Saturday, May 14, 2011
Desperate Households Series
Desperate Households Series
Written by Pastor Richard Pfeil of WCCPC
June 2008
“Standing on the promises.” …where would you be if you didn’t stand on a promise God gave you in scripture sometime in your life? The words that they just sang, “… the promises that cannot fail, when the howling storms of doubt and fear assail, by the living Word of God I shall prevail.” Hallelujah! Those are great words, aren’t they? And the next verse says, “Standing on the promises of Christ the Lord, bound to Him eternally by love’s strong cord, overcoming daily with the Spirit’s sword.” And the last verse says “Standing on the promises I cannot fall, listening every moment to the Spirit’s call, resting in my Savior as my all in all.”
Two years ago, Pastor Richard did a series called “Building Margin into Your Life.” Do you remember that? Many of you have spoken to me about that particular series from two years ago. Many of us don’t have much margin in our lives. We run on this thin line and if anything goes wrong on that thin line, it messes up two days. Do you ever feel that way?
We are in the middle of this series called “Desperate Households,” and as Richard and I were talking about this series, we have identified four areas that we have seen in our counseling and our own personal lives, where households are desperate. Last week Pastor Richard talked about how hard “Desperate Parenting” can be in this day and age. This week we are going to talk about being “Desperate for Rest.”
Now you retired folks rest all of the time, don’t you? You don’t do anything anymore. You just get up in the morning, drink your orange juice, read the paper, mosey around outside, and that is about it for the day. You are not tired, are you? Resting in my Savior’s love, my all in all…
During that series Pastor Richard did two years ago he talked about the verse “Come unto me, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Rest is more than the absence of doing things. Sometimes we can sit down in a comfy chair and we still are not at rest, are we? I want to talk with you today about that kind of rest.
We need two things in order to stand on the promises of God. We need trust and we need surrender. We need to trust that the promises are true and we need to surrender to the Promise Keeper. We break our promises all the time, but there is One that doesn’t break a single promise ever. Paul puts it this way in 2 Corinthians - all of the promises of God are ‘yes and amen.’ That means there is no room for a promise not being fulfilled by God.
God has taught us spiritual realities using physical things, and he does it over and over again. The stories, the things that he was teaching his people in the Old Testament, have spiritual realities fulfilled in the New. When we think about Egypt we think about a people in bondage…physical bondage. When we talk about the spiritual, we talk about people in spiritual bondage to sin. When we talk about the Promised Land…the physical place on earth called Canaan where God led his people there, a land flowing with milk and honey, a land where they would possess it and own it because God gave it to them… the spiritual correlation to that is our eternal place of possession which is heaven.
God taught his people to observe a physical Sabbath. Six days he created the earth and on the seventh he rested. That physical Sabbath, as we obeyed and worked that out, was to give us a picture of something deeper than just not doing any work on Sundays or Saturdays (whichever place you honor). It is more than that. We cannot do any work on that Sabbath day, that historical Sunday, and dishonor God all week; so there is something more we were to get out of that physical Sabbath. Understanding a physical rest was to help us understand a spiritual rest….a bone-deep rest.
My husband was reading some things on the Internet. A poll in China asked “Would you rather have money or rest?” They picked money. In the United States we picked rest. I would suggest to you that our whole lifestyle betrays that choice! Our households are desperate for rest! My kids don’t know how to sit still! My daughter had a district soccer game yesterday and when she got home she was bored to tears! That whole thing took five hours and we were worn out and she wanted to go to the mall! I don’t go to the mall on the weekend, but we took her. She is a good kid.
I want to talk to you about some other events in the Old Testament that were to give a picture to us of something more spiritual. You know the story of the Israelite people. God took them out of bondage in Egypt, brought them to Mount Sinai, gave them the Ten Commandments, and he also gave Moses a picture of a tabernacle - the place where God would come down and dwell in the midst of the people. And they grew and came into that Promised Land, Joshua took them in there.
King David, who was anointed king after King Saul, had this idea, “God, I want to build you a house. I want to build you a temple, something more extravagant,” something bigger then the tabernacle they had carried with them everywhere that they went.
David never got to build that temple, but his son, King Solomon, built that temple. And on the day that they dedicated that temple King Solomon prayed a prayer that God would come down and rest in that temple. And God did, on that day, come down and rest. God’s presence came down in that time and rested in the midst of his people.
Israel goes on, obeying God sometimes, and not obeying God sometimes; and then one of the saddest recordings in history takes place. In the book of Ezekiel 11:22, the prophet records that because the people had so dishonored God and not spent time with God, that the very presence that came down in Solomon’s time lifted up, moved to the East, and left. There is no other time in the history of Israel that God’s presence dwelt among them in that temple, in a physical structure, because God was about to teach them something about what was coming that was going to last.
In 2 Corinthians, Paul tells us that we are the temple of the Holy Spirit. Never again did that presence of God come and dwell in a physical structure. Jesus came and tabernacled among us, then when he went up to his father, he sent us the Holy Spirit (which we celebrated last week on Pentecost). And so this physical picture of God coming down and resting in the temple now is the correlation of God coming down and resting in us. God’s presence rests in his people.
There are two purposes for which God gave us this physical Sabbath. He gave it for relationship and remembrance. That physical Sabbath was to be a day spent with God and each other, and as Exodus 32 says, we will remember that it is God alone that sanctifies us. The law against breaking the Sabbath was so stringent because God wanted to give us a picture of how important we were to him. If we don’t spend time with him it is like we are cut off from our lifeline and our relationship with him.
Hebrews, Chapter 4, is very clear about what our Sabbath rest is today. Our Sabbath rest is Jesus Christ dwelling in us through the Holy Spirit. Now, you might say “Pastor Jody, I am still desperate for rest.” We are desperate for rest because we don’t let that savior rest in us. I want to go deeper than just saying, “You need to not take your kids to all these places. You need to make time for yourself.” You know all of that, don’t you? I don’t need to preach that to you. You know those kinds of life decisions you need to make to make time for rest.
What I want to suggest to you is that even though you might do all of that day in and day out, you may still be at this place in your life where you can not rest. It is because we are carrying around with us heavy burdens that we have not yet given to Jesus. I don’t care how old you are, none of us in our lifetime will work it all out. I wish I could, but I don’t think that is going to be possible. But I know I am going to be better this month than I was a month ago if I am trying to walk with Jesus Christ.
In that sermon series two years ago Pastor Richard gave you an invitation. It was the invitation that Jesus gives to us: “Come all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” I have an invitation for you today, too and that invitation is to take rest in him so that he can take rest in you. What that means for us is that we work out things in our lives. We lay down those heavy burdens. Why do we work so hard? Maybe we are seeking approval. Maybe we just don’t think that we will ever be good enough for God. Well, you know what? You won’t! Because he makes you good enough!
There is always one more soup kitchen to serve, isn’t there, Ruth? There is always one more meal to deliver to somebody and when you go home and you put your feet up there is always one more thing that you could do, isn’t there? So let’s get over that folks! You will never be good enough! We are all good enough because Jesus Christ makes us good enough.
I am righteous because of the righteousness of God not because of any righteousness on my own. We have things built up in us that we must let go of and my challenge to you is that our emotional life, our private life (the burdens we carry, the things we carry that we don’t give to Jesus) will affect our spiritual life in a very intimate way. If you are carrying baggage around with you (because you had situations in your life that render you unable to trust or surrender to anybody because you had to make it on your own) that will affect your relationship with Jesus Christ. You will not be able to rest because your whole life you are going to be trying to work things out on your own that you need to just take and lay down at the foot of the cross.
What a friend we have in Jesus. The Lord is here because the Lord is resting in us. Can you take rest in him? The Lord is here because his people are here. Can you take rest in him? Because if you don’t you will never get that bone-deep rest that you long for everyday. Sing this last verse of What a Friend We Have in Jesus with me.
Copyright . Cheaper by the Half Dozen.All rights reserved. 