Rest

Jesus reminds us that Sabbath rest isn't meant to be a burden. It is a gift from God—woven into creation for our refreshment, renewal, and reconnection with the Divine.

I’d like to begin with a very quick survey. Do you think Sunday is the beginning of the week, or the end?

I’m curious of what you think because last Sunday, after everyone went home, I settled onto the couch to upload my message to my blog.

But the moment I sat down, my head found a pillow, and before I knew it, I was out cold. I wasn’t just tired—I was spent. Physically. Mentally. Spiritually drained.

​It was like my body staged a quiet mutiny, vetoing every plan I had made for the rest of the day.

​Was it the end of a long week that caused me to crash? That’s certainly possible. Or was my nap pointing to something else?

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been walking through the 8 Sacred Moves of Creation. Light, Water, Land, Time, Life, and Work. Each one pulling us into God’s rhythm of love.

Today, we come to the seventh move: Rest. As we will see, rest isn’t something we stumble into at the end of a long week. It’s a spiritual practice woven into the very DNA of creation from the beginning. Here's what the story tells us:

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished and all their multitude. On the sixth day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation. These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.                                                                                                                                                 Genesis 2:1-4

We all love a good lazy day. So why do we feel the need to pack every waking moment with busyness? Like I said a couple of weeks ago, humans are the only creatures that wake up with a to-do list.

I think even science would agree with scripture that says rest was built into creation. Trees drop their leaves for a season. Bears hibernate. Even the seas pause daily to recalibrate. Our human bodies know this rhythm. Our heart rest between beats, lungs between breaths. Yet we keep running until our bodies break and our souls fray.

Why is that?  Why do we brag about being on call 24/7? Or admire those who are the first at work and the last to leave?

Americans suck at this work life balance thing. We choose to measure our worth by our productivity instead of our presence. Not only is that bad for our bodies it quickly wears down our minds and our spirits.

Ignore it long enough, and your body will take matters into its own hands, knocking you out right in the middle of your over planned agenda.  But like Anne Lamott believes, “Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.”

As we see in our reading, true rest isn’t just taking a break. It’s a sacred rhythm for renewal. How we reconnect to God, not the grind. Genesis says God finished all the work and rested “blessing the seventh day and making it holy.”

The Hebrew word used here for rest is shavat—often translated as Sabbath. It’s a verb that doesn’t mean collapsing from exhaustion. It means wholeness, completion, perfection.

God steps back, delights in what has been made, and calls it whole. As Glen McWherter, the creator of the 8 Moves, points out, “Without rest, the work is incomplete.”

And so, Sabbath rest is the first thing Scripture calls “holy.”  The day God personally blesses and sets aside for us to teach us the rhythm of life: creating and ceasing; doing and delighting.

This might explain to us why Sabbath makes it into God's Top Ten List of commandments: “Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy...” (Ex. 20:8) But, again, how well are we doing to honor this? What would our day planner reveal?

It's probably a safe bet to say you've heard someone say, “I’ll rest when I’m dead.” Maybe you’ve said it yourself. I know my wife has never said it. She practices the power of sleeping in.

I like to think it's not because she's lazy (she's not) but because she knows this commandment isn’t saying rest is optional. Instead it's mandatory. It’s how we remain faithful to God’s covenant with us.

The fourth commandment acknowledges that time belongs to the One who created it. So how we manage it matters.

When critics challenged the disciples for plucking grain on the Sabbath, Jesus shot back, “The Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27).

​Here Jesus is reminding us that Sabbath rest isn't meant to be a burden. It is a gift from God—woven into creation for our refreshment, renewal, and reconnection with the Divine.

Again, Sabbath is about restoration, completion, wholeness. It’s why Jesus healed on the Sabbath…making people whole again, and communities complete.

The same fullness that God declared on the seventh day and called good Jesus offers to us wherever and whenever we need it.

He says, “Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while” (Mark 6:31). He knows the work of love asks a lot from us. That it requires us to withdraw and recharge if we’re going to practice the way of Jesus. Love is hard. Loving the kind of folks Jesus calls us to love is even harder.

Again, he says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest… for your souls” (Matt. 11:28). This is Sabbath language. A deep, holy pause born from the heart of God.

Jesus' critics missed this point. Sabbath isn't a prohibition. It’s restoration offered to the weary and the overworked, to the anxious and the overburdened, to you and me. It's an invitation to dwell in the Divine stillness that quiets the body, clears the mind, and heals the soul so we can love God, love others and serve both.

We need physical rest because our bodies aren’t machines. Chronic busyness will wear us down. God even told Israel to let the land rest every seventh year to remind us life doesn’t hinge on our endless output. But on God’s loving grace.

We also need mental rest because our minds are overloaded. The noise is only getting louder, more distracting, and more divisive. How many things have already distracted you today that have drawn you away from the presence of God instead of closer to it? Sabbath quiets the noise, so we can be fully present to faithfully love and serve with clarity and joy.

Lastly, we need spiritual rest to help us remember who we are: A beloved creation made in the image of our great Creator. If God can rest, so can we.

So to everyone who wears their busyness like a badge of honor, I want you to imagine your cellphone for a moment. Think about how it works tirelessly—processing, connecting, entertaining. Yet, no matter how hard it works, how technologically advanced it is, it’s completely useless if the battery is dead.

The command to rest is God’s way of saying, “Plug yourself into me.” God not only recharges your battery. But redeems and renews your perspective, trust, wholeness.

So the way I see it, Sabbath rest isn’t a reward for a productive week. It’s the foundation for having one. And this holy reset is a foretaste of eternity God’s own rhythm doesn’t measure our worth by productivity, but by our heart’s presence.

Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “Sabbath is that uncluttered time and space in which you can distance yourself from your own activities enough to see what God is doing.”

When we stop striving, we start seeing. We notice the tired eyes and the quiet ache in those we’ve rushed past all week. Rest turns down the noise so love can speak up. 

Henri Nouwen said it like this: “We are called to rest not simply to recover, but to remember who we are: God’s beloved, called to make that love visible in the world.” 

And that’s the point—not just to recharge, but to reconnect. To trust that in God’s economy, love is the only measurement of a faithful life well-lived. And to love is to be present together.

So let’s just slow down and reset our priorities. Let’s put the phone on the charger and step away from it, allowing our souls catch up to our bodies.

Let’s walk slowly through the noise. And re-engage with the rhythm of life built into our DNA.

Even if it’s only an hour, let that time be spent doing the most Sabbath thing you can—sharing presence with each other. Become the space where anyone can find rest and restoration in your presence.

Because when we rest together, we begin to remember together: who we are. And what we’re here for. We are God’s beloved, building a community of love together in the space between, where grace is the currency and love is the map to God’s holy heart.

So, let’s begin each week, not with an agenda but with rest.

As we reconnect with all of creation and find peace in the tender arms of God who sings:

​ “Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.”


Work Cited
Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 135.
Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year (New York: Anchor Books, 1993), 225.
Paraphrase inspired by Henri J. M. Nouwen, Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World (New York: Crossroad, 1992).