Sermon Transcript
From Genesis: Then God said, let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. So God created mankind in his own image. In the image of God he created them, male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.
God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning, the 6th day.
Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. By the 7th day God had finished the work he had been doing, so on the 7th day he rested from all his work. The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the Lord God commanded the man, you are free to eat from any tree in the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it, you will certainly die. The Lord God said, it is not good for the man to be alone.
I will make a helper suitable for him.
To Adam he said, because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, you must not eat from it, cursed is the ground because of you. Through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken. For dust you are, and to dust you will return.
Morning. Little group activity here as we get started. I want— I’m going to give you a minute for this, okay? I want you to turn to the person next to you or someone around you, and I want you to to tell them your very first job that you had. If you are young and you’ve never had a paying job yet, just make it up, okay?
I give you permission, or something that you would like to do at some point for a job. But I’m gonna give you a minute to tell them just really quickly what you did for your first job. Go.
If somebody’s being left out, include them.
30 more seconds. 30 more seconds.
10 seconds.
All right, let’s bring it back in. Great. I always have fun hearing you guys chat and connect, and if you were left out of that, I’m interested to know after the service maybe what was your first job. My first job that I got paid for was at a place called Randall’s in Houston where I grew up. It’s a grocery store similar to like Safeway but quite a bit bigger.
And my job, the title of my job was sacker, okay? I was not on the defensive line of any football team, but it was a sacker. So for you young people, back in the dark ages we had these things called paper bags that nobody knows about anymore. That was what you got whenever you bought your groceries. And so my job was to help people get their things into the paper bags, and then I helped them to their car, and then I got tips if they liked me.
And some of you know that I’m from the South, and once I moved here several years ago, some of you commented on the fact that I say yes sir and yes ma’am a whole lot, and they want to know where I got that from. I didn’t get it from that job, but I just honed that skill, okay? Because you can get a tip when you say yes sir and yes ma’am and those kinds of things. But one of the things I remember is my very, very first paycheck that I got is I thought I was getting paid a certain amount, and then when I got the check, it was not that amount. There was some money taken out, and I wasn’t expecting that.
And I complained to different people, and I asked my dad about it, and he said, welcome to the workforce. This is what happens. You work and you don’t get the full amount. And I didn’t understand all of that. So jobs, right?
I mean, we don’t typically come to church thinking about jobs, thinking about work. I’ll get to that in just a moment. But we’re in a series that we’re wrapping up today here on Palm Sunday about what we’ve been calling Good Creation. And we started off by asking or pointing out the fact that every culture that has ever existed, including our own and even ancient cultures, all had a narrative about how the world began. How did the universe come to be?
Every civilization, every culture always asked those kinds of questions. How did we get here? How did anything get here? And we talked about that in contrast to the other ancient narratives that existed, what’s unique about the biblical story, instead of God coming out of chaos, is that the Christian story says that God preceded the chaos. That in the beginning, it was God.
Wherever you can pinpoint beginning, that’s of course a confusing idea, But the scriptures say right off the bat, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and he created it with his word. And so that’s our explanation, the Bible’s explanation for how we got here. God speaks. And then the next time that we talked, we talked about the 6 days of creation leading up to what we’re talking about today. But we looked at the different ways of how God sort of started forming places for people and creatures to live, and then he filled those places that he had formed with people and creatures to be able to live.
And we talked about how very often we want to know more of the story of how God did it, the method, but scripture seems far more interested in explaining the meaning, the why, and what do we do with this. And so we talked about that, and then we talked about how God created human humans. All humans are created in God’s image. And what does that mean? And we talked about the sanctity of all life because of that.
And then we also talked about how God created, in his own goodness, rules and boundaries for his people, and that that was not a punishment to create these rules and boundaries, that the rules and boundaries preceded sin entering into the world, and that God created these things because he’s a good God and he’s wise. And then we talked last week about marriage and our need for relationships. And we’re looking this week at the biblical teaching about work. And I know that you’re riveted already about that. For many of you, this is your day off, and so I apologize here.
But you don’t have to work today, perhaps some of you, so I’m ruining your weekend by even mentioning that possibility, ’cause I’m reminding you that some of you have to go to work later on today or tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that. And you’re thinking, Steve, I came to church I’m here today precisely because I don’t want to think about work and I don’t want to talk about work. Fair enough. I do get that. The fact of the matter is that if you work 40 hours a week for 40 years of your life— and by the way, I’m including students in this, right?
And I’m including those who work from their home in this equation. If you work 40 hours a week for 40 years of your life, that means you will put in more than 80,000 hours at a job during your lifetime. And these hours, of course, the thousands that you spend in school preparing for work, on top of thousands more that you spend in cars, planes, buses, trains traveling to work. And then if you’re like most people, you also spend a lot of time thinking about work. What do I need to do next?
How do I solve this problem? How can I address that issue? How can I excel? How do I stand out? How do I pull this off?
How can I interact with my boss? How do I interact with my coworkers, with my employees, with my customers? How do I deal with that person? You know that person, that guy? Nobody likes that guy.
How do I deal with that guy? How do I communicate this need? And then it also may well be that there are some of your thoughts about your job are not just about operations, they’re also about the meaning of it all. I mean, why am I even doing this? What’s the purpose?
And why do I want to keep doing this? Is this all worth it? And why? Seriously, what is the point? Then of course you have all sorts of other questions nagging at your conscience about how your relationship to your work or to your study is taking a toll on you.
Yes, it’s taking a toll on your health, takes a toll on your marriage, on your kids, on your relationships, on your relationship with God, on your ability to just be able to breathe and be a normal functioning human being who doesn’t always feel like you’re drowning?
These are not minor questions. They’re not. These are things that reinforce that one of our greatest needs, whether we realize it today or whether we came here with this in mind or not today, is we have got to recapture a biblical understanding of how vocation, no matter what your vocation is or what it will be in the future, future, how that ties in with God’s ultimate purposes for the world, and how that ties in with God’s purposes for your own life. We desperately, desperately need to see how God himself delights in work and how he even designed our work by his goodness and by his grace for our good and for his glory. So as we consider this topic today, what would God want to say to you today?
I’ve been praying, and I just humbly submit that I believe God wants to show us 3 things today, at least 3 things. First, he wants to remind us of the original vision and design of work, and then he wants to point out how work got ruined— the work, the ruin of work— and then a better way to work. Can’t wait till we get there because really we want to know a better way to work if we’re going to make it in this world. So we’re going to consider first the original design or vision of work. What is the biblical vision or design of work?
What does it actually to work. A few weeks ago, we considered Genesis 1:2, where it says that in the beginning, again, God created the heavens and the earth, and then it says that in the beginning, the earth was formless and empty, and darkness was over the surface of the deep. The Hebrew phrase that is used there for the world being formless and empty can also be rendered as wild and waste. Wild and waste. And I really like that rendering because those are the same words that are elsewhere used in Scripture to describe desert and wasteland.
And while that wild and waste state of earth might have been beneficial for, say, a lizard or a fox or some such creature, it was not a state that was beneficial for humans. And so the rest of Genesis 1 is about God taking the earth from a state of this wild and waste and turning it into something wonderful, something beautiful, something good. And God’s personal life-giving Spirit shows up in the dark wasteland, and he speaks and he creates. He doesn’t just create objects, he creates objects that work and function. He’s forming the earth, and then he’s gonna fill the earth.
And behold, all of it is so good. God is creating structure, he’s creating order, and he’s creating potential, something meaningful meaningful from that which had previously been unmeaningful, that which had been wild and waste. And that takes us to Genesis 2:2, which Casey read for us just a moment ago, which says, by the 7th day, what did God do? He finished the work that he had been doing. So on the 7th day, what did he do?
He rested from all his work. Did you know that this is the first time the word work is mentioned in Scripture?
And so who is the first worker in the It’s God. We don’t often think about that, but it’s God. And what is God’s work? His work is taking darkness and disorder, wild and waste, and generating a world of order that is incredibly beautiful. Psalm 19:1, the heavens declare the glory of God.
When you look at creation, when you look at all that God has made, it just shows how glorious and beautiful He is. But notice that God isn’t making creation or nature to just sit there. He creates it for it to bring benefit to others. That is the work that verse 2 in chapter 2 is talking about, from which God is resting.
It’s the work that God engages in. And you and I can— because a good God engages in work, God works— because a good God engages in work, then you and I can have confidence that work is also good. So what does it mean then to work. I’d never really thought about this much more before preparing for this message, I’ll be honest with you, but God just really opened my eyes, and I hope he opens up your eyes to something really interesting and fascinating. What is work defined by how God works?
Work is first taking something that is disorganized and then bringing order to it. Okay, second, it is taking something and bringing forth beauty from it. And then third, it is making something that benefits others. That’s the biblical vision of work that we see here in Genesis. Those 3 things: order, beauty, benefit.
Order, beauty, benefit. So in other words, the biblical vision of work is not simply survival for ourselves. Work is a very others-centered activity, even though we don’t typically think of it like that. Do you see that in this passage? Work is something that God does so that he can then share the fruits of his work with others.
And so humans, you and I, are invited to imitate the very, very first worker and to do the same things he does. So whenever you see a human at work, you know what you’re seeing? You’re seeing the image of God. That’s just a beautiful vision of work and a vocation that a lot of us need to recapture. And this point might cause someone here to go, okay, so then I guess it really doesn’t matter then.
Steve, what kind of work a person does, because I guess all work is dignified. Not exactly true. I think you and I could probably think of certain kinds of work which would actually be extremely degrading to yourself or to other humans, or exploitative, or something that would actually cause you or them to lose their own humanity. But that said, yes, there are many things— most human vocations, most jobs are able to replicate this biblical vision of work, and that you can create order out of chaos, you can bring forth beauty, and you can benefit other people. So when you create a business— many of you have created a business— what are you doing?
You were taking something that was chaotic and you were bringing order to it. You’re bringing forth beauty, and then ideally it will benefit other people. When you create a work of art, what are doing? Order out of chaos and beauty and benefit to others. When you build something, when you take an unproductive department in your work and you turn it around— we have some wonderful teachers and parents in this room— when you’re a parent or a teacher and you bring out the full potential of the kids that you are trying to instruct and you’re showing them what they can do, when you’re a medical professional and you take a disordered body that is falling apart and you help restore some order Or you’re like my friend Jerry Kinoshita there who takes people’s teeth and he straightens them out.
Or you’re a therapist or you’re a counselor and you take something disorderly, a life, a relationship, and you bring order and beauty out of it. Or you’re working in the yard and you’re bringing order to that. Or you’re styling somebody’s hair and you’re bringing order to that. When you do any of those things, what are you doing? You’re doing work that images and reflects God.
The first worker, God as Creator. Do you see that? When you come to grasp this kind of vision, you come to realize there are really essentially no menial jobs or insignificant jobs. You’re doing what the Spirit of God does back in the very 2nd verse of the Bible, where the Spirit hovers over the wild and the waste and brings then order out of chaos, brings newness out of undeveloped material, beauty and benefit. And every human being, I think, here in this room has a deep desire to image or to reflect that in some way.
So Genesis, I think, is going out of its way to say, look at how good work is. In paradise, you have beauty, right? You have food, you have sexual intimacy, you have an unfettered relationship with God, and you have work. Even seemingly menial or dirty work where you have to get your hands dirty. Dirty.
That is not a punishment. God put the people into a garden, said, get your hands dirty. This was God’s plan and intention from the beginning. It’s not a result of sin, even though we do experience terrible days at work that tempt us to think that, yes, work is a result of sin. So the Bible gives us an incredibly high view of work, an incredibly high view of workers, even the ones that we tend to look down upon as if doing that type of work is beneath us.
We’re all called to work. Why? Because God works. And I just want to pause here because I was, I was preparing for this message. I just, I just wanted to hone in here on this, that some of you need to hear this because you’re walking through a season of pain, a season of discouragement, a season of sorrow right now.
And I just want you to hear that God is working. He’s working on your behalf today. You need to know that God is working for you. That’s what Romans 8:28 tells us. And we know that in all things God— what?
He works. And he is doing so today even for your good and even for your own benefit, even when we don’t see it, if you love him and are called according to his purpose. And some of you just need to receive that today and sit in that. Maybe that’s this message for you, is you just need to remind yourself, God is working on my behalf. Even as some of you are walking through a difficult season, that’s the design of work.
And we see that in the garden, before sin entered into the scene, the work that God had called humans to do was perfectly joyful and perfectly fulfilling. No mindless toil, no cutthroat competition, no sense of futility. Their work was simply a matter of gathering up all that God had overflowed in terms of blessing to them. And that sounds lovely, but for most of us, that’s not our experience. For most of us, work feels like, well, work.
Feels like 2 steps forward, 3 steps back sometimes. But what if the problem isn’t that work is bad, but rather that the problem is the way we work, and that the things we have to work with are fundamentally broken. Work in Genesis 1 and 2 didn’t feel like work to those first humans because the people were at peace with the environment. The environment was at peace with them and just provided for them because that’s how God designed it. That was the opportunity that was presented to humanity.
You all know the rest of the story. Something else looked even more appealing to the humans in Genesis 3. We wanted to work on our own terms without God. And that brings us us to the ruin of work. Point 2, the ruin of work.
Because humans tried to work on our own terms, all of a sudden the ground that had previously been the source of life as a gift from God becomes cursed. Genesis 3:17-18, God says, cursed is the ground because of you. Through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. So now instead of producing fruit trees for you and me to be able to eat freely from, now it’s producing a sort of twisted, inverted tree with thorns and thistles. So the moment that sin enters into the world, it begins to undo all that God had made for good and beauty and order and benefit, and it turns it back into what we have in verse 2, the beginning of the Bible— wild and waste.
The human’s relationship with one another turns back into wild and waste It gets fragmented and distorted. Most of all, the human’s relationship with God turns back into wild and waste, distorted, fragmented. And moreover, our relationship to work turns back into wild and waste, fragmented, distorted. So God made the world to need work. We’re not originally made to just sit around and do nothing.
That’s not the image. We’re supposed to work and to work hard. Why? Because again, God works. He was the first worker.
But now there’s going to be some resistance. The environment has now changed, and now the efforts of humans are going to be thwarted by thorns and thistles. You know, when you’re a gardener— I don’t know if we have any gardeners here— thorns and thistles and weeds, they’re your archenemy, are they not? Because you’ve been outside all weekend trying to plant or trying to protect your tomato plants or whatever you’re planting, and then when you come back a couple of days later, and the weeds that you had spent so much time trying to get rid of actually come back in even greater number. What is that all about?
And then when you add birds and squirrels and gophers to your list of enemies, that’s a lot of frustration. The birds and the squirrels and the gophers and the weeds and the thorns and the thistles are fine in an environment that is wild and waste, but they’re not fine when they’re in your garden that you spent so much time trying to cultivate. That’s the resistance. This resistance comes from all sorts of places in our world. There’s stuff that you and I have little to no control over— birds and squirrels and weather.
But then there’s also resistance that is internal to you and to me, resistance that comes from my own lack of ability, resistance that comes from my own ignorance or my own dumb choices. That’s the image here in Genesis 3. Sin is fragmenting not only our relationships, it’s fragmenting and distorting our judgment and our own moral decisions. And if those things are all messed up, then all of a sudden the relationships where we carry out the work are going to be distorted. And there’s just the distortion, of course, of sin that’s out there in the world today, where the sin of your coworkers— it’s not even necessarily your own sin, but the sin of your coworkers inevitably just starts spilling over into your own life and into your own work.
And on top of that, of course, we have to deal with things like unfavorable market conditions and your startup idea that you had that was so perfect except nobody wanted to put any money into it. You were sure it was a good idea, but the conditions weren’t quite right. You get the picture? Thorns and thistles. That’s where we live.
You look around for a bit. Jobs today are seemingly more insecure than than ever. And if people or departments don’t perform, they get eliminated. Moreover, the distance between the people at the top of the organizational ladder and the rest of the organizational ladder has only gotten wider and wider. And when you make more money than other people because you’re in management, it’s just expected that of course you’re going to put in more hours than everyone else.
And if you don’t want to do that, get out of the way. Somebody else wants that spot. And meanwhile, people, people on the bottom of the organization are having to take on multiple in order to just make ends meet. And then we think about the effects of technology. Technology is wonderful.
The good news about technology is that because of technology, you and I can now work anywhere. The bad news of technology is that because you can now work anywhere, that means you can now work everywhere, which means that you can’t ever stop working or prevent it from spilling into every nook and cranny of your life. Life. And then it doesn’t also help that our culture says, well, you have to define yourself by what you do and then attaining it, and then you can gain significance. That only adds to the social, psychological, and emotional pressure on work to be either fulfilling or at least lucrative, for goodness’ sake.
Again, thorns and thistles. So Genesis is offering this contrast, this fulfilling vision of work in chapters 1 and 2 of imitating the Creator and bringing order and beauty and benefit for others to share. Now that we live in this Genesis 3 post-fall world where our hearts are compromised by selfishness and sin and fragmented relationships to God, to one another, and the environment, and where our dreams and, you know, desires frequently get thwarted, our goals, we have to figure out how are we going to live with weeds and thorns and thistles. And what Genesis is asking us to do— don’t miss this— is to hold both of these things in our hands. You may be in a Genesis 1 or 2 type of situation right now, and you may be in a Genesis 3 type of situation right now.
You’re likely going to have to face both at the same time in many seasons. And so the fact that you are experiencing difficulty in your work doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re in wrong place. Just means you live in the world compromised by sin along with the rest of us. And it also means, boy, do we desperately need divine perspective and divine help to sustain us in these environments. Point 3, a better way to work.
You and I know from experience that even the very best jobs can be unbelievably frustrating and filled with all kinds of difficulty and anxiety. But it’s not like we just stop working, right? That’s not an option. We were made to work. At the same time, hopefully you’re understanding we can’t derive our significance from our jobs.
We can’t look to them as a way to justify our existence or to prove our worth to ourselves or to other people. That never works. That will crush you. So what does the Bible say that you and I have to have in order to have a better way to work? And that is we have to have rest.
Have to have rest. Genesis 2:2 says that God finished his work and then God rested. And we naturally take this to mean, okay, I get it, yes, physical rest is important. And by all means, I want you to hear from me as it is helpful. Have a day each week where you rest from the stuff that you do to make money, or where you’re practicing digital asceticism and getting away from the screens for a while.
Or being with people that you love to be with, or being out enjoying creation and enjoying God, or just take a nap. Yes, absolutely do those things. But the rest that God enters into on the 7th day is something more than just those things. The rest that God enters into is teaching us, ironically, a better way to work. His rest Rest, again, is teaching us a better way to work.
But one of the reasons why we tend to miss this fact is because most of us aren’t really sure what to do with the whole notion of God resting. We’re like, does God resting— like, what does that have to do with creation? What would it mean for God to rest? Does he go to a spa? Does he take a nap?
Maybe this will help. I shared a few weeks ago about the difference between building a house and building a home and how I tried to encourage us to think that Genesis is really more focusing on the home narrative than the building of the house narrative. And when you move into a home, there’s often boxes to unpack, and it’s chaos, wild and waste. The furniture has to be arranged. You got to hang up pictures.
You got to hang up clothes. You got to decide what each room is going to be used for. And then when all of that ordering work is done, what do you do? You rest from the ordering work by living in the house, making it your home and enjoying it. To put it another way, when a king or a queen is trying to establish his or her reign, they may have to overcome enemies and secure boundaries and appoint ministers, build a palace, construct a throne, all of those kinds of things.
And when all of that ordering work is done, the king or queen does what? They rest on their throne. Throne. They’re likely not taking a nap. Instead, he or she now is actually beginning the work of their reign and establishing and building up the kingdom so that everybody can live in peace and joy.
That is what is happening here on the 7th day. God is resting on his throne, and he’s still resting on his throne today. It doesn’t mean he’s not working, but he’s ruling and he’s So what is this saying to you and to me? It is telling us that you absolutely have to regularly have Sabbath rest from work. The word for rest in verse 2 there of chapter 2, where God rested, is the word Shabbat in the Hebrew.
Some of you have heard that word. It’s the word from which we get our word Sabbath. So God Sabbathed, God Shabbat from the work that he had been doing. At its most basic, Sabbath simply means rest. Means to cease from, to stop.
Something beautiful happens when we deliberately cease from our— or stop working in order to rest, because it just— you know what it does is it forces us to stop the hustle and the bustle and to stop acting like we’re the center of the universe, to stop thinking like our work is the most important thing in the world, or that our striving and labor is somehow keeping everything glued together The whole purpose behind the idea of Sabbath or rest is for us to, you and I, to renounce our own personal dominion over our time and over our calendar and to instead recognize God’s rule and dominion over our time and over our calendar. I tend to think that every day belongs to me. The fact that I have a calendar app on my phone and I get to determine what goes on there, that unconsciously convinces me that I control my days. We naturally consider ourselves the masters of our time. We all live with this myth or illusion of control, and that’s just narcissistic and exhausting, isn’t it?
So the whole ritual practice of taking time for Sabbath rest is meant to humble us. It’s meant to be about us renouncing our autonomy, and it cracks the door open hopefully just enough for us to realize, oh, actually all time belongs to God, does it not? So the intent is not to say, okay, I get it, I get 6 days and God gets 1 day. It’s the wrong way to think about it. It’s more like what I need is a regular reminder of the true reality of my life, which is that none of my days belong to me.
And the intent is also not to simply focus on physical rest, although it once again And yes, we all need rest from physical work and exertion, but there is still a deeper problem at work that needs to be addressed because what we need even more than physical rest is deep rest for our souls. And if you don’t have that, all the vacations in the world aren’t going to help. You’re going to burn out. So it’s by this reminder of the need for Sabbath rest that God is actually beginning— notice this— to rescue us from wild and waste and chaos and It’s how God is recreating us. That is the point of God resting and the point of us being called to rest as well.
We know today, looking back at Genesis, that the Sabbath rest of the Old Testament was ultimately pointing forward to an even greater Sabbath rest that is found only in one place, and that’s in Jesus. God rested in Genesis because he finished his work, the work of creation, and he essentially He said, it is finished. Centuries later, we know that Jesus, too, cried out from the cross the exact same thing, saying, it is finished. Why? Because He did the work that was necessary in order for you and I to have our sin debt paid for.
And there’s no amount of work, friends, that you or I could do to save us from our sins and to make us right with God. Salvation and forgiveness from our sins and a relationship with God comes only through resting in Jesus’ finished work on your behalf. That’s what salvation is. You are resting from this need to work. When you come to Christ, what does it mean to be a Christian?
You are resting from your need to work and try to prove your worth to God. And because you are now reconciled to God through Jesus’ death when you become a believer, that means you have everything you need to find ultimate meaning. Your ultimate source of joy is not what you do, but in who you know.
Let me repeat that. Your ultimate source of joy is not in what you do, but in who you know. That’s what salvation is. It’s what being a Christian means. It’s a declaration that you are not resting on your own goodness, but have instead placed your hope and your eternal trust in God’s goodness on your behalf.
And the baptism that we’re about to witness here in just a moment The baptism is a symbol of that outwardly. What is baptism? It’s someone who is inwardly fully resting in the finished work of Jesus for their salvation. That’s what that’s a symbol of. It’s to say nothing else needs to be done here.
All the work that needed to be done to pay for our sins is finished, paid in full by Jesus. Friends, God is inviting us to rethink today. Today, how we think about work. In contrast to our culture where the whole point of me is defined by what I do and by my work, and where the whole point of rest seems to only be, well, so that I can work longer, the Bible is teaching us— this is just mind-blowing to me— the Bible is teaching us that the goal of work is actually rest. The point of life is actually rest, to rest knowing that God is in control of all things.
So because God is resting on his throne right now, and because of Jesus’ substitutionary death for us, I want to invite you to think of some situation or some circumstance, something you’ve been trying to control that is really in God’s hands. And whatever that is, I want you to just in a moment when I pray to say to God, I’m not in charge of that. God, I’m not in charge of my time. I’m not in charge of my calendar. God, I’m not in charge of my spouse.
Not in charge of my boss. I’m not in charge of the economy. So God, would you please take the throne of my heart rather than these things? Friends, this day God is inviting you to quit trying to control your life. This day God is inviting us to surrender This day, take a breath and relax.
And when you are resting this week, and I hope you do, enjoy it. And when you are working this week, do it together with God and enjoy it. Enter into his rest. Let’s pray. Father, I thank you for your word.
May it not return void. May it be a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path. May we hide it in our heart that we might not sin against you, but that we might walk in the freedom that you have purchased for us by the death of your Son Jesus, who has enabled us to work, yes, but also more than that, to rest, because you are in control. Take these circumstances, take these situations. We relinquish control of them to you.
We pray all these things in Jesus’ name. Amen. Amen.
