Rest Assured: The Promise and the Peace

 February 15 2026

Genesis 1:27-31, 2:1-3, Matthew 12:1-14

         One of the most common ideas that we as Christian’s have is that our influence in the world is getting less and less all the time. I think we can all agree that the church and what it stands for no longer seems to have much bearing on the lives of millions of people. Yet, as true as this is, perhaps the influence that the church has on our society is just more subtle, less noticeable than it should be. I mean, think of how our world is structured around a seven day week. Yes, as churches we can bemoan the fact that there are no longer any blue laws on the books that keep people at home on Sundays, and that there is too much going on, on what is supposed to be a day of rest. Yet, what we still have is a world where people have come to expect and enjoy the weekends, to have a little time for rest and relaxation. Yet, what many people do not realize is that this idea of taking one day out of every week to rest is one that can be traced back to the first chapter of every Bible. Isn’t it fascinating that the glorious end to the creation story, a day of rest, has now become an expected way of life. Perhaps we all sense that we were indeed created to rest once in awhile.

         Well, this need we all have to rest is what we have been looking at in the last several weeks in this series of messages entitled, “Rest Assured”. You see, the gift given to us at Christmas named Jesus, desires that we might receive from him the gift of rest. This is what he promises us in the eleventh chapter of Matthew, where hear Jesus tell us, “Come to me all you who are heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me for my burden is light, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” This is the very reason Jesus was given to us by the Father, so that we might be given rest for our souls. So we are right to ask ourselves, “Have I taken and opened up this gift of rest Jesus has given to me? Can I honestly say that I have found rest for my soul, as Jesus promises me that I should have? 

         When we encounter Jesus we must be willing to lay down the burdens that are just crushing us, and take Jesus up on his offer by taking up the yoke he offers us. This means that we will go wherever Jesus may lead us, and where we find that he is taking us is back to the beginning called Genesis. We know that the story of creation is where we need to be because on the seventh and final day of the creation story we find that God rested from all the work that he had done in creation. This may not seem to have much bearing on us, his people, until we remember the Ten Commandments, found in the twentieth chapter of Exodus. There, we find that God’s people were to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. God tells his people that six days shall you labor and do your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath, a resting day, to the Lord. On this day, you shall not work, you or your son, or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant, nor your livestock nor any people of the nations who are with you. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, and then he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” Has it become somewhat obvious that the reason for the creation story is to provide the background and the reason for the keeping of the Sabbath? You see, for those who are not familiar to the story of creation, this idea that every seven days everybody stays home and takes a nap is rather peculiar. In the first place, why every seven days? Well, throughout the Bible, you will find that seven is a holy number that is used to represent wholeness, or completeness. Seven speaks to the ideas of peace and perfection. These meanings given to the number seven have their roots in the creation story where we are told God completed his work in seven days. As we hear in the creation story, the measurement of time usually follows the rhythms of nature. The hours we count and the days we number, merely keep track of the movement our earth around the sun. The months were originally based upon the waxing and waning of the moon. The years are structured by the various seasons and so on. So when we come to the marking off of how many days are in a week we find that this number seven is simply not found in the cycles created within the natural world. Seven, you see, is simply the number God has chosen to represent his work. 

         So our weeks follow the original format found in the beginning which was given to us by God. The pattern is that there is six days to work and then there is a seventh day to rest because this is the very rhythm of God. Now, as Christians we must be careful how we understand the keeping of the Sabbath because it will seem quite natural to believe in Jesus and, at the same time, feel the need to keep the Ten Commandments. You see, Jesus himself told us that he came to fulfill the Law. This means that Jesus brings about the life that the Law was always pointing us to. So it is important that we know just what is the purpose of this day of rest, I mean, why did God believe that this res was so necessary? The answer as to why there is this need for a day of rest is not as easy to find as we might expect. You see, even in Jesus day, the most upright, devout Law follower, did not apparently even know why God had set up this seven day schedule. This is discovered one Sabbath day, when Jesus and his disciples began to pluck heads of grain as they walked through a wheat field. Now, when these Pharisees saw Jesus being all ok with the behavior of his students, they were appalled. Didn’t Jesus know the law? Did he not know that when it says, ‘No work”, it means, “No Work”? So Jesus reminds these Pharisees of a story about David, and how David had once offered his famished soldiers the sacred bread of the Tabernacle. Even though the bread was holy there was indeed something more holy than what is found in the tabernacle and that sacred item to be revered was the very life of the men who were in intense hunger. Jesus continues this line of thought by asking the Pharisees if they were not aware that on the Sabbath the priests in the Temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless?” Then Jesus reminds them that the disciples eating a bite of breakfast was something that was greater than the Temple here! Now to the Pharisees this had to be an outstanding statement for the Temple was as great as it gets. Yet Jesus speaks as an authority on the Sabbath because he is the very Son of Man; he is the Lord of the Sabbath. Right here, Jesus is taking us back to the original seventh day of rest in the story of creation. There, when we are told that God rested, we are to picture God seated upon his throne. This image of one resting there on that seventh day is none other than Jesus .

         Jesus, then is not just our Lord, but he is the one who reigns over the seventh day. You see, the Sabbath day is given to us to remind us that the very reason why God rests, and the reason why we rest is solely because of this: our God reigns. And further, the Sabbath also tells us that our God reigns through his people, the ones God created to reign and rule over his creation. You see, this reigning as God’s representative in the world through the serving of our neighbor, this is the true work for which we have all been created to do. So as we pause and rest from our labors, this is what we are called to remember. You see, this serving of others by giving them what is needed for life, as in the case of Jesus who meets a man whose hand is deformed, this is not the work that the commandment is calling us to cease from doing. Jesus clearly tells us that it is indeed lawful to do good on the Sabbath. Now, when we hear the words, “…to do good…”, we should know that this is the mark of the creation story. Every time God created another piece of his masterpiece he declared that it was, “Good”. The culmination of all this goodness is a creation that is overflowing with life. So when Jesus tells us that we are to do good, we can be assured that this means that we are to always be working at the giving of life. There is never to be a day when we are to rest from doing this good work.Whenever and wherever we see a need to serve someone else, doing whatever is necessary for someone else to be set free from their anxiety or worry about life, God tells us to go ahead and get busy. You see, the fulfillment of this commandment to keep the Sabbath is given to us so that we might begin to see every day as a Sabbath day. Yes, we do have to work in order to live but we can remember that such work is not the work we were created for. Yes, we do have to go to work but that work does not have to consume our life to the point that we have no time, or strength left to do the work God created us to do, ruling and reigning through the service of others. Yes, we do have to work but God will provide just as he did in the beginning. We need not be concerned about all that we need because above all we should know that our God reigns, a truth that is made more certain every time we reign and rule through our service to others.

         We have to understand that now because Christ has come to fulfill the law, keeping the Sabbath for us is to be an every day way of life. Each new day is a day we are to rise, living a life at rest yet ready to do the good work God has for us. Already when we consider what we were created to do we sense that we are not up to the task, and we are to right in doing so. You see, before we can rest there on the seventh day, God first does something on the sixth day to make this life at rest a real possibility. We are told in the twenty-eighth verse of the first chapter of Genesis that God blessed the people that he had made.  Now when we wonder just what does it mean for God to bless us, we discover that Jesus has revealed this to us. We first are to know that the word, “blessing”, in the Hebrew language, simply means to kneel before another in order to fear them a gift. When it tells us that God blessed humanity in the beginning, we are to have this image of God kneeling before us offering us a gift, so once again we see the posture of a servant. Now the gift God gives to us is his word. As we remember, creation began with God speaking, and when God spoke a word, light appeared, the light, as we learn in the first chapter of John, which is the life of all humanity. Then, as the creation of the world concludes, God speaks not one last word but this time three words to bring forth the highest creation called Adam, humanity. 

Yet, surprisingly, God is not done speaking because before God sends his people forth, he once again speaks a word, called blessing. Through this blessing of God our life is to produce good fruit. This good fruit is found listed for us in the fifth chapter of Galatians.There Paul teaches us that the fruit God brings forth in us, is not merely more life, as was the case in the rest of creation, but rather, the fruit in us is instead a life with certain qualities. These characteristics are: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and the very life of heaven living in us.You see, this fruit God speaks into being within us is the very eternal life of God. This life springs up in us in much the same way as the rest of creation, through God speaking it into being. 

You see, the blessing of God is the gift given to us by the word of God. As God speaks his word, it brings forth in us earth-bound creatures the very life of heaven which is the very source of the fruit of the Spirit. We hear the words God blesses us with in what Jesus teaches us in the fifth chapter of Matthew. These nine blessings found there can be divided into what might be called a word of promise, a word of judgment and a word of life, which correspond to the voice of God the Father, the voice of God the Son and the voice of God the Holy Spirit. 

The first of these blessings, found in the fifth chapter of Matthew, the third through the fifth verses, is what we might call a word of promise given to us by our Heavenly Father. This promise is for those who know that they are the poor, the empty handed ones,  these are who our Heavenly Father welcomes home so they might experience the very life of heaven. Blessed, Jesus again tells us, but this time it is those who mourn, those whose life is marked by loss. This sense of grief is something we all know so instinctively, and it is the root cause of all our anxiety and worry. The blessing that is given to those who grieve, is that they are found by their eternal Father. What comfort it is to know the one who can never be lost to us is the very one who finds us when all seems lost. The Father who comforts us speaks to us, telling us that if we are willing to learn, to take the yoke of Jesus upon ourselves, then God promises us the earth will be our inheritance. 

So, let’s step back and look at how we are blessed through this word of promise spoken to us by our Heavenly Father. God speaks to the empty handed people that to them will be given a home where heaven can be experienced here on earth. In a world marked by loss, we are found by our eternal Father, the one and only who can never be lost from us. And our eternal Father promises us that if  we are willing to learn his ways, then we who were once empty handed, ravaged by the losses of this world, we are promised that the entire creation will one day be our inheritance. 

When we hear what our Heavenly Father promises to us we are to realize that this gift can only be received by faith. Can you believe that in this world marked by so much evil that there can be a place where the goodness of God can be found? I mean, can you really believe that the comfort given to us by our eternal Father is really the answer to the tragedies we experience through all that we have lost here on earth? Are we willing to yield our life over to the guidance and direction of this Heavenly Father who promises us that if we do so the whole creation will one day be given to us as a father gives their child an inheritance? You see, the blessing spoke to us by our Heavenly Father is to call forth certainty in us because now at last we have found, or perhaps better, we have been found, by our eternal Father. You see, all we have to do is to wonder just why it is that the one who is not only eternal but also invisible, would even decide to be known by us? The answer is that the God who too knows the pain of loss, desires that we know that there is indeed a goodness beyond the evil of this world. Such is the message of the cross, the painful loss, and the resurrection, where the goodness of God overcame the evil of this world. You see, it is God offering to us his goodness, this is what demonstrates his great love for us. Out of this great love we find in us a willingness to trust in his promises, above everything else. And here in this trust, we find that we are no longer restless, for we have found a certainty in the God who loves us. Amen!