OCT 23 2016 | Rest

Sea Change Church · "Rest" · Adam Stadtmiller · October 23, 2016
Leviticus 25:1-7
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

Good morning, church. Good to see you. We are excited to be here on this Sunday. I start looking forward on Thursday. As soon as I ship off this message, I let it rest in my soul. One of the things I do that Hemingway did, I got this from him, was he would stop looking. He feels that you need to stop working on whatever you're writing and give it a chance to go subterranean.

Give it a chance to go to that second layer and level of your mind to have rest and to let it birth things that you could not think in the forefront of your mind, that are deep within the reaches of your creativity. It's a chance to rest. I don't know if you know, but rest is a value of this church. You saw one of the other values here a moment ago, a multi-generational church.

Chris and Bonnie are really close friends, and Chris, you said that that was a one, best friends, best friends, right on. Now, Chris, you said to me that you're not sure that you're her best friend, but she's your best friend, and I'm that way with Dick Cotton. Dick Cotton is one of my best friends. I'm not sure one of his best friends. Dick, my 93-year-old best friend. There you are, Dick. He's over there. There he is, right there.

We have lunch about every six weeks together. You guys go out almost weekly and hang out looking for some mentorship. That's one of the things we want to see happen at this church. We, as a four-corner church, want to change four corners. The corners are your heart. This corner of La Jolla, the corner that you live on, is the third corner. The fourth corner is the four corners of the earth, and we had an opportunity to do that this week with one of our values, multi-generational church.

If you got an email, I sent an email out to a bunch of our leaders and our team. An article I wrote this week for Christianity Today, and it was called the Rosetto Effect. And it talked about multi-generational church. And I want to encourage you, it'll be in the news from the pews this week, but if you search my name and then just the word Rosetto, you will find an article I wrote.

And it is about our church. It is about the things that are happening at La Jolla Christian Fellowship. And that went around the world this week. And I got emails from pastors and other church leaders around the world saying it's something they needed to hear. Once again, a little church on the corner getting the ability to take the values that God has given us, multi-generational, and as you'll see on our worship stage, as you'll see in our children's ministry, we want to blend people together.

We don't want to throw you off into your little segregated groups. We want to have a multi-generational church. So that was exciting. One of our other values, and I thought it was time to speak about it, is rest. We have 11 values here. One is authenticity. Another one is fun and play. I want church to be a place of fun, a place that we can play.

But I would say the core value, one of the, I would say if there was a list, you want to say that they're all equal. But I think that rest is core to this church. I believe that God created the world to rest. His entire creation is built to have rest. And we often live in a very fast-paced world. I don't know if anybody has noticed that, if anybody has been stressed out, overwhelmed, the 24-hour news cycle, the political news, the emails.

I came in today, and Drea said after a few days on vacation, she had 181 emails staring her in the face. And she said to me, you know, I thought it was going to be worse. I'm like, I thought it was going to be worse. It's like getting kicked in the face and saying, I thought it was going to be worse, you know. That's a lot. I want to say I believe that our world is broke.

That one of the reasons it's broke is because it doesn't know how to slow down, especially Western culture. Two years ago, I did a four-week sermon series on the value of rest. And it was probably one of the most remembered series that I've done because people regularly talk to me about it. If you go to the Google reviews or the Yelp reviews, people that were here mentioned that in the reviews.

It was something that constantly keeps coming up. And one of the things that I wanted to do as a lead pastor was to provide a church environment where you as a congregation come and can feel at peace. You don't have to come, jump into our church, and get to work. And as I've been around and different, I've been in church for a while, it seems through the 90s and the 2000s, and even now into where we are currently, that there's this model that time's running out, and the more we do, the better.

And there's very few church models I see, although there are some, where rest is a value, believing that when we slow down, we give God the margin for restful increase. Write that down in your notes. Restful increase. What does it look like to get out of the way, to have enough faith, to let God work within the margins of your life? And oftentimes we have to create margins.

I'll ask you this, how's your margin? How much margin do you have? How much rest do you have? Do the boundary lines of your life, emotionally, physically, whether it be financially, whatever it is, the boundary lines of your life, like it says in the scripture, do they fall in pleasant places? We want this place to be a model of rest. When we go to heaven, it's as we enter into what?

God's what? Rest. The characteristic of heaven is complete peace and rest. And if the kingdom of God is meant to come on earth, then it means that what we represent here on the terra firma that is earth, in our own spiritual geography, if it is going to look and resemble heaven, and that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to harvest, we're trying to source the nature of heaven and implement it to steep it into the place that we live, then it means that if we are going to have the kingdom of God on earth, like Jesus prays in Matthew 6, then the place that you live, that rest and peace, will be one of the main characteristics of your life.

How are you doing? How are you doing? How's your rest? How much margin do you have? Or do you constantly feel that you've got to get up and going? Can you never stop? When you sit down to rest, are you turned back on? Again, they say that the average person checks their phone 400 times a day, and even if that's wrong, let's say it's 200, let's even half it to 100, let's half it to 50.

Okay? Let's just say 50. I mean, checking our phone 50 times a day is a lot. They say the phone is the most intimate thing in your life. You take your phone to bed with you, right? You take your phone, does your phone not end up in your bed? Why is a phone in your bed? I won't, you know, there's a lot of things. I won't put my dog in my bed. I know some people like that.

They're cats. They're just all types of people. My wife barely lets me in the bed, you know? But there's Steve Jobs just sitting there beside me every single night. No, it's a zzzz, zzzz. You ever been woken up in the middle of the night? The world needs a Sabbath. The world needs a Sabbath. And if the world doesn't take a Sabbath, God has built it to break.

You look at the oceans and how there's no time to rest for the ocean. You look at the land. In this scripture, we see the divine characteristics of God being implemented, being put into his creation. Every time God creates, he takes a bit of himself, he sources a bit of himself, and he implements that, he infuses that into the creation. God himself does not need to rest, but for some reason, God rests.

It is a sense of peace and of joy. Albert Camus, the philosopher, Nobel Prize winner, the second youngest Nobel Prize winner at 46 years old, died at 46 in a car accident, said this when he was living in Paris during World War II, during the occupation, and I'm almost finished with the book The Day Paris Went Dark, or When Paris Went Dark, about the occupation of Paris by the Nazis.

He said, life had become hell for the mind. Interesting. I see that today. I see today that we are living in a place that is constantly trying to provoke your emotions. You go on, even news today, news is no longer news. News is about clicks. News is about heightening your emotions. Whether it be fear, anger, pity. It's not about news. It's about presenting the news in a way that will cause you to lose margin, in my opinion.

That we see that you are constantly being pushed to the next level, the next exciting thing, or whatever it is. There is no margin for rest. There is no news. There is no news that speaks about rest. Albert Camus, once again, said life had become a hell for the mind, and I see that today. I see that if you want to immerse yourself in what this culture offers, it will become a hell for our mind.

We'll never stop. We'll never let things rest. We'll never be able to pull away like Jesus did on a regular basis. Look at your notes. I wrote, The World Needs a Sabbath. And as we talk about stress, this is a Wikipedia definition for stress. Stress is being stretched beyond your limits, overextended without proper recovery time, and doing more than your humanity can take.

Most of us don't feel like we have, especially when you're young. You don't feel like there's any limits to your humanity. Stress leads what? We know this is a fact. What does stress lead to? Death. Stress leads to death. God has created us that if we don't slow down, you will eventually die. We are built that way. You look at creation itself. In this passage again, in Leviticus, God is showing that the world needs margin.

And if you don't give the world margin, what will happen to creation? It'll die. It'll become sick. And we see that our society today, and just the environment we live in, is becoming sick. How's the margin in your life? Let me ask that again. There's two things that we're going to look at in this context of today's message out of Leviticus. We'll get back to Acts next week.

The context is the thing called the sabbatical year. In Jewish customs, there was a law. God wrote a law into Jewish, to the Jewish culture. He created laws because he wanted to show them the blessing that comes with being obedient to the things he commands. God doesn't just make arbitrary commands. Every command by God is given so that you might receive a blessing.

Let's just look at that. There is an idea that God has given commands so that you can't have any fun. That's not true. The commands of God are given so that you might have blessing. Look at the dietary commands of the Jews back in the day. Now, those are no longer commands anymore for us as modern day believers after the cross. But if you were to live a kosher diet, you would be one of the most healthy people in the world.

Just because God creates things and he gives commands in order that you might be blessed. And rest was a command by God. Now, you don't have to follow that command anymore. But if you don't, we will inherit the due penalty for not following his commands. Because even though they are no longer rigidly called to follow because he has given us grace, we still can receive the blessing by following them or we can receive the penalty by not following them.

Let me ask again, how is your margin? Here's the context. The Sabbath year. Look in the notes. Is the seventh year of a seven-year agricultural mandated by the Torah? For the Lord of Israel, excuse me, for the land of Israel and still observed in contemporary Judaism. During Shemitah, the land is left to lay fallow and all agricultural activity, all debts except those of foreigners were to be remitted.

There's a time where God said, stop and take a breath. How good are you at that? How good are you at stopping and taking a breath? Now, C.S., was it, excuse me, Eugene Peterson said, a day off is a bastard Sabbath. He said, a day off is not a Sabbath. A Sabbath is when you intentionally take time to put God first, to cease from all work, not in a legalistic way, but to celebrate life, to practice gratitude and to practice joy and spend a day with God.

Doesn't mean, you know, you can garden, you can run, you can do different things, but it's not just a day off. It is a day that is dedicated to the Lord. And in my family, each of us has a Sabbath. Tonight at 6 p.m., my wife will start her Sabbath. We are not allowed to ask her to do anything. We are not allowed to ask her to take us for a ride. I cover all the driving around on Mondays.

That's her day. Friday is my day of Sabbath. I turn the phone off and oftentimes you will not, as Drea experienced this week when she texted me on Friday, she did not get a text back, even though I saw it come in because it was my Sabbath and my children start on Saturday night and they have their Sabbath and they do not, I'll say, hey, come do the, take the trash out and she'll go up.

Dad, Sabbath, sorry, not taking the trash out right now. And I'll be, ah! Sabbath doesn't mean you don't put away your own dishes, please. Every one of us. My daughter on Saturday, my, Lucy, will run around on Saturday afternoon saying, yes, it's Sabbath, it's Sabbath, I can't wait for Sabbath. Dr. Edith Egger talked about when she was in the prison camp when she came and one of the services she spoke and said that there was a rabbi that when they were in Auschwitz would come around on Friday evening before the sun would set and say, look up, my friends, and smile, for today is Sabbath to rest and celebrate in the midst of Nazi oppression because God is still on the throne when we allow him the margin to be in the throne.

And let me say, do you have enough faith to take a rest? It takes faith to rest. Oftentimes I know when the enemy is getting at me because I'll be around this campus and I'll start seeing everything that needs to be done. Oh, that light socket needs to be fixed and it'll just start overwhelming you. Do you ever get to that where everything and then things aren't working and the computer doesn't work and on and on and on.

And you know what I do a lot of times? If I'm in the right mindset, I say, you know what? I'm going home. God, I need to let you have restful increase and sort this out. And I just, sometimes, I just need to let go and not work, work, work, work, work. Because I am built, maybe like many of you, to work until you die. We have a gnarly German-Polish work ethic in my family.

My grandma, okay, had stage four bone cancer. She didn't find out until three weeks before she died. She was carrying the laundry out and walking past me and collapsed and I caught her in my arms and carried her to the bed. She never got out of the bed. She worked until she died. I mean, just hardcore. I remember the year in advance, she was sweating. She didn't know why she was sweating in bed.

She had bone cancer where the bones were getting ready to break, but she worked and worked and worked and it's just how our family is. We have had to work at having rest, at trusting God enough to take time off to let Him give you increase. Let's look through this now. You know that we're talking about the Sabbath year. Here's the main course in the notes.

Rest is an act of faith that entrusts God with your provision. That's powerful. And seats Him on the throne of your life. Let me say that again. Rest is an act of faith. Have you ever thought about that? That when you take rest, it is an act of faith. The most vulnerable thing that you can do is sleep. Because when you are asleep, you have no control over anything.

I think God did that on purpose. It says that, you know, that God blesses people with sweet sleep. He protects them in their sleep. That God, we are vulnerable in that place and God has created us that no matter how much you want to run away from His command, at some point, you will have to sleep or die. It's one of the most vulnerable things. And so when you sleep and when you rest, it is an act of faith, believing that God can do more than you can when you work.

It's an act of faith that entrusts God with your provision and seats Him on the throne of your life. In the Old Testament Scriptures, rest was a command. A command meant to bless people. God has given you rest to bless you. There is so much intrinsic value and blessing within rest. And are you soaking in the blessing of rest? All of God's commands come, as I said earlier, with an inherent blessing attached.

This is the secret of obedience. Let me say that again. All of God's commands, now you don't have to follow them if you don't want. We have free will. But many of those commands that were of the Jewish religion that are no longer, that we are now under grace, like giving, tithing, generosity, those are no longer commanded. As we talked about for three weeks, there was a command that you had to give.

You never have to tithe as a believer. You never have to to give offerings and you can still go and stand before God and under his blood be blessed. But you will miss the blessing because he didn't, just because he removed the command doesn't mean he removed the blessing. Let me say that again. Just because he removed the command doesn't mean he removed the blessing or the penalty that comes with breaking commands even though you no longer have to follow those like the Jews did under Torah law or under the law.

All of them have that. Let's go to the key points. Point one that we'll see today as we circle the tower now. In the Old Testament, God commands rest as it reflects the character and nature of God. Let me say that again. If you want to be like God, you will work from a place of rest. Remember, God was resting before he worked in creation and as soon as he was finished with creation, what did he do?

He rested. Work is always bookended by God's rest. God is more of a rester than he is a worker. He works in rest. In the Old Testament, God's commands rest reflects the character and nature of God and two, second point for today, rest is an axe of faith that releases supernatural provision for your life. But you never thought of that before. Now you've heard many people preach and build whole churches on the idea that if you tithe, you are going to have supernatural provision.

I actually believe that's true. I'm just not going to build my whole church on that platform because I believe we're just kind of taking one little thing out. But I believe that that's true. I believe there is a blessing, a supernatural, that if you're not a generous person, whether it be in your time, your treasure, talent, wherever you're generous, God will give you supernatural increase beyond what you have.

Meaning if you never are generous, you will end up with less than God wanted you to have in the end. One of the best ways to increase blessing in your life is to release blessing. Scripture is full of that. It's rife with that. But the same is true for rest. And it's interesting, we'll see in a moment that when you rest, when you let God, let's say you're a salesperson, and you say, I've got to make another call.

I'm going to work until 10 o'clock tonight even though I'm going to miss my kid's soccer game. When you say no, five o'clock I'm off or six, whatever the time is, and I'm going to go to the soccer game and that call might not get made and I'm just going to trust that God's going to give supernatural provision. When you do that, you allow God to bless you supernaturally.

I believe that you will have more production with restful increase than you will have on your own ability. You can have your results or you can have God's results. I want to say we've had quintuple growth at this church and one of the main models we have had is rest. And one of the elders said to me about six months ago, I never thought when you brought this rest thing in, he said, I thought it was lazy.

And he says, I never thought with a model that you keep pushing rest and if you talk to my staff and my co-workers, I'm always pushing rest. Go take a break. Go walk. Go home. Ask Drea. Go home. You've been here too long. He said to me, I never thought we would have the increase that we've had with a model of rest because I've always been trained to work, work, work.

We are a restful church. We're getting ready to move into a season of Advent where you are going to be asked as your small groups to shut down for five to six weeks and have nothing going on and people say to me all the time, isn't Christmas is coming up? Isn't it the busiest time of the year? Absolutely not for me. Absolutely not. It is a time for me to think and ponder the birth of Jesus Christ.

For the last four years, after the first weekend of the month, my wife and I and family can't block every single night out until about the third or fourth of January for a month, we don't do anything at night except come home for an entire month of December. I don't go to 12,000 Christmas parties. I'm sorry. I can't go to every Christmas party. I don't feel guilty that I can't go to every Christmas party.

We come home and we spend a month as a family and we do the Advent candle because four or five years ago we finished the birth of Christ and I didn't even know it happened. It was all presents and stuff. We're going to give us an opportunity. If you come to this church, we want to give you an opportunity to be at peace, to have seasons of rest. And guess what?

We're still growing. God's still moving in the midst of that. And I got to hustle because I'm not going to get through these notes and I want to make sure we get out for donuts and coffee. I got to rest. Rest, number one, rest reflects the character and nature of God. This is good. When this came to me this week, I thought, yeah, there's nowhere in the Bible I can find and maybe you can where the devil is at rest.

Never. You will never see the enemy of God at rest. Find it for you. If you find it, please email me this week. Second thought, don't. It's Job 1.7. In Job, this is always a fascinating verse to me. It's one of the most intriguing verses in the Bible to me. The Lord said to Satan, where have you come from? Satan answered the Lord, from roaming throughout the earth, going back and forth on it.

That's what he does, back and forth, never at rest, always up to mischief. The enemy will never rest and there is no rest in hell. That is one of the characteristics of the enemy. There is no rest and if you want to know what the culture of the enemy looks like, it is in chaotic, frivolous movement. You look at our culture, we cannot rest. Let's do a Thanksgiving sale on midnight, on Thanksgiving Day or Christmas.

It's ridiculous. Just over and over again, remove any margin out, remove any family. If you want to know what the culture of Satan looks like, it is a city, it is a culture that has no time to rest. Satan never rests. 1 Peter 5.8 says, Be alert and of sober mind. Why? Because your enemy, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.

One of the most subtle attacks of the enemy is to destroy your Sabbath. The Sabbath of spirit. The Sabbath that comes from taking intentional rest for yourself. To just breathe. To walk on the beach. To stop and smell a flower. To be able to enjoy life. We lose the ability to enjoy life when we are constantly pushed. When your mind never has a moment of quiet.

We'll go on date nights with my wife sometimes and we'll do five, six minutes in the car and no one will talk. I used to think that was weird. Like now it's awesome. We have great conversation but we can be silent. We can be still. We have times at home where the, hey, there's no computers on. Get off the computers. We're just gonna be, we'll light, you know, some candles, have some bread that's baked.

We'll just sit around and eat and spend time together. How's your margin? Satan never has it but God, he's the author of rest. Look at his character. Exodus 28. Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Rest is holy. It's not laziness. It's holy that when you rest before God and say I'm done working, I'm gonna sit with my Lord now or I'm gonna be with friends in the Lord.

It's holy. It's an act of holy. You wanna be holy? Rest. Now this is, you know, we can, obviously this is not laziness I'm talking about. It's about after a hard day's work knowing how to rest. Matthew 11, 28 Come unto me all you who are worried and burdened and I will give you what? Rest. Mark 2, 27 Then he said to them the Sabbath was not, was made for man not man for the Sabbath.

What does that, what does that mean? It says that God created something because man was built for it. Man was built and in that God put rest and so God created a Sabbath where man could express himself, mankind, ladies, could express ourselves in rest. Exodus 33, 14 The Lord replied, My presence will go with you. And when you went into the promised land, one of the key characteristics of God's blessing was rest.

It says, I will give you what? Rest. After the establishment of Solomon's kingdom, it said that God gave him rest on how many sides? All sides. It's blessing. If you put rest into your life, you will see more rest come to your life. You will see more times of blessing come to your life. Let's consume the text quickly. The Lord said to Moses at Mount Sinai, Speak to the Israelites and say to them, When you enter the land I'm going to give you, the land itself must observe a Sabbath.

See, in the notes, God has created even the soil we walk on to need rest. He's created the earth to reflect his nature. It needs rest. Other examples of nature resting, deciduous trees, winter, night. And why does this also need rest? What God creates always reflects his character. Romans 1.27 backs this up. Now we're definitely circling the tower, coming in for a landing here.

Romans 1.27 says, For since the creation of the world, okay, so during God's creation, God's invisible qualities and in his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen and it is understood from what has been made, what's been created, so that people are without excuse. Meaning that God has created the world and within it he has infused his nature so that you might understand him.

And it says that people are without excuse to know that there is a God and what he is like. And if you look at a leaf, you look at the sun, everything that is created by God has a story behind it, that he wrote his name on that creation. So we see that in creation. Verse 4, let's go to that. But in the seventh year, the land is to have a Sabbath year of rest, a Sabbath to the Lord.

Sabbath is this, it's offering to the Lord, it's a test of, an act of faith that gives God margin to be in your life and to be in control. Resting lets God be in control of your life. Like, like a few other things. The word Sabbath year, the Shemitah that we talked earlier means to release, to let go, to give rest. Now here's the closing, conclusion, the blessing of Sabbath that I talked about.

This supernatural increase that comes when you learn how to rest. And this is powerful because if you look further down in Leviticus, so we're in Leviticus 26 now, that's what was read by Carol. If you go down further, this is what you see happens when they give up basically three years of production. Because they don't sow and then they have to have a whole year of not working.

In that year, it means they also don't sow in the year that they're giving the land the rest. Which means they have no produce for the second year. It actually is a three year cycle that when they start, they don't get to sow until two years later and then it takes nine months, does that make sense, for the crops to come again. They are really saying, you go to a farmer back in agrarian culture and say, you're not allowed to plant this year.

That means two years and nine months basically until they see any harvest from their crops again. It's phenomenal. It is such an act of faith. But look what God says and this is where the scripture tells us there's supernatural provision when we do that. It says, Leviticus in Leviticus 25, follow my decrees and be careful to obey my laws and you will live safely in the land.

The land will yield its fruit and you will eat your fill and live safely. You may ask, this is a great question, what will we eat in the seventh year if we do not plant or harvest our crops? Verse 21, I will send you such a blessing in the sixth year that the land will yield enough for how many years? Three years. While you plant during the eighth year, you will eat from the old crop and continue to eat from it until the harvest of the ninth year comes in.

As long as we continue to think we're God, we're never going to rest. The culture of hell is constant activity. I want to lead myself because I know as a pastor, I know the amount of pastors that burn out that are trying to be the next great thing and it's more about their platform than it is about the people, that'll kill me. And I want to provide a church where when you come here, you actually get to expand your, when you expand your boundaries.

That by being in this church, you have more margin and rest is one of those things. So I'm going to be speaking about our values over the next year as we come into 2017. our 90th year on this corner. And we are going to continue to encourage you to seek God and put him on the throne of your life in rest. You ready to take a break? Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.