and we are distracted that God in His mercy and grace gives you Jesus to give you ultimate peace through the cross and resurrection and to show you what it means to rest in Him every day and a specific day of the week that you set aside. You see, don't miss the point. Don't miss the point that it's about stopping but it's about setting it apart and that leads us to our last point. It's to surrender.
Notice what it says in verse 10. It's a Sabbath to the Lord our God. Why say that? Because God knew that we could stop, that we could set apart some religious practices, that we could read Jesus' story with Bible and read it with our kids, but God knew that we could stop and do all that and we can miss the point which is the Lord our God.
The Sabbath is to God. If we don't get the person of God, whatever your practices are, you miss the point. And so we have to come to this last point. What is Sabbath?
It's full surrender to the Lord our God. You see, we can set aside time. We can stop. All of you have done that.
You got the first two components down. Listen, now you got to get the third one. It's got to be to the Lord your God. And so you're in church this morning.
Listen, I'm glad that you have designated set aside this time to stop unto God. But you got to fully embrace it. You got to fully surrender it to God. And so as we walk in here, some of us are like the Pharisees.
When we pick apart things that we see, we focus on our weeks, our schedule, ourselves, maybe even right now, even as we sing. We sit back, we fold our arms. I've seen some of you. You think I'm not singing.
I think what does this guy have to say to me today? You think about your week, you think about the rest of your day, you think about it. And we're thinking about ourselves instead of surrendering everything to God. Listen, it makes the stopping.
It makes the setting apart completely pointless if you don't surrender. But if you think about it, when we sing, what a lot of us do, I know not everybody does this, but a lot of us do is we raise our hands. And maybe you're new to church and you just thought, does everybody have a question? Why is everybody raising their hand?
Nobody ever calls on them. It's not when we raise our hands. It's also not to be super spiritual. But raising our hands is really an external posture of an inward surrender.
And so when you raise your hands or you open up your hands or you do the one hand to the side, whatever your style is, when you do that, what can you not do? Or you can't protect yourself. Or you can't defend yourself. You're completely vulnerable and open before God.
And so somebody could, don't ever do this, but somebody could come alongside and punch you in the gut, right? I think about that sometimes when I'm raising my hands. Somebody could do that to me. Why?
Because I'm completely vulnerable before the Lord. My hands are raised. It's a sign, an external sign of an inward surrender. You see, that should be our Sabbath.
That we stop, we set aside, and then we open up to God and we embrace it fully. The person of Jesus Christ their lives. That you don't have to actually raise your hands, but it does help. It symbolizes a deeper meaning of God, I'm laying everything before you.
I'm laying my busyness, my distraction, my sin. It's all before you. Then I'm not going to try to defend. I'm not going to try to deflect on some other people.
God, I am laying myself bare. And I'm not focusing on myself because you can't do that. I don't know if you notice. You can't do that when you're doing like this.
You can't focus on yourself. You have to focus on something bigger, something greater, someone greater, and that's Jesus Christ. So we stop. We set aside.
But don't miss the surrender that takes place in your heart. Don't miss that today. Let me ask you a question. What is preventing you from surrendering to God?
What is stopping you from opening yourself fully to God? Because listen, whatever that is, is preventing you, it will always prevent you from experiencing what Sabbath rest really means. What is that for you? Is it distraction?
Have you just been trained to follow the next lead, the next big thing? You don't want to miss out on anything, and so you never rest. You are the epitome of weezer. You don't have a set time where you work and then you rest.
It's all blended together and your mind is going crazy and you never actually rest. Is it that for you? Is it sin in your life that has disrupted your life and your relationship with God? And you walk around with guilt and shame and guilt and shame.
Maybe you try a few different things and religious practices, but then you go back to that sin and then you are in guilt and shame and never ending cycle for you and never rest. Jesus Christ has paid for your sin on the cross so you confess your sin, repent of it, turn to him, experience his grace and mercy and rest. You don't have to stay in that cycle, but listen, you have to step out and you have to fully surrender your sin to God. Some of us are hanging on to it.
Some of us are hanging on to our distraction. Some of us are hanging on to our work. No matter what I can tell you right now, you think, you don't know me? You don't know my job.
You don't know my family, my friends. You don't know what kind of obligations are on my time, but you need to know God knows all that. And he still, listen, he still created the universe with you in mind. You're not the exception.
He wants you to rest. Even in your 50-hour week job, even with your four kids, even in all your relationships and your social media, God wanted you to rest. He created a rest with you in mind. You didn't show up on the scene and you were like, man, that guy, his life is so busy and it needs to be, because he's so important.
And he's getting things done I had no clue about when I created the universe with the power of my word. You're not the exception. And so what is it that you need to fully surrender? Maybe you do need to.
When we sing, maybe you need to raise your hands as a posture of surrender to God. And you need to give up that sin, that distraction, that business, that work to God and say, listen, God, I trust you with this. Because that's what surrender is about. I think many of us won't do this this morning.
I wish everyone of us would do this. I wish everyone of us would stop to surrender. But I think the reason many of us maybe won't do this today is because even right now, you don't trust God. You don't fully trust God.
Can you really heal me of my sin? What's your cross really sufficient for my sin? I know it was for other people's and hypotheticals, but was it sufficient for my sin? And so we won't surrender to him so we can rest.
We don't trust God and think, God, I can give a day of rest and not check email and not spend my time grinding away at work on a day I should be resting unto you because I control this thing. Because I don't know if you really have this. I don't know if I really believe God, you work when I rest. You move when I stop moving.
I don't know if I really trust that. I don't know if I'm willing to surrender that to you. Listen, don't let that be the story of your life. God has a better story.
It's working and resting and finding that all in Jesus Christ by surrendering this to him, by trusting that he is good. He is gracious. He gave you rest as a blessing, not a burden. You're not the exception.
He's wired this in. It will go well with you if you rest and you need to trust that. You need to believe that and you need to walk in that. And so that's what rest is.
I want to practice it. This morning as we close, Psalm 4610 says this, be still and know that I am God. Be still and know that I am God. I want to practice that.
I want you to be still. I want you to close your eyes and bow your heads. Take an opportunity to do that now. Just right where you're sitting.
Close your eyes and bow your head. We don't do this again because it's some super spiritual thing. I do this honestly plainly because I want you to focus on being still and knowing who God is and that you can trust him to rest. I'm going to read this portion of him by William Longstaff over you.
And just sit there, listen to these words and soak them in. It says this, take time to be holy. The world rushes on, spent much time in secret with Jesus alone by looking to Jesus like him thou shalt be. Thy friends in thy conduct, his likeness shall see.
Take time to be holy, let him be thy guide. And run not before him, would ever be tied. Enjoy, or in sorrow, still follow thy Lord. And looking to trust in Jesus, to trust in the Lord.
Take time to be holy. Be calm in thy soul. Eat thought in each motive beneath his control. Just picture that.
Eat thought in motive beneath his control. This led by his spirit to fountains of love. Thou soon shall be fitted for service above. Take a moment of stillness, right where you are, every head bowed, every eye closed.
And just give some time to trusting God. Take time to stop, to set aside, to surrender whatever it is that you need to surrender this morning. Take a moment to do that now. God, I want to thank you for these moments where we can't be still and we can't rest.
God, we believe that you are in our presence. That we don't gather here, out of some symbolic effort, to make ourselves right with you. We gather here because we believe through Jesus Christ. He has made us right with you.
And so we sing about that and we celebrate that and we even take a moment right now to be still and remember that. And God, I pray that in light of that truth, in light of what you have commanded us to do, in light of what Jesus fulfilled in that commandment of rest, that we would respond to that this morning, that we would rest, that we would completely surrender and trust you. Whatever our business is, our distraction is, our sin is, however big those things are, God, you are bigger, that they don't surprise you, that you sent your son to die for all of that business sin and distraction, even though you knew it was coming, you paid it in full. And so God, that we would rest in response to that.
We need you. And I don't like to say that all the time. I know many of us feel uncomfortable saying, we need anything in America. But God, I just confess and publicly confess for all of us.
We need you. We need to stop. We need to set aside. We need to surrender to experience your beautiful, glorious, gracious rest.
Help us to do that even now, as we sing. It's in the name of Jesus. Amen.