Sabbath: The Gift Of Jesus Rest | From Resident, to Citizens and Neighbours | Pastor Preston | September 25

Lake Ridge Community Church Podcast

Join us on a journey from residents, to citizens and neighbours! See you Sunday!

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Hi there. My name is Preston Pouteaux. Welcome to the Lake Ridge Community Church Podcast. This is where we share some of our messages from Sunday mornings. So we're glad you're here to listen. We'd love for you to to join us in person. We meet on Sunday mornings at 10:30 a.m at Our Lady of Wisdom School here in Chestermere. At our core, we're a community of people, so we gather on Sundays, but we also do a lot in the week. Together, we are people learning to follow Jesus and love our city. So to learn more, visit lakeridgecommunity.com. Hope to check in and visit with you soon. Take care. Thanks for listening.

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Our sermon series is from residents to citizens and neighbors. And so today I wanted to as part of our building on the first piece, which was being a resident, which is people who are just here not for a long time, but for a good time, right? We are here just filling space. We are maybe here trying to figure out how to live in this place with the time that we have. Well, Jesus, he has something to say about the time that we use and how we use our time. And the story of Mary and Martha gets us wrestling with how we use our time and our energy. And so my question for you is this. How do you feel about this story with the Mary and Martha story? How do you feel? Do you feel put off by it? Do you identify maybe more with Mary or with Martha? Is it a question about being responsible? Is it a question about Laziness? All that stuff is peaking up here. Who is right, Mary or Martha and why? Did you know a group of Christians, several hundred years ago, they moved from Europe, which is largely Christian, to North America, and they put on really tight, stiff shirts, and they were called the Puritans, bless them.

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But they looked around, they were like, there's no roads here. There's no cinemas here. There's no shopping malls here. We got a lot of work to do, right? We have to build things. We have to work really, really hard. And so they moved here and they started building things. And they worked harder and harder and harder because they learned the more that they worked, the more money they made, the nicer house they had, the nicer car they had. And so you skip forward a few hundred years, and next thing you know, it's called for adults, it's called the Protestant work ethic, right? Protestant work ethic means I work all the time because I'm going to live the American dream, right? So we put all these words to it. It was first approximate work ethic, then it's the American dream. We're going to work really hard and get a lot of stuff. We won't be lazy. And in fact, if you're a good Christian, you will never stop working. You will work very hard every day of the week, except for this thing called Sabbath, which we'll talk about. But even then, as time went on, they worked so hard.

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Well, something began to happen. People worked hard, but they forgot why they were working. Do you ever forget why you were doing something? I sometimes walk into a room and I don't even know why I'm there anymore. And I got to retrace my steps, right? Well, these people, they work so hard, these first Christians and then the Christians after them and after them, that like Martha, they forgot that they were doing something really important. They forgot what they were supposed to be here for. And all the stuff that they keep getting makes them less and less happy. Do you ever go to the Dollar store and get something and it used to make you quite happy, and now you get a new thing and that's a little bit less happy, and then you get another new thing and that's even less happy until eventually it doesn't even make you happy anymore, right? Something about stuff doesn't make us happy. So we can try harder to make more stuff, but it doesn't always make us happy. And so their whole life went by and they got more and more stuff and they were less and less pleased with what they were doing.

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They were only residents in this life. They were only here to get some things. And they didn't know that they were supposed to be part of something bigger. The reason why they started working hard is because they're followers of Jesus. But they forgot they were like a Martha. And this has shaped most of our Western culture today. They did not know how to be a citizen of the kingdom of God and a neighbor to those around them. OK, kids, I got a question for you. Enough is enough. If I have this many toys, is it enough? What do you think? Put your hand up if you think this is enough toys. Are you sure? Okay, what if I get this many toys? Is that going to be enough? Yeah. Okay, parents who have a toy room, is this enough toys? How about this? You think so? Okay. What if this whole room was full of toys? Would that be enough toys? Even still? Did you know there's a lady, she's against world records for the most shoes. Do you know how many shoes she has? Felicity? How many? She has 100 shoes. She has 14,000 shoes.

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And you know what? When they talked to her, she said that isn't even enough. Do you know that we aren't very good sometimes at knowing when we have enough? And so Darlene Flynn, who has the most shoes in the world, she still thinks she needs more. Well, get this. Did you know today in some countries, people work so hard that they get sick? There's even a word for it in Japan, where they work some of the hardest hours. It's called Kiroshi, where you will pass out at your desk. And if you've passed out at your desk because you've worked so many hours, your boss comes by and says, Good job. And so you can look up corrosion. And you will find this whole culture of people sleeping on streets wearing business attire because they were so tired, because they work so many hours. And people walk by and go, well done. You work so hard, you got sick. There's 700,000 people a year pass away because they work too hard. But if you think that I'm trying to tell you not to work hard, let me tell you this. Here's the other thing that has happened.

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It gets even stranger. Even though people have worked harder, harder, harder, people are also getting lazier lazier. Meet this. Did you know right now in America, 130,000,000 people in the States don't exercise 2 hours a week, and they spend up to 7 hours a day on a screen? So we're working, working harder, harder, harder. And we're getting lazier, lazier, lazier. How does that even work? How does that work that you can work hard and your body isn't working for you anymore. They're not exercising. They're looking at screens. I don't think it's healthy anymore. And so people who are getting sick and all of these things, they are having to think through a new way of doing it. And I think we are going to talk about what that is. My daughter collated all my notes today, and they're upside down. So we can get burned out. We can get frustrated. We can try working harder and we aren't happier with it, or we can try resting and being and not exercising and something goes wrong. Well, do you think God knows how our bodies work? God made it. Does anybody have a shirt tag? Does anybody have a tag on the back of their shirt?

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Can anybody feel it? Can someone come up here with their shirt tag? Hey, come on up. Let's see what your shirt tag says. Let's see what this says. Okay, yeah, cool. It says, Made from HNM. Made, I think, in Bangladesh. What else does it say? Oh, no, this is made in China and says how to wash it and the size and all of that stuff. Okay, you can sit on down. Guess what her shirt tag says. Who made the shirt, what it was made for? And it even says, I know. That's nice. And it even says how to take care of it. Did you know that you have a tag on your life that says who made you? Do you know who made you? Who God made you? Do you think God knows how to take care of you? Do you think he has an idea about how you're supposed to work and how you're supposed to rest? Well, I think there's two big stories in the Bible that talk about this. In the very beginning, the very beginning of the Bible, god made the whole world. And he made air and he made the light and he made the land and he made the sea and he made animals.

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Do you know what the last thing is that God made? What do you think? What's the last thing that God made? No, what is the last thing God made? Adults. What is the last thing? Oh, you got we think humans are the last thing God's made, right? God made humans hockey and then he made rest. It was actually a thing God made of all the most important things he made. He actually made rest. Do we think about that very often? Do we think about how we relate to the world through a lens of rest? This is what it was called. It was called Manuha. It means rest. Can everybody take a deep breath at the end of it all? He said miniha rest. It's the last thing is needed for the world to be complete is to know how to live in the world. It's one thing to be alive in it. It's another thing to know how to live into it. So it's more than a day off, manuja. This rest means peace, it means joy, it means friendship, it means celebration. And more importantly, it means living in the world with God, in God's beautiful world.

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So a little while later, things aren't bad. Kids. Have you ever heard ivy? Have you ever heard about the people of God? They were taken to be slaves in Egypt. You've probably heard this story. They're slaves in Egypt and it was a place that didn't celebrate, manufacture. They didn't know how to rest. Slavery means you worked all the time. Morning, new night. Do you think you could work all the time? No. And they start to cry.

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Cry out to God. They said, this is not good. Adults, do you ever cry out to God after working a lot of shifts? This is not good, right? I am not enjoying this anymore.

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I'm not feeling like I'm enjoying the good and beautiful world with the good and beautiful God anymore. So you cry out. And these people, they cried out. And so you know what God did? He gathered them, he rescued them, and then he gave them some commands about how to live.

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And some of the commands called the Ten Commandments, first you should trust God, and then you should do some other things. A few of them are like love your parents, don't kill people don't steal. And one of them, the fourth one is you should enjoy some manufacture. You should rest, you should enjoy the Sabbath, rest. And so these people, they were given the commandment that one day a week you should do nothing but live in Manuha, live in Shabbat, live in rest.

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And then once every seven years you should take a break. And then once every 50 years you should take an even better break. And they laid it out. And so God gave them these things to remind them to stop.

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How hard is it for us to stop? Is it hard to stop? Well, God told these people, he said, this is how you do it. You got to stop. And when you stop, everything will get reordered in you.

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Everything will be made right. You are not a slave to the world and work, but the working and the resting. This is what it is. It is a gift. So how do we Manuha?

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Well, what does it mean again? It means joyful, repose. It means tranquility. It means delight. It's a good nap.

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Has anybody had a nap? It's been a long time since some of us have had a good nap, right? You have had a good nap. I want a good nap. So let's take a look at how Jesus does manufacture.

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He shows us how. There's a guy named Dallas Willard. He's a famous kind of Bible teacher guy. When he asked his students, he said, what is one characteristic of Jesus, the top characteristic of Jesus? And people started to throw them out.

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They started to say, well, he's kind or he's all powerful or he heals. And he goes, I think the top characteristic of Jesus is he's relaxed. And most people kind of nod at that and they go, I don't even know if it's in my top 100 relaxed. Do we serve a relaxed, unhurried Jesus or have we made Jesus in our image as one who does not know how to manoeuha? Is Jesus relaxed?

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How do you think Jesus can be relaxed? I think Jesus as if anybody knows how bad things are, right? He had twelve disciples and they were crazy people. All of them were. She shouldn't have been relaxed.

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He should have been like, I'm trying to help twelve people figure out how to follow me, and they can barely figure out their way to the next day. But he's relaxed. You know, one thing I'm taught as a pastor is the hardest thing to learn is to be what's called a non anxious presence. Do you know how hard it is to walk with a couple of hundred people and not get some anxiety about what those beautiful people are going through at any given day? Let's just say, am I anxiety somewhere, live somewhere I don't want to share?

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Too boldly. But it does not feel like Jesus relaxed a lot of days. And here Jesus is showing me that he walks into the world as a relaxed person. Does he know something we don't? Does he know something about how the story ends?

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Have you ever read a book and you know how the story ends? And so it's not so bad. We sometimes watch like big, dramatic, scary movies in our house. But as long as we know that it ends in a certain way, then we can get through it, right? Jesus knew how some of these stories end, and he knows how this story's end.

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And he knows that we can live relaxed and unhurried, that it's healthy and good. So the sticker I got look at what I got during our sticker trade says this jesus took naps. Be like Jesus. He slept in a boat, in a storm. He knew how to stay unhurried and relaxed even when things weren't looking good.

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So matthew 1128 to 30. Kayden, read this. Then Jesus said, come to me, all you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. I will give you Manuha. Take my yoke upon you.

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Let me teach you, because I'm humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Have you ever been so tired that it's like I say to Kelly, sometimes my tiredness is like soul deep tired. There's a word for it, soul deep tired. Even sleeping, I don't think can help me with what I'm feeling. But he says, you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.

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Did you know Jesus is the source of Manuha? Jesus is St. Gregory the Great. He said this for us, the true where are my notes? Here.

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For us, the true Sabbath is the person of Jesus. Gregory the Great lived in the most tumultuous time. He was one of the last main Popes of Rome. I read Him all summer long, and I was surprised that he said, jesus is our Sabbath. He is our rest.

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We find rest in Jesus living like Jesus, relaxed, grateful, and knowing that we can work and rest in a way that gives us life. So what can we do on a Sabbath day? I've been trying this on Thursday. I had a board meeting, so I couldn't quite rest right away. But after that, on Friday morning, I was like, today I'm going to rest.

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Fridays are usually my day off. I had more things to do, so I couldn't quite escape it. But I had a few hours in there and this is what I discovered. I can put away my iPhone. I can put away my iPad.

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And guess what? We walk, we play and we read. Get it? It's playing on Words iPhone to WePlay get it. Okay, it's going to take a second here, right?

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We can do stuff together, right? Okay. We are allowed by Jesus. Jesus says this. This is a perk of being a Christian.

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You don't have to worry. Did you know one day a week you don't have to worry if something comes up? WorryFree day, right? You can put away the worry on that day. It might be hard, but we can do it because we follow Jesus.

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It's a perk. Okay? Call it an added bonus feature of following Jesus is you get a day of no worry. You can trust and relax. You can cook good food.

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You can have a feast, and you can invite people to eat your food with you. You can gather around. We can celebrate healthy food and thank God for it. We can feast because God always provides. It's a day where we remind ourselves our pantry has food in it.

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It's good. We can take a whole day each week to be with those we love. Do you have people nearby that you love that you haven't seen for a long time? This is a good day to gather them around. I was walking in Jerusalem on a Sabbath day.

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Now, the Jewish people, they take this very seriously. There are very strict rules. And I was walking the place was dead. And as I was walking through, a man in a house robe stands out of his door and he says, hey, you. He knows I'm a Gentile.

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Gentiles. They cannot ask us to do anything, but we're the only ones that can help them because we aren't following Sabbath, right? So he's standing there trying to use very particular language to get me to do something. And he says this, our light is, you know, me. I'm thinking to myself, your light is off and you cannot turn your light on because of Sabbath's rules.

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But if he just says vaguely, my light is on. So I'm like, would you like me to come and see your light? He's like, Is it broken? Maybe? And I said to him, this is me being a little bit cocky.

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I was like, you know, you can't ask a gentile to do work for you on Sabbath. He's like and he's like, get out of here. And he's going to wait for the next sucker to come along and try to turn on his light. I wonder if that's living in Manuha stress about turning your light on and off, Manuha, is this joyful rest that we can be alone on manuja day, right? We can have a nap, we can turn off our TV, we can rest.

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We can be quiet with our thoughts. We can find an adventure. We can go sit on a park and watch people. We can make something, look for something, drink tea with friends, have lunch. That takes a long time.

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And we can give and live generously and share. The last thing that God made was space to actually live this life fully and richly, to actually enjoy this beautiful life. So when Sabbath Manuha does, is it reorders our world? It says, enough is enough. I have enough of what I need today.

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To a world that always says you need more standing and saying, I have enough of what I got now I want to enjoy it. A world that says More, more and more. Jesus says it says Jesus is rest in a noisy world that demands more of me. It says I am human and I have limits. It says I live this life with God, who is the one who actually gives me an expansive life.

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The life I actually want is found in him. Says, I can relax because I have a gift from God called a day to rest. Best of all, Sabbath was made to be done together. Abraham, heschel he calls Sabbath a temple. In time.

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We come to a place of worship. This is ground, solid ground with walls. It says Sabbath is a temple in time where we stop and we worship God in time, not just in place. I think he's very wise. So what if we once a week as a community together?

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What if our city knew that Christians in this town had their lives ordered not for more, but for enough is enough? What if there was a community of people in this city that had their hand up to more and more, rush, rush, rush, fight, fight, fight to get something. And what if the city had a community of people. I don't know. They look like a couple of hundred people who love each other.

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Love Jesus. And they are trying to turn their lives in such a way that they can live knowing which way is up. Knowing that the last thing God made was actually the pinnacle of it all. That God made people to then enjoy and be a part of this. That we would work really well the rest of the week.

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And that at least one day a week we would know how to rest. That was actually envisioned as what Evangelism was back in the day, that there was a group of people that knew the right way up of God's order of things in the world. What if Lake Ridge was known to preserve Sabbath rest? Would that be weird? Would that be the strange thing?

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And not that we just didn't mow our lawns on that day, but that we had a way of celebrating each other and God and love on this beautiful day and gathered each other around. That beautiful picture. I think that's a picture of a community of faith alive. Not just mere residents, but citizens of the kingdom of God that know what is ours as a birthright. Because we have Jesus.

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We are not residents of this world living like this world. We're not rushing around for the next big thing. But maybe we're foregoing something. Maybe we've been giving something away to know that we are citizens of the kingdom of heaven. To living a new way.

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Not the Mary or not the Martha way, but a merry way of living. So I'm going to end with this one last thing. What are you going to do with your Manuha Shabbat? Rest. Do you think you could talk about that?

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Kids, do you think you guys got some ideas of things you can do on a day of rest, a day of relaxing? Scotia doesn't slow down very easily, so I'm not sure. Friends, would you please stand? Please stand. Yes, please stand.

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Come on. There we go.

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Even in the storm, it says on this little sticker, jesus took naps. Be like Jesus. Yes, it's a good one, isn't it? Do you want my sticker? That sticker is yours.

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I love it. I love it. Jesus took naps. Did he know something that is true? Friends, I think he wants for you the greatest gift of what I think he gave when he made the world, which is a day of rest that goes so deep, that goes deeper than just getting a nap in, but that you so deeply know what you are made for, who you are made for and who you belong to.

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So may the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and grant you his peace. His Manuha, Sir Shabbat, rest in this season. Amen.

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Amen. Go and be the people of God. Work and rest. You are loved. Amen.

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Have a good week, everybody.