Welcome to this Come to Jesus Daily Devotional. Today, we reflect on the wisdom contained in having a week that comprises of six days of work and one day of rest.
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“Moses assembled the whole Israelite community and said to them, “These are the things the Lord has commanded you to do: For six days, work is to be done, but the seventh day shall be your holy day, a day of sabbath rest to the Lord. Whoever does any work on it is to be put to death. Do not light a fire in any of your dwellings on the Sabbath day.”” (Exodus 35:1-3)
Here, Moses reminds the people of God’s Sabbath command. Prior to all the work that will need to be done for the making of The Tabernacle, God reminds them to rest - Our busyness should come out of a place of rest! This - the fourth of The Ten Commandments - is modelled on the account of how God created the world in six days, which was followed by rest. We read in Genesis 2:
‘Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then 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 2:1-3)
The word ‘Sabbath’ derives from the Hebrew, ‘shabbat’ and means to cease, to end, to rest. Today, we simply want to see that we are designed to work and rest. However, most of us find it hard to get a healthy balance of work and rest. Faced with the amount of things on our to-do list, our response can vary between two extremes: We are tempted to give up, feeling overwhelmed and ‘burnt out’; alternatively, we seek to work harder - we become workaholics in order to deal with the pressure. God put rest into His Law so that people would not forget that they should set apart a day of rest for God - and this was so important that the penalty for disobeying this pattern was death!
Rest is vital for our spiritual, emotional and physical health. In his recent and highly popular book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, John Mark Comer writes:
‘He [God] built a rhythm into the DNA of creation. A tempo, a syncopated beat. God worked for six, rested for one. When we fight this work-six-days, Sabbath-one-day rhythm, we go against the grain of the universe. And to quote the philosopher H. H. Farmer, “If you go against the grain of the universe, you get splinters.”…It’s been proven by study after study: there is zero correlation between hurry and productivity. In fact, once you work a certain number of hours in a week, your productivity plummets. Wanna know what the number is? Fifty hours. Ironic: that’s about a six-day workweek.’
Whilst wanting to avoid the rigid and legalistic approaches that often attend those who seek to keep a sabbath day, I do believe that we are to, if we can, have a day that's set apart from our usual work and set apart for recreation (in the right sense of the word) and worship (Worship being at the heart of recreation). I put this in the category of wisdom rather than a command from God; I put it this way because It’s very interesting to note that we don't see any teaching in the New Testament about having a day of rest! No epistle urges us, for our well-being, to take a day off. However, I believe that it's God's will that we seek to have such a day and seek to establish such a day with the influence that we have because we are always in danger of being enslaved to our work.
How is your work and rest? Are you in balance? How do you need to respond today?
Community group notes and study
1. Notices
It might be good to begin with notices. Please share from this week’s Church News.
2. Icebreaker
How has God been speaking to you from His Word this week and how has this helped you?
3. Worship together
Let’s begin our time together by lifting our eyes and hearts to worship our great God. Perhaps you have readings and songs that you would like to use together. Let’s be open to the gifts that the Spirit wants to give in order to encourage one another.
4. Study and pray together
Our message on Sunday followed the theme of rest. We can seek rest in the wrong places and we can become burnt out and so hide and run away from the pressures of life. However, if we listen to God regarding a wise approach to work and rest, and if we truly seek to draw our rest and strength from Him, we will thrive and be a blessing to many.
Please read Exodus 35:1-3 and Genesis 2:1-3
Did God speak to you about anything specifically from Sunday’s message?
What would you say these passages teach us regarding a wise balance of work and rest?
It’s interesting to see that, in Exodus 35, He reminds people of the six-and-one principle before going on to task them with the hard work of making The Tabernacle. What are the principles that we can learn from this?
Please read Hebrews 4:1-10; How is the Sabbath command (of Exodus 20:8-11) fulfilled in Christ? How do you ensure that you keep this kind of sabbath?
Please read Matthew 11:28-30; How do we, or how can we, seek to live in the good of this promise?
SIV - How will a godly and wise balance of rest and work ensure that we remain faithful in Serving, investing and InViting?
SIV - Do we have any stories of how we have ‘Served, Invested, and inVited’ recently?
SIV - Spend some time together talking and praying about who and how you are seeking to bring your community to Jesus.
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