This week we started a series called Three Things That Can Change the World. We jumped off talking about truthfulness and the power that truthfulness has in our life. And over the next few weeks we're talking about truthfulness. We're talking about Sabbath keeping and we're talking about graciousness.
And all three of these, they're about culture changing and culture shifting activities that we have because these are reorienting practices. They're historic to Christianity, but they're also distinct against the current of the world. This week we're talking about Sabbath keeping. And one of the things I mentioned last week briefly was this large idea that had been coming through my own mind, the way that I've been thinking lately is about this.
It's life's not about neutrality. It's about to be neutral means to not do anything. It means to not take a side, to not be positive or to not be negative with anything. And this has been a year that's about neutrality.
It's a year that in many ways we hit pause on so many things. We pause projects, we pause trips, we pause moves, we pause vocational changes. I think more things have been canceled in the last 12 months than in the last 12 years in my own life. In many ways this has been a year of nothing.
And it's this season that we were willing to write off. But one of my biggest fears is that they say it takes 21 days for something to become a new habit. We've had a lot more than 21 days of living this way. What does it mean for us to realize that it operatively might not be a good idea.
But here's the thing. Sometimes doing nothing means we're actually dying. Atrophy is the reduction of a biological system after it reaches this normal or mature state in which it wastes away due to poor resource management or on use. Now our life has the ability to atrophy right now.
Our spiritual formation who we know we are inside of Jesus Christ has. It can be atrophy right now. There's so many things about our culture that we could be in that moment right now. And Sabbath keeping is the primary exercise of God's people.
It's a primary way that we are really supposed to be kind of forming. I'm going to talk about that this week. Last week we talked about the Kingdom and how our understanding of the Kingdom of God and what we've been called to admission is going to kind of go through that of these next few weeks. But Dallas Lord calls the Kingdom our own range of effective will.
One of the things that we talk about this at Foundry, one of the ways we've always done this is our Kingdom is our God tasked mission field of influence. These places that God has put us into intentionally and for a reason. And so how does Sabbath keeping? How does that point to a distinct vision of Jesus if we aren't practicing this primary action of distinction that he has given us?
That's what I want to do this morning. I want to talk about how changing our world by doing nothing actually means doing everything. Marv Adon is beautiful, beautiful, amazing woman. I met years ago.
She's sweet, just a little lady that all we want to do when you meet her is to give her a hug. Marv Adon wrote this on the Sabbath day. We deliberately remember that we have ceased trying to be God and instead have put our lives back into his control. Concentrating on God's Lordship in our life enables us to return to his sovereign hands all of the things that are beyond our control and terrifying us.
Once those things are safely there, as long as we don't stupidly take them back again, our emotions can find true, comforting and healing rest. And again, okay in red, our passage, I want to think about some of these biblical things that we find about when Sabbath is first mentioned in Scripture. This is the first two chapters of Genesis. This is early in our world.
And this first few chapters of Genesis, they're distinct in what they're trying to communicate. There's no accidents here. Nothing is included that does not matter. In verse 26, we read that God can say, let us make humankind in our own image.
So how and the why of us being created? That's about what is central to us is people and what is central to our purpose. God said, let us make them in our own image. Let us make them to be an accurate comparison of who we are.
And the word for image, if we just kind of just pull down and down and down and down into the idea of the word bank, you might say, it comes back to this ancient word that means a house that is equivalent to another. That we were made, we almost say, let us make humans to be a true picture of us. God also said, they will reign upon this earth. We were giving shaping authority over the world.
We're given influence. We're given as will or calls an arrange of effective will. God gave us to that at the very onset of creation of who we're supposed to be. And now the rest of chapter one, it turns into this massive task list.
It's one that would make some of us just faint in terror and others would be rubbing their hands in excitement. My wife would be automatically making a spreadsheet at this moment. God is telling us, I am equipping you with everything you need to accomplish this task. Chapter two, the story kind of goes on and we find that God creates the Sabbath.
He blesses it and he calls to be holy. Now to be blessed is something that contains uniqueness for how it forms the good life. It means to be happy, to be special, to be distinct. He also declares the Sabbath holy.
You know, the only thing that God has done up until this time is work. He makes us and he gives us a job to do. He gives us a big job. And then the absolute next thing he does is declare a time of ceasing, of intentional stopping, the very first thing that we were actually able to do was an invitation to rest inside the presence of God and who he is.
Now the Sabbath keeping practice is central to our identity, not just as God's people, but as people overall that rest is built into what we need to live. Our very first invitation in life was to behave like God. This first lived out thing was us practice of resting with him. The very first thing we heard in life was to work.
And the very first thing we did in life is to rest. You know, even in Exodus we had a situation where Moses goes up on Mount Sinai, he's given to 10 commandments, and everyone in Israel is just impatient about what God is doing, who God is. They had all sorts of questions, but once they made the golden calf and Moses comes down, he breaks the 10 commandments and he's mad and he grinds up the whole golden calf into a powder and he makes this like really probably nasty tea with it and he makes everybody drink it, a bunch of people die out of a plague and all these bad things happen about idol worship. And as soon as that arch in Exodus is done, God goes back into making sure that Israel knows not about idolatry but knows to always be keeping the Sabbath.
It's not the idolatry that God feels like he needs to come back to and impress the importance upon. He comes back to them keeping Sabbath. They understand that that is the primary way they are to stay distinct is to be practicing Sabbath. But we have to look at how sin changes those things for us.
You know, sin changes our relationship not just to work, but it changes our ability of who God has created us to be. But Jesus has come, Jesus has brought us back into a right relationship with him. We see Jesus says, you know, the man wasn't created for the Sabbath, the Sabbath was created for man. That there's this participation with God that we still have access to that is only found by our practice of regularly and rhythmically creating rest in our lives.
AJ Sowabata says this, our time-saving devices, technological conveniences and cheap mobility have made life easier and interconnected. And as a result, we have more information on our fingertips than anyone in history. Yet with all this progress, we are ominously dissatisfied and bowing at these sacred altars of hyperactivity, progress and technological compulsivity, our souls increasingly pant for meaning and value and truth as they wither away, exhausted, thraseled, displeased, ever on edge, our bodies wear ragged, our spirits thirst. We have an inability to simply sit still in B.
And as we drown in 24-7 living, we seem to be able to do anything but quench our true thirst for the life of God. The result is that we have become perhaps the most emotionally exhausted, psychologically overworked, and spiritually malnourished people in history. Here's the thing, our souls don't have the margin they need to actually be present. We're essentially functional idols at this point.
We are clinging to an example of this kingdom, but instead not having the space to actually let Jesus in. Hebrews 4 verses 8 through 9 is so much about rest and who it is as God's people and what God has asked us to do. And this is what it says. Now, if Joshua had succeeded in giving them this rest, God would not have spoken about another day of rest still to come.
So there's a special rest still waiting for the people of God. For all who have entered into God's rest have rested from their labors just as God did after creating the world. So let us do our best to enter into that rest. Sabbath keeping is fundamental to the way that we view the world and view life with God.
And as the writer of Hebrews said here, how much sense does it make for us to be believing in eternity, believing in eternal life with the presence of God? And to have God give us this Sabbath, this tiny created bit of eternity that's built into our life, but we are not practicing it. How much sense does that make? I'm in a confession moment with you right here now.
This is something I've learned over the last few years. I'm dealing with a lot right now and it says, I am a workaholic. Absolutely in 2020 has made it worse. And I think about this in my own life.
I think about the things I need from God in my life, but also think about the things that God might be asking me to do and how they're so clouded right now by an obsession with busyness that I will dwell in my life. Now, what culture do we have where we realize that we're encouraged to break to one of the 10 commandments? And think about this. To honor your father and mother.
Oh, you know, if you're really mean to your mom and dad and your mean to your family, we're going to say something about it, right? Yeah, we're going to say that. A doubt shall not commit murder. If we go kill someone, commit murder, there are consequences to that.
So don't covet the things that belong to your neighbor. If we went to our neighbor's garage and stole something, there would be repercussions and consequences. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. And when we work seven days a week, we get a raise.
Think about the backwardness of that in our situation. One of the very basic elements of following God, being part of his kingdom, is something that we actively war against. And our life. Now, what does it mean if we in this church, including me, your pastor, are simply too busy and too distracted to actually change anything?
We have to stop. We have to cease. Derek Thompson wrote this article. It's called, Workism is Making America Miserable.
He said this, the early economists in the 20th century failed to anticipate that work would morph into a kind of religion. Promising identity, transcendence, and community. Call it workism. The belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also is the centerpiece of one's identity and life's purpose.
And the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work. First, let's say one thing to you. And it's one thing, if you hear anything, this is what I want you to hear. That the greater degree to which we will allow the idolatrous busy to ingrain itself in our life will be a hidden indicator of the level of emotional, physical, relational, and spiritual consequence that we will have to deal with one day.
To change things in our world, we must fundamentally realize that the story of Jesus Christ and being a follower of Jesus Christ means to have a drastically different understanding of the role of work, stopping, and ceasing in our life. And that might be one of the most powerful things that we have to tell anyone. Marvadon, back to Sweet Marvon. Just Google a picture of her to see she's amazing.
But Marvadon says that Sabbath keeping is to be deliberate in our actions and to recover our identity is the holy, beloved people of God. So we'll move into some application here and it's something that I've just been working on and thinking. I think so much of it is really just us understanding what's going on. But if you go over to those that home sheet, not like the message notes or you can get the link for the home sheet, what I've included in there is a little bit of a worksheet just to help us understand some Sabbath practices we might have in our life because they're going to be different for everyone.
If I come in here and list off some stuff, there's going to be things on there that are tremendously life giving to me that must be life stealing from you. So I want us in this application portion just to do two things. Let me help just construct a vision of this life around us and then go download the home sheet. Go grab that worksheet that's attached to that.
Just you and your family just run this worksheet through of what this might look like for us. But just kind of build that big picture. It's about expansion and it's about contraction. What expands the vision of Jesus in your life?
What contracts the vision of Jesus in your life? The Sabbath keeping is about us making a decision that one just fundamental view of our person. It is that this is what I do, but instead it is this is who I am inside of Jesus. That is our root.
That's how we determine these Sabbath practices. Now, Sabbath is about trust. Do you trust Jesus enough that by taking one day to completely focus on a different world that you will be taking care of the other six days of the week? Sabbath is a trust issue.
Do we have a trust? I have a trust issue. Now, Sabbath is a regular exercise of our trust. Muscle has to be happening regularly and normally it's part of what's going on just an occasional use of this trust muscle.
It won't allow our soul to truly create a Sabbath life. It has to be something we're willing to fight for and we treat it just like we treat working any other muscle. But Sabbath keeping is also deeply personal and corporate, something we do with other people. Sabbath keeping is about intentionally creating separation in our life in what is holy.
It makes us ask questions about what is destructive in my life and what is constructive in my life. It's about expansion and contraction. A couple weeks back we had a fantastic equipping night with my friend JD Walt all about living the Sabbath life. The link of that is in the message notes.
It's not going to hour and he has a conversation about 15 of us here in the church. I heard you go download that, listen to it, watch it. We'll also put it on the Foundry Cast podcast feed so you can do it in your car. We'll see this in the spring of this vision about actually practicing this.
This is about positive holiness and about negative holiness. But this is where I think we have to think about this in the 21st century where we are now. What are we adding into our life that causes us to grow with Jesus and what are we separating from? How can we expand the peace and the trust of God and what can we take away that contracts the peace of God in our life?
Friends ultimately this is what it is. What price are we willing to pay to become a community that provides an alternative to a worn out, fractured and broken world around us? If God has given us a kingdom to be influential over what are we willing to do to get there? Here's the thing.
Sabbath is primary to this. It's going to be the change of change agents. But we can't take anyone anywhere. We haven't been ourselves first.
That's why I had to confess and talk to you about this earlier because I have to do this in order to lead all of us into doing this. But we have to make this a regular part of our life. That Sabbath keeping is a positive thing given to us in order to find our difference and to live into our distinctness as the people of Jesus. Let's pray.
Father, these are big words. These are big things. This is a big conversation. My prayer in this moment is just as we're still doing this in a weird in a different way.
But God is for us to understand that the neutrality that we have been present in and that the soft sacrifices that we have done that have led to cheap grace. And Jesus, if we want to drink deeply from your well, why would we not go back to the very thing you gave us? Lord, a highway that goes straight to that well. And God, the only thing that's asking us to do is to not do something.
God, to be intentional, to be deliberate, thinking about what is it like for us to just call apart and to set something apart as holy in order to refuel ourselves in order to focus on you, in order to recalibrate our hearts and our minds. God, these are the things that you have given us. God, let us be faithful into that. So you know we pray.
Amen.