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Sermons and messages from Pastor Jason White and others at Colonial Hills Baptist Church in Tyler, TX
Well, it is definitely Labor Day weekend, right?
It is a holiday weekend, and
finally,
it is a time to rest from our labors.
Can I get an Amen? Alright? I mean,
many of us are definitely laboring, right? We're
laboring at our place of work. You know, things
just never seem to stop at work, right?
The deadlines just keep coming. The
projects just keep coming. The
patience that we see just keep coming, that many of you are laboring at school, right? The classwork, the homework, the projects, the tests, the practices, the games, the meets, the tutorials, it's just it's always something when you're in school. Many of you are laboring at home, and there's housework and there's dishes and there's laundry and helping with kids' homework and there's bath time and bedtime routines. Again, it just seems to always pile up and there's something that requires your labor. Many of you are actually laboring in retirement. I know that because you tell me that you're busier now than you ever were when you were working before, yay. Can't wait for retirement one day. That just sounds awesome, right? The truth is, we're all laboring. No matter what age or stage of life we're in. We all seem to be busy. Many of us are just exhausted and physically tired, but it's not even just that. I mean, many of us are laboring in our relationships. There's fighting and bickering and arguing, and you feel the weight of that awe. You feel the conflict and the give and the take, and you, gosh, you just hate that. You can't seem to be happy when it comes to your relationships, of course, when you add to that, the worry that you sometimes feel, the anxiety that's hanging over your head about anything and everything, and illness, that you're going through, an illness, that somebody that you love is walking through, your finances, inflation, the unrest that's in our country and around the world right Now and certainly we can't forget about the sin, struggles that we labor through in our life, those things that we struggle with, the weight that we feel from that the guilt, the shame, is always there. There's a distance that you may feel from God, an emptiness, a dissatisfaction, and then there's so much laboring to try to get rid of those feelings of guilt and shame and the emptiness and dissatisfaction that we feel. And listen, if it's not your own sin, maybe it's the sin of someone else that they carried out against you, right? You've been wronged in some way, and you're carrying that anger and resentment and bitterness, and there's just always this tension right? Your blood pressure's up. You can't sleep at night, and you're laboring because you've got to figure out a way to get even, to stay mad, to justify yourself before everyone else that you're right and they are wrong. And it's exhausting. There's just all of this laboring in our lives, the busyness of life, the physical exhaustion, the sin struggles, the relational conflict, the mental health struggles, the general dissatisfaction and emptiness that we feel. But thank goodness it's finally Labor Day weekend. Now you can relax. Now you can get recharged, and now you can hit the reset button, and things are going to be different until the alarm clock goes off on Tuesday, right back to the grind, back to the busyness, back to the conflict and anger and resentment and guilt and shame and worry and fear and the threat of failure in your life and the threat of judgment and condemnation. But listen, that's just the way it is. It's just the way life is. Right. You've got to catch these deep breaths now and then hold on until you can get to Thanksgiving and then Christmas, and then hold your breath again until you get to the next three day weekend, or when you can finally escape for a week to go on vacation. It's just life. It's just the way it is. But does it really have to be that way? Is the question that I want to ask this morning. Is there a way to experience more rest in our lives than just catching our breath on a three day weekend, or when we can escape for a vacation. The author of Hebrews sure seems to think so. In chapter four, verses nine and 10, the author of Hebrews says There remains, then a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for anyone who enters God's rest, also rest from their works, just as God did from his so we see him mention the Sabbath rest. Here he uses the term God's rest. Certainly, these two things, whatever they mean, are connected. It. He says that in order to experience this rest, we have to rest from our works. What does that mean? And then whatever it means. It's similar to the car, just as in the same way that God rested from His Well, what work did God rest from? How did he seem to rest well. What he's referring to is the rest that God entered into during creation, or after he had created the world. When you go back to the creation account found in Genesis after he did the six days of creating, it says By the seventh day, God had finished the work that he had been doing, and so on the seventh day, he rested from all His work. God got a Labor Day right. He was so tired and so exhausted from all the work that he had been doing, from creating that he finally got a Labor Day and had a chance to rest. No, of course, that's not what happened. God doesn't get tired. He wasn't tired from that. It wasn't exhausting when he was doing the work of creation. Resting here or rested means that he just simply ceased from his work that he was doing. Why? Because it was perfect. There was nothing else that he needed to add to it in order to make it any better than it already was. Because it was perfect the way it was, everything that was needed had been created so he could rest now from his work. Now here's the other thing I want you to think about when we're talking about God resting on the seventh day. What happened the day before this? God created Adam and Eve he created human beings. Right? The first five days, we see him doing the work of creating the world and everything in it, right? But by the time he got to the sixth day, all that was done, everything that was conducive for the environment for human beings to live and flourish in and have all that they needed. That work was done. And so he created them. And then he stopped and he rested. And so when you think about Adam and Eve in that perspective, when he finished that work, what were they entering into? From the very first moment that they were created, Adam and Eve were entering into God's rest, right? They entered into his rest. So all Adam and Eve did was enter into God's rest from the moment that they were created, and they simply began to partake of everything that was finished, all the work that was already done. And they lived in God's rest. And they experienced God's rest to provide for all that they needed, and were created for while they were in the garden, that is, until sin entered the world, and that rest was broken now, and all of a sudden, for the first time, they began to experience unrest in their lives, and not just physical unrest or mental unrest, but a deep unrest within their spirit where they would never be able to find true peace and true contentment and true value and worth and dissatisfaction apart from God. And that's honestly, the position that every single one of us are born into, right?
I mean, with sin in our lives and being separated from Him when we're born into this world, we're looking for approval, we're looking for purpose. We're looking for meaning. We're looking for significance. We're looking for worth. We're looking for affection from someone and would since we're looking for those things, that's when we begin laboring to try to find those things, and as we labor to try to find those things, we become addicted, addicted to performance, addicted to religion, right? We labor to perform so that we can achieve, and the more we achieve, the more we will be approved of by other people and of God, we labor to find purpose. We work at it, to find our worth, and we perform to find affection from God and others based on how we're doing in life. And it's exhausting and it becomes addictive. We labor through all the religious duties to try to remove the guilt and the shame and the condemnation that we feel when we're laboring and we fall short, right? And so we become addicted to this cycle of performing, performing, performing, and finding things in it, and then we fail, and we become addicted to religion to try to get rid of the shame and the condemnation, the guilt and the failure to get. To all of those things that we can't perform in. And so what we think is, gosh, if I can just get to that point in my life, if I can just get there in my Christian life, or my religious duties the way I'm performing at these things, then I'll finally be able to rest. It's always in our minds, we're looking ahead. I just need to get through this sin, struggle or that thing, and when we finally achieve this in my career, I get to this point in my life, it's going to be different, then things are going to be different at that point, and I'm finally going to rest. I can stop laboring for approval. I can stop laboring laboring for purpose and meaning and satisfaction, right? But the author of Hebrews describes it differently when he talks about rest, right? I mean, there's a Sabbath rest. There's a there's a God's rest that comes and he says again, it's a rest from their works. He doesn't say there's a rest that comes through the performance when you finally get there one day, he doesn't say, there's a rest that comes when you get all the religious duties, right? One day, he says, there's a rest that comes when you finally learn to rest from your own works of performing and religious duties.
But how in the world. Is that possible, right?
I mean, if we haven't gotten there yet, that's where we gotta get to, right? How's it possible if haven't gotten there and performed well enough to get those things that that can be true in our lives? Well, the answer, of course, is found in the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ as declared in Scripture. Many of you familiar with what Jesus said in Matthew, He records this in 11. Chapter, 11, verse, 28 where Jesus says this, he says, Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Come to me, and I will give you rest. Rest comes from Jesus. Rest is found in a person. He doesn't say. Rest is found through your performance and getting there one day again. Rest is found through your religious duties. Rest is found in Jesus. Again, though, how's that possible? How
Is Jesus really going to give me rest? What
does that look like? How does that apply to my life? Well, we know that when Jesus went to the cross, he was going to the cross to pay for your sin. And remember that sin is what got us into this rat race in the first place, right? Adam and Eve, when they were first created, they were experiencing rest. They had God's rest. They entered into his rest. But then the sin came in. That's when everything got messed up, and it left them laboring to try to find rest. It leaves us laboring through performance and religion to find rest. And so Jesus had to deal with the root of the problem. If sin was what caused the unrest and got rid of the rest they had in the first place, he had to deal with the sin, because that's the root problem. And so Jesus did. He took all of the sins of the entire world, past, present and future, and he put them onto himself, and he paid the penalty for them, which, of course, was death. And John tells us that while he was hanging on the cross with all of those sins on himself, paying the penalty for those that he cried out this as he took his last breath. It says when he had received the drink, Jesus said it is finished with that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit? What? What was finished, though, well, the work that was necessary to pay for your sin and to provide forgiveness, which, again, was the root problem of your unrest, the lack of rest in the first place, to provide salvation and reconciliation back to God. Jesus said it is finished, when writing about his finished work on the cross later, after his death, resurrection and sending of the spirit, the author of Hebrews again, we were in chapter four earlier, a little bit later in this book, he says this, day after day, every priest stands and performs. Man, you gotta perform. You gotta get there. You gotta get somewhere. Here's what, oh, religious duties. It's about religion doing it all the above. You gotta stand. You gotta do the work. And again and again he offers the same sacrifices which can never take away sins. They might temporarily cover them, but they cannot take them away. But he says, when this priest, what priest? This is a reference to Jesus had offered for what all time one sacrifice. Four sins, plural. He sat down. Why did he sit down? Because his work was finished. Standing is the way that we work. You're moving. You're getting work done. You've got to perform. You got to do your religious duties. He was doing all of the work, but because the work was done, he could now rest from his work. He could sit down. Jesus rested because all of the work necessary to provide you with ultimate rest that you're laboring after and chasing and performing to try to get was finished. And that's why, earlier, the author of Hebrews again, could say there remains a Sabbath rest, a rest that comes from God, just as again, he talks about it from the creation perspective, the way that God rested. So there's a parallel. There's a parallel between Genesis chapter two, opening of creation, finished work. God rests. And then the people entered into his rest, Adam and Eve, right after they were created. And now there's Jesus, the second member of the Trinity, the Son of God, God incarnate in flesh, who finishes his work now and rests from his work, rest of creation, first, now, the rest of the finished work of the Cross. And now, what can people do? Enter into the rest the same way that Adam and Eve entered into the rest at the garden, things have been restored through Jesus's finished work on the cross, to enter back into the rest. And in that rest, when we enter into it, we have all of the approval that we've been trying to earn for our entire lives. We have all the value that we've been looking for all the worth, the peace, the contentment, the satisfaction that we have craved and pursued and chased after and labored after for so many different ways we have all of that now in Christ, because Jesus is our rest. But Jason, how come those of us who have put our faith in Jesus then for salvation, feel so tired? How come we feel so unworthy and undervalued? How come we don't feel the peace and the satisfaction and the contentment in our lives if
we have it then?
Well, the answer, again, is found, of course, in Scripture. It's found in this section of scripture that we are looking at in Hebrews, where this is Hebrews chapter four, just a few verses before this at the very end, the very last verse of what he writes in chapter three has to do with the Israelites. Think about the Old Testament and the Israelites, right? They were, they were laboring as slaves, enslaved by the Egyptians, right? God frees them and delivers from that, and he's leading them towards this promised land to enter into His rest in the Promised Land. But the problem was, is that they never got there for 40 years. They just wandered around in the desert, that generation of people. Why? Why did they never enter into His rest? The author of Hebrews says we see then that they were not able to enter because of their lack of performance and their lack of doing all the religious duties. No, they didn't enter because of unbelief, unbelief, their lack of trust in God. Because of that lack of trust in God, they couldn't enter them into the rest that God was leading them into in the Promised Land, instead of resting in God's work along the way to provide for them, to lead, to empower them. They walked in unbelief. God can't get us there. God doesn't know what he's doing. He's not providing for us. I feel differently. I think differently. We better take matters into our own hands and try to labor through our own works to get us to the rest in the Promised Land. And so therefore they wandered in the desert because of their on belief, right? They had to labor. They were laboring on their own. And so again, what we see then is that when the author of Hebrews then comes back and says that, again, there's a Sabbath rest, there's a rest, there's God's rest, and it remains from those who rest from their works, right? We rest from our own laboring, and trusting in our own laboring to get us to the point where the rest will be and recognize that it's found in Jesus and he's the only way, the only way to experience. Rest is to walk in belief and trust that Jesus is rest and that you have it in him. So, so this is not just resting from your works to enter into salvation and trust in Jesus as the Way, the Truth and Life that's certainly true, right? You, you get his rest first and foremost by saying, Gosh, I I recognize that there's no way for me to get to heaven without the sacrifice of Jesus, and so I accept His free gift of salvation. I quit trusting in my own works to be able to get me there, and I trust in Him for the forgiveness of my sins and the promise of eternal life, and in that moment, you enter into His rest, right? But that doesn't always mean that you're going to experience His rest. And so here's what we're talking about again, just through the way we've we've visualized this several times before, right? We've talked so many times before about how we have a body and that we have a soul and that we have a spirit in the moment that we say yes to Jesus and are completely forgiven is the moment that Jesus comes to dwell in us. Apostle Paul said. The apostle Paul said, I no longer live, but I've been crucified with Christ, right? And I no longer but he lives in me. And Jesus said, Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Jesus is the rest. And so the moment we say yes to Jesus for salvation, Jesus, the rest enters into our lives, and we have it. It's there. It can never be taken away. It's always at the very core of our being in the spiritual union that we now have with Jesus. But here's the problem. The problem is, even though we have it, we don't always experience it, even though it's there. Why? Well, because we have feelings and we have a mind with thoughts and choices that we make and speech that comes out of our mouths and actions that we perform in our body, and there's things out in the world that capture our attention out here. And so we get caught up in all these things that we're feeling, and they're causing the stress, they're causing the unrest, because I'm feeling all of this stuff, I'm having all of these thoughts that are causing anxiety, and these other things that are going on in my life, and so I can't experience did you see that choice that I made and the sin that I entered into? What's that saying about me, and that speech that I used, or my actions, or, Oh, if I could just get out here, somewhere out here, there's rest further down the road, if I can just get there. And so what we see is that we're trying to experience all of this rest by going, if I, if I could just calm my feelings down. If I could just just, just calm my feelings down, I'll be able to rest. If I could just start to control my thoughts better, I'll have rest if I could start to make better choices. And I see that and get to that place down there, I'll have rest in these things, or again, if I get further down the road, this is my goal. I've got to get there. That's what I'm aiming through for in my job or in my Christian life or something. Then I'm going to get it. But look, guys, that's we're trying to find rest all out here in our solical level and in our bodily level, or all the way out here in the world, in places. But where is the rest? The rest isn't here. The rest isn't here. It's not out there in the world. The rest is deep within you, right there, but our attention is everywhere else, other than there. So that's why the Apostle Paul says to renew your mind to the truth over and over. I guess first of all, the first step would then be, you gotta know that's true. You can't renew your mind to the truth if you don't know that's the truth, right? But once you know it now and you see it, oh, yeah. I've always kind of thought that the rest was found. And when I get my life together at a certain point, and I finally get approval before Jesus, because I'm acting right, and I'm different now and all of those things, but now that you know the truth, that it's there, then when you're feeling start up and you're experiencing less, or the thoughts that come up and go, I gotta get there. I gotta go down there, then we know the truth. We recognize the lie. Because that's Satan and his activity to go, keep the focus out here. Keep the focus out here. You gotta try to find the rest out here. And he knows you're never going to find it. So then we renew our mind back to the truth that the rest is found in Jesus and that I am in Christ. And have it right. Here's here's the verse again, there remains a Sabbath rest for who
the people of God. And guess what? If you've put your faith and trust in Jesus for salvation, then guess who you are, the people of God. And therefore you've entered into the Sabbath rest. You have God's rest again, the question is whether you're going to experience. Against or not. The question is whether you are going to continue laboring to try to get to some place that you need to be in order for your life to finally be right and you can experience rest then when you get there, or whether you're going to actually experience the rest that you already have in Jesus as you start walking by faith and continuing to walk by faith and through the laboring of life. Now that doesn't mean, listen, I'm not saying that our work is going to stop, right, that you're just all of a sudden not going to get busy. That's not what we're talking about here, right? We will not cease from our work. We will cease from our flesh being the point of reference, right? And so when you think about the solical level that we just drew, and the body and all those things we're chasing after, we rest from that being the point of reference, because that's the point of reference for most of us. All the thinking is going on in that realm, right there. But we start looking to our flesh, and we start doing and quit getting where we need to be and all of that stuff, and we make Jesus the point of our reference. And then as we enter back into activity, at that point, we'll be able to do the activities and the laboring from a place of rest and experience it in a radically different way. You can go back into the laboring of work. You can go back into the laboring of school. You can go back into the laboring at your home, but you're going to experience that work in a different way, because you're going to experience the deep rest that you have in Jesus during the activity. Now you can go back into the labor of the relational conflict that you have and experience it in a different way. Why? Because the conflict does not have to stop for you to experience the rest in Jesus that you already have while the conflict is going on. And that's what we think. If I can just get through the conflict, I'll finally be able to rest. Well, how about the rest? Is it the deep soul or part of your spirit, and even in the middle of the conflict, you recognize I still have his peace. In the middle of this, I have his rest, and can experience it even in the conflict doesn't ever have to end for me to still experience God's rest, right? We'll be able to enter back into the things going on in our country, on our world, in a different way. We don't have to have things in our country get to a certain point to finally go, Oh, now I can rest because of who's in the White House, or decisions that are finally being made there no Jesus doesn't leave you no matter what choices somebody else is making about our country or government that can't take away your rest, that can't take away your peace and the experience that you have in Christ and the same thing through your sin struggles or the things that other people do to you, you don't even have To have gotten rid of those things to experience true rest, because you still have it in Jesus, and we trust that he's working those things out through you as you keep your eyes fixed on him. So again, there is a Sabbath rest for the people of God, and if you put your faith and trust in Jesus, you have it. The question is whether you will experience it or not, stop laboring and chasing after it, recognize the truth that you do, renew your mind to it, and walk by faith that moment by moment, you have his rest. No matter what is going on in your lives, let's pray faith.