Rest in Real-Time

Sabbath is rhythm and resistance for worship and rest that leads to refreshment. This is crucial for the Christian life, and it’s as relevant today as it ever has been. 

That was the gist of Sunday’s sermon on the fourth commandment, to “Remember the Sabbath, to keep it holy.” As I’ve talked with several of you after Sunday, a reoccurring theme seems to be that this topic has already been in the air. It’s something you’ve been thinking about and discussing. In fact, in God’s providence, our Community Group focused on Psalm 23 last Wednesday, and specifically what it means that God “leads me beside still waters” (verse 2). Have you ever stopped to think about that? Still waters. We spent 90 minutes talking about rest, because our Community Group gets the tension we all feel. 

A Different, Better Rule

The pace of modern life, driven by the values of Secularism, is incompatible with Christian discipleship. Yes, incompatible. If we’re going to experience rest for our souls — if we’re going to follow Jesus as he calls us — it means we can’t “buy in” on everything the world around us is selling. And I don’t just mean the major sins of things like abortion or the attempt to redefine marriage, but also the subtler schemes we gulp indiscriminately. 

 Our lives must be governed by a different rule, a better one.  

Paul would call it life in the Spirit (see Galatians 5:25), or in another place, simply, “new creation” (see Galatians 6:16). We might just say the Jesus way. It’s all the same. It’s the truth of Jesus that births in us the life of Jesus that leads us in the way of Jesus.

But How Does It Look?

And so what exactly is that? How does that look? It most basically means, as Dallas Willard defines it: “a disciple is who Jesus would be if he were you” (see here). It’s not simply “acting” like Jesus in one-off performances, in those particular junctures when Christlikeness is required; but instead it’s living your entire life in the pattern of Jesus, steeped in his love, overcome by his realness, empowered by the very Spirit who indwelled him. 

It eventually means you pick up “habits of grace,” as Pastor Mathis calls them, the routines that avail your soul to God’s new, daily mercies. And even then, as we’re all walking in these habits, it’s not going to look exactly the same down the line … not with all of our different living arrangements and jobs and responsibilities and all that. For example, I would commend you to have a morning practice of prayer similar to mine (even wrote a book about it), but I can’t bind your conscience here. You have plenty of elbow room to figure out what makes most sense for you. So do that. 

And then also, at the same time, we should recognize that the practices that tend to stick are the ones embraced by community. It’s easier to continuing doing the things we do together. That’s especially true when such practices are going against the grain of the surrounding world, as following Jesus does. 

While most of this is best worked out in Life Groups, there is great potential for Community Groups to explore these practices together. And you continue to think about these things and discuss them, here are a few clarifiers that might help:

1) There’s a difference between hard work and busyness.

We typically use these words interchangeably, but they’re different — or I think we should use them differently. Admittedly, part of my concern comes from Eugene Peterson who once wrote about pastors, 

… the word “busy” is the symptom not of commitment but of betrayal. It is not devotion but defection. The adjective busy set as a modifier to pastor should sound to our ears like adulterous to characterize a wife or embezzling to describe a banker. It is an outrageous scandal, a blasphemous affront.” (The Contemplative Pastor, 17)

Busyness, according to Peterson, is a form of laziness because it means we’re burning our time on things less important than the task at hand. It means we’re trying to juggle too many balls — some of which we should just put down … but we don’t put them down because we’re too lazy to let our actual values set our agenda. We act out of anxiety, cowering to the expectations of others and stretching ourselves thin. There’s incredible activity, but only an inch deep. That is “busyness.”

But don’t confuse busyness with hard work. Hard work is doing the things you’re supposed to be doing, and there just happens to be a lot of it. It’s the right thing at the right time, in high demand. For example, if at your job you have a stack of papers on your desk that you must review by Friday afternoon, you’re not busy, you just have some hard work ahead. If you’re reading this article while you should be reviewing the stack of papers, then you’re busy. Save this for later; go review the papers. 

Hard work is a good thing — and even a wonderful thing if you know you’re stopping on Sunday no matter what. The rest will just be all the better. Now, to let the hard work encroach upon the rest turns it into busyness — because you’re no longer doing the right thing at the right time. And if you’re afraid of Sabbath rest because you worry it’ll make you a sloth, that’s like fearing grace because you think it’ll make you sin. It means you’re not going deep enough.

2) Hurry is about how you get where you’re going. 

Okay, we need to mention the word “hurry.” It’s also different from “busyness” (although the busy are often hurried). Think about “hurry” as how you get from A to B. It’s more the mode of how you do whatever you’re doing, and generally it’s a bad thing. 

Hurry is what makes people text and drive, or be curt with their kids, or miss the sunrise that’s right in front of them. It typically includes some form of multitasking — you know, trying to do multiple things at one time as if we were not really human. The problem with hurry is that most technology encourages it. Every app is meant to make something only a few swipes away, easy enough to do while you do that other thing. 

One big problem with hurry is that it can even infect your hard work. It takes a good thing and turns it upside down because you do it the wrong way. 

An example would be how I take my kids to school in the mornings (something I’ve been freshly convicted about). Taking my kids to school is a good thing, to be clear. The hour I get up, and what I do to get my children dressed, fed, and ready for the day is hard work. But when I revert to snapping fingers and barking orders something goes amiss. I’m not angry, I’m just trying to speed them up. We’ve got to be there by 7:50am, which means we need to leave by 7:35am, which means — would you please just put your other shoe on?! 

Inadvertently, I’m discipling my kids on life-pace … which ends up just being life in general. Modeling for your children how to get where you’re going is modeling for your children how to live. And it occurred to me some months back that if I’ve taught my children anything over those many precious hours we’ve had in the window of wakeup to school drop-off, I’ve taught them how to hurry. No bueno. It was basically doing the right thing the wrong way, and the Spirit was kind to call me out.

Maybe we could put it all like this:

• Hard work is the right thing at the right time in high demand.  

• Busyness is the wrong thing at the wrong time. 

• Hurry is the right thing in the wrong way.

What do you think? How’s that sound? Leave any additional thoughts or questions in the comments below. It’d be great to pick up these discussions with one another in the coming weeks.