Why should Christians make rest a priority?
Of all the company brands and slogans of the past sixty years, it is hard to think of one more memorable or enduring than Nike’s: Just Do It. These three words can speak encouragement about what we are doing or demand something about what we’re not doing, but they are ultimately designed to motivate us to activity. The slogan was the brainchild of a marketing creative named Dan Wieden, and it led to a massive boost not only in his career but also in the destiny of Nike, which was a small company at that point. What many don’t know is that the inspiration for the slogan came from a death row inmate who, at the point of execution, stated, “Let’s do it.” Dan Wieden heard this story and began to move the phrase around in his head, eventually arriving at the famous line.
As believers, when it comes to God’s Word and our Christian walk, we can be tempted to adopt a “Just Do It” mentality. Quite understandably, much of our application and much of our motivation for faith springs from an appetite for activity or from guilt about our lack of it. We can come to equate busyness with blessedness, doing for Christ with dwelling in Christ, putting ourselves on a fast-paced treadmill of keeping busy for Jesus. The truth is that, like the background to the Nike branding, if we take this to an extreme, it can kill us. An unchecked “Just Do It” instinct can lead to a lack of health physically, emotionally, and spiritually, and can land us in the territory of breakdown, burnout, and all sorts of other consequences.
Over the next few weeks on this site, we are going to look at rest, examining this radical concept built into God’s very good design for his world and for us. We are going to think together through what the Scriptures say about rest and why that matters to us today, asking ourselves the key question: how can we embrace rest and be blessed by it? This is a fitting theme as we enter the summer months and many of our normal activities wind down, with our thoughts turning to downtime.
In this instalment, we consider physical rest. This will be followed by later articles on spiritual and eternal rest. The series will then be rounded off with some thoughts on how congregations can help their pastors to take holidays and pursue Sabbath in their ministry.
As we think today about the Sabbath, I am aware that we are walking into something of a potential minefield. Questions quickly arise about how the Sabbath relates to our lives, how it relates to the Lord’s Day, what expression it should have, and what we can and cannot do. I am purposely side-stepping those questions for now, not because they are unimportant, but because they can serve as a distraction from the bigger theme of what rest is and why it matters.
From Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, we can offer two answers to the question of why rest should matter to Christians.
1. Rest is expressive of our relationship to God
The context of Exodus 20 is fascinating. The people of God are at a crucial point in their national history. God has just accomplished a great deliverance for them. He has brought them out of Egypt and carried them through the Red Sea, and now he is giving them his law and statutes: the manner in which they are to live for him and be distinguished as his people.
Here we have the Ten Commandments, God’s ten words about the way his people are to walk. They are full of conviction, wisdom, and righteousness. Yet it is interesting that, at the heart of them, with more words devoted to it than to any of the other commandments, stands the Sabbath. It is absolutely central to God’s revelation of himself and of his standards.
The problem with reading these verses and considering this theme is that these words have been weaponised in one way or another. With incredible irony, we have come to view the Sabbath as one more thing to do, another brick in the rucksack, another responsibility to discharge. But the Sabbath is an expression of relationship to a God who is full of mercy.
Exodus 8:1
Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go in to Pharaoh and tell him: This is what the Lord says: Let my people go, so that they may worship me.”
The Exodus is not simply about a new location or even a new liberty, but about a new Lord. God is bringing his people out of Egypt as a declaration that they are his servants and not merely Pharaoh’s slaves. They belong to him, and they will serve within his economy. The Sabbath is central to this.
Walter Brueggemann writes:
Sabbath is not only resistance. It is alternative. It is an alternative to the demanding, chattering, pervasive presence of advertising and its great liturgical claim of professional sports that devour all our ‘rest time.’ The alternative on offer is the awareness and practice of the claim that we are situated on the receiving end of the gifts of God. To be so situated is a staggering option, because we are accustomed to being on the initiating end of all things.
The contrast between Pharaoh’s leadership and God’s lordship could hardly be greater. Under Pharaoh there were bricks without straw, work without rest, relentless production. Under God there is life in his providence, a weekly rhythm that insists on rest, trust, and dependence rather than endlessly filling the granaries.
In terms of rest, the Israelites found their supreme example in the Lord, with God himself patterning what rest is – what precedes it, what commends it, and what flows from it. The rationale for rest as it is embedded in God’s law is primarily the creation example of God labouring and then resting.
Exodus 20:11
“For the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and everything in them in six days; then he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and declared it holy.”
The biblical pattern, then, is labour and then rest. We can witness this right across the canon of Scripture: labour and then rest. Ultimately, we see that fulfilled in Christ: Jesus laboured, Jesus rested, and Jesus is risen.
It is so important that we do not get lost in the details here. God has programmed into the rhythms of righteous living that we should rest, that we should resist the urge and pull of a ‘Pharaoh economy’, to use Brueggemann’s language, and that we should be distinguished by our commitment to rest and our liberty to do so in the Lord.
Eugene Peterson puts it beautifully:
Sabbath is the time set aside to do nothing so that we can receive everything, to set aside our anxious attempts to make ourselves useful, to set aside our tense restlessness, to set aside our media-satiated boredom. Sabbath is the time to receive silence and let it deepen into gratitude, to receive quiet into which forgotten faces and voices unobtrusively make themselves present, to receive the days of the just completed week and absorb the wonder and miracle still reverberating from each one, to receive our Lord’s amazing grace.
The question, then, is this: how is our rest? Where is our sabbath? Are we answering the call of the lordship of God or the lordship of Pharaoh? Which economy do we most resemble? Whose do we most visibly serve?
Society calls us to be humans doing; the Sabbath calls us to be human beings, creatures of God, bearers of his image, followers of his example, recipients of his grace.
Do our lives embody rhythms of rest? One of the beauties of the Lord’s Day is that, for many of us, it allows us to combine both rest and worship. For some, however, that is not possible, given their responsibilities in public worship. Even then, we still need to seek out time, and pray for time, simply to remind ourselves that we are not God and that the one we worship is good and gracious. There are also those longer periods of rest that can do us a lot of good: holidays, short breaks and sabbaticals all honour the labour-then-rest model of the Bible.
2. Rest is an expression of our relationship to others
So far, it would be possible to misunderstand what has been shared here as a hymn in praise of “me time”, but there is a profoundly social element to the Sabbath. It is striking that the commandment with the longest explanatory statement is also the one that extends rest to everyone.
Exodus 20:10–11
“But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. You must not do any work—you, your son or daughter, your male or female servant, your livestock, or the resident alien who is within your city gates… Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and declared it holy.”
Love for the Lord as their Lord, their example, and their Redeemer is certainly part of this obedience, but so too is love for neighbour. The Sabbath sets everyone free to rest in the Lord. It is not merely a religious stipulation but an economic protection.
Look again at those who are commanded to rest: families, servants, livestock, and the immigrant population. This is the moment when all of creation is allowed to breathe, to rest, and to find respite. Men and women, young people, those born in Israel, those who have joined Israel, human life, animal life, and even the land itself are drawn into this rhythm of rest. This principle was extended through Israel’s sabbatical culture into the Sabbath year and, ultimately, the Year of Jubilee. It could hardly be further removed from the world of bricks without straw.
The applications are not difficult to see. They touch our families, our workplaces, our churches, and all who carry responsibility for others. A culture without rest produces people who are ineffective through exhaustion and inattentiveness, because they are depleted. Rest is not an optional extra. Taking time away from our business and our busyness, making sabbath space to simply be in God’s presence and rest in his providence, is a fitting way of showing how much we want to imitate God, and how much we are willing to trust him.
At this season when many people turn their thoughts to holiday, we need to be reminded that rest is not a concession to our weakness but a commission from our God, not something to be begrudged to others or to ourselves but something to embody and celebrate as a key rhythm and right for those who belong to God’s economy.
Andrew Roycroft serves as Managing Editor for Grace Publications. He holds Masters degrees in English Literature and Theology from Queens University Belfast. Before entering the world of publishing full-time, Andrew served as a pastor for 24 years in Northern Ireland. He is married to Carolyn and they have two teenage daughters.
