Christ Church at Grove Farm

Rev. Craig Gyergyo: First of all, to all those of you who are guests who are joining us on this Mother's Day, I want to say welcome. Even as we've been worshipping this morning, when we think about those who are here for the first time or even the second time, we're just praying that you'll experience God. We pray that Jesus will touch you and that the message of the gospel through the songs, through our prayers, and through the collective of our worship will really touch you deeply. We're so glad you're here.

For the last couple of weeks, our church family has been walking through a series here called Analog Sunday. At the heart of this is the idea that we want to recover the practice of Sabbath. So, what we're doing is we're learning how to slow down, we're learning how to box out the noise, and we're learning how to become present to God, to rest in Him, just as Lindsay sang over us.

My hope is that Analog Sunday will not just be a three-week series, but that it'll be a part of our culture. It'll become a part of our vernacular, the way we talk about our life in Christ. What we want to be is a people who learn how to stop. We want to learn to be a people who learn how to rest in Him, to rest in Christ. We want to be a people who are more formed by the presence of God than we are by all the noise and distractions around us in this world.

I've heard a response from people as we've been in this series, and people are talking about it. It's great. As I've been talking to people, one of the things I've heard from many is this: "This is hard." The idea of trying to lean into Sabbath, it's tough to stop. It is difficult to slow down, and it's difficult to leave work unfinished. We feel that in particular, I think. What we also, I think, are realizing is that it's difficult to sit still long enough to actually wrestle with what's happening in your own soul.

That's what happens when we get quiet before God. I'm learning that very few people hear the idea of Sabbath and say, "Well, that sounds easy." I think it's just the opposite. Everyone is like, "Man, it freaks me out a little bit." What happens is that you hear about the practice of Sabbath and immediately you feel opposition. You feel a sense of resistance. That's because stopping exposes stuff.

It exposes how we're dependent on being productive. That is a very American, very Pittsburgh thing to be. It also exposes just how much we are attached to distraction. Even to leave your phone in the car or leave it at home for this worship service feels risky at times. It also exposes just how deeply we want control of our lives. So, there's something I think we're learning, and that's this: Sabbath is way bigger than scheduling. This is not just a tactical thing in your life. As we've been saying in this series, it actually presses into what you trust, what we trust. It presses into your identity, it presses into your security, and it presses into how we worship God.

Here's the question I want to frame the text we're going to look at, the message we're going to receive this morning from the Lord: Why is it that the rest that Jesus offers us feels so difficult to receive? Jesus says, "Come to me. I will give you rest." Why is that so difficult for us to actually participate in? This is exactly where the passage takes us. The moment that Jesus begins defining Sabbath, that resistance, that opposition, comes in. It erupts immediately.

We're going to look at two vignettes from the Gospels. We're in the Gospel of Mark, chapter two, and we'll go into chapter three a little bit also. Let's start in chapter two. Listen to verses 23 through 28 of Matthew 2. "One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and as his disciples walked along, they began to pick some heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, 'Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?' He answered, 'Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? In the days of Abiathar the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions.' Then he said to them, 'The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.'"

Let's get the picture here. The disciples are walking in the grainfields with Jesus, and they begin plucking some heads of grain as they're walking, just for a little snack. Immediately, here are the Pharisees watching, waiting, and they object. They say, "Unlawful!" They throw the penalty flag. It's not just about grain, of course. This is bigger than that. What it's really about is authority. These guys are playing the authority card, and it's about control. It's about who gets to decide what faithfulness looks like. That's how they operated.

By the time that Jesus got on the scene here in the New Testament, layer upon layer of regulation had been added around the Sabbath. There's the Talmud and there's also the Mishnah, and these Hebraic texts had extensive instructions that were written by priests and scribes. They governed nearly every detail of Sabbath observance. They took a command and made it into this thick book. It's interesting, God intended the Sabbath as a gift. But somewhere along the way, the rhythm that God designed to restore people had become something that was now burdening them.

When they say, "Aha, gotcha," Jesus responds by bringing up a story from the life of David. It comes from the Old Testament, 1 Samuel 21. In this story, David, who is God's anointed king, and his men are hungry. What happened was they ate the consecrated bread. They had a snack with that, which was reserved for the priests. What Jesus is doing in bringing this story up is he's reminding them, showing them how deeply God actually cares about restoring life, more than all the religious show stuff.

That leads to a key statement in the passage. Jesus says, "The Sabbath was made for man." The Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath. Sabbath is a gift. It's given as restoration. Humanity and people were never meant to be crushed under rules of the Sabbath. It's interesting, there's a gentleman in our church, one of our brothers, who came to me after the first week and he said, "I grew up in a cult." In this cult, Sabbath-keeping was really big. He said to me, "I've hated the Sabbath."

The reason he's hated the Sabbath is because it was made into all these rules and a sense of fear baked into it. What the scripture is saying, what Jesus is saying, is no. "The Son of Man is Lord of even the Sabbath." The Sabbath was a gift to people. What Jesus is doing here in this first vignette is he is re-establishing, he is restoring Sabbath to its true center. He's saying, forget all this stuff you've heard about not eating on this and not plucking grain and all these things. Let's return to what it really is. He says, "I am the Lord of even the Sabbath." In other words, the purpose, the meaning, the authority of God converge in the Sabbath in him.

Let's look at the second vignette. I think this will become even more clear as we go along what Jesus is talking about when he says that he is Lord of even the Sabbath. In verse one of chapter three, we're just going on in the story. "Another time Jesus went into the synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there. Some of them were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal him on the Sabbath. Jesus said to the man with the shriveled hand, 'Stand up in front of everyone.' Then Jesus asked them, 'Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save a life or to kill?'"

They remained silent. They had no answer to this. He looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored. Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus. Look at this instance; it teaches us something. Jesus enters the synagogue. Seems like this would be a safe place. A man with a withered hand is there that day. What you get from the text is you feel the tension in the air.

These Pharisees are watching carefully, and they're looking for another "gotcha" moment. They're not there to worship God. They want to see whether Jesus will heal on the Sabbath. It almost seems like a joke, like this is a problem. The atmosphere is thick. Jesus calls the man forward, puts him in the center of the room, and he asks a question to the Pharisees. He says, "Which one is lawful? Which one's the right thing to do? To do good or to do evil? To save life or to kill?"

This is what Sabbath is moving towards. It's always has been. It's moving towards life. Sabbath is intended to move towards restoration. It's meant to move towards wholeness, not these crippling rules. When Jesus asks the question, the room goes silent. Silence has a way of exposing hearts, doesn't it? The scripture says that Jesus looked around at them in anger. He's got this anger and it's emerging in him because something sacred has been desecrated. The sacred thing is the Sabbath. Something sacred's been distorted. He grieves because hearts have become resistant, calcified, even antagonistic towards mercy.

Jesus says to the man, "Stretch out your hand." Put yourself in that synagogue for a moment. Everyone looking, everyone watching. The very place, by the way, this hand of this man that's marked with weakness is suddenly put in the spotlight in the center of the room. This hand doesn't work. This hand is the mark of weakness and limitation in this man's life. Jesus speaks directly to that place, which is way bigger than the hand, the place that this man's learned to live around. He says, "Stretch out your hand." As he responds to Jesus, his hand is restored. How beautiful.

Sabbath is where God restores what life has withered. That's what the Sabbath is. The same spirit that raised Christ from the dead is now working in that hand and is now working in weary people. What the power of God is doing is restoring what restless living has withered away, has taken away, has sucked away and diminished. Then there's this sobering moment in the passage that really strikes me. The Pharisees leave, and what do they do? What's their response? They begin plotting how they're going to destroy Jesus.

There they are, the people most committed to protecting the Sabbath, and they could no longer recognize that the Lord of the Sabbath, as Jesus calls himself, is standing right in front of them. The religious people, the people who were all about the Sabbath, missed the Sabbath right in front of them. Everything that we've been talking about these past couple weeks, everything we're talking about today, in fact, is moving toward one central reality. I'm actually trying to adjust the way I speak of this because there's a reality here and that's this: Jesus doesn't just talk about Sabbath. He's not just teaching about Sabbath. He embodies Sabbath because he is Sabbath.

Jesus is our Sabbath rest. The rest that humanity and people have been longing for forever is found in Jesus Christ. He is the Sabbath. The restoration of the hand and the wholeness that's seen there is all revealed through Jesus. If you look at Hebrews 4:9, it says this very succinctly: "There remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God." There is a Sabbath rest. There's a deeper rest than even a one-day pause in your week. It's a rest where burdens are lifted. It's a place where the withered parts of your life can begin to live again. The deepest form of Sabbath is a person, not a practice. Sabbath is the one who carried sin. Sabbath is the one who bore judgment so you don't have to. Sabbath is the one who stood in the place of weary, weary sinners.

Jesus still welcomes the sinful, weary, exhausted people into his rest. He still says, "Put out that hand. I want to restore it." Why do we resist rest? Why is there so much opposition around this? The first reason is this: rest exposes what we trust. I think this is why Sabbath feels difficult, because stopping confronts our dependencies. We have grown dependent on noise and activity. When we stop working, we discover how much security we're actually deriving from our productivity. All of a sudden, it's like, well, I don't feel comfortable. I don't feel like I have any purpose.

When we step away from the constant input, our phones and all this, we actually also discover how restless our souls are and how they've become. Sabbath exposes what we lean on for identity and for control. So, here's the question: what becomes loud? What's amplified when everything else is silenced? Once everything else goes quiet, what is it that all of a sudden you're hearing? I think everyone knows this feeling. You experience it maybe when you go to bed. You stop moving and, instead of peace, your mind starts racing. It's an awful feeling when that happens. You wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat with panic and anxiety.

When our communion with God wears thin, our soul is searching for something to substitute, to fill that gap. So, the Sabbath is uncovering what distraction is actually in our hearts and trying to usurp the place of God in our lives. Then in that place of honesty, the Holy Spirit begins forming us into the people who can actually rest in the Lord.

The second reason I'll tell you is this: rest requires surrender. This is why it's hard. This is why it's difficult. It requires surrender on our part. Jesus tells the man, "Stretch out your hand." Now, that command required trust. First of all, it required trust just to stand up in the front of the synagogue and have your withered hand on display and to actually believe that Jesus could do something about it. He had to bring all this into the open. Most of us resist that very thing. We don't want to bring it into the open. We want to keep that hidden away. We'd rather manage our situation, our exhaustion, our distraction, than expose it. We'd rather distract ourselves than actually sit before God honestly. Because when we're not busy, we become vulnerable. But that's where surrender begins. Rest begins where the surrender begins.

What part of your life are you still trying to hold together on your own? How are you trying to hold it together? What do you need to surrender? Here's the third thing. Rest can't be replaced by the rules, by religion. The Pharisees were deeply religious, but they were also deeply restless. Their religion wasn't helping them with this. Even though their lives were centered on regulation and on scrutiny and control, they were still restless. The tragedy of this passage is that these religious leaders stood in the presence of restoration and they rejected him. They're that close. Hardened hearts can remain close to sacred things while actually resisting the God who is present and wants to give you life.

There's a scripture that Paul writes to Timothy where he talks about having an appearance of godliness but denying its power. Here's the question: is your life organized around God while your heart remains distant from him? These are things to look in the mirror and say, God, would you speak to me about this? Would you show me? Honestly examine me.

The Jesus that we see here speaking of the Sabbath, saying the Sabbath was made for people, saying the Sabbath is something that I am Lord of, that same Jesus still speaks. He stands and he offers you the very same invitation. He extends this to weary people, to distracted people, to people who are controlling or controlled, to people who are exhausted. Jesus says, "Come to me." He says, "Bring your restlessness. Bring your withered places, the places that feel like they're dried up. Bring the parts of your life that you've been trying to hold together on your own." He says, "Bring it all to me. Come to me."

You don't have to keep on proving your worth through constant activity. You don't have to. You can let that go. You don't have to keep on carrying what only Jesus can sustain because the one standing before us today is Lord of the Sabbath. He is our rest. In him, weary souls find their rest.

Rather than talk about it, why don't we do this? Before we move any further, I want to give you a moment to actually practice this, to practice what we're talking about, to sit still before God only for a moment here. You'll see how it threatens you, but there's no need to rush. There's no need to fill the silence. There's no need to try to perform to fix yourself, either. You, right now, as you are today, can come before God honestly and be still before him. You might just end up closing your eyes in this moment or bowing your head. If you want to reflect on these questions I've put before you, I'm going to put those on the screen. Let's just take a moment and be still before the Lord.

O Lord, teach us to be still before you and find that you are our rest. Lord, help us to still the noise and the clamor and to find you. We pray this in Jesus' name, Amen.