Future Church Brisbane
Join Luke Kennedy and friends at Future Church in Brisbane, Australia.
Talks from our gatherings as well as deeper discussions and Application panels around the practicals of Following Jesus.
Future Church Brisbane
Sabbath 02: Rest as an Antidote to Achievement and Consumerism.
The quest for rest is often fraught with internal battles—resistance, fear, and the disquieting silence of God. I confess my own skirmishes with these silences, the irrational doubts that can cloud one's faith when the world grows quiet, and the comfort of media distractions we often seek. Yet, we find inspiration in the Israelites at the Red Sea, whose story teaches us the power of stillness and trust in God's deliverance. Whether you're grappling with the idea of Sabbath or looking for ways to surrender control, we offer counsel and an invitation to explore the restorative rest promised by God.
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I had a lot of conversations with people after last week. I think there was like a couple of different responses that I heard about the first teaching on Sabbath, which is about stop stopping working, and the first group of people were like love the concept, but it's very hard to change, so I'm going to just be more mindful, just to take it easy. Welcome, good to have you here. Thanks for coming back. I've got three more weeks to convince you of what a Sabbath is. The other group of people I spoke to was this concept is amazing and I want to give it a try, even though I don't know what I'm doing. We'll give it a go and we'll see what happens along the way. And welcome to you as well. Great to have you and hopefully over the next month or so we can work out together what that's going to look like in your life and be a great blessing to you. So today is part two of this teaching we want to do and hopefully get into. The fabric of our community is around rest.
Speaker 1:The last time I went to Japan was probably the worst holiday Izumi and I ever had. If you've gone to Japan, you'll love it. It's amazing. We used to live there 15 years, so we're very comfortable in Japan, know Japan very well, know every system there well, know every system there. Most of my family can speak Japanese because they are Japanese and they, yeah. Anyway, I won't go down that rabbit hole, but we just happened to be there when one of the biggest typhoons ever was sweeping through Japan. There was like three of them in a row that all kind of converged. Well, we were on the Shinkansen the, the bullet train, while this typhoon was coming through japan and uh, and it got so bad, the wind got so crazy that they actually stopped the train. Um, we had been at azumi's parents house and we were way out in the bush, basically catching the shinkansen, and then the train had to stop because the winds were so bad.
Speaker 1:Okay, we're thinking what are we going to do? I'm going to get off the train. We're going to have to get a taxi somewhere, find a hotel. We start calling hotels. Everything is booked because everyone's in the same boat, right, so there's no hotels. Okay, we've got a little baby. We're like taxis. The line for the taxi was about 300 people long and there was one taxi in this little town. So we thought, okay, we are dead If we get back on the train.
Speaker 1:They said you can wait on the train. So we're waiting. While we're waiting, the rain starts pouring in, so much the train station underneath the train starts flooding. It's flooding, it's getting bigger and bigger. We are now stuck on the train. We can't get off and we have nowhere to go. We're kind of stranded. And so they say we're going to take the train back the other way, the opposite way of where we're meant to go, to get to another station where people can get off. So they start heading back the other way. Well, I'm trying to get hotels. The whole Tokyo is full, yokohama is full, every train station is. Hotels are totally packed full because everyone's in it. Like thousands and thousands of people are stranded, sleeping in the train stations and we're just thinking this is just a nightmare situation for a family of little kids. Our kids are going to understand.
Speaker 1:It's now midnight, I'm at midnight, I'm stranded on the Shinkansen and I think who on earth can I call to come and save us? Who is crazy enough to come out in the middle of the night, in the middle of a typhoon, and come to a small town and rescue us? And I thought to myself Jared, jared will save us. Okay, I called Jared. I called Jared and I said man, we are stuck, we're in trouble, and Jared's like I'll be there, so he gets in his van. It's about an hour's drive away and about an hour and five minutes later Jared is blocking the street with his van, helping us pack our suitcases into his van, drives us back to his house another hour and Jared and Gabe let us sleep in their downstairs room and we are saved. How many of you know there's a couple of different kinds of rest that you're finding in that moment. There's the rest of how many of you know we slept real well that night in that room. That was a godsend. But there was another kind of rest that we also found, and that was the rest of my friend is coming to my rescue. There was a rest on the inside to know that everything is going to be okay. I would say today thank you, jared, by the way, thank you, gabe. Yeah, well, give him a hand. Great, and I said so. Do you want to come to Australia with me and you can do renovations on our building together?
Speaker 1:There's a couple of different kinds of rest that we need. There's a rest that comes from knowing Jesus in your life that you can't get any other way. Can I just say that to you? You can try to fill it with everything else but Jesus coming into your life and setting you right, knowing that you know God in your life, knowing that his life has poured into your life, there's a rest that comes with that only can come from Jesus and nowhere else. But there's another rest that we also need and that is a rest that is for our body, our life. There's a rhythm of rest that we need in our lives.
Speaker 1:Hebrews chapter 4 talks about that.
Speaker 1:We enter God's rest through faith.
Speaker 1:There's a spiritual rest where we enter God's rest the moment that we put our faith in Jesus. There's a rest that comes into your life, a trust knowing. Many theologians translate the word face into trust, which is a great word, but increasingly into relax or rest, meaning, like you know, when you've got a baby and you're holding the baby and the baby's sleeping on your chest and that baby has not a care in the world because they know I'm being held by a daddy or mummy, because they know I'm being held by daddy or mommy. That's the kind of rest that you enter when you put your faith in Jesus. I know that God loves me, I know that God is with me. And then there's also rest. That comes from the way that we order our lives around. God's reality comes from the way that we order our lives around God's reality. Jesus' way is a way that leads to a lighter and lighter and more restful life. That's the reality. But this is not the life that's being sold to us on a daily basis. If you were to look at advertising today, rest just always seems just out of reach, and it's usually attached to buying a product or a service or an escape or a holiday or maybe just a distraction for a moment, but it never seems to really live up to it. But it never seems to really live up to it.
Speaker 1:The intellectual in the medieval times, thomas Aquinas, was once asked what would it take for the human heart to be satisfied. His answer was hmm, everything, everything in the whole world, every experience with every person, forever and ever. That's what it would take to be satisfied, and there's something true about that that there's some kind of yearning inside of our heart that is eternal and can only be satisfied by an eternal God, something bigger than what this world can offer us. Cs Lewis talked about this. The restlessness that we have is because we are made for something bigger than just what we can see or touch with our hands. There's something more to it, and that is what comes from God, and God alone. Rockefeller was one of the wealthiest people to ever live, and he was famously asked one time how much money is going to be enough, and he famously said just a little bit more. Just a little bit more. And I think that's very true. That's the lie that our culture is selling us. If you just get a little bit more, you will be finally able to rest, but it never seems to quite deliver, does it? It's always out of reach. Just a little bit.
Speaker 1:Augustine, one of the most influential Christians who has lived in the fourth century. He was a young wild man living a wild life. He heard a little girl singing a Bible scripture and he thought it might be a sign to pick up the Bible, started reading it and was reading challenging verses from Romans 13 about not living a lustful and wild life, but coming and finding Jesus. A lustful and wild life, but coming and finding Jesus. And he went on. That day he gave his life to Jesus. And then later on, he does this famous quote. And the famous quote just says you have made us for yourself, lord, and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in you.
Speaker 1:It's something very, very true about that we can't truly rest until we find our rest in God, find comfort in God, find a stop with God. Is there a way that we can learn how to rest truly rest with God? Is there a practice? Is there something that we can do to find rest? And I think the answer is yes, and our answer is going to be it's going to be Sabbath. Sabbath is a way to teach yourself that my rest is in God, not in my accomplishments. It's a way to orient your life around the rhythm of God rather than accumulation, the twin gods of the West, achievement and accumulation, which so much of our lives are oriented to. If I can just achieve this thing, I'll be happy. Or if I can just get this one more thing, I'll be happy. If I can experience this one more thing, I'll be happy. But we know intuitively that is not the case. Sabbath reorientates our life to say I am going to stop achieving for one day in the week, I'm going to stop accumulating more and more things. I'm not going to let the God of consumerism consume me. I'm going to stop and actually rest with God, because God is enough for me, more than enough. Is this making sense?
Speaker 1:Genesis 2, verse 2, we read this last week. This is about God finishing his work and on the seventh day he rested from all of his work. God blessed that day, made it holy or special because he rested from all his work. God doesn't rest, by the way, because he's like exhausted. God could continue to work forever. He rests because his work was complete in us, his work was complete and he stops.
Speaker 1:When I often think about rest the word rest right, I think in Australia we have this thinking of rest is like, or maybe we even think about maybe resting while we should be working. You know, there's a sense of like it's just some downtime or maybe it's a nice holiday. That's what we think about rest. But if we think a little deeper than that, it's not just rest of doing things. If we go a layer deeper than that, one rabbi put it like this it's not just rest from work, it's rest from even thinking about work. They would say it's rest from work. Being God in my life. It's reorientating work. You are not number one in my life. God is number one in my life Because, for me personally, I can stop working but be thinking about working the whole day. I can just go back to doing my to-do list for tomorrow and be filled and consumed with what needs to be done. That is not real rest. That is not rest for the soul. Stop work and also stop being led by work, even when I am resting.
Speaker 1:Last week we had a look at the Ten Commandments as a way of God establishing a new society. Actually, sabbath is actually mentioned two times in the Old Testament in terms of the law. First was in Exodus. This is when God first brought the people out of slavery, and he's establishing a new society. And he's saying the new society is going to be not work, work, work, work, work, but it's going to be work for six and then rest for one. Sorry, sorry man, people are looking at me all judgy. Now I don't know who that song is. I just heard that somewhere, so I'm not sure what that is. But in Deuteronomy it actually says the same commandment again, but a slightly different wording. It's about 40 years later that this commandment is given again. So you can imagine it's probably to the children of the people who were coming out of Egypt. So it's kind of a new generation and it's going to be slightly different. It's almost exactly the same, except for the end part is going to say remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord, your God, brought you out of there with a mighty hand in an outstretched arm.
Speaker 1:Therefore, the Lord, your God, has commanded you to observe the Sabbath. Observe it. You know, think about how we observe maybe, christmas. We observe that day. We keep it special. We don't plan other things on that day. We observe Easter. It's not just to watch it okay, it's to put it in the center of what we're looking at in our lives.
Speaker 1:He's saying I want you to observe Sabbath, not because Sabbath is like some rule that we're trying to keep together. It's observe the Sabbath so that every week, you are reminded that it was God who brought you out of slavery and that you are no longer a slave. You are not a slave anymore. Stop acting like a slave, because you are not, and the way that I'm going to remind you that you're not is every week. You're going to stop working, because slaves don't stop working. Slaves work 24-7 until they die. Free people can have rest. You are free, and the reason you are free is because of the work of god and his mighty hand in your life.
Speaker 1:So the last session we talked about, we talked about sabbath being a rhythm of creation, meaning god has birthed into the reality of what it means to be human. Work and rest. If you fight against it, do it at your own peril. If you go with that, it will lead to life. That's just a reality. Fight it if you want. But this one, this command, is more about resistance. Resist, the urge to go back to what you used to have. Resist, going back to Egypt. This is going to become a big part of the story their old god, their old fake god, pharaoh. And Pharaoh becomes like an archetype for the whole narrative of the Bible as an oppressive, evil taskmaster. Pharaoh hated rest. He hated it. In fact, he was always bashing the people saying get back to work. You lazy people I mean lazy they are literally working 24-7,. Okay, you lazy people, work more, achieve more.
Speaker 1:It's interesting that there's actually two kinds of in this Egyptian economy. There's actually two sides of this coin. One is there's the slaves who work for free. They're slaves. They work 24-7. And they can't have Sabbath. They can't have rest because of external pressure. Okay, ringing any bells? Okay, they're in a position where their situation is stopping them from being able to rest. The other side of the economy is the Egyptian side of the economy, and the Egyptian side of the economy is living off the backs of the slaves but never truly being satisfied, wanting more and more and more. In fact, the Egyptians would build cities, literally build a city to put all of their stuff that they didn't use, but they wanted to keep Like a storage city, and they would use the slaves to build the storage city. Does this sound familiar to anyone? By the way, does anyone have like an extra room in the house where it's just full of stuff that they never use? I wonder which side of the economy that we are on today? Just think about this for a moment, because I think we're probably on one side or the other, or maybe even a little bit of both.
Speaker 1:I love what the commandment says I don't want you in Deuteronomy, chapter 5, I don't even want your foreigners to work on the Sabbath, I want them to have Sabbath. Why would God say that? It's a warning, guys, don't you? Now that you're free, I don't want you to become the next Pharaoh, now that you are not the oppressed ones in the language of many, I don't want you to become the oppressor Now. It's my turn to be on top. I used to be down and now I'm on the top. I used to be the hammer, the nail, and now I'm the hammer. This is not the way that God's economy works. God's saying it's not. You used to be slave and now it's your turn to be a slave driver. No, no, no. It's time now to create a whole new way of being human, and that is God's the one who's supplying our needs.
Speaker 1:We need this so much more, and if you think this is not really happening today, there's 40 million slaves in the world today, by conservative estimates. Today, our consumerism is contributing to that. In our world, in our extremely wealthy world that we live in, it's a pyramid. No pun intended there, but it is a pyramid where it's an extreme amount of wealth in the hands of very few, and, by the way, that's everyone in this room. That's when I say minority. Even if you are a poor university student here today, you are in the top wealthiest people in the world. Okay, so let's get that straight. Versus extreme poverty in the majority of the world, or a great discrepancy. That's the world that we're living in. I don't believe that that's glorifying to God. That's the world that we're living in. I don't believe that that's glorifying to God. Consumerism is one of the ways that we feel that difference.
Speaker 1:I need more stuff. Who's going to make that stuff? Somewhere else, some other person, some other way, and it's going to be cheap. I think not to bash getting stuff. There's nothing wrong with getting things, but I think that we need to maybe stop and think a little bit more before we consume more and more and more. What is the goal of my life here? Is it to fill more rooms with more stuff? Is that the goal of my life? Am I just being sucked into what the world around me is teaching Get more, achieve more, get more, achieve more. Am I really doing that? Is the culture around me actually affecting me in ways that I'm? I think? Maybe I wouldn't want them to be affecting me and I need to actually think about what I'm doing. This is challenging stuff, isn't it? So rest is an act of resistance. It's an act of resistance to break my addiction to achieving more and consuming more, because I don't want to use my freedom to recreate Egypt.
Speaker 1:I think one of the biggest challenges we have in Australia is now I'm talking to you guys is the housing market. Right, it's a really challenging housing market in Australia. It's a unique problem in Australia. It's not like this in a lot of places in the world. The idea this is the idea, young people, if you haven't got it yet, you leverage yourself into as much as you can okay, leave no room for error or an interest rate hike, push yourself to the very max to get the biggest house that you can get, and then you work extra and extra and more and more and more to be able to pay for it and then repeat that's the Australian dream that's been sold to the next generation. Something about that. When you say it clearly like that just doesn't sound like the gospel that we're trying to preach and maybe we need to rethink. Do I really need that? What is the goal of my life that I'm trying to achieve? If this sounds radical to you, I don't think it is. I just think we're so influenced by the culture around us. It's not really that radical.
Speaker 1:So there is external pressure on you to not rest. I need more stuff. My kids need to be in one more sport. I need to push for that extra thing. I need that holiday. So I'm going to work more so that I can be so tired that on the holiday I can just get a little bit of rest, and then I'm going to dread the whole holiday coming back to work. Are you enjoying my motivational talk? I'm just challenging us to rethink what life could look like. I've got one life. There is external pressure on you. When you decide that I'm going to take a Sabbath, there will be external pressure on you from family, from the sales at the shops to say, no, you don't need that. Come and do more with me, come and achieve more, Come and consume more. But you know what I find, more than external pressure you're going to find is there's going to be internal pressure, internal resistance to stopping and resting. There's something inside of me that doesn't want to rest. Something inside of me, there's an Egypt inside of me that doesn't want to stop. I think it goes quite deep in that.
Speaker 1:My observation is that many Christians are actually afraid to stop and be alone with God. One theologian put it like this I don't want to stop and rest because I know if I'm alone with God, I may discover that we don't have much in common. If I stopped and rested and it was just me and God, is that a happy place or is that a very confronting place? If Jesus was standing in front of me today saying, hey, can I come to your house for dinner, am I nervous or am I excited? And I think I was talking to someone yesterday when we were having this conversation and was saying you know what?
Speaker 1:I think I avoid time with God because I'm stubborn and if I'm honest, I'm fighting with God. I'm fighting against what God wants to do in my life. To be really honest, they're like, yeah, when I say it out loud it sounds really dumb, but I've got some stubbornness in here. That's why I avoid time with God. And for me, I think, one of the things I saw in myself and the avoidance of time with God, I think for me was probably more around things like well, what if I get time alone with God? What if I stop? There's no other distractions, and then God is just silent, like nothing happens. What does that mean? Does it mean like my faith's not good, or I'm not a good Christian or I'm some kind of faith Like I'm trying to still trying to achieve in my quiet time with God. I still need to tick a box. Yes, I heard the voice of God and I couldn't just simply relax, still trying to control God, even in my stopping. It's pretty honest, isn't it? So what do we do instead?
Speaker 1:I think the thing that many of us do is we, instead of stopping and relaxing and seeing the goodness of God, we distract ourselves from that process by filling it with many other things. Tv, media I mean, that's been a big one for me me, I've been in media for a long time like we literally create media to distract people from their lives. It's okay, it's like that's what movies are meant to be, for just a little break from reality, and sometimes that's a good thing. But if you're running away God, filling your life with distraction because you're afraid to meet with God for some reason, afraid to stop, that's something that needs to be adjusted. And notice the example that I'm giving. It's not God is unwilling to come and meet and love me deeply, it is that I have insecurities around God.
Speaker 1:Here's the good news, guys when you actually do stop and let God into your life. You are going to find that God is far, far more gracious and kind than you could ever imagine, that his willingness to engage with you, to pour out his good love on you, is so, so good. We're straight on to the harrowing me up here, straight on to the practicals fantastic. God is so much better than you could ever imagine His willingness to pour out his love on you, and that's what we're doing today. I would encourage you, like, I think, for a lot of people. If this is an issue for you, here's something you could do.
Speaker 1:When you come to our gatherings, leave your phone in your car. Just don't bring it. You don't need it. What about notes? We could send you notes by email later, Everything that God wants to say to you. Just let him say it to you. You will remember and we can send you notes. You just relax. You don't need your phone. You don't even need any photos. I mean, we have a camera. Use it. It's right there. It's not connected to the internet. I think many of us would find that, not having our phone, it's almost like we get anxious. Start feeling for it. You start feeling that you know when you've got a buzz in your, but it's not even there. Do you know what I'm saying? Like you have a what do you call that? A vibration, but it's no phone in your pocket. That means, yeah, you have an addiction. Yes, let me end with this.
Speaker 1:Okay, exodus, chapter 14. This is the reminder that God was talking about. I read this story to my daughter the other day, the other night, and I was straight to sleep. So if you go to sleep, I'll see my job is well done. This is the passing through the Red Sea.
Speaker 1:As Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up and there were the Egyptians marching after them. They were terrified. They cried out to God and they said to Moses is it because there was no graves in Egypt that you brought us out to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out here, bringing us out of Egypt? What have you done to us except set us free from slavery? What have you done for us? Didn't we say to you leave us alone, let us serve the Egyptians? You're not serving them. You're slaves. It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert. It would have been better to stay a slave than to go and meet with God. That was the original ask to Pharaoh. Let us go out into the desert so that we can be with God and celebrate a sacrifice. It would have been better for us to be slaves than to go and be with God.
Speaker 1:Moses answered the people don't be afraid, stand firm and you will see the deliverance of the Lord. He will bring you today. The Egyptians you see, today you will never see again. The Lord will fight for you. You only need to be still, stop, rest and you will see the deliverance of God in your life. Can you trust, I wonder today, can you trust that if you stop working hard and take a rest, will God come through for you? Can you trust that that all of the external pressures, that God is big enough and strong enough and caring enough about your life that he can actually take care of some things without you at the center of the universe or me? Whatever your fear is when it comes to entering the rest of God, god will handle. Your role is to simply stop and be still and trust. Remember you are not a slave anymore. God is king. He is not a king like Pharaoh. He is a Sabbath-keeping, sabbath-commanding God. Jesus called himself Lord of the Sabbath and he's offering today, for every one of us here, rest for your soul and your body. So the question is today, will you receive rest, will you enter into rest even though there's resistance?
Speaker 1:Some practical ways you can do that Okay, we jumped the gun before. You've already read that. So some practical ways that you can do that, of ways that you can do that, okay, great, prepare, prepare for service Prepare, prepare to stop. If you're unprepared, things are going to catch you off guard. This is what I've learned with being a parent Prepare to be interrupted, prepare for things to go sideways. Yesterday we tried to do Sabbath and we had a couple of sick children. Well, lots of things go out the window, but we still had good rest.
Speaker 1:The second part of that Next screen Okay, prepare for external resistance. Your phone, social media, chores, planning to-do lists. Prepare for external resistance to come and stop you from getting rest. What do you do about that? I think the best thing you can do. I said this last week what's the best? My daughter, what's the best thing about Sabbath? Mommy has no phone and daddy has no computer. This is resistance, because the work is never finished. But I am not a slave. I am a free person because of God, so I can choose to put this away and say now is stop, now is time to rest, and then, lastly, prepare for internal resistance.
Speaker 1:Is there some fear of entering into God's rest? Maybe there's some feelings that will pop up. I told you last week, when I started doing Sabbath, I started feeling angry, and the reason I started feeling angry was I had nothing to distract myself from what I was really feeling inside. But it's amazing how, instead of judging yourself about how you feel, you can just take that and present it to God and say God, here's reality, I am a bit angry. Can you help me with that? The gracious hand of God coming into your life and helping you? He will. He's so kind, he's so good. Or maybe you're just feeling anxious. I need to control things? I'm feeling anxious, I need to control things. I'm feeling anxious, bring that to God. God, help me to trust you, help me. And what you're going to find is, over time, the pathway to rest is going to get smoother and smoother and smoother.
Speaker 1:As you see, god's strong hand come through for you time and time again Good, challenging, encouraging, a little bit of both. Some things to think about, disagree with, take on a journey. All good. Process that with me. Let me pray for you, god, we love you. Thank you for the gift of rest.
Speaker 1:I pray for people here who struggle with rest. God, that you would help them to stop and to allow you to lead them into stopping and resting, to trust you with external pressure and God. All this internal resistance that we have, god, we offer that to you so you come and work in our hearts. God, all this internal resistance that we have, god, we offer that to you so you come and work in our hearts. God. Pray for those people here that don't really haven't really received you as the ultimate rest in their life. God, I pray even today they would open their hearts to you being their rest, rest for their souls, an eternal rest that never stops, a spiritual rest that, jesus, you would come into their life, forgive them, make things new in their life and give them trust in you. In Jesus' name, amen.