3 EXERCISES THAT WILL MAKE YOU HEALTHIER, FITTER, AND STRONGER, PART 3 - RESTING, THE ART of SABBATHING

Part 3, Resting – The Art of Sabbathing

In my past two editions of my weekly Pastor’s Desks I have drawn parallels between caring for our physical health and how we should care for our souls (our spiritual, emotional, and mental health). In Part 1, I discussed the benefits of aerobic exercise for our physical health (which increases the demand for oxygen intake) and how this was similar to the spiritual discipline of praying. In Part 2, I had compared the need to maintain a healthy balanced diet for good physical health and how this related to the need for the believer to maintain a healthy spiritual diet from reading, studying, and meditating on God’s Word, the Bible. Now I turn my attention to an oft neglected aspect of our spiritual well-being: resting. As a disclaimer, I am one of the least qualified to discuss this topic—but, embarrassing, any lessons I have learned about the value of rest have come negatively from not resting as I should have and then enduring the inevitable consequences.

It is in vain that you rise up early
and go late to rest,
eating the bread of anxious toil;
for he gives to his beloved sleep.
Psalm 127:2

 

“HAVE YOU BEEN BUSY?”

Being busy is like a badge of honour for many people. It’s not enough to be a mother looking after young children. This mother is expected to be a busy mother looking after young children! Men are trained to regard being busy as a condition of manhood. It becomes their excuse for not getting things done – “I’ve been busy”; and their routine introductory conversation starter, “Been busy?” In fact, it is almost a shameful thing for a man to confess that he hasn’t been busy and almost unthinkable for him to say that he has spent the whole day doing nothing! But perhaps it is because people do not make rest a routine part of their regular week that they are so prone to burn-out? Before we consider the enormous spiritual benefits to resting, I want to overview some of the largely unappreciated benefits of rest, particularly sleep. 

If you lie down, you will not be afraid;
when you lie down, your sleep will be sweet.
Proverbs 3:24

 

THE BENEFITS OF RESTING/SLEEP

Several years ago I collapsed in my office in excruciating pain unable to move my legs. It turned out that a motor-cycle accident that I had had twenty-five years earlier (after a Nissan Patrol had side-swiped me and put me into a coma with a broken shoulder) but had apparently also broken my back – yet had not been diagnosed at that time. After I was eventually able to re-use my legs I went for scans which revealed the true nature of the damage that had caused my collapse. The neurosurgeon said my back was now too far gone to operate, but there were two things I could do to help manage my back health from this point: (i) drink more water and (ii) get more sleep (he also said get more active, take pain killers and rest when it hurts too much). Since then I have tried to do just that. I have also done a bit of research into why sleep is so important to our health — and not just our physical health too! Here are some of the benefits of getting 7 to 8 hours of sleep a night:

• BOOSTS IMMUNE SYSTEM: Sleep is necessary to boost our immune systems to be able to fight off diseases.
• PREVENTS WEIGHT GAIN: Insufficient sleep causes our bodies to produce an appetite increasing hormone (ghrelin) that leads can lead to weight gain.
• DECREASED RISK OF HEART ATTACK: Proper sleep is necessary to reduce the risk of heart attack because our hearts need to rest through sleep and decrease our blood pressure and the amount of cortisol in our blood which places our hearts under stress.
• PRODUCTIVITY INCREASES: A well rested person is a much more productive person.
• IMPROVED MOOD:  A good sleep pattern has a dramatic impact on our emotional well-being.
• INCREASES HEIGHT: When we sleep our spinal discs re-hydrate (if we have actually drunk enough water throughout the day) and we actually wake up a millimetre or two taller at the start of our day.
• DECREASED TRAFFIC RISK: Lack of sleep dramatically increases your risk of a road motor vehicle accident. The person who only gets five hours sleep a night quadruples their chance of crashing!
• SLEEP IMPROVES MEMORY: When we are asleep it is an opportunity for our minds to sort and file information away in the long-term memory of our brains.

We sometimes hear of national Prime Ministers or Presidents that “get by on four hours of sleep a night” and wonder how on earth they could do it. The truth is. They can’t. Not in the long term at least. God has designed us to sleep. Busy people often view sleep as “time wasted”, but the data clearly tells another story. And when we add in the number of times that God spoke to people while they slept (Gen. 15:12-21; 20:3-6; 28:12-15; 31:24; 37:5, 9) we begin to realise that there may be more happening to us while we sleep than we might realise (or happening to other when we pray for them!). 

JESUS SAID TO HER, YOU ARE ANXIOUS AND
TROUBLED ABOUT MANY THINGS

The sisters, Mary and Martha appear in two different stories in two different Gospels. In Luke’s Gospel, Dr. Luke tells of when Mary and Martha hosted Jesus for a meal. Mary rested at the feet of Jesus as He sat teaching her while her sister Martha was left carrying the load of hospitality in the kitchen. The problem wasn’t that Martha was serving and Mary wasn’t – the problem was that Martha was distracted by her serving because she had become resentful of her sister Mary who wasn’t serving. Pastor Phil Hills would say over and over again, “We don’t rest from work, we work from rest!” Before we had our larger auditorium we used to hold our pre-service prayer meeting in my office. On my white-board I had “Our service is our worship. Our service enables others to worship.” Martha’s problem was that she did not see her serving as worship of Christ which enabled Mary to worship at the feet of Christ! Jesus saw right into the heart of Martha and exposed her needless anxiety and resentment. Naturally as a Pastor I want people to serve gladly in our church and to do without any sense of resentment that others should be serving more – but I especially want people to serve from rest so that others can rest in worship at the feet of Jesus just like Mary did!

¶ Now as they went on their way, Jesus entered a village.
And a woman named Martha welcomed Him into her house.
And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to His teaching.
But Martha was distracted with much serving.
And she went up to Him and said,
“Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.”
But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things,
but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.”
Luke 10:38-41

 

SABBATH – A DAY OF REST, WORSHIP & THE WORD

It seems that from creation, God established that mankind should rest from his usual labours each seventh day (Gen. 2:3) and reflect on his relationship with God with thanksgiving. In much the same that sleep is seems counter-intuitive to the busy person, the idea of a sabbath (resting each seventh day) also seems counter-intuitive to a busyness person. It may also seem odd that God would even have to incorporate such a thing as a sabbath day into a set of ten primary laws for all former Hebrew slaves who had never previously got any time off before being delivered Egypt! But God actually made it the fourth commandment after:

(i) Have no other gods (Exo. 20:3),

(ii) Do not make or bow down to any carved imaged or anything in the sky above or on the earth or in the sea (Exo. 20:4-5),

(iii) You shall not take the name of the Lord in vain (Exo. 20:7), and

(iv) Remember to keep the Sabbath day holy (Exo. 20:8-11).   

After Israel settled into the Promised Land they soon neglected to keep the Sabbath and God raised up the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel to call them to repentance to re-establish their obedience in honouring God by observing it. After the Jews returned from their Exile in Babylon and Persia they actually became very legalistic about keeping the Sabbath and even developed some 600 additional sub-laws on how it was to be kept properly! Interestingly, each of the Ten Commandments is repeated in the New Testament as applicable for Christians, except keeping the seventh-day Sabbath. This is because the Old Testament Sabbath not only provided a principle of weekly rest from usual labours and a time to reflect with thanksgiving upon the Creator, it also prophetically pointed to the coming of the Messiah who would redeem lost mankind on cross and bring an end to the “works of the law” (Gal. 2:16; 3:13). The writer to the Hebrews said that to turn to Christ in repentance and faith was to permanently enter into God’s rest and warns those tempted by false teachers to try to earn their salvation by keeping certain rules, such as seventh-day-Sabbaths not to be fooled:

So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, 
for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from His works as God did from His.
¶ Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience.
Hebrews 4:9-11

When Jesus rose from the dead on Sunday morning, and then fifty-days later sent the baptising Holy Spirit on the first Pentecost Sunday of the Christian Calendar, tens of thousands of formerly seventh-day Sabbath keeping law-abiding Jews were converted to Christianity and were baptised and switched their Sabbath observance to Sunday not just as a day of rest — but as a weekly day to celebrate their newfound eternal rest!

In our day we too meet each Sunday to do the same! It is an exercise that is good for our physical health, our mental health, our emotional health, and especially our spiritual health!

Your Pastor,

Andrew

Let me know what you think below in the comment section and feel free to share this someone who might benefit from this Pastor’s Desk.

YOU HAVE HEARD THAT IT WAS SAID

THE HISTORY OF REFRESH

Kim and I arrived in Tasmania in 1995. We arrived unknown, uninvited and for many – unwanted. Having recently resigned from our church in Melbourne after sensing God’s calling us to finish up there, we arrived here a little uncertain of what our future held for us, except that we knew God had called us here. Within a week of arriving I was invited to become the pastor of Legana Assembly of God and was appointed in September. This was a church of 17 members with around 40 in attendance on an average Sunday. So when most of the congregation advised me that they weren’t going to be around for the coming Easter, because they were going to their ‘shacks’, I was facing the pastoral nightmare of having no-one turn up for what is the most important event on the Christian calendar and one of the two most likely dates on the church calendar when non-Christians are most likely to accept an invitation to attend church. This is why I devised a counter-Easter program to attract an appropriate crowd to honour Christ. This counter-Easter initiative became our annual Easter Refresh Convention.

Commit your work to the LORD,
and your plans will be established.
Proverbs 16:3

THE PRE-CURSER TO REFRESH

Easter 1996 was held in our own building. We had no electricity, no carpet, no toilets, no water, and no car-park. It would be another 4 months after this event, on Saturday August 31st, when we would actually open our building. We borrowed electricity from a neighbour. We hired in some portable toilets. Our first Easter guest speaker was someone named, Maddog. We had 750 people attend over the course of 5 days. Each year since then, we have fought hard to keep Easter in its rightful place in the Christian and Cultural calendar. Our guest speakers have included Mike Berry from Annapolis, Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson, Stand To Reason’s Greg Koukl, former Superintendent of the Assemblies of God, Andrew Evans, Reasons To Believe’s Kenneth Samples, Dr. Fazale Rana, and Dr Hugh Ross.

Every Easter we have strived to bolster the faith of believers by helping thinkers to believe and believers to think. We have reached out to those who might never have any interaction with Christians any other time year apart from attending our Easter Refresh meetings. On one occasion this involved six of the twelve Tasmanian senators, members of the state and federal parliaments, and local mayors. Over the years we held these meetings as dinners at York Park and breakfasts at the Tailrace Centre. Our Good Friday evening outreaches were, for three years, held in the Albert Hall, with around 990 attending the Hugh Ross meeting.

A COLLECTIVE EASTER WITNESS

One of the reasons I have strongly urged our church family to give the Easter long-weekend to God rather than simply treating it as an opportunity to go camping is that when we come together as the church to commemorate the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ togetherwe provide the world with a collective and attractive witness. Despite the rampant secularisation of society, the world still expects Christians to treat the Easter season as sacred occasion for the Church gather. Just as when we gather together over Easter it amplifies our witness, when we don’t, it potentially injures it. Little wonder then, that a few years ago, one of the most secular of our State politicians, when discussing the place of Easter, declared in Parliament that “Christianity was no longer relevant”. In a personal conversation with our State Governor, Prof. Kate Warner, I made mention of our new church auditorium. She expressed surprise that a church could be growing in this day and age. (I often meet this kind of response from secular political leaders who each make it clear that they consider Christianity to be irrelevant to our State as was made abundantly evident in the recent proceedings in our Legislative Council!)

 if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth.
First Timothy 3:15

Dr. Jeff Zweerink, speaking at our Good Friday evening event 2016

EVANGELISTIC, PROPHETIC, APOLOGETIC

And Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by Me.”
Matthew 11:4-6

Our first few Easters were largely evangelistic. Evangelism does two powerful things. It articulates the Christian message to those who have never heard it before in a way that helps them to see their need for a Saviour from the eternal peril that awaits them and their immediate brokenness that currently afflicts them and to see that Jesus the Christ is that Saviour and the Healer for their soul. Secondly, it reminds believers of that which we all too readily forget: the gospel. We need to be reminded that Christ came, ministered, died, and rose from the dead, to redeem people and make the way for people to enter in the bliss of having their sins forgiven, their orphaned lives adopted by the King of kings, their brokenness healed, and their paradisical eternities secured.

Whenever the church lapses into apathy about its responsibility to evangelise the wayward, or uphold the Lordship of Christ in every arena of society, God raises up prophetic ministries to heal this breach. This is why, for a number of years, we had guest speakers who were prophetic. For those of us who were in attendance at the Easter Dinner where several politicians had our visiting American prophetic ministry prophesy over them, to then witness over the coming months the fulfilment of those prophecies (one of them even published a book in which he referred to how significant this moment was in his life) it will be very hard to forget what we heard and saw. There remains one outstanding prophecy to be fulfilled from that night. The prophetic ministry at these Easter Refresh meetings achieved the goal of strengthening the faith of believers and bolstering our confidence in the God Who Speaks.

But sometimes, before evangelism can begin to be effective, the obstacles to surrendering to the Saviour need to be removed. This seems to be one of the points in Christ’s parable of the sower. In 2010, our guest speaker, Kenneth Samples, was from Reasons To Believe. He showed the compatibility between faith in Christ and logical thinking. Two years later, we host Dr. Fazale Rana, also from RTB. Then in 2014, we hosted Dr. Hugh Ross. As a result of Dr. Ross’s visit, many thinkers came to faith in Christ over the ensuing months. Two years after this, we hosted our third RTB speaker, Dr. Jeff Zweerink, an astrophysicist who presented scientifically credible reasons for faith in the God of the Bible.

I hope by now you can see that over the past 23 years or so, the annual Refresh Easter Convention has set about to refresh believers’ confidence in the God of the Bible and to refresh people’s understanding of what it means to be a Christian. This past Refresh convention also sought to respond to the urgent challenge that Christianity is facing in the public square and to address those who have only ever had Christianity misrepresented to them. It featured two speakers, and here’s what they said.

APOLOGETICS IS NOT SAYING SORRY

At our Annual Influencers’ Breakfast, where a hundred guests gathered, including political leaders, business people, and community leaders, we heard one of our keynote speakers share why Christianity was unique and how the teaching of Jesus Christ differed markedly from that of Islam’s founder, Muhammad. For example:

Teaching	Mohammad	Jesus the Christ
Use of swords	Used swords and commanded their use for those who opposed Islam (Q. 22:25; 47:4)	Taught that swords should be put away and not used (Matt. 26:52).
treatment of enemies	Should be put to death (Q. 8:39)	Should be loved (Matt. 5:44)
blindness	Ordered people to be blinded (Hadith 520)	Healed blindness and opened the eyes of the blind
lameness	Ordered people to be made lame (Hadith 520)	Jesus healed those who were lame (Matt. 9)
withered hands	Cut people’s hands off (Q. 5:38)	Jesus healed withered hands (Matt. 12:10-13)
adulterers	Adulterers were hit, whipped, and stoned (Q. 24:2)	Jesus forgave the woman caught in the act of adultery (John 8:7)
the dead	Killed the living (Hadith 369)	Jesus raised the dead (John 11:1-45)
responding to opponents	Ordered his opponents to be killed (Hadith 248)	Jesus excused His opponents (Lk. 23:34)
rape	Encouraged his men to rape enslaved women (Q. 4:24)	Never encouraged rape. Never encouraged enslavement.

We heard that today there are people who have spoken out against the inconsistencies, factual errors, and human rights abuses of Islam based on the example and teaching of Muhammad, and have since been convicted in the European Court of Human Rights for defamation for doing so. For example, an Austrian woman, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was found guilty of human rights violations and fined $600 after stating in a private seminar that the founder of Islam, when in his 50s, married Aisha, a 6 year old girl at the time, which he then consummated three years later, had committed, what is considered today, to be a serious crime by Western standards. 

At our Maundy Thursday dinner, we heard from both our speakers as I interviewed them. Samuel Green told us that shortly after his conversion to Christ, while a university chemistry student in Sydney, he encountered Muslims who were particularly opposed to Christianity. In reading the Qur’an he discovered why. Samuel went on to learn Arabic and study Islam and has for the past few years been debating and challenging Muslims about the claims of Islam in very public settings. He shared why this was so important since Muslims have a misrepresentation of Christianity, and Christians generally do not know what Muslims believe or how different Biblical Christianity is from Islam. 

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures,
First Corinthians 15:3

On Good Friday, Samuel shared “Jesus, Islam, and The Gospel” showing how the teaching of Jesus offered the means for the forgiveness of sins and salvation with God, and how this differed markedly from Islam. In our Good Friday evening service, Samuel demonstrated that, unlike what Islam taught, Jesus Christ clearly claimed to be God, the co-equal and co-eternal, divine Son of God. In between our Refresh meetings we had a team of children’s workers reaching out to hundreds of children and families in City Park.

On Easter Sunday we heard that resurrection of the Christ demonstrated Jesus’ claim to divinity and that on the day of Pentecost recorded in Acts 2, Peter announced that the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus was prophesied in the Old Testament as the only means salvation for mankind. Our Easter convention culminated with our keynote speaker sharing stories of how many muslims around the world have been coming to know Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour. What was particularly pleasing, and something which most who attended were unaware of, was that there were a number of Muslims present in our first service who returned in our evening service and were very attentive to what was shared.

If I haven’t done so already, I want to thank everyone who worked so hard to make this Easter so successful. Many many people worked tirelessly to make everything happen. Some of them were noticed but most weren’t. I especially want to thank each one who did give their Easter to God and helped our church to be an attractive witness this Easter. Your faithfulness deeply touched me. Thank you. Long after I’ve gone I hope that our church will still bear a bright witness each Easter which will puzzle political leaders and cause them to wonder. And I hope that the seed which we have been sowing over these past 23 years will bear much fruit by a future generation of Christ followers.

And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.
Galatians 6:9

Pastor Andrew.