An end to striving
Introduction:
how tired are you? I recognise that this is a dangerous question to ask at the start of the sermon, since there’s every chance that you will now start thinking about how tired you actually are, reflect on the things that are making your tired, realise how many of them you have left undone, or that need your attention, or you need to to work harder on, and then never get you back, you’ll be lost, drifting off in the land of frantic busyness – but nonetheless, fearlessly, I ask you again, How tired are you? We live in a world of unprecedented technological change, that once upon a time promised an end to work as we knew it, or at least a massively reduced working week. But as we all know, the fact that you have a mobile phone doesn’t mean you work more conveniently; it means work interrupts your life more inconveniently, and all those additional missed calls results in monstrous additional funds pouring into the coffers of the telcos.
if you’re anything like me, from time to time you mutter to yourself, ‘I’m so tired’. I hate mornings, but I’ve realised that unless I do my devotions in the morning before the kids get up, I never get there, and so that has become something of a mantra as I drag my feet to the shower after the alarm has so rudely interrupted the best part of the day – ‘I’m so tired’. For you it might be the end of the work day, as you have bounced from thing to thing, project to project, demand to demand; or perhaps at the other end of the spectrum, you have been entirely under-challenged by your work, bored witless, basically shuffling paper, which brings on its own tiredness, the fatigue of disengagement.
I suspect the original readers of our letter felt a different sort of tiredness – the tiredness of being on your guard 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, always watching, always wary, ever uncertain, never really at ease, because you know that there is possibility of serious danger just around the corner, in the form of soldiers or perhaps the brutality of the mob come to do you in. This was a tiredness that was leading them to do stupid things, as tiredness often does – to slowly drift away from their confidence and pride in Jesus, to harden their hearts to the call of this Jesus to walk in his footsteps, even if meant following him all the way to the cross. And so this most excellent pastor writes them a letter of spiritual insight and urgency, warning, cajoling, rebuking, inspiring, and in chapter 4 reassuring them that God knows their tiredness and has done something about it – nothing less than inviting them and us into his rest. Restfulness, relaxation, stress free, chilled out – this is the truth about the Christian life, and the word of God to us today is that if we hear his voice, and do not harden our hearts, we too can grow in this reality. In case you don’t believe me, and missed it when it was read to us, hear it again, this is God’s promise to you today, Hebrews 4.10: “Those who enter God’s rest also cease from their labours as God did from his.” And our task under the life giving authority of Holy Scripture is to understand what on earth that might mean for you and me.
1. What rest?
rest is without doubt the all-consuming focus of this chapter – 10 times in 10 verses reference is made to rest of one sort or another, all sparked by the Psalm which is at the center of this section, Ps 95. Remember, as we heard last week, the Holy Spirit says to us, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion”, there is nothing more lethal than a cold, hard calloused, unresponsive heart towards God, because when the Exodus generation did precisely that, God swore in his anger, ‘They will not enter my rest’. And our pastor picks up the point in ch 4.1:
1 Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest is still open, let us take care that none of you should seem to have failed to reach it. 2 For indeed the good news came to us just as to them; but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened. 3 For we who have believed enter that rest, just as God has said, “As in my anger I swore, “They shall not enter my rest,’ ” though his works were finished at the foundation of the world. 4 For in one place it speaks about the seventh day as follows, “And God rested on the seventh day from all his works.” 5 And again in this place it says, “They shall not enter my rest.”
this is a compressed piece of slightly backwards and upside down logic, but like untying your shoelaces, if you don’t tug in it too hard, but gently work it apart, it opens up without too many problems. There are 3 steps:
The paragraph starts at the end, which is what makes things challenging. There is the promise of something, and the promise is still open. Why is it still open? Well, verse 2, it’s open because the people to whom the promise was made originally didn’t take up the offer, didn’t receive the thing that was promised. And why didn’t they receive the promise? – they didn’t receive the promise because they didn’t meet the promise with faith. Now, in this tiny little phrase is almost everything that is important about the Christian way. We are told something fundamental about God and how he is toward us, and something fundamental about us and how we are toward God. About God, we are told that he is the promise making God. If you know nothing else about God but this, you’ve still got 95% of what’s important. He is into commitment, he loves his creation, he pursues his people, he makes promises to them, he wants to do good to people, what the Bible calls bless, give of what is his, joy and glory and love, and make it ours. He is the promise making and promise keeping God. Before anything else, he makes promises. Our word for the way that God is into promises is grace. That is the shape of his relations to others – gracious, making and keeping promises. But we also learn something about us, which actually follows on from what we learn about God. The basic stance of a person toward God is that of faith, which makes perfect sense since the only thing that you can do with a promise is to receive it and the way that you receive a promise is by faith. Some years ago, in fact in 5 months it will be 20 years ago, a women who I’m sure didn’t quite know what she was getting herself in for made a promise to me – to have and to hold, to love and to cherish, unconditionally, until death interrupted things, either hers or mine. That’s a promise, I have it in writing, just in case the awful reality tempts her to fudge the issue, and all I can do about the fact is to trust her that she meant it, to believe her, to relate to her in a way which takes into full account that this is her stated promise and commitment to me. I can’t add to the promise, I don’t need to force it out of her – it’s already given – it would be dopey of me to to try to deserve it, it’s a promise, and promises are received by trusting the promise. That’s how promises work – or in the case of the Israelites, how promises don’t work, because they heard the promise of God, and didn’t unite it with faith.
So second, what is the promise about? The promise has to do with rest, but it’s no ordinary rest, it is quite specifically God’s rest. Our author goes back to the very beginning, to the act of creation and the account of it in Genesis chs 1-2, and picks up the narrative of how God rested on the seventh day from all his works. Now this is a fascinating idea, that God rested. It’s not that he stopped altogether – if God stopped altogether his involvement in the created order, if he withdrew his love and care and power by which he upholds the universe, then the whole thing would collapse into a sort of sludgy chaos. And yet something did stop – he stopped adding to the template, stuffing more into the picture, and said, like an artist with a painting, or an architect with a design – ‘enough, perfect, now it’s time to enjoy it, to display it, to fill it.’
Which leads to the third point – the rest into which the Exodus generation was invited, the promised land of Canaan, and which was eventually occupied by their descendants, was never really the full extent of God’s rest, and our author says that you can tell that because Psalm 95 speaks of a time after it – Today. You see it in v. 6:
6 Since therefore it remains open for some to enter it, and those who formerly received the good news failed to enter because of disobedience, 7 again he sets a certain day—”today”—saying through David much later, in the words already quoted, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.” 8 For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not speak later about another day.
what’s going on here is that the author is working overtime to say 2 things – on the one hand, the people under Moses did not make it into the promised land, they all died in the wilderness, as God swore, they shall not enter my rest. And the lesson to learn there is the lesson of faith – they were disobedient, because they did not combine what they heard with faith. But, on the other hand, the next generation did – under Joshua, they did eventually arrive at the river Jordan, and crossed it just like they had crossed the Red Sea, and did battle with the Canaanites and eventually settled in the land flowing with milk and honey, just as God promised they would decades ealier. And in fact, the end of the book of Joshua stresses that they had entered God’s rest, Josh 21.43:
43 Thus the Lord gave to Israel all the land that he swore to their ancestors that he would give them; and having taken possession of it, they settled there. 44 And the Lord gave them rest on every side just as he had sworn to their ancestors; not one of all their enemies had withstood them, for the Lord had given all their enemies into their hands. 45 Not one of all the good promises that the Lord had made to the house of Israel had failed; all came to pass.
And the thing that our pastor wants us to notice here is that although in a sense they had entered God’s rest, the promised land, the very fact that centuries later in the time of king David, who wrote Ps 95, God is still speaking of a day, the divine ‘Today’ as a day when people need to hear his voice and not harden their hearts so that they can still enter his rest; that shows that the rest which God’s people had under Joshua in the promised land did not exhaust the promise of entering God’s rest, but that rest remains open, which is exactly where we arrive in v. 9:
9 So then, a sabbath rest still remains for the people of God; 10 for those who enter God’s rest also cease from their labors as God did from his.
for those first readers, as for us, there remains a Sabbath rest, that is, the promise by God to be with God in his ceasing from his labours. And that is God’s promise to you.
• so what does this mean?
2. Make every effort
one thing is clear – it doesn’t mean sitting around doing nothing, it’s not that kind of rest that is in view here. From the start the pastor writes of taking care, making every effort, and not falling into disobedience in the same way that the original receivers of the promise did. In fact, he is well aware that the word of God, that is the promise of God, can have a profoundly discomforting effect, v. 12:
12 Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. 13 And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.
• God’s word, his promise, is not like a piece of information about an offer that some used car salesman is making to you, something you can take or leave, that you have mastery and control over. No, this promise is this kind of thing that tells you about yourself by how you respond, it gets inside you and forces a decision from you and shows the state of your heart, whether it is hard or soft, cold or warm, indifferent or responsive, faithless or faithful.
• so this kind of rest is entirely comfortable with focussed hard work, clear eyed discipline, a spiritual responsiveness to God that leads to the kind of costly discipleship that serves and sacrifices and gives. The basis of our tiredness lies elsewhere.
Conclusion:
At root, I think that the weariness that invades our souls and not just our bodies is a function of spiritual anxiety. We are not sure who we are, whether we measure up, whether I am acceptable – to myself, to others, to God. And it seems to me that there are 2 responses we can make to this
On the one hand, we can start working really hard. Making sure that I am moving up the career ladder, getting promotions quicker than my peers, ensuring that the pay increases and bonuses are good, better, best. All of that thing has little to do with money, and everything to do with identity. If only I can keep feeding my anxiety with these scraps from the corporate table, proving myself to myself, adding award upon award, taking up more and more responsibility, getting more and more people to acknowledge me; or perhaps scraps from the social table, with an ever increasing social circle, more and more friends and less and less genuine connection with people; if only I can keep feeding the insatiable furnace of my anxiety, then I can keep getting up and making it through the day. But of course, it is exhausting, the exhaustion of the rat on the treadmill, precisely because there is no end, just round and round and round.
Or there is the other side – bailing out, getting so sick and tired of the race that you give up on the rats altogether, numbing out and just working to get through the day with least interruption and minimum hassle, so that you can get up and do it again.
but what God offers is rest, his rest, a deep rest for your soul – the rest that comes from having a great, faithful, merciful high priest, who has passed through the heavens and is there, at the right hand of God, who has secured our place in God’s people, so that there is an end to the striving of the soul. All its questions have been answered, all its anxieties have been met, all it’s needs have been filled. Death will not triumph over it, since Christ is risen; sin will not pollute it since Christ has sanctified us in his death; there is nothing left to prove precisely because you have been known at your worst and still loved and cherished by God the son, who shared flesh and blood just like you and gave his life as a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people.
• which is why this rest is entirely compatible with a hugely energetic, deeply engaged, overflowing diary of action, projects, tasks and appointments. In the end, it’s got little to do with what you do , and everything to do with why you do it. The Christian at rest acts not out of deficit, but out of fullness, clear as crystal on the what is and what is not at stake in their activity; the Christian at rest has been freed from the quiet desperation that marks and marrs so much of the striving around us, and so is able to give rather than take, serve rather than self serve, sacrifice rather than accumulate; and at the same time, the Christian at rest is able to say no to things, is perfectly comfortable disappointing people who want them to do stuff, and maybe even are seeking to manipulate them into things, because they don’t take up responsibilities to prove themselves or to please others, or even to please God, precisely because they know that God is already pleased with them, and so a ‘no’ is every bit as legitimate as a ‘yes’.
and so I’m OK with being tired in the morning, because it’s the tiredness in the knowledge that what happens for the next 45 minutes might just be the most important things that happen in my entire day. I quite like the fact that my life is full of activity and responsibilities; and I love it that I plenty of times I say no to things. For the Christian, every day is a sabbath day, every day is lived in the warmth and peace of knowing that it is well with my soul, and that everything that needs to be done has already been done – by Jesus. You don’t have to make up for the fact that you can be a jerk – God knows it, and has already made up for it for you. You don’t have always to be right, or good at something – you are comfortable with your weaknesses, because Jesus has shared all those weaknesses. You find it easy to say sorry, because owning the fact that you fail morally and relationally is not a complicated thing – it is the basis of the life that you now live in Christ. This is the Sabbath rest of God
so, how tired are you, how tired is your soul? Hear the invitation of God to you, the gracious, peaceful, vibrant invitation of God – “a Sabbath rest still remains for the people of God; for those who enter God’s rest also cease from their labours as God did from his.”
let’s pray
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