In Today’s World Can We Rest?

People now sleep 2 1/2 fewer hours each night compared to people from one hundred years ago.

The average office worker has 36 hours of work piled up on his or her desk. It takes three hours a week just to sort through it and find what we need.

We spend eight months of our lives opening junk mail, two years of our lives playing phone tag with people who are too busy to answer, and five years waiting for people who are trying to do too much and are late for meetings.

(Stats from The Overworked American  by Juliet Schur and Rick Warren)

In Genesis, when God created the world, He modeled for us the rhythm of rest and work. He was not weary or tired, but rather set an example for the humans He created. This is how He made them; to function in a rhythm.

In the Ten Commandments, God showed how much He valued this rhythm by making the Sabbath Day one of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:8). 

At the core of this command, God wants us to trust him rather than our own efforts. By stopping our work one day in seven, we place our trust in God to achieve what we need to do. It takes us from the place of striving and into one of dependence.

This is not merely an Old Testament concept. Exodus 31:16-17 tells us that this is a “perpetual covenant, a sign forever”. Later, Hebrews uses the picture of rest as a “shadow” of the eternal rest we are heading towards in heaven one day.

Application:
1. Can you make a commitment to rest from what you normally do one day this week? Can we rest?

2. Think of all the areas of our lives that would change if rest were more a part of our culture. Words like stress, burn out, and busyness would be used less. Imagine the health benefits to living the way that God created us. What in your life would change?

3. Do you trust God to get the job done, or do you feel you are responsible? What does either response say that we believe about God?

“ God made the 7th day a perpetual memorial to the completion of the entire universe and all that is in it. His rest was to be symbolic to both his rhythm of work and cessation of labors and to his eternal hope (of a permanent rest)”  Walter Kaiser 

This post is one in a series of devotionals which were published in La Biblia Del Discipulo (The Discipleship Bible), which is a Spanish language Bible. For more information on the Bible, please visit : http://www.bibliadeldiscipulo.com.

The E-Version is also available for IPads or mobile devices. Copyright 2011.