Christ, Our Sabbath Rest at Work

00:00:04.000 | Christ is our Sabbath rest.

00:00:07.000 | We celebrate this beautiful truth every Lord's Day, every Sunday.

00:00:11.000 | But what about on a day like today, on Monday?

00:00:14.000 | Is Christ my Sabbath rest today at work?

00:00:18.000 | That's Pam's question for you, Pastor John. It's a good one.

00:00:20.000 | Pastor John, hello, she writes, "Christ is our Sabbath rest, a hearty amen to that wonderful truth,

00:00:26.000 | to the degree that I understand it, and I don't think I fully understand it quite yet.

00:00:31.000 | This seems to mean a lot more than Christ has set apart one day of rest for us, the Lord's Day, on Sunday.

00:00:38.000 | At the very end of APJ 658, you called Christ our 'eternal rest,'

00:00:45.000 | and that means you said, 'pervading all our work, we are restful in Christ.'

00:00:54.000 | Can you explain this to me? How is Christ our Sabbath rest even while we are working?"

00:01:01.000 | If we had time, we would dig into Hebrews chapters 3 and 4,

00:01:06.000 | because there, that amazing author presents an argument for the present rest of the people of God

00:01:13.000 | and the future eternal rest for the people of God.

00:01:17.000 | He urges us in 319 and 4.1 to fear lest we attain or fail to attain the rest, meaning fear unbelief,

00:01:27.000 | because belief is the only way into the rest of Jesus Christ, both now and in the future.

00:01:36.000 | But we don't have time to do that as much as I'd love to, and I want to go straight to Pam's main question,

00:01:43.000 | namely, how do we experience the rest, the Sabbath rest of Christ at work?

00:01:52.000 | In other words, what meaning does it have while we're expending great energy

00:01:59.000 | to speak of enjoying the restfulness of Christ in that very moment of wearying exertion?

00:02:08.000 | So the text that I have in mind now is not Hebrews, but Matthew 11, 28 to 30, where Jesus says,

00:02:15.000 | "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

00:02:21.000 | Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I'm gentle and lowly in heart,

00:02:26.000 | and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light."

00:02:36.000 | So the burden and the yoke of the lordship of Jesus is easy and light.

00:02:44.000 | So in the midst of our labor, our strenuous efforts to do our very best in our vocation,

00:02:53.000 | the submission at that moment to the demands of Jesus is called a restful experience.

00:03:02.000 | You will find rest for your souls precisely in the midst of your exertions

00:03:08.000 | to do your job with excellence for his glory.

00:03:12.000 | So what is that experience like? I think that's what Pam's really asking.

00:03:18.000 | What's it like working as hard as you can and in the very doing of it,

00:03:24.000 | experiencing Christ as our soul's rest, not just after it, not just before it,

00:03:32.000 | but in it, in the very exertion of our life's work?

00:03:38.000 | So here are four ways that we can experience the soul rest of Christ as we are doing our work.

00:03:50.000 | First, we work with the sweet assurance that we stand already justified before God,

00:04:00.000 | not on the basis of our work, but on the basis of faith alone in Christ's work,

00:04:08.000 | even as we work. So Romans chapter 4, verses 4 and 5.

00:04:14.000 | How sweet are these words? "Now to the one who works,"

00:04:20.000 | and he has in mind working for justification, working to get right with God,

00:04:26.000 | "to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift, but as his due.

00:04:34.000 | To the one who does not work for justification, to get right with God,

00:04:41.000 | but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness."

00:04:52.000 | If we don't get this right, nothing will be right.

00:04:57.000 | Our souls enjoy the glorious, precious, sweet restfulness of knowing that we are right with God

00:05:07.000 | through faith alone and that the work we are doing, sweat on our face, weariness in our bones,

00:05:13.000 | exhaustion in our minds, is not done to get right with God.

00:05:20.000 | Yes.

00:05:21.000 | We are delivered from the horrible torment of soul that thinks,

00:05:27.000 | "I must work, I must do a good job so that I can get right with God,

00:05:32.000 | I can get a right standing before God."

00:05:36.000 | That kind of restlessness and anxiety and striving is over.

00:05:42.000 | The verdict has been rendered by the King of Heaven, "Not guilty, my son, not guilty, my daughter."

00:05:53.000 | So go about your work with a deep restfulness of soul.

00:05:59.000 | Number two, in Christ, we work hard with the thrilling energy that we are loved by God

00:06:11.000 | very personally and forever.

00:06:15.000 | Ephesians 2, 4, amazing verse.

00:06:19.000 | Paul says that God's great love, and that phrase "great love,"

00:06:23.000 | I think it's the only place in his letters he uses that very phrase.

00:06:27.000 | God's great love made us alive in Christ.

00:06:33.000 | That means we were dead and he made us alive because of love

00:06:37.000 | before we did anything to get the love.

00:06:40.000 | We do not work with the restless, nervous anxiety of trying to win the affections

00:06:48.000 | of a lover that we're not sure of.

00:06:51.000 | The great love of God, if we're alive in Christ, it was great love already that put us there.

00:06:58.000 | So picture this analogy, to feel what it means to work out of the thrilling energy of being loved.

00:07:04.000 | Suppose I have been dating Noel, who's now been my wife for 54 years,

00:07:09.000 | but this was true once upon a time.

00:07:12.000 | Suppose I've been dating Noel for just several weeks,

00:07:16.000 | and I feel very strong affections welling up in me,

00:07:21.000 | and I'm thinking, "This is the woman I want to marry."

00:07:26.000 | But I'm not sure what her affections are yet.

00:07:31.000 | Then the day comes when she needs some heavy lifting done for her

00:07:36.000 | as she moves a dozen boxes or so, books, furniture, from one apartment to another,

00:07:43.000 | I go to her apartment to help her move.

00:07:47.000 | And as I start to go down the stairs where she has everything packed up,

00:07:55.000 | she puts her hand on my arm, and I turn to look at her,

00:08:01.000 | and she says right into my eyes for the first time,

00:08:06.000 | "I love you, Johnny. What happens to my exhausting work that afternoon?"

00:08:13.000 | [laughter]

00:08:15.000 | Oh, my goodness.

00:08:17.000 | There flows into it a thrilling energy of being loved.

00:08:25.000 | There is in the exhaustion of the heavy boxes a restfulness of soul of not wondering anymore,

00:08:34.000 | "Am I loved? I am loved. I am loved."

00:08:38.000 | And, of course, the analogy breaks down a little bit

00:08:43.000 | because God doesn't need any help with lifting heavy boxes. I got that.

00:08:48.000 | But the principle is the same.

00:08:51.000 | He gives me the privilege of serving His purposes in the world,

00:08:57.000 | and He takes away all of its burdensomeness by saying, "I love you. I've got you.

00:09:03.000 | I love you. I choose to love you."

00:09:07.000 | Number three, the analogy of Noel's love, however, is not nearly good enough to capture the point.

00:09:19.000 | God's love doesn't stand by, like Noel stood by, and watch us lift the boxes of life.

00:09:32.000 | Watch us do our job at work.

00:09:34.000 | He doesn't stand by and watch, counting on us to muster the energy because we're loved.

00:09:41.000 | His love commits Him to help us. Help us.

00:09:47.000 | He steps into our lives by His Spirit within us

00:09:51.000 | and becomes the kind of energy that turns our work into something far greater than mere human achievement,

00:09:58.000 | even in response to love.

00:10:01.000 | It becomes a kind of God-wrought miracle that gets Him praise and touches other people

00:10:07.000 | in ways we can't begin to explain when we're operating in the strength of God.

00:10:13.000 | I say this because in 1 Peter 4, verse 11, Peter says,

00:10:19.000 | "Let the one who serves," you could say, "works."

00:10:24.000 | Serve, work by the strength that God supplies in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ.

00:10:35.000 | To Him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.

00:10:41.000 | In other words, there is a restfulness in work because God is an inexhaustible helper in our work

00:10:52.000 | so that our energy is really, in a profound sense, His energy supplied to us.

00:11:00.000 | Number four.

00:11:02.000 | Therefore, the obstacles that always meet us in our work

00:11:09.000 | and which formerly robbed us of peace and restfulness and filled us with anxiety,

00:11:18.000 | those obstacles don't have that effect anymore

00:11:23.000 | because now we know nothing is too hard for the Lord, Jeremiah 32, 17, nothing.

00:11:32.000 | And He works everything together for our good, Romans 8, 28.

00:11:38.000 | So, at least for those four reasons, we can speak of Christ being our rest, rest for our souls,

00:11:51.000 | even in the very exertion of our daily work.

00:11:57.000 | Beautiful and robust explanation of this rest for our souls.

00:12:02.000 | Thank you, Pastor John. It's a lot to meditate on here, a lot of connecting threads working out

00:12:07.000 | from this great reality of Christ, our Sabbath rest as we head off to work or to school on this Monday.

00:12:14.000 | Thank you for joining us today. If you want to ask Pastor John,

00:12:17.000 | type your question out and email it to me at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.

00:12:22.000 | Well, if you were to sit down with John Piper's Collected Works, his 13-volume Collected Works published in 2017,

00:12:30.000 | and you read the entire thing cover to cover, you'd come across the word "satisfied"

00:12:35.000 | almost 1,500 times. "Satisfied." It's all over his works, all over his ministry.

00:12:43.000 | But you'd likely not read a definition. So, what does John Piper mean when he uses the word "satisfied"?

00:12:50.000 | You want to know, and now I want to know, and we'll ask Pastor John on Thursday.

00:12:54.000 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you next time.

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