A Sabbath homily. Voice recording forthcoming.
♪ Great Is Thy Faithfulness
Thomas Chisholm
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Grace and peace to you.
There is a rhythm to the universe that we often miss in our hurry. A rhythm of work and rest, of action and stillness, of pouring out and being filled. We are so focused on the doing, on the achieving, on the next thing, that we forget the sacredness of the pause. We forget that sometimes the most faithful thing we can do is to stop. To breathe. To remember that we are not the ones holding it all together.
I want to start this morning with a story you may have heard this week, because it holds both halves of what I want to say.
In Eden Prairie, Minnesota, two brothers named Noah and Cole Dingels set up a lemonade stand. They were seven and four when they started. That first year they raised three hundred and fifty nine dollars, and they gave every penny of it to a group that supports veterans, inspired by their own grandfather who flew Army helicopters for more than thirty years. They did it again the next year, and the next. Five years now. And that little stand, run by two boys with paper cups, has raised more than sixty thousand dollars.
That is a story of grit. Of small hands doing big things. Of showing up, summer after summer, when they could have stayed inside. And we will come back to their grit. But there is another side to that story, a side that is just as important and much easier to miss. It is the side of rest. Of knowing that even as we work, we are held. That even as we serve, we are sustained. That our purpose is not finally found in what we do, but in who we are, and in the One who calls us.
From the very beginning, GOD built rest into the fabric of creation.
Genesis tells us that after six days of making a world, GOD rested on the seventh. Now think about that. GOD does not get tired. HE did not rest because HE needed to recover. HE rested to show us something, to write a rhythm into the very shape of the world. Work, and then rest. Labor, and then Sabbath. Doing, and then being. HE did not just make a world. HE made a rhythm, and HE called it good, and HE built it into the seventh day so we would not forget it. And later, when GOD gave HIS people the commandments, the ones we treat as the bedrock of a good life, HE did not only say do not steal and do not lie. HE said remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. HE put rest right there in the middle of the moral law, next to the great prohibitions, as if to say that a life with no rest in it is not just tiring. It is a life that has forgotten who GOD is, and who we are not.
And yet we resist it. We fill our Sabbaths with more doing, more achieving, more striving. We treat rest as something we have to earn, rather than something we are given. We think that if we just work hard enough through the week, we will finally deserve a little peace. But the Sabbath is not a reward for our work. The Sabbath is a reminder that our work is not what defines us. That we are loved, not for what we produce, but for who we are. That before we ever poured a single cup, we were already HIS.
This is one of the hardest truths for a hardworking person to receive. When you have spent your whole life being valued for what you can do, rest starts to feel like exposure. It feels like falling behind. It feels dangerous to stop, because you are afraid that when the doing stops, the worth stops too. Hear me this morning. Your worth was never in the doing. It was settled long before you were useful to anyone. Rest is where you stop trying to earn what GOD has already given.
♪ It Is Well With My Soul
Horatio Spafford
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So let me hold the lemonade stand back up, because there is a danger in a story like that, and I do not want to preach it wrong.
Noah and Cole did not rest from their work. They showed up, year after year, and that is exactly the grit we admire. So am I standing here telling you the answer is to work harder, to serve more, to grind like two faithful boys until you have raised your own sixty thousand dollars for GOD? No. That is the very trap the Sabbath breaks. Because their work was never the point. The love behind it was the point. The purpose that carried them was the point. And here is the part that matters most. That purpose was not something they had to manufacture. It was already there, waiting for them to step into it. They did not invent a reason to serve. They received one, from a grandfather, from a country, from something bigger than a lemonade stand. Their striving did not create their purpose. Their purpose held their striving.
And that is the difference between striving that exhausts and serving that sustains. One of them says, I have to hold this all together or it falls apart. The other says, I am held, and out of that I can pour myself out. The first burns you down to ash. The second can go on for five years and feel like joy.
Think of two kinds of water. One is a stream fed by a deep spring, water rising from a source it did not create, flowing day and night without effort, because the source keeps giving. The other is a person with a bucket, running back and forth, trying to keep a dry channel full by their own arms alone. Both look like water for a while. But only one of them lasts, because only one of them is drawing from something bigger than itself. The Sabbath is GOD asking us to stop being the person with the bucket, and to let ourselves be the stream fed by the spring.
Listen to the promise Isaiah gives to tired people.
They who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint.
Notice how the strength comes. It does not come from gritting your teeth harder. It comes from waiting on the LORD. The word there is not a passive, idle waiting, like a man staring at a clock. It is the waiting of someone who has put the whole weight of their hope on GOD instead of on themselves. And to those people, the ones who have stopped trying to be their own source, Isaiah promises something almost too good. You will mount up. You will run and not grow weary. The very strength you could not manufacture by force will be given to you as a gift, when you stop trying to generate it and start receiving it.
That is the promise of the Sabbath. That in our resting, in our waiting, in our pausing, we are renewed. Not because we finally worked hard enough at resting. Because we finally let GOD be the One who holds us up.
And notice the picture Isaiah reaches for. An eagle does not flap its way up to the heights by sheer effort. It finds a current of air already rising, and it spreads its wings, and it is carried. The strength that lifts it was already there in the sky, waiting. The eagle simply stops fighting and lets itself be held. That is what waiting on the LORD looks like. It is not doing nothing. It is spreading your wings on a strength you did not make, and letting it carry you higher than your own effort ever could.
♪ Be Still and Know
Steven Curtis Chapman
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And then hear what Jesus says, the very first words HE preaches in the Gospel of Mark.
The time has come. The kingdom of GOD has come near. Repent and believe the good news.
The kingdom of GOD has come near. Not, the kingdom of GOD is available to whoever works hardest for it. Not, build the kingdom by your own sweat and you may earn your way in. It has come near. It arrived. It came to you before you did anything to deserve it. And the good news, the actual good news HE tells us to believe, is that the kingdom is not built by our striving. It is built by HIS grace, and we are invited to step into it, to rest in it, to trust it.
For a lot of us, believing that is harder than any work we have ever done. We have practiced self-reliance for so long that trusting anyone else, even GOD, feels like letting go of the wheel at high speed. To repent, in this sense, is to turn around from the exhausting belief that it all depends on us, and to trust that GOD is already at work whether we are striving or resting. That is the good news of the Sabbath. You do not have to earn your way into it. You can stop. You can breathe. GOD is at work, even when you are not.
Now let me bring this home, because we all live in ordinary weeks that do not look like a lemonade stand or a Bible story.
Somewhere in this room there is someone running on empty. You have been showing up, day after day, for your family, for your work, for people who need you, and you are tired in a way that sleep does not fix. You have started to believe, quietly, that if you stop, it all falls apart, and so you never stop. Hear the word of the LORD to you this morning. You were never meant to carry it alone, and you were never meant to carry it without rest. The GOD who built the seventh day into creation built it for you.
And there is someone else here who has the opposite fear. You are not exhausted from doing too much. You are afraid you have not done enough. You look at a story like Noah and Cole and you feel small, like your quiet life has not added up to anything worth showing GOD. Hear this. GOD is not measuring your output. HE is not waiting for you to do something impressive before HE loves you. The same GOD who sees a sparrow fall sees the small, hidden, faithful things you have done that no one else noticed. In HIS kingdom, the small things are never wasted.
The Sabbath is not just a day. It is a posture. A posture of trust, of rest, of faith. It is the belief that GOD is at work even in the small things, even in the quiet things, even in the things no one else sees. Noah and Cole did not set out to change the world. They set out to serve, and they trusted the purpose that carried them. And so it is with us. We do not have to do great things to be part of GOD’s great story. We only have to do small things with great love, and to trust that in our resting as much as in our working, GOD is fulfilling HIS purpose in us.
So to the one who is weary, may you find rest in the knowledge that you do not have to carry the weight of the world. To the one who is striving, may you remember that your worth is not in what you do, but in who you are. To the one who is hurried, may you pause and breathe and remember that GOD is at work, even in your stillness. To the one who is doubting, may you trust that GOD is fulfilling HIS purpose in you, even now.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
Grace and Peace.