Rest Is Not What You Do When You're Empty: God's Answer to Our Exhaustion
I Paid an App to Tell Me I'm Too Busy
Let me tell you something about myself. I have pretty bad ADHD. My brain doesn't naturally sort things into what's important and what can wait. It just dumps everything on the table at once and says, good luck, buddy.
I can't tell you how many times a deadline has rolled by and I either completely forgot about it, or I remembered it three days too late. And every single time, I tell myself the same thing. I just need to declutter. I just need to get organized. I just need to find more time.
So I got this scheduling app called Motion. It's incredible. It looks at everything on your plate and it builds your calendar for you. I love this app.
Do you know what it told me after it analyzed everything? I am too busy. Not "here's how to fit it all in." The app looked at my life and said, there is no free time here. I paid money for an app to tell me I was too busy.
I don't think I'm the only one in this room. A report came out a couple of years ago from a company called Sorbet. They found that 62% of American workers did not use all their paid time off. And 5.5% of workers took none at all. Zero days. An entire year.
Here's what I want you to notice. We are tired. We know we're tired. And when we go looking for the reason, we almost always land in the same place: it's my fault. Bad planning. Poor discipline. There must be something wrong with me specifically.
The exhaustion is real. But our diagnosis is wrong.
A People Who Had Never Rested
To show you what I mean, I need to take you back about 3,500 years. Israel had been in Egypt for four hundred years as slaves. They had quotas, and the quotas didn't care whether you were sick or your kids were sick. When they finally worked up the courage to ask Pharaoh for a little relief, do you know what Pharaoh did? He gave them more work.
In Egypt, nobody got a day off. Not because days off were frowned on. Because a day off was unimaginable. The very first people who would hear the command we're going to read this morning had never once in their entire lives had a guaranteed day of rest.
And God brings them out of Egypt. Watch what happens two months later.
Exodus 20:2: "I am the Lord your God, who rescued you from the land of Egypt, the place of your slavery."
Don't skip past that. God introduces himself as the rescuer before he gives one single command. They are not obeying in order to get out of Egypt. They obey because they are already out. Always grace first.
But here's the diagnosis. God brought Israel out of Egypt in a night. Getting Egypt out of them took a whole lot longer. They were free people who were still living at a slave's pace, because that was the only pace they had ever known.
I wonder if that's some of us this morning. I wonder if we're rescued people who never actually changed our pace. We're still going like somebody's counting our bricks.
Rest is not what you do when you're empty. Rest is what God did when he was full.
Stop
About two months out of slavery, God sits these people down and gives them ten commands. And the longest one, the one he spends the most words on, is about a day off.
Exodus 20:8: "Remember to observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy."
God's first word to us about rest is not "relax." It's "stop."
The Hebrew word behind Sabbath is shabbat, and it means to cease. To quit. To knock it off. It does not mean take a nap. It means the work ends.
That should be a relief for us. Because "feel rested" is not something I can put on a calendar. I can't schedule an emotion. But I can schedule a stopping point. Some of you have been trying to earn some feeling of rest that never shows up, and God is just telling you to stop working.
Six Days of Work, One Day of Freedom
Exodus 20:9: "You have six days each week for your ordinary work."
God is not against hard work. He gives us six days of it. What God does here is draw a line around work. The line is there because unbounded work is the problem. Work with no end point on it will take everything you've got and then it will start taking things that aren't yours to give.
Verse 10: "But the seventh day is a Sabbath day of rest dedicated to the Lord your God. On that day no one in your household may do any work. This includes you, your sons and daughters, your male and female servants, your livestock, and any foreigners living among you."
Here's what I want you to see. This command was not given to the tired worker. It was given to the person in charge.
Look at who gets named. You. Then your sons and daughters. Then your male and female servants. Then your livestock. Then the foreigner. It doesn't stop until it has included every single person and animal who has no power to say no to work. The "you" in that verse, in the Hebrew, is singular. It's addressed to the head of the household.
We read this verse and hear permission. Finally, I get a break. But that's not really what it is. It's a limit on the boss. God is standing over the one person in that house who could keep everybody else going, and he says, no. You don't get to do that. Not to them, and not to yourself.
This is God prying the whip out of your own hand. You came out of Egypt, but a lot of us picked the whip up on the way out the door and just kept cracking it, on the people around us and on ourselves. God is taking it away.
So what does that mean? Rest you take at somebody else's expense is not what God is talking about here. If you're resting and somebody else in your home isn't, you haven't kept this verse. You've just moved the workload around. It looks like one person on the couch and one person doing the dishes and the laundry and the bedtime routine, and calling that a restful evening.
Even During Plowing and Harvest
Some of you are thinking, pastor, I literally cannot stop. The farmers in October. The nurses. Single parents.
Exodus 34:21: "You have six days each week for your ordinary work, but on the seventh day you must stop working, even during the seasons of plowing and harvest."
Some of you know exactly what that means, because you farm. Harvest is not a season you can move. There's a window, and if you miss the window, you lose it. That is the most expensive possible time to stop. And God says, stop anyway.
He is not naive about what he's asking. He picked the most expensive week of the year and said it out loud. The times when stopping costs the most are exactly the times we need to stop the most.
If you're a nurse and your one can't be Sunday, then your one is Tuesday. If you're in harvest and your one can't be Saturday, then find it somewhere. God is not asking for a square on the calendar. He's asking for a rhythm in your life.
Because God Did It First
Verse 11: "For in six days the Lord made the heavens, the earth, the sea, and everything in them; but on the seventh day he rested."
He doesn't say rest because it's healthy. He doesn't say rest because you'll be more productive on Monday. He reaches all the way back to Genesis 1 and he says: I did it first.
Now think about that. God does not get tired. Isaiah 40:28 says he never grows weary. So this was not God recovering. He wasn't worn out from making the mountains and needing to put his feet up.
So why did he stop? Not recovery. Completion. Satisfaction. Enjoyment of finished work. He looked at everything he had made, and Genesis says he saw that it was very good, and then he stopped and he enjoyed it.
That's why I said what I said earlier. Rest is not what you do when you're empty. Rest is what God did when he was full.
Stopping isn't weakness. Stopping is imitating God. When you close the laptop, when you sit down on the porch and just look at your family instead of managing them, you are doing the thing God did on the seventh day.
How many of us ever stop to look at the good work we've done? God finished, and then he sat in it. We finish, and we start over.
Come to Me, Weary
Israel could not keep this command. Read through the prophets. Amos, hundreds of years later, describes merchants tapping their feet, waiting for the Sabbath to be over so they can get back to business.
Sounds a little familiar, doesn't it.
God gave a perfect command about rest, and a stubborn, exhausted people could not obey it, any more than we can. So God did something else. He did not send them another command. He sent a person.
Matthew 11:28: "Then Jesus said, 'Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.'"
Sinai gave a command about rest. Jesus offers himself.
Notice what he does not say. He doesn't say come to me when you've got it together. He doesn't say come to me once the schedule is fixed. He says come to me weary. Come as you are.
One Block of Time
Let me give you one way to start saying yes to that invitation this week. Just one thing. Pick one block of time. A few hours. And protect it as a family. Put it on the calendar with a name on it, the same way you'd put a doctor's appointment, and then do not fill it. Let it stay empty. Sit in your living room. Eat a meal slow. Do nothing productive and don't apologize for it.
If you're already thinking about how you'd have to move three things to make that work, that's the whole point.
Here's the diagnosis I promised you at the start. You are not tired because something is wrong with you. It was never your discipline. It was never that you're less organized than the person next to you. You are tired because you're living at a pace God never asked you to keep. You are living at Egypt's pace, a slave's pace, and the Lord is calling you out of it.
Rest is not what you do when you're empty. Rest is what God did when he was full.
So this week, in your house, with the people God gave you: Stop together.
Small Group Questions
ICE BREAKER QUESTIONS
On a scale of 1-10, how busy do you feel right now? What's the biggest thing filling up your schedule this week? If someone looked at your calendar, would they say your life looks sustainable or unsustainable?
When was the last time you took an entire day off, no work, no chores, no productive tasks? If it's been a while, why? If it was recent, what did it feel like?
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Pastor Nate opened with his ADHD and the scheduling app that told him he was too busy. He also shared the statistic that 62% of American workers don't use all their paid time off, and 5.5% take none at all. Why do we struggle to take rest even when it's offered to us? What are we afraid will happen if we actually stop?
Pastor Nate said: "We are tired. We know we're tired. And when we go looking for the reason, we almost always land in the same place: it's my fault." He challenged this: "The exhaustion is real. But our diagnosis is wrong." Do you tend to blame yourself for feeling tired, "if I were just more organized, more disciplined, more together"? How would it change things to consider that the real problem might be the pace itself, not your ability to keep up with it?
Israel had spent 400 years as slaves in Egypt, where "a day off was unimaginable." Pastor Nate said: "God brought Israel out of Egypt in a night. Getting Egypt out of them took a whole lot longer." Where might you still be living at a slave's pace even though you've been rescued into freedom? What "Egypt" habits do you still carry?
Exodus 20:2 introduces the Ten Commandments with: "I am the Lord your God, who rescued you from the land of Egypt, the place of your slavery." Pastor Nate emphasized: "God introduces himself as the rescuer before he gives one single command... They are not obeying in order to get out of Egypt. They're already out. They obey because they are already out." How does this order (grace first, then commands) change how you view God's commands, especially the Sabbath?
Pastor Nate clarified: "God's first word to us about rest is not 'relax.' It's 'stop.'" The Hebrew word shabbat means to cease, to stop, to quit. "You can obey this whether or not you end up feeling great afterward." Why is "stop" more achievable than "relax"? What specifically do you need to stop this week that you've been trying (and failing) to squeeze in on top of everything else?
Pastor Nate pointed out something most miss: "This command was not given to the tired worker. It was given to the person in charge." Exodus 20:10 names the head of household, then works down through children, servants, animals, and foreigners. "It's a limit on the boss." Where do YOU have the power to make others work, or to keep yourself working? What would it look like to "pry the whip" out of your own hand?
Pastor Nate said: "That rest you take at somebody else's expense is not what God is talking about here. If you're resting and somebody else in your home isn't, you haven't kept this verse." He gave the example: "One person on the couch and one person doing the dishes and the laundry and the bedtime routine, and calling that a restful evening." Be honest, does this pattern exist in your home? Whose rest gets sacrificed for whose? What needs to change so the whole household rests, not just one member?
Exodus 34:21 says "even during the seasons of plowing and harvest," you must stop. Pastor Nate said: "He picked the most expensive week of the year and said it out loud... the times when stopping costs the most are exactly the times we need to stop the most." When has stopping felt too expensive to you? What did it cost you NOT to stop? What might it cost you to keep going at your current pace?
Pastor Nate distinguished between why humans rest and why God rested (Exodus 20:11): "God does not get tired... So this was not God recovering. Not recovery. Completion. Satisfaction. Enjoyment of finished work." He said: "Rest is not what you do when you're empty. Rest is what God did when he was full." How does this reframe rest, from recovering from work to enjoying completed work? When was the last time you actually sat and enjoyed something you had done, without immediately moving to the next task?
Pastor Nate ended with Jesus' invitation from Matthew 11:28: "Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest." He observed: "Sinai gave a command about rest. Jesus offers himself." What's the difference between rest as a command to keep and rest as a Person to come to? How might coming to Jesus this week (rather than trying harder to rest) actually be the answer to your exhaustion?
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