Doing okay. Hard to believe we're flying through summer, huh? Oh. Oh. I live in Wisconsin because I can, you know, I've learned to be content in whatever state I am.
I moved to Wisconsin 33 years ago and I love Wisconsin, but I hate February, March and April. Can I be honest? Anybody? For honesty in church, I struggle. That's why we just bought a place in Florida for those three months.
Last time I was here, you were meeting in the other part of the building. So I haven't been here to worship in this room. It's a beautiful room that's come together. My colleague Rob Wise from the Forest Lakes District has spoken here a couple times. I'm the district superintendent.
Lakeview is part of the Forest Lakes district. There are 17 evangelical free church districts around the United States. Ours includes Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. And I've been in this role about 10 years. We have almost 170 churches.
And a new Bible study just began a week ago Saturday in Wanakee. And so there's 30 people that were at that house. I don't know if that house is going to hold up with 30 people for very long. But there's a church that started in Wanakee. We've got.
I'm meeting tomorrow at the church down in the southern part of the state that's looking to become a free church. We have three others that, Lord willing, maybe this fall we'll be bringing into the free church. And so God is at work. And because of your partnership, God is doing things. We have a districts youth conference that if you've heard about districts, we had 4,600 kids in green Bay last January.
A little bit of energy there, a little bit of caffeine that was there. And Lord willing, this next January we'll also have the district's youth conference in Green Bay, Wisconsin at the KI Convention Center. I met with the team this last week and plans are underway. Everywhere I go, of course, when it's 90 degrees, I don't see it, but 90 degree weather, I see everybody in our churches always see sometimes a district sweatshirt that people are wearing, which is great. Advertisement for our district's youth conference.
I'd like to put up on screen a QR code. If you're able to check on this. What I'd like to ask you to do would be to consider being part of our prayer team. We are hoping to get a large number of people who will faithfully and fervently pray for things that are happening around the district. James says that the fervent effectual prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.
And so we would love to have you be part of our prayer team and send out prayer updates. Well, this morning I'll tell you where I'm going. So I just kind of say, well, at least halfway through, you might say, well, that's where he's going. Did he get there? So hopefully we'll all arrive at the same place on our journey.
But this morning, God offers rest. And what I'd like to do is start in the Old Testament with the children of Israel and a promise that God made to Abram about experiencing rest and kind of follow that through the Old Testament just quickly. And then I'd like to land in the New Testament in Matthew chapter 11 and in Hebrews chapter 4 and look at a specific formula that Jesus gives us for rest. So if you have your program, you see when you came in, in your program, this God offers rest and there's a place for you to take notes. I always say, if you're taking, if you're making a list for Walmart, I won't know the difference.
If you're writing feverishly and it's okay, but if the Holy Spirit puts something on your heart to write down, do so. Now the reverse. There's some questions I would just encourage you to entertain and think through that relate to the scripture texts and the theme of the morning. The term rest in the Lord is an often used phrase in the Bible. When the Psalmist in Psalm 37, verse 7 said this, Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for him, he wasn't talking about physical rest that involves taking a break from activity, relaxing, napping, stopping to gather strength.
Rest in the Lord as a context of what we're going to refer to today is a spiritual rest that comes from confusion, worry, stress and anxiety. I don't know about you, but do you ever get anxious again? Anybody for honesty in church? My hand's right up there. Friday, one of my best friends, I got a call and he was in an ambulance on the western part of the state of Wisconsin and was airlifted having a heart attack.
Praise the Lord. He's getting out of the hospital tomorrow. But that shook my world on Friday.
Friday and yesterday, my oldest daughter and her husband and their two dogs. He has a new job in Houston, got a major promotion and they were driving following the. He was driving the rental truck and she was driving a car. And I get a call on Friday night. My wife and I just went out to eat and I get a call that says, dad, we're dog tired.
We're in the middle of Illinois. We had no idea Illinois was so long. Yesterday it was. We had no idea Arkansas was so wide. But anyway, I was concerned.
So we got them a hotel and was praying for them. They were supposed to get to Memphis, which I thought Milwaukee to Houston. Memphis doesn't seem like that. Does anybody else think Tennessee? Like that would be out of the way.
But I learned not to argue with my 37 year old researcher daughter. But they were tired and said there's no way we're going to make it to Memphis. So I was concerned about them falling asleep on the road. Some storms that are hitting, as you know, Texas and the Gulf in terms of a tropical storm. And so I'm praying, laying in bed at night going okay, glad they made it to the hotel.
How far do they have to go tomorrow? And praying yesterday and report safely. They made it to Houston last night. But those are things that occupy thoughts. And if we're honest, there's all sorts of things.
Maybe a conflict at work, maybe a conflict in your own family, maybe a relational dynamic that has gone sideways. Maybe it's a future test that a doctor has prescribed and it's got you concerned. If we're honest, all of us struggle with anxiety. The Hebrew word for rest here is translated as peace.
To be quiet or to be calm. Peace. So the first thing that I see here, two points this morning is God promises rest to his people with a covenant. God promises rest to his people with a covenant. All the way back in Genesis chapter 12.
Don't have to turn there. But in Genesis chapter 12, Abram, before he became Abraham, has an encounter with God. And God makes this covenant with Abraham and he tells him that he would be receiving a region of the world that would be a gift to him and to look up and the stars of the heaven. So would be the number of his people, the sands of the seashore. So would be the number of his people, that heritage.
And God promised him a land. Ironically today that land is Lebanon, Syria and Egypt. Not necessarily the place I would want to go for vacation. My accountability partner's from Egypt and he's told me some amazing stories about even what it's like to live there today. But Joseph, we come fast forward from when this promise of a land and rest was given to Abram.
We come to Joseph, Abraham's great grandson. And there was a famine and it predicated Joseph's father and the rest of the brothers all moving to Egypt. Little did they know they would be there for 400 years. And they would move from being guests to being slaves. Ironically, as they were leaving 400 years after captivity and time in Egypt, after the plagues and after Charlton Heston.
For those of you who are older and the Ten Commandments, God said in Exodus 33, verse 14, My presence will go with you and I will give you rest. God reiterated that promise and rest again to let these people know after 400 years that God was going to give them the rest, the peace, the quiet, the calm that they desired. And this restful, peaceful living depended on the Israelites. However, staying faithful and being obedient to God alone by keeping their covenant with Him. Unfortunately, the descendants of Abraham and these almost million and some people who left Egypt after 400 years and were promised rest and peace again did not keep up their end of the bargain.
And so God became frustrated with this whole generation. And in Psalm 95, verses 10 and 11, it says, For 40 years, I loathed that generation. That's pretty strong words from God, isn't it? I mean, I can say I dislike something, but to use the word loathe, even just saying loathe, strong distaste, right? He says, I loathed that generation.
And they are people who go astray in their heart and they have not known my ways. Therefore I have sworn in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest. That meant that everyone 21 years of age and older died over the next years of the journey. People were probably looking around saying, when's your birthday again? Are you 20 and under?
Because everyone 21 years in age and older did not enter into God's rest. Let me give you a quick definition of what I would say. Rest is this morning. Rest is knowing God personally through faith in Jesus Christ and his work on the cross, his death, burial and resurrection, and living each day, abiding in him, close, connected to him, trusting him. That's how you get rest.
What does it mean to enter into that rest? Well, it starts with us recognizing the bad news. Every person in this room, we all were born sinners. Now I know that of my daughters I have two girls, 37 and 35, and I taught them how to play sports. And one thing I didn't have to teach them was how to sin.
They learned that from their mother. No, accurately, through scripture. It came through me.
I have a two year old granddaughter that just turned two this last week. And I said to her, when she was about a year old, I said, you know, honey, to my wife, I said, you know, sweetheart, I think the sin Gene skipped a generation. She turned 2 last week. Let me guarantee you she has the sin gene. She was born with it.
But we're born with that sin nature. And that sin nature separates us from a loving God. And God in his grace and in his mercy and in his desire to make things right, sent the only one who could pay for your sin and for my sin, that was his Son, Jesus Christ. It took a perfect spotless Lamb of God to shed his blood to pay for our sin. So Jesus came to this earth with a mission in mind and that was to go to the cross to pay for the penalty of sin that you and I rightly deserve to pay.
He paid a debt we could not pay. He who knew no sin became sin so that we could be made right with God. And if we turn from our sin in faith to the cross and the empty tomb, we come into a relationship with Jesus Christ. And that's where peace begins. So this morning, if you don't know Jesus, if you don't have a personal relationship with him through faith in Christ's death, burial and resurrection and repentance from your sin and turning in faith to him, just say you're never going to find rest, you're never going to find peace.
And and so that's where it all begins. Eventually, because of widespread disobedience, going back to this group of people who entered the promised land, the 20 year olds and under at the time of the proclamation of anyone in that generation was going to die. They were carried off to exile again to Babylon this time. And God, after having them in Babylon for a number of years in Jeremiah 30, verse 10, the new living translation says this, that God's speaking to this, this people. So don't be afraid, Jacob my servant, do not be dismayed, Israel says the Lord, for I will bring you home again from distant lands.
He was going to deliver them again from Babylon back to their home. And your children return from their exile, Israel return to a life of peace and quiet rest and no one will terrorize them. Another promise that God made. Can you venture to guess what happened again? They didn't keep up their end of the covenant.
They didn't enter into rest again. You'd think they would have caught it. Time in Egypt, time in the desert, in the wilderness, time in Babylon and yet. But don't be so hard on them, because I would say we don't always get it either. Isaiah 32:17 says, and the effect of righteousness will be peace.
And the result of righteousness, quietness and trust forever so this morning, friends, God offers us rest, which is peace and a place of contentment in knowing Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior. Well to the New Testament in the Book of Hebrews. The writer of Hebrews again refers back to this group of people in Hebrews 4:1:3. And the writer says, God's promise of entering into his rest still stands. That promise he made way back to Abram.
So we ought to tremble with fear that some of you might fail to experience for this good news that God has prepared. This rest has been announced to us just as it was to them. But it did them no good because they did not share the faith of those who listened to God. For only we who believe can enter his rest. As for others, God said, in my anger I took an oath.
They will never enter my place of rest. Even though this rest has been ready since he made the world, God's promise of entering his rest still stands today, friends. So we ought to tremble with fear that some might not experience it. As believers, we are not guaranteed immunity from life's storms, but we have a choice about how we react to those storms, about where we go for dependence in the midst of those storms. We can either respond in fear or rest in the Lord's presence.
We can either waste our time worrying or trust in the Lord to take care of us. The writer goes on to say in verses 9 to 11 about the final rest for believers in heaven. So then there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For whoever has entered God's rest has also rested from his works, as God did from his. Interestingly here, this is the only place where this word Sabbath is used in this text.
It's kind of a unique usage. But then the referral back to creation, the Genesis account. I've always kind of found it interesting that God gave the Sabbath and people said, well, if God needed rest, then we do too. Can I be honest with you? If God is omnipotent, all powerful, did he need rest?
No. The Sunday school answer, obviously, no. God didn't need rest. But God saw that we need rest. And so the Sabbath that was given is for us.
It's like when Jesus was in the New Testament, going with his disciples along, and he did some work on a Sunday, on the Sabbath, on that day, whatever it was, either Saturday night to Sunday. And the religious leaders of the day got all worked up about it and came after him. And he said, you need to know the Sabbath wasn't created for God. The Sabbath was created for you as human beings. Because you need rest.
I think of that old commercial on TV of the engine that's running at high RPMs and they say over time engine wear breaks down the viscosity of your engine oil. So therefore you should have Valvoline, because all of a sudden it shows this engine going at really high RPMs and all of a sudden smoke starts rolling out of it and it seizes up. And that's what the Sabbath is. That was given to us as a day of rest was because God knew, as he created us and he knows that we need this rest, speaking of physical rest, but also of rest from what we're doing. So he says, let us therefore strive to enter that rest so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience.
Well, if pharmaceuticals are any barometer of the emotions of our times in our culture, then we are the most nervous, stressed out, anxiety ridden culture in the world today. Illnesses are worsened by anxiety and stress more than by any other factor. One psychological authority said this anxiety is the official emotion of our times. They went on to say, whoever isn't schizophrenic these days isn't thinking clearly, clearly a joke. But isn't it true?
We are probably the most favored in terms of what we have by way of lifestyle nation of anywhere in the world. And yet we consume more pharmaceuticals for anxiety, for stress, for coping mechanism than anywhere else in the world. Not even close. By way of comparison, whoever is, as I said, not having anxiety, it's part of what we. I wish we as Christians were immune from the problem of stress and anxiety, sleeplessness, depression, poor eating habits.
All of those things plague us. I read about a one day diet for those of us who are going through anxiety. It's called the stress diet. Pamela Petler in her Joy of Stress wrote about this one day diet. Listen to it and see if you've ever been on this diet in the morning for breakfast.
One half grapefruit, one piece of whole wheat toast, no butter, 8 ounces of non fat milk. What a great breakfast, huh? The breakfast of champions. Let's move on to lunch on our stress diet for a day. 4 Ounces of lean skinless broiled chicken breast, 1 cup of steamed zucchini, herb tea, no cream, no sugar, and one Oreo cookie.
Now we come to our mid afternoon snack. The rest of the package of Oreo cookies to deal with our stress and one quart of rocky road ice cream with plenty of hot fudge on it. As we continue our one day stress eating diet, we come to supper since we already blew it in the afternoon with the whole rest of the package of Oreos and Rocky Road ice cream. We have two complete loaves of garlic bread buttered with butter on both sides, one large pepperoni pizza, heavy on cheese, thick crust of course, one large picture of Diet Dr. Pepper and three Milky Way candy bars. And how do we close our day of this stress diet?
We open the freezer for our late night snack and eat the entire frozen cheesecake right out of the freezer. That's our one day stress. Been there, done that, have had the effects of that. Now I want to pause and just say, anxiety is no laughing matter. If you've experienced anxiety, if you've had stress related to worry about the future, it's a real thing.
The question isn't whether or not we are an anxious culture. There's a deeper question that must be answered. And that's why in an age when we have so many high tech gadgets that are supposed to relieve us from the stress of our lives and work, why are we so anxious and live under such amounts of stress? I would say it's because we don't know how to rest. We don't know how to enter into what Jesus is going to lay out for us by way of what he wants for us.
And another corresponding factor I would say is something that happened in 2007. In 2007, do you know what was invented? The iPhone. Now I love what this enables me to do, the iPhone. I mean, I, I do almost everything off of this little device, but when I go out to eat with my wife or I'm meeting with a group of people or my team, I turn it on silent.
But if I don't remember to turn it over, all of a sudden something pops up and I look at it and I'm like, oh, right, there's a call. Oh, I need to follow. Oh, I need to follow up. Oh, there's. Oh, oh boy, oh boy.
And my wife will look at me and she says, who did you just invite to dinner? It's like, oh, my universe. That's code for turn that thing over, buddy, and make sure you're not divided in this attention to your sweetheart. And I would say, growing up, I grew up in a little town in Iowa. And we.
You could tell what season of the year it was sports wise by what the Payne boys were doing. We were out either playing football, baseball or basketball. And my mom would come outside and she would whistle. I mean, she had a whistle that could pierce, pierce the sound two blocks away at the elementary school, playing hoops, I could hear. I was like, oh, Mom's whistling.
Time to go home. And, you know, I lived at a time as a child where I didn't have a lot of control of my surroundings. Some. But I didn't know what was happening on the world stage.
I had very little control of it, too. I had low awareness and low control. Today, we still live with the same amount of control, very low control over what's happening in our world. But we have a humongous, Humongous. That's maybe wrong.
An incredible amount of knowledge about the awareness of what's happening. There's a bombing that happens on the other side of the world, and 30 seconds later it pops up on our iPhone and we hear about it with pictures and details. I mean, we live in a world where all of this information, this intake, which I don't want to. Don't hear me say that I'm anti information, because I'm not. But it has become a distraction for us.
Jesus rest is available all day, every day, every night, all night. And you can't beat a deal like that. Nowhere in the New Testament do we ever see Jesus ever once worried or hurried. I love that about him. He's in the boat, sleeping on cushions, and they're going across the Sea of Galilee.
And just remember who was rowing the boat or who was navigating the boat. These weren't your weekend pontoon drivers like me. These were seasoned veterans, fishermen who had lived on this lake. And all of a sudden the winds came up and the waves were beating against the boat. There's Jesus sleeping in the boat.
And they go over and they wait. Don't you care that we're going to perish, that we're going to go down? And I love what the text says. If you read it earlier, he didn't say, let's get in the boat and go halfway and drown. He said, let's get in the boat and go to the other side.
And he's sleeping and he stands up. They're going, wake up. Don't you care we're going to die? He stands up and he looks and he says, peace, be still. And scripture says immediately the winds were gone, the waves were gone, and they were on the other side of the Sea of Galilee.
Never once do we see Jesus worried or hurried in the New Testament with all the pressures that were on him. We never read that he worried or he never read that he was hurried. You can too. Let's go to the second part of the text or the message this morning. And that's the formula that Jesus gives us for rest.
Jesus gives us a formula for rest. And that's found over in Matthew, chapter 11. Listen to these words. Matthew 11, 28, 30, Come to me. In Matthew 4:19, Jesus called Andrew and Peter and he says, follow me and I will make you fishers of men.
That was an invitation for discipleship. This is an invitation for rest. Come to me. It's personal, exclusive. It's compelling.
You cannot find rest in yourself and material possessions or anything else that this world offers. Only Jesus offers rest, true rest. So he says, come to me all who labor and are heavy laden. Labor means to become weary or tired as a result of hard work. Let me just say that I am all about hard work.
I remember as a preteen age boy in Iowa growing up, and one day going up to my mom, the oldest of three, and I said, mom, I'm bored today.
Some of you are quite wise. I have never used that phrase again. She had more creative ways to deal with my boredom that day, through hard work and chores. One of the things that I've heard our daughters say to us is, mom and dad, we are so glad that you've taught us the value of a good hard day of work. So I'm not against hard work.
Hard work is a thing that we all should work hard. But there's difference between being weary of work and weary in work. Come to me. This invitation. He says, all who are weary, overworked and heavy laden.
That word heavy laden carries the connotation of a cargo ship, the picture of a cargo ship that's in port back in that time and was so laden with cargo that it couldn't move out of port. So Jesus looks at us and he says, come to me, all you who are overworked and are heavy laden, carrying a burden, whatever's on your shoulders, come to me. And I, then he says, will give you rest. These are personal terms. I will give you rest.
It's a gift. In the classical Greek, the word rest was used for the laying down of an object finishing a formal speech, or as we would call today, you know, a mic drop, walk away. It's also a legal argument when the prosecution or the defendant says, I rest my case. And then the case moves on to another portion. It's commanding officer says to his soldiers to halt and put down and take a respite.
Or it's allowing a field to be unplanted for a period of time for rest. That's the word I will Give you rest, the connotation. A picture of this is found in New York City, a building in the Rockefeller Plaza on Fifth Avenue. Right across there from where the Christmas tree is in Rockefeller center, etc. There's a statue of Atlas.
And Atlas, the picture is the entire weight of the world is on his shoulders. And I would just say that that's one way to live, feeling as though the strain or burdens of the world are all on you. Ironically, across the street in the building in the background was that is St. Patrick's Cathedral. And if you were to go to St. Patrick's Cathedral today and you were to walk up to the front, behind there's a little shrine and there's a picture in the shrine of Jesus as a child holding the entire world in his hand. What a way to live.
Either you're the one holding on to the world like Atlas, or you come to the one who has the entire world in his hands. That's the way. Another way to live. Jesus invites us to stop carrying the world on your shoulders and put your life in his hands. In verse 28, Jesus offers rest to those who labor are heavy laden.
In 29, he commands them to put on his yoke. Now, friends, this isn't a bait and switch scheme. This is the proper understanding of the nature of rest. It's proper understanding that as a train looks, if a train, this is probably only Thomas the train would think this way. But as a train is going down the tracks and looks over and sees horses running freely in the pasture, a train might say, boy, would I ever like to be free and run like the horses there in the field.
But the train needs to recognize the only freedom it has is when it remains on the tracks. Because if the train leaves the tracks, it doesn't have freedom to go anywhere. Its freedom comes from being on the tracks. So Jesus goes on to say, come to me, Take my yoke upon you and learn from me. There's a school where Jesus is a subject matter and he's also the master teacher in which every believer is enrolled.
And there's a lifelong course of study that's prescribed and that's to learn from him how to rest. He says, I am gentle and lowly in heart. This is the only passage in the New Testament where the character and condition of Jesus heart is described. He says, I'm gentle and I'm lowly in heart. Gentle is the same word that Jesus used in Matthew 5:5 in the Sermon on the Mount.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the Earth and meekness is not weakness, it's strength under control. Matthew 20:28 says, the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and give his life a ransom for many. Humility. It means that Christ cares about the yokes and the burdens that you carry. Verse 30 says, why you should take his yoke, because his yoke is easy.
That translation has a wide range of meanings, but it means well fitting. Ox yokes in the day when Jesus would have made this illustration were made of wood and carpenters would come out and they would check the shoulders of the oxen and they would carve out the wooden yoke to fit. They would come out after doing it and then see the high points where there might be rubbing, et cetera. And they would again, you know, fit those ox yokes to the specific oxen. There's a legend that says that in Nazareth there was a little carpenter shop that Joseph owned and he had apprentice son named Jesus.
And there was a sign that was on the outside that said our yokes are well fitting and that our carpenters know how best make yokes for oxen. Jesus would have learned from the carpenter shop what it was to put on the yoke and to fit it specifically for the beast, the burden of that day. So when he says to us, take my yoke upon you, my yoke is easy. A Sunday school teacher asked what the yoke of Jesus is, and one old boy answered, it's when Jesus puts His arm around you and, and he lets you know that he loves you. Not only is his burden light, and his yoke is easy, but his burden is light.
Coming to Jesus and following him is not a life without burdens, but his burdens are light. Why is the burden light? It's because he's doing the heavy lifting. Let's say you were somewhere here in the area in the county and you were going up a really steep hill. Think about where that steep hill might be around here, close by.
And you've got on your shoulders this backpack that's heavy. It's packed full and it's a warm July day and you're struggling up a hill carrying that backpack. And a friend comes by in their car and stops and says, hey, where are you going? And it's on the top of the hill and beyond. And so you say, I'm going to so and so.
And they say, well, get in, let me give you a ride there. You get in the car and you take the heavy backpack off of your shoulders, but you put it on your lap and your friend looks at you and says, hey, this car has enough horsepower to get you and your bag up the hill. Put it on the floor, let me carry it. That's what Jesus offers to us. He says, my burden is light, my yoke is easy.
No burden, friends, is too heavy if you are yoked with Jesus. If the burden of trusting and obeying Jesus seems too heavy, it's because you're trying to carry it by yourself. He never intended it for it to be that way. Close your eyes for just a moment. As I close, I want to read from Matthew 11, 28, 30.
From the message Eugene Peterson a paraphrase said this about this text, Jesus words from Matthew 11. Listen as if Jesus were talking to you. Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion?
Then Jesus says, come to me, get away with me and you'll rediscover what life really is. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me. Watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.
I won't lay anything heavy on you or ill fitting. Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly. Father, thank you for this rest that Jesus offers us. Thank you for how you offered this to the children of Israel all the way back.
And Lord, they never entered into that rest. And Lord, you also offer rest someday with you in glory. Lord, I pray whatever anxiety might be on the hearts and minds of these dear ones in this room, I pray that they would bring those anxieties, those fears, those cares to you. Thank you, God, that you're faithful, that when we bring those anxieties to you, you will take care of every need and you will do the heavy lifting. Thank you.
And may you be glorified by what you do in our lives.