God Values Rest

Blog by Alan Fadling

Good work done in the power of God’s Spirit honors God. Who could argue with that? But learning to rest well, receiving God’s gift of refreshment and renewal, is also a way to honor God. That one is harder for many of us to envision. Rest can sound lazy. It certainly sounds unproductive.

But rest is God’s idea. God made our bodies to need sleep in a daily rhythm. God gives the gift of sleep to those he loves. He says so in the Psalms (see 127:2). But some people turn sleep into an evil that is to be resisted or at least minimized. They brag about how little sleep they get because they only value what they accomplish in their work.

But I’ve discovered that resting is a good gift. In rest, I remember who God is and that God is at work in mightier and more strategic ways than I’ll ever be. In rest, I see my work as a gift to be received, enjoyed, and shared rather than a burden to be borne day after day.

Sabbaths

God also gives the gift of a weekly Sabbath. God even protects the edges of that Sabbath by providing guidance that invites us to stop our work as a way of making such a day special or “holy” as the Old Testament refers to it.

In all of this, work still made up most of the days for God’s people, but it is rather surprising how many non-workdays God built into the rhythm of their lives. God really does value rest. We see this in 

• The gift of daily sleep
• The gift of weekly Sabbaths
• The gift of feast days throughout a year

God values rest so highly that he commanded the Jewish people to let their land rest one year out of every seven. In Leviticus 25, God says that the Sabbath year for the land was one in which they weren’t to plant or prune or harvest their fields for profit. They could eat what grew on its own, and in this way God would provide for them. In addition, every fifty years there was to be a kind of super Sabbath year for the people and their land called a “Jubilee.”

Throughout the books of Leviticus and Numbers the Jewish people were instructed to observe these Sabbaths and feast days and “do no regular work.” These days of rest were to be a pause from their usual routine.

How might that work today? Honestly, I don’t know for certain, but a Sabbath year for the land could certainly provide a rationale for the idea of work sabbaticals. I’m growing more convinced that God is offering us more of the gift of rest than we realize. I don’t think that workaholism is a mode we can offer in the service of God. There are moments and days and even seasons when the way to be faithful to God is to rest. Rest is good!

God is not watching our life like a shareholder of a public company watches quarterly productivity. While it’s true that God desires for us to bear good fruit, he invites us to bear fruit that is even better and more lasting. But what God measures and treasures as fruitfulness is different from our expectations.

“He Makes Us Lie Down”

Unfortunately, Israel never did well in observing or honoring the Sabbaths for the land every seven years. Resting to that extent requires a lot of trust in God’s provision.

Part of the reason for Israel’s exile into Babylon was that God’s people had not given the land its Sabbaths. It was God’s way of allowing the land to rest the way he had intended. There’s an almost throwaway line at the end of Second Chronicles that highlights this uncomfortable reality.

Jerusalem has been attacked. The temple has been looted and burned. The city walls are broken down. God had been warning his people that their continuing disobedience would be disastrous for them, and it was. But there is a surprising comment that the chronicler makes in the end:

“The land enjoyed its Sabbath rests; all the time of its desolation it rested, until the seventy years were completed in fulfillment of the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah.” (2 Chron. 36:21)

What an amazing comment for the chronicler to make as the story closes: the land enjoyed its Sabbath rests. The people had been working that land year after year, decade after decade, century after century until the land was exhausted.

When Moses gave God’s people the rules about a Sabbath for the land, he also warned them what would happen if they weren’t willing to follow God’s wise guidance. Specifically, he told them a day would come when they might be driven out of the promised land. And when that happened, the land would finally get its rest (Lev. 26:34-35).

Centuries later, the prophet Jeremiah warned God’s people that a seventy-year captivity was coming (Jer. 25). For the seventy years Israel was in exile, the land was able to observe the Sabbath years it hadn’t had for nearly five centuries.

Rest Through Hardship

The whole time the land lay desolate, it was resting. I am struck by this connection between a desolate season and rest. Sometimes a season of great consolation can be very draining. When everything is going our way, we may just keep working and working until we collapse.

Seasons of desolation have sometimes been a place in which my own rest ethic has taken shape by necessity. Seasons of loss, experiences of burnout, or places of exhaustion have been the times when my body had no choice but to receive to receive the rest God had always been offering.

We may find ourselves in a challenging season. It doesn’t even have to be “our fault.” Maybe we lose our job or hit a quarter- or mid-life crisis or experience some painful loss. While such circumstances often derail our normal work life, they can also be seasons in which we receive the unexpected gift of rest.

We might get stuck on what sounds like punishment language in Jeremiah or from the writer of Chronicles, but I think we need to see the bigger picture. Even when God sends discipline to his disobedient and rebellious children, he has redemption in mind. After seventy years, the Jewish people would return to a land that had rested and was ready to be more productive than any of them could imagine.

When the circumstances of life force us to rest, that can be a darker shade of grace than we can easily see. But it is grace nonetheless. God has many ways to help us receive the gift of rest he is offering.

In closing, when I’m invited to talk about unhurried living, the idea of a rest ethic is implicit in much of what I teach. I’m not just recommending an unhurried life so people will get more work done from a less exhausted place. I’m calling people into the eternal living that Jesus invites us to in the Father. That forever life is rich in rest.

Let God shape a good and holy rest ethic in you. These days, resting at all tests our trust in God’s ability to provide for us if we honor his gift. But I’ve found that growing in this sort of trust has borne very good fruit in my life, my relationships, and my work.

For Reflection:

• When have you faced hardships or challenges that disrupted your life and your work? Are there any ways that this might have led to unexpected rest?
• In what ways might God be inviting you to deeper places of rest in your life and work? In what ways are you receiving that invitation? In what ways are you resisting?

Photo by Jean Carlo Emer on Unsplash