I will give you rest is the last of the 10 things the magnet in Bob’s office said God wants us to remember. We are to remember the rest God gives.
“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.” [Gen 2:2-3 NIV]
In the creation God gave us an example of the day of rest, the 7th day. In the giving of the law to Moses God made the Sabbath–a day of rest–part of the law. By the time of Christ, the law of the Sabbath had been ensnared by so many rules and regulation that it had lost its meaning. Christ cut those bonds when He declared, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath,” meaning that the day of rest was created to serve man, man was not created to serve the day of rest. [Mark 2:27 NIV]
I know that God has given us salvation, which is an eternal rest, no longer striving in our own flesh to gain what we can only gain by faith, but I’m not talking about that kind of rest this morning. I’m talking about a Sabbath day of rest. Christians too often equate the day of rest with the law, and since we have been set free from the law, we ignore it. But like so many other things in this walk of faith, the day of rest preceded the law. In fact, God made the day of rest holy right from the very beginning.
We think we must always be going, going, going. That to rest is somehow sinful. To celebrate a day of rest is somehow placing ourselves back under the law. But our Creator understood our needs, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. We need a day of rest each week, a time when we rest, play, fellowship, love. It doesn’t have to be a Saturday or a Sunday. We just need to find some time every week to wind down and refresh.
God gives us eternal rest, yes, but He also wants us to find a time-based rest.