LEARNING TO FIND REST
Just recently besides doing and keeping up with the ‘usual’ things – HopeFM, preaching appointments, I have had to help organise and take part in a Reversing Diabetes programme, a funeral for a previous member and good friend, and an excellent trip with my wife to Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia. How has your week been?
What is going on in your life at the moment? What commitments and plans do you have? How much did you manage to finish this last week but what still needs to be done? Life can be and quite often is an endless round of repetitive tasks which then gives us little time to be able to do something new, something different, something exciting and challenging, something……
We all have 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day and seven days a week, yet we do not get done what we want to do. Also because of the incessant round of activities and our need to get more done we finish up not getting the rest we need.
If you know anything about the French Revolution you will recall that they established a ‘god of reason’ but they changed the week from a 7 day cycle to a 10 day cycle. Result? After a short period of time not only man, but even the animals were exhausted and getting ill. They had to revert BACK to a 7 day cycle.
Interestingly, where does the 7 day cycle come from? We get our day from the earth rotating one full cycle, we get our month from the rotation of the moon, and we get the year from the distance travelled by the earth around the sun. Where does the 7 day cycle come from? …. There is only one source for this,
and that is to be found in the book of Genesis (chapter 2 verses 1-3).
When God created the earth he made it in 6 days and then rested on the 7th and blessed that day BECAUSE on it he rested from ALL the WORK that he had done. In fact you will know that even one of the 10 commandments makes mention of ‘remembering the Sabbath day’.
Why should God have it written – and the first word in that commandment REMEMBER? Simply because we forget. And that is what so many of us are doing all the time. We forget that we need to rest one day in seven. It is not impossible to work all the hours God sends us, it is not impossible to work 7 days a week but it will be probable that we will suffer the consequences.
Consequences that will be related to our health and our relationships. One lesson I learned some years ago from Dr Samuel Bacchiocchi* was from the passage quoted in Genesis above that God rested from the work he had done. In the same way, said Bacchiocchi, we should learn to rest as if the work we had done in that previous 6 days was DONE, completed!
Yes, finished. What a great thought! If I learn to rest considering my work FINISHED for that week then I can forget ‘work’ and REST without anxiety that so and so is not finished or this has not yet been done etc. This only goes to show that our God wants the best for us all in that he recorded this in Genesis so we can learn to benefit from our Creator’s lessons. Why don’t you try it out? Consider your work complete and rest forgetting about what still needs to be done for 24 hours and pick it up again ONLY on the next day.
* A good and excellent resource on this topic is to be found in ‘From Sabbath to Sunday’ by Samuel Bacchiocchi, A Historical Investigation of the Rise of Sunday
Observance in Early Christianity. I am sure a search on Amazon will help you find a copy.
WinWellness - Rest for the RESTLESS - SABBATH
LOGIN