Well, Christ is our Sabbath rest.
We celebrate this beautiful truth every Lord's day, every Sunday.
But what about on a day like today, on Monday, is Christ, my Sabbath rest, today at work.
That's Pam's question for you, Pastor John is a good one.
Pastor John, hello, she writes, Christ is our Sabbath rest, a hearty amen to that wonderful
truth, to the degree that I understand it.
And I don't think I fully understand it quite yet.
This seems to mean a lot more than Christ has set apart one day of rest for us, the
Lord's day, on Sunday.
At the very end of APJ 658, you called Christ our quote, eternal rest, end quote.
And that means you said quote, pervading all our work.
We are restful in Christ, end quote.
When you explain this to me, how is Christ our Sabbath rest even while we are working?
If we had time, we would dig into Hebrews chapters three and four because there, that amazing
author presents an argument for the present rest of the people of God and the future eternal
rest for the people of God and he urges us in 3, 19 and 4, 1 to fear, lest we attain or
fail to attain the rest, meaning fear, unbelief because belief is the only way into the rest
of Jesus Christ both now and in the future.
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, namely, how do we experience the rest, the Sabbath rest of
Christ at work?
In other words, what meaning does it have while we're expanding great energy to speak of
enjoying the restfulness of Christ in that very moment of wearying exertion?
So the text that I have in mind now is not Hebrews, but Matthew 11, 28 to 30 where Jesus
is, come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I'm gentle and lowly in heart and you will
find rest for your souls.
For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
So the burden and the yoke of the Lordship of Jesus is easy and light.
So in the midst of our labor, our strenuous efforts to do our very best in our vocation,
the submission at that moment to the demands of Jesus is called a restful experience.
You will find rest for your souls precisely in the midst of your exertions to do your
job with excellence for his glory.
So what is that experience like?
I think that's what Pam's really asking.
What's it like?
Working as hard as you can and in the very doing of it, experiencing Christ as our souls
rest, not just after it, not just before it, but in it in the very exertion of our life's
work.
So here are four ways that we can experience the soul rest of Christ as we are doing our
work.
First, we work with the sweet assurance that we stand already justified before God not
on the basis of our work, but on the basis of faith alone in Christ's work, even as we
work.
So Romans chapter four, verses four and five, how sweet are these words.
Now to the one who works and he has in mind working for justification, working to get right
with God to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift, but as his do to the
one who does not work for justification to get right with God, but believes in him who
justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.
If we don't get this right, nothing will be right.
Our souls enjoy the glorious, precious, sweet restfulness of knowing that we are right with
God through faith alone and that the work we are doing, sweat on our face, weariness
in our bones, exhaustion in our minds is not done to get right with God.
We are delivered from the horrible torment of soul that thinks, I must work, I must do
a good job so that I can get right with God, I can get a right standing before God.
That kind of restlessness and anxiety and striving is over.
The verdict has been rendered by the king of heaven, not guilty, my son, not guilty,
my daughter.
So go about your work with a deep restfulness of soul.
Number two, in Christ, we work hard with the thrilling energy that we are loved by God
very personally.
And forever, Ephesians 2.4, amazing verse, Paul says that God's great love and that phrase
great love.
I think it's the only place in his letters he uses that very phrase.
God's great love made us alive in Christ.
That means we were dead and he made us alive because of love before we did anything to
get the love.
We do not work with the restless, nervous anxiety of trying to win the affections of a lover
that we're not sure of.
The great love of God, if we're alive in Christ, it was great love already that put us
there.
So picture this analogy to feel what it means to work out of the thrilling energy of
being loved.
Suppose I have been dating Noel, who's now been my wife for 54 years, but this was true
once upon a time.
Suppose I've been dating Noel for just several weeks and I feel very strong affections
welling up in me and I'm thinking this is the woman I want to marry, but I'm not sure
what her affections are yet.
Then the day comes when she needs some heavy lifting done for her as she moves a dozen
boxes or so books, furniture from one apartment to another and I go to her apartment to help
her move and as I start to go down the stairs where she has everything packed up, she
puts her hand on my arm and I turn to look at her and she says right into my eyes for the
first time, I love you, Johnny.
What happens to my exhausting work that afternoon?
Oh my goodness.
There flows into it a thrilling energy of being loved.
There is in the exhaustion of the heavy box is a restfulness of soul of not wondering
anymore.
Am I loved?
I am loved.
And of course, the analogy breaks down a little bit because God doesn't need any help with
lifting heavy boxes.
I got that, but the principle is the same.
He gives me the privilege of serving his purposes in the world and he takes away all of
its burdensomeness by saying, I love you, I've got you, I love you.
I choose to love you number three.
The analogy of Noel's love, however, is not nearly good enough to capture the point.
God's love doesn't stand by like Noel stood by and watch us lift the boxes of life.
Watch us do our job at work.
He doesn't stand by and watch counting on us to muster the energy because we're loved.
His love commits him to help us, help us.
He steps into our lives by his spirit within us and becomes the kind of energy that turns
our work into something far greater than mere human achievement even in response to love.
It becomes a kind of God-wrought miracle that gets him praise and touches other people
in ways we can't begin to explain when we're operating in the strength of God.
I say this because in 1 Peter, chapter 4, verse 11, Peter says, let the one who serves,
you could say, works, serve, work by the strength that God supplies in order that in everything
God may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to Him be long glory and dominion forever and
ever amen.
In other words, there is a restfulness in work because God is an inexhaustible helper in
our work so that our energy is really in a profound sense.
His energy supplied to us.
Therefore, the obstacles that always meet us in our work, and which formerly robbed us
of peace and restfulness and filled us with anxiety, those obstacles don't have that
effect anymore because now we know nothing is too hard for the Lord, Jeremiah 32, 17,
nothing, and he works everything together for our good, Romans 8, 28.
So at least for those four reasons we can speak of Christ, being our rest, rest for our
souls, even in the very exertion of our daily work.
Robust Explanation of this rest for our souls, thank you, Pastor John, to a lot to meditate
on here, a lot of connecting threads working out from this great reality of Christ, our
Sabbath rest, as we head off to work or to school on this Monday.
Thank you for joining us today.
If you want to ask Pastor John, type your question out and email it to me at AskPastorJohnitDesiringGod.org.
So if you were to sit down with John Piper's collected works, his 13 volume collected works
published in 2017, and you read the entire thing covered to cover, you'd come across the
word satisfied almost 1500 times satisfied.
It's all over his works, all over his ministry, but you'd likely not read a definition.
So what does John Piper mean when he uses the word satisfied?
You want to know, and now I want to know, and we'll ask Pastor John on Thursday.
I'm your host, Tony Renky, we'll see you next time.