Finding Rest in a Weary World

By Andrea Lucado

Do you remember naptime in kindergarten? That welcome 30 minutes of rest when the teacher turned off the lights and all of the students rolled out their mats and slept? Unfortunately, kindergarten was probably the last time you had any sort of structured rest in your life. Once we graduated from those early years of school, we entered a world in which rest was desired but very difficult to acquire. By adulthood, our conversations seem to center around how much we have to do and how little time we have to do it.

Rest isn’t exactly of value in our culture today. If it were, we would prioritize it more, and we wouldn’t find ourselves exhausted at the end of each week, staring at yet another packed and busy weekend ahead. There is indeed no rest for the weary, as we are told.

Perhaps this is why scripture is so insistent upon building rest into our lives. God knew the human tendency to do more, earn more and achieve more. We aren’t going to stop unless someone makes us.

We don’t have to read very far into the Bible before seeing this idea of rest modeled by God Himself. In the story of creation found in Genesis 1-2, we see that God rested when His work was finished.

By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.  Genesis 2:2-3

This is the only place in the Bible where God blessed time. And He not only blessed it, He sanctified it, which means he set it apart from all of the other days. The day of rest is not only to be observed; it is to be considered holy compared to all of the other days. This is why Jewish law includes practicing the Sabbath every seventh day, a day to rest.

Even if you can’t devote an entire 24 hours to rest each week, we could all benefit from incorporating the Sabbath into our lives. Maybe instead of an entire day, you could build in an hour or two to your weekend, or an afternoon or morning.

The idea of a devoted time of rest can feel uncomfortable at first. We have been told to do and to produce, not simply sit still and be, but God modeled rest for us at the very beginning. He wrote it into the law for his people, and we continually see in scripture that the people of God went to Him for rest (Psalm 62) and for refuge (Psalm 46). And eventually, God sent His son, Jesus, who would bring rest to every weary soul (Matt. 11:28).

Maybe culture tells you that there is no rest for the weary, but that’s not what God said. Rest is a big deal to Him. It was so important that He marked it as holy after He created us. How can you make space for the Sabbath in your life today?

If you’re interested in reading more about rest and the creation story, check out our Bible study on Genesis: Genesis, The Beginning of Everything.