Full Sermon Transcript
WELCOME
Pastor Chris Paavola:
I am not trying to pretend that my Thursday is any busier than your Thursday or trying to get into some weird competition where I try to out busy you. But my Thursday was nuts. It was crazy. So, the morning started, a bunch of people from St. Mark, including our bands and leaders from the church, were a part of the prayer breakfast that was downtown at the Kellogg’s Arena. And so it was awesome for our band. How cool is that? Our band was asked to lead that, and then we had leaders here who were in charge of the thing. Ashley got to pray at that. Our kids got to sing at that. It was great. But the problem is it was super, super early. So woke up at like five o’clock, five 30, got there by 6:37, got the kids all situated, did the whole prayer breakfast thing, left the prayer breakfast and brought the kids to school late and then came here.
And then on Thursdays is my one-on-one days with all of the staff members and leaders of the church. And it’s just like 30-minute meetings where they give me an update on what they’re doing and how can I help kind of stuff. And it is great, but it’s like seven back-to- back- to- back, 30-minute, mean back- to back meeting, meeting, meeting. I’m just hammering away at these meetings, get done with that. And then there was a board meeting for our school, our world for children that I wanted to be a part of and give them some updates. So that was during lunch, but I didn’t like RSVP that I was going to be there. And so I ate a bag of Cheetos for lunch and then went through the meeting, got done with that meeting and went straight to another meeting. It was a conference zoom call, and I was on that for way too long.
Got done with that. Then when school was done, and so the kids came out of school, they do every day. They walk across the street from Mingus Brook here and they come down the hallway to my office where they usually do homework, but we had to run home and wash Mark’s baseball uniform. It was pitcher day for baseball. And so then I take ’em home and then I get Isaiah and Mark both loaded up. I drop off Isaiah at lacrosse and I take Mark to baseball, and then I watch a little bit of the baseball. And then I go back and I pick up Isaiah from lacrosse. I bring Isaiah home. He doesn’t want to stay all night. Baseball takes forever. Then I go back to baseball, I pick up Mark and then Mark and I go to the middle school to pick up my daughter Seila from the band concert there.
And then we’re driving home and it’s after dark. And I started laughing to myself when I started thinking about this week I’m preaching on a work-life balance because it was just nuts. I’m like, this is so ridiculous. This is just garbage. And it was just a day from 5:00 AM to 10 o’clock, just go, go, go, go, go, go. And the problem is my Thursday looks like my Wednesday and my Tuesday, and I’m just incredibly busy. And so this idea of preaching about a work-life balance, I feel like a hypocrite, but it also just feels so such an impossible standard. And yet we all know that we need some kind of work-life balance because we feel it intuitively. We have to have a balance between rest and work, but too much rest and too much leisure that leads to slothfulness and being a slugger. And we don’t want that.
We know that there’s just diminishing return there where eventually you’re just going to feel like you don’t have much purpose or meaning. And then on the other side, if you have too much work, all work and no play makes Chris really difficult to deal with. It’s just not fun to be around me if I’m a workaholic going from sunup to sundown and just constant go, go, go, go and never taking a break. And we know that that also has a diminishing return where I become ineffective in my work where all of a sudden, I’m no longer as productive as I could be or as attentive as I could be. And it’s just this, we know there’s a balance we need between work and rest, but what is it and why is it that we always feel out of balance? And this is not just something that we’re dealing with.
This is a phenomenon across the world. I did a quick Google search of the word work-life balance, and I gave a bazillion returns. So, I was like, I just want to see articles. And I clicked on articles. It was like just in the last month there were articles from Inc Magazine and the BBC and CNBC and all of this idea of work life balance and the suggestions that they had. And frankly, I think their garbage, I just think I read them and they just feel so impossible. And I think they’re, and I think the writers have a good thing in mind. Or if you read books on work-life balance, like the four-day work week and all that kind, there’s well-meaning thoughts there, but I don’t think they’re realistic. I think they’re idealistic. And the problem with the work-life balance is that you’re trying to balance life and life happens.
You can follow the advice of these articles and stuff like that and they all, you get your identity, you figure out your responsibilities or your priorities, you can get your identities identified, you can get your priorities prioritized, and you can start out your day with this ideal day. I’ve got work-life balance here I go Zen like state. And then life happens. You get a phone call and your kid is sick and you got to go home from work to pick him up at school or go to school work to pick ’em up. Or you get a phone call from your spouse and the car is making a funny sound. Or you get a phone call from a family member and there’s some kind of crisis going out and you’re just putting out fires and you can have all the margin you want in your life, but eventually life takes over.
THE COMMAND OF REST
We have so many demands and responsibilities on us that work-life balance feels impossible. What I want to do today is take a step away from these well-meaning and well-intended articles and advice from our friends of a work-life balance. And actually look at what God says about work-life balance. And he actually has a solution for us. And you can hear hints of it from what we talked about last week. So to bring you up to speed or refresh your memory, we talked about God’s command to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. And it comes to us from Exodus 20 verse five or starting Exodus 20, starting in verse eight.
8 There he’s given this command of the Sabbath day and he says: ”Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy six days you’ll shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God” on it you shall not do any laundry work, on it you shall not catch up on your inbox.
Work on it. You shall not do any work for in six days. The Lord say it created it. Now everybody say it created the heavens and the earth, the sea and everything that’s in them. But he rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blesses the sabbath day. He made it holy. And we talked about this, we looked at this. And what you can glean from that is that there is this thing that we’re supposed to do on the Sabbath day, this holy thing, meaning it’s different than everything else we do in the course of a week. It’s different than the other six days of the week. And what we do on the Sabbath day should be holy and different. And there’s two things that we can do to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. And this is going to be a compiling list that we continue to build through our series.
HOW DO YOU KEEP THE SABBATH DAY HOLY?
But we talked about you keep the Sabbath day holy by resting from your work, stop it, don’t work. And then two, remember God’s work of creation and that’s where in six days he created. So you rest. And what we’re supposed to do is reflect on
and think about and remind ourselves of and remember God’s work of creation that in six days he made it all. And this means he’s in control. You are not in control so you can rest. He gives you permission. He’s got it. He’s got it under control. It’s not up to you. You can rest and that’s a good thing. If it did depend on you, you better get to work. There’s a lot to do. But if God is in control, you can rest. That’s where we left off. But God gives this command to rest. One more time in scripture.
He gives this command to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy and rest one more time. And it’s in the book of Deuteronomy. So in the Jewish Torah, the first five books, Penta Penta, these are the books written by Moses. The book of Deuteronomy is in the Pentateuch. So Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy the fifth, one of the five. The word Deuteronomy, deter means like two. This is where we get our word duet or duo. So Deuteronomy. And then honor enemy means law. So it’s like the law again, a second look at the law. And in the book of Deuteronomy, he reiterates all of these laws that he’s given in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers. And a lot of times just he repeats them verbatim. But sometimes he repeats a law and then gives a new perspective and a new angle on it as a sense of a new insight into this particular scripture.
12 “Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the Lord your God has commanded you. 13 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 14 but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work… 15 Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.
And wouldn’t you know it when he repeats the law to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy? He gives a fresh angle on it that starts to inform us as we think about our work life balance. It comes to us from Deuteronomy chapter five, verse 12. “Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy as the Lord. Your God has commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord.” Your God on it shall note it all looks the same. But then we get our next verse where it gets distinct. Verse 15, “remember that you were slaves.” He doesn’t mention the creation account. He mentions there’s slavery in Egypt. “Remember you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there.” Remember that? Remember how the Lord brought you out with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm? Don’t forget it. Therefore, the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.
So it’s in effect. God is saying to his people, okay, I want you to work hard for six days, but on the seventh day I want you to rest, not just to remember my creation, to also remember my deliverance. So we keep the sabbath day. Here’s a new instruction for us. We rest from our work. Next slide please. We remember God’s work of creation and we remember God’s work of deliverance that he rescued us from the hands of Pharaoh, from slavery. So stop working, meaning all these things that you’re doing day after day after day, you can rest one of those days. You’re no longer slaves. And maybe slavery sounds funny to us, like slavery is a hard word or a strange word to associate with our task list. But think about what slavery is and what it means to be a slave. It means there’s a task master and it means that as a slave, you don’t get a choice. You have no agency and you’re told what to do, when to do it, and how much to do it. You’re a slave, you don’t get a choice. You’re told what to do, when to do it, and how much to do it. You don’t get a choice.
And now think about all of the demands in your life. You know what you call that growing pile of laundry? Well, be careful you’re in church, careful what you call it. But do you know what you call the growing pile of laundry? Do you know what you call the growing pile of mail? Do you know what you call the growing pile of dishes demanding? You can call ’em other things, but they’re definitely demanding and they don’t have your interest in mind. They have their interest in mind, and that is slavery. The task master doesn’t have your interest in minds. It has his interest in mind. And so at your expense, you do the work of slavery and everything that you have to do is a demand placed on you. And if you do it day after day after day after day with no rest, then you’re just like a slave. You’re just like a slave.
If you do everything and today is like a day where you catch up on all of the things that you need to do and you’re going to finally catch up on everything at Sunday, I can finally catch up and get ready for the week. You’re doing it wrong. You’re living like a slave and you’re not a slave and God’s like, stop it. Stop working on this day and remind yourself what’s so easy to forget what you get amnesia about, that you are not a slave, that you have been set free from your task master. And so every one of us can stop because God knows. God knows there is no end. There is no end to the number of things that you have to do. I promise you, every person in this room could clean their oven.
I promise you. Everybody in this room could move their fridge, pull it out and look and be aghast at what needs to be vacuumed underneath there. Every one of you, there is always something to do. It is never ending unending demands. And God is saying, stop today. Stop. This is not a day to catch up because you’ll never get caught up. This is a day to stop. And there it is, my friends, God’s solution to the work-life balance, God’s solution to your daily demands is a weekly withdrawal. God’s solution to your emails, to your laundry, your lawn is a weekly withdrawal. Stop working.
GOD’S SOLUTION TO YOUR DAILY DEMANDS IS A WEEKLY WITHDRAWAL.
And he’s trying to move us out of the day to day to start thinking about week to week. And this is so different than the advice you’ll find on any news article that you’ll read online or any book that you can buy because everything that you’ll read about is examining your day. God’s like, no, no, no. Think about it. Not day to day, week to week. I’m not a expert in, I’ve never walked a tightrope. I’ve never walked in a balanced beam at gymnastics or anything like that. So I am not as agile as other people in this room might be. I think the only time I’ve ever walked on anything like this is at a playground, but this is a balance beam. So I’m not very good at this kind of stuff, but I don’t know much about it. But I know the adage don’t look down, right?
BALANCE BEAM
There’s a guy who walked across Niagara Falls on a tightrope and a journalist afterward asked him, what were you thinking about when you were doing that? And he said, don’t look down. And adage was born, don’t look down. And it makes sense because if you’re on some kind of balance beam or tightrope and you’re trying to find balance and you’re looking down, you’re taking in the wrong information, your perspective is hyper-focused on where your feet are and you need to have a sense of direction about where you’re going. And so if you’re trying to find balance by always looking at your feet, it’s going to be difficult. It’s going to be exhausting and it’s going to be frustrating and you might fall to your doom, okay?
But if you’re walking on a balance beam and you have perspective that is long-term and you’re looking ahead, you get a new sense of balance that you can proceed much easier because you’ve got a long-term perspective in mind. It’s not a short term moment by moment perspective. And this is what the Sabbath is for us. No matter how crazy your week is, no matter how messed up and over the top and breakneck speed your day is, you know that Sunday’s coming. It’s a crazy Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, but Sunday is coming and I got this. And what you get on Sunday balances out the week that was, and the week that’s coming, what happens on Sunday, this day of rest when we come together, helps you recover from all of the chaos behind you and it recharges you to take on the next six days in front of you.
That’s what we heard in the reading that Grant did. When God commands a year of rest for the land on that sixth year, I’ll give you enough for that year of rest. And then how the land recharges for that seventh year is enough for the next six years that follow. And it’s the same thing with you that what you experience in here is we rest together on the Sabbath day and keep it holy, helps you recover from the week that was and prepares you, and orients you, and charges you and gives you everything the strength that you need for the week that’s in front of you.
It it’s stopping to sharpen the saw. It’s like Abraham Lincoln talked about. If he had, I think it was 12 hours to chop down a tree, he’d spend six of it sharpening the saw. It just goes faster and you are a better worker, a more productive you, a more productive mom and dad, a more productive coworker. You take this day of rest and make it holy. It’s like the words of CS Lewis where he talked about the sense of balance. And he says that joy is the serious business of heaven. It’s this idea that you should rest as hard as you work. And what you experience in one day of rest balances out the six days behind you, six days before you rest today.
FREEDOM
Now, I could quite honestly end the message right there. You got it? There’s your takeaway. There’s what you need to go through the next six days, but I think it would actually fall short of God’s intent for the Sabbath and what he wants us to learn from it falls just a little short. It’s easy to miss. There’s something else powerful for us in the Sabbath that God wants us to learn. So many times God tells us to do something to illustrate a higher spiritual reality, right? Like to do something, to have some kind of a ritual or some kind of lived experience that illustrates a greater spiritual reality. So when you give an offering, you’re doing something to remind yourself that God is in control. When you take the body and blood of Jesus and the bread and wine, you remind yourself that God forgives you of your sins.
And it’s like this earthly image for a heavenly reality. And even the parables that Jesus tells, he tells these parables that are like an earthly metaphor for a heavenly reality or a spiritual reality. And the same thing is true with the Sabbath day and this day where you stop working and remember God’s work of creativity, but also God’s work of deliverance. It has to do with this idea of slavery because when Jesus steps on the scene and starts talking about slavery, well, he starts telling this group of religious leaders and starts talking to ’em about how they are enslaved and they’re confused and they’re like, Jesus, what do you mean we’ve never been anyone’s slave.
34 Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin… 36 So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.
John 8
Then Jesus says these words from John chapter eight, verse 34,”I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin.” The Sabbath day is supposed to raise our eyes to a spiritual reality of slavery and sin, not just demands of our day, but spiritual demands placed on us as well and how we need deliverance from them. I say often and it bears repeating so that we remember it, but we don’t. We’re not a sinner because we sinned. We sin because we’re sinners. It is our condition. And when you sin, it’s just evidence that, oh, you did. There you go. You’re born into sin and you are in need of deliverance.
And think about, and maybe you’re thinking, well, sin and slavery, that sounds strange, but think about our definition of a slave. It’s someone or something telling you what to do, when to do it, and how much to do it. And every time you sin, you succumb to that someone else’s directive over you telling you what to do, when to do, and how to do it. When you look for that image that you saw on the internet, when you take part in that delicious gossip that has nothing to do with a person, you’re talking about when you have that addiction that you can’t break something is telling you what to do, when to do it, how much to do it, slaves.
And then Jesus says in verse 36, “but if the sun sets you, say it now, say it like you’re liberated. “If the sun sets you, you are free indeed.” So do not make yourself slaves again to the sin. And on the Sabbath day, we come together to remind ourselves that Jesus Christ lived a perfect death, died, lived a perfect life, died a perfect death, and rose from the grave for the forgiveness of our sins. And he delivers us. So on the Sabbath day, we don’t just rest from our work and remember his work of deliverance, that we no longer have to keep up with all the demands of our day. We also remember that he’s delivered us from sin. We could do nothing about it.
And it gives a new image to this balance beam all of a sudden. Because if I’m struggling against sin and looking at my life and I start looking down at the day and I start to feel guilty about my sin and it’s hard and I’m trying to find a sense of balance and I’m losing and I’m frustrated, I’m exhausted. This is the wrong way to go about my struggle against sin. But if we have our eyes on Jesus and we have a six day, seven day perspective, and it’s not day to day, it’s week to week, and we come back again and again and again to be reminded that we have a savior who has delivered us, I’m fixing my eyes beyond the moments. And even though I struggle with sin, I have a perspective that brings balance and brings me much needed rest for my souls.
So you’re tired and you’re exhausted. I’m looking at a group of bedraggled haggard people. You are worn out people. I’m just kidding. Just kidding. But you are, you’re tired. And he came in here exhausted. And it’s not just because of the week that you had. It’s not just because the garbage that you put up with from the people in your lives and the demands put on you and the 17,000 responsibilities that you have, you’re tired because you’re carrying in not just the burdens of the world. You’re carrying in the burden of sin. You walked into here needing rest.
PRAYER
And so I think it’s time we rest. So let’s confess our sins to God that we might find the rest our souls long for. Will you pray with me? Heavenly Father, I pray for this beautiful group of people and this very, very tired group of people. And God, we confess to you that there are a lot of demands placed on our lives and that we are carrying a heavy burden of responsibility. And I also pray God, that we are carrying in a heavy burden of sin. We brought it into this place and we need deliverance from both. So God, we thank you for this day that you’ve delivered us from task masters and a list of demands the day that we can rest and be reminded of what we so easily forget that it is for freedom. You set us free. Forgive us for making ourselves slaves again, and we bring to you our sin that what your Holy Spirit was moving in this room when we started talking about sin, that it’s the sin that came to mind. We bring it to you right now, asking for your deliverance and your forgiveness that we might find rest.
Thank you so much for sending your son to shed his precious blood for us, Jesus. And it’s in his name that we pray. Amen. I as a called and ordained servant of the word, your pastor, I’m so honored, so excited to pronounce to you the rest you so desperately need. I announce to you by the grace of God, that your sins are forgiven. I forgive you all your sins in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
