Rest Is a Gift from God

On the seventh day — with the canvas of the cosmos completed — God paused from His labor and rested. Thus God blessed day seven and made it special — an open time for pause and restoration, a sacred zone of Sabbath-keeping. — Genesis 2:2-3 The Voice

Do we really think our all-powerful, all-knowing God needed to rest after just six days of work? Possibly, but it seems more likely that God chose to rest to show us the importance of resting from our labors. He knew that we would need an example to follow, and that lesson is just as important today as it was all those years ago. 

Our culture places a lot of emphasis on working hard, earning your place, and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, but a close reading of the Bible reveals a very different message.

God doesn’t love you because you work harder than anyone else.

You can’t earn your place in heaven through good works. And God certainly doesn’t determine your value by your use of your bootstraps — quite the opposite.

After all, the Bible isn’t full of stories of independent go-getters who won accolades all on their own by working around the clock. No, the stories are of people who leaned on God to achieve great things by saying yes to Him and following His path, which includes good work, but also always includes rest.

The Sabbath was the first day specifically set aside for something established by God. More holy days and holidays and feasts would come later, but the Sabbath has been with us since creation. It is one of God’s first gifts to us, a sacred time to give our bodies and minds a chance to recharge and anchor our weeks in rest and communion with Him. Resting regularly isn’t being lazy and doesn’t mean that we are shirking our responsibilities. It is simply accepting God’s generous gift. Building our lives around weekly rest is the first step in accepting the rhythm of life God laid out for us at the beginning, and it only brings us closer to Him.

Rhythms of Rest 

To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under Heaven. — Ecclesiastes 3:1 NKJV

The entire world runs on cycles. Day becomes night. Night becomes day. Winter melts into spring. Spring blooms into summer. Summer fades into autumn. And autumn freezes into winter. 

• Years pass by, and people are born and eventually die, but these cycles that God created remain the same.

He set each cycle moving at creation, including the ones that govern our days.

The Bible models this cycle for us. It is a rhythm of work, play, worship, and rest. Days for work, nights for rest, Sabbath each week, and everyone pausing to come together to worship and celebrate for holidays and feasts. Everything in balance to keep us healthy physically, mentally, and spiritually. The seasons have always played a role too. Work was limited by daylight and the weather until very recently. There was less outdoor work to be done in the winter and more time to rest. Now, of course, thanks to technology, we can work anytime and anywhere, even when we shouldn’t.

Our modern, busy, go-go-go, I’ll-rest-when-I’m-dead mentality doesn’t truly disrupt or circumvent the cycle God provided us, even if it feels like working around the clock is some sort of cheat code to getting to the good life. It may lead to financial success, but it always comes at a cost — usually our health and overall well-being. We’ve turned away from living in community and working together to carry the load in favor of doing it all on our own, in our own ways. As a result, we’re a society of people who are sick, unhappy, burned out, lonely, and overwhelmed. And that is definitely not God’s plan for us.

Prioritizing rest is about more than catching up on sleep. It’s about living our lives in sync with the rhythms God laid out for us that are designed to bring us closer to Him.

The Sabbath Was Made for Man

Then He said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” — Mark 2:27 NIV

Keeping the Sabbath has always been an important part of Jewish culture, and as stated in the Ten Commandments, no work was to be done on the Sabbath in order to keep it holy. But in Jesus’ time, that had been taken to extremes. It was considered work to put food on the table, to gather water, to do almost anything at all. For many people the Sabbath was not restful; it was stressful.

Jesus was revolutionary in many ways, but at the time, one of the most controversial things He said was, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” 

The Jewish leaders had turned the Sabbath, the day of rest, into a series of rules to be followed. Jesus recognized that for what it was: a perversion of God’s original gift of a day of rest. His simple statement said volumes. The Sabbath wasn’t some divine test where God was watching for every infraction. It was a generous gift, a sacred day to pause from the hard labor of the week and be refreshed.

What hobbies do you have that refresh you?

How can you incorporate those into your plans for the Sabbath over the next few weeks?

Excerpted with permission from The Weekly Rest Project, copyright Zondervan.

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Your Turn

Do you rest or do you go-go-go? God gave us rest as a gift! What fills your soul and relaxes you? ~ Devotionals Daily