[0:00] I want to read to you the first 13 verses of Hebrews chapter 4.
[0:13] Listen to these words. Therefore, since the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us be careful that none of you be found to have fallen short of it.
[0:26] For we also have had the good news proclaimed to us, just as they did. But the message they heard was of no value to them, because they did not share the faith of those who obeyed.
[0:38] Now we who have believed enter that rest, just as God has said. So I declared on oath in my anger, they shall never enter my rest. And yet his works have been finished since the creation of the world.
[0:51] For somewhere he has spoken about the seventh day in these words. On the seventh day God rested from all his works. And again in the passage above he says, they shall never enter my rest.
[1:04] Therefore, since it still remains for some to enter that rest, and since those who formerly had the good news proclaimed to them did not go in because of their disobedience. God again set a certain day, calling it today.
[1:17] This he did when a long time ago he spoke through David, as in the passage already quoted. Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.
[1:28] For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken later about another day. There remains then a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For anyone who enters God's rest also rests from their works, just as God did from his.
[1:42] Let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will perish by following their example of disobedience. For the word of God is alive and active, sharper than any double-edged sword.
[1:55] It penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow. It judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight.
[2:06] Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give an account. This is the word of the Lord. Let's pray, let's ask for God's help as we study this morning.
[2:20] Gracious God, won't you speak that living word into our hearts this morning. Won't you pierce our hearts with that word. We want transformation, we want change. We've just spoken and prayed about that, Lord, and it comes ultimately through your word.
[2:36] The words of the creator God have life and those words are contained in scripture. And so may we see into scripture clearly this morning. May we see your son and his love for us and may we be changed by what we see.
[2:48] Help us now for Christ's sake. Amen. So maybe some of you did actually get a break where you got to go away a little bit.
[2:59] Maybe some of you had to work all the way through Christmas or New Year's. But maybe you got something of a break where you got to get away from your basic routines for some period of time. And so you should be feeling pretty fresh right now.
[3:11] You should be looking and feeling fresh, full of energy, full of enthusiasm. Should be feeling rested. But I suspect, because this is not my first start of the year, that for some of you, you're feeling pretty tired right now.
[3:32] And it's only the 12th of January. 13th of January. What is the date today? 12th of January. Some of you are feeling tired despite the fact that you've had a really lengthy break.
[3:43] Now why is that? Why are you feeling like that? Our passage that we just read goes some way in answering that actual question. And the answer is simply this.
[3:54] There is a rest that you need that you cannot get from taking a break. There's a rest that you need that you cannot get from taking a break. There's a rest that you desperately need that no holiday, no matter how fantastic it is, can provide you with.
[4:09] This book of Hebrews we just read from, you've got a book written by an author. We don't know who the author is, but he writes a book to a bunch of Jewish Christians, ethnically Jewish Christians, who are tempted to give up on the faith.
[4:22] They're struggling. They're facing persecution. They're facing exclusion. Primarily from other Jewish folk. And he's saying, don't give up. Don't return to the old ways.
[4:33] What you have in Jesus is so, so much better. Keep on going in Jesus. Jesus is better. Keep believing in Jesus. And one of the ways that he encourages his readers to keep going in their faith is by pointing them to the object lesson of the ancient Israelites and their desert wanderings.
[4:49] Their 40 years of wandering in the desert after the Exodus, before they went into the promised land. And he says they wandered in the desert because they didn't listen to the voice of God.
[5:00] They didn't trust in the voice of God. And the argument he makes, what he does in the chapter just before the one we read is he basically unpacks Psalm 95, which is a psalm about the desert wanderings of Israel.
[5:15] At the very end of Psalm 95, you find God saying to the Israelites, I declared on oath in my anger, they shall never enter my rest. So God says to Israel, look, you've been disobedient.
[5:27] You haven't listened to my voice. You will never enter my rest. And so what the author of Hebrews does is he spends almost an entire chapter, so chapter 4, what we read, talking about that last verse of Psalm 95.
[5:43] Hebrews 4, 1 starts like this. Therefore, since the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us be careful that none of you be found to have fallen short of it.
[5:55] The original language is actually even stronger than kind of be careful of falling short of this. It's more like be fearful. Have great apprehension. Be fearful of falling short of this rest.
[6:06] So it's incredibly important. So two things I want you to see this morning. What exactly is this rest? And number two, how do we get it? How do we enter into it? What is the rest?
[6:17] How do we enter into it? First one, what is the rest? There's a couple of clues in the passage that tell us what this rest is. So let me run you through a few of them here. Number one, the rest appears to be bigger than mere earthly rest, physical earthly rest.
[6:36] Because if you think, you say, well, what concept of rest would have been in the minds of the original readers? Psalm 95 is talking about the Exodus. And the rest envisioned there is the people of Israel coming out of slavery, coming out of oppression that they suffered, going to a physical land, Canaan, where they would live in peace and they would live in prosperity.
[7:00] That was the hope of the rest that they had at that point. So you've got to say, well, is the author saying that? Make every effort to get back to that point. A peace and security in the physical land of Israel.
[7:10] A stable, prosperous nation state in a geographical promised land like in the Old Testament. A physical earthly peace. Is that what he means by rest? Well, I don't think so.
[7:23] And here's why. In his describing of this rest, he actually goes way back before Israel. He goes back before the Exodus and he goes all the way back to the creation of the world.
[7:35] So look at verse 3. Now we who have believed enter that rest, just as God has said. So I declared on earth in my anger they shall never enter my rest.
[7:47] That's that quote from the last line of Psalm 95. And then he says this. And yet, here's that is God, yet his works have been finished since the creation of the world.
[7:58] For somewhere he has spoken about the seventh day in these words. On the seventh day God rested from all his works. And again, in the passage above he says, they shall never enter my rest.
[8:11] So you see what he does. He draws an analogy between God's resting on the seventh day and this rest that the readers are to make every effort to enter.
[8:22] God's resting creation and the rest that we're now supposed to make every effort to enter. So whatever this rest is, it is clearly, I think, bigger than just a nation being at peace within the land of Canaan.
[8:36] And then the next few verses actually confirm this. So look at verse 6. Therefore, since it still remains for some to enter that rest, and since those who formerly had the good news proclaimed to them did not go in because of their disobedience, God again set a certain day calling it today.
[8:54] This he did when a long time later he spoke through David as in the passage already quoted. Today if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts. For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken later about another day.
[9:07] There remains then a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For anyone who enters God's rest also rests from their works, just as God did from his. Let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest so that no one will perish by following the example of disobedience.
[9:24] See, if you know the story in the Old Testament, the Israelites didn't wander in the desert forever, did they? Eventually that generation died out, and then the next generation, under the leadership of Joshua, went into the promised land of Canaan and established themselves there.
[9:41] In fact, the very end of the book of Joshua, the last chapter, chapter 21, verse 44, we read this. The Lord gave them rest on every side, just as he had sworn to their ancestors.
[9:53] So there they got. They got that physical, earthly rest in the promised land of Canaan. But what does the author of Hebrews say? Verse 8?
[10:05] If Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken later about another day. So he clearly has in mind something that is bigger than physical, earthly rest here.
[10:18] So that's the first thing. Second thing. This rest is about completeness rather than inactivity.
[10:30] Completeness rather than inactivity. When most of us think of rest, I think we often think of doing nothing. That's what I think of. Lounging. Like when you've had that incredibly busy day, when you're a useless wreck at the end of the day, so you come home and you just flop into a couch and you lie there motionless until hunger pains get you and you need to get up and make yourself some supper.
[10:52] That's what I think of when I think of rest. We often associate rest with inactivity, but that's not the case here. So the analogy with God's rest helps us with this.
[11:04] God creates the world in six days in Genesis chapter 1. Then at the beginning of Genesis chapter 2, we get this. By the seventh day, God had finished the work he had been doing.
[11:16] So on the seventh day, he rested from all his work. And 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. Now many, many, many different writers have pointed out that there is something missing from the seventh day.
[11:33] Every other day has a morning and evening refrain in it, one to six. The seventh day doesn't have that refrain. So a lot of people, I think, take that to mean, rightly take that to mean that the rest that God enters into is in some sense ongoing.
[11:52] It hasn't stopped. There's no evening yet. The sun hasn't gone down on God's rest. And yet, when you read the rest of the Bible, God is clearly at work.
[12:08] Numerous ways, bringing about his purposes through his people. You see, the Bible has this tension where it sees God being simultaneously at rest whilst also being very, very active at the same time.
[12:23] He's active, but he's at rest. What is he resting from? In Genesis 2, he's resting from his creating work. His creation is complete. And so he rests back in that completion.
[12:34] Things are as they should be. There's peace. There's harmony. There's order. There's all the things as they should be. There's goodness in the creation. It's all complete. It later does get disrupted by sin.
[12:45] But at that point in Genesis 2, it's complete. And so God rests in the completeness of it all. Similarly then, for the analogy here in Hebrews 4 to work, the rest being described is not rest from earthly activity necessarily, but rather it's an entering into the sense of completeness, wholeness, harmony, peace, goodness, just like the original creation.
[13:14] So well-known New Testament scholar Donald Guthrie, he says this. He says, What believers can now enter is none other than the same kind of rest which the Creator enjoyed when He completed His works, which means that the rest idea is of completion and not of inactivity.
[13:34] So that's the second thing. Third thing, the rest is both a present and a future reality. So you might read all of this and you might be tempted to kind of jump the gun a little bit here.
[13:49] And you might say, well, surely He's speaking about heaven. Our eternal rest after we die. Don't we say rest in peace to people who pass away? Isn't that what's going on here? Now that's not entirely wrong, but I do think it is, like I said, to jump the gun a little bit.
[14:05] So look at verse 3. Look at how verse 3 begins. Now we who have believed enter that rest.
[14:16] So the writer says that Christians, we have believed, Christians, present tense, enter that rest. We enter that rest, present tense, when we believe.
[14:28] Not just when you die, but when you believe, he says. So according to the logic then of verse 3, if you're a Christian, there's a sense in which you are in that rest right now. If you're a believer this morning, there's a sense in which you're in that rest right now.
[14:41] But then he does add some more complexity to this idea. So verse 11. Let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will perish by following their example of disobedience.
[14:57] So speaking to Christians, people who have believed and invented the rest, he then says, make every effort to, future tense, enter the rest. So if you're a Christian, there's a sense that you're in this rest already, but you still strive to enter the rest in the future.
[15:15] Do you see that? The future aspect, I think, gives credence to the idea that the rest really being spoken about here in the fullest and ultimate sense is the eternal rest Christians will enjoy with God in the new creation forever.
[15:28] That certainly is in line with the idea of rest being wholeness and completion. And so I think it's legitimate to say, well, yeah, there's a future orientation here.
[15:41] That's true rest. That's ultimate rest. When we're in heaven with God, then you can really, really lounge on the couch. I've got bad news for you because it seems like we'll probably work in heaven. But it'll be good work.
[15:52] Restful work. So that's one way of thinking about it, but it's not the whole way of thinking about it. The rest here also includes a present reality of the believer. So let me take, that's the third thing.
[16:05] So let me take these three things in time together for you. Three ideas. Tell you what I think rest is in Hebrews 4. Based on what we've seen, I think we can say that the rest that's being spoken about here is ultimately a spiritual rest whereby the believer in their heart finds wholeness and completion and peace in the reality of God.
[16:26] Let me say that again. It's a spiritual rest whereby the believer in their heart finds wholeness and completion and peace in the reality of God. It's something we will experience in fullness when we enter into the new creation at the end of the age, but it's also something we experience and we taste now to some extent even in the present.
[16:46] Really it is to have your heart at rest in God. If you want the shorthand. Now friends, I think, and I think you know this, but I think you and I need that more than we possibly, possibly know.
[17:00] So we desperately, desperately need this true rest more than we know. One of my favorite poets is the 19th, I don't have many, but one of my favorite poets, the 19th century poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
[17:15] I first started reading his poetry when I discovered that it was his poem that's behind the Christmas carol, I Hear the Bells on Christmas Day. He has another poem that's called The Day Is Done.
[17:27] And it's a poem about a person who comes home from a long day of toiling. And he's coming home and he's looking for rest. It's been a day of hardship, it's been a day of sadness, and he comes home and he looks for rest in the evening.
[17:42] And the way that the poem is structured, it sounds like he's asking his wife to help him find rest. And what he does is he asks her that she might read a poem to him, to put him to rest.
[17:57] And the fourth stanza goes like this. Come read to me some poem, some simple and heartfelt lay, that shall soothe this restless feeling and banish the thoughts of day.
[18:10] Not from the grand old masters, not from the bard sublime, whose distant footsteps echo through the corridors of time. For like strains of martial music, their mighty thoughts suggest life's endless toil and endeavor.
[18:25] And tonight I long for rest. So in that poem, he makes a really interesting observation about the arts and about all the great poets and writers.
[18:37] He says to his wife, Look, don't read to me a poem by one of the famous poets or lyricists out there. I don't want to hear that. Why? Well, because all the greatest poets in life, what do they write about?
[18:50] They write about the reality of life. And the reality of life is not one of rest. It's one of endless toil. So he provides pretty incisive commentary there on the human condition.
[19:02] That we are restless. Like if you want to go and find a good poem, written by a famous poet, that really strikes at the reality of life, it's going to be about toil. That's what he's saying. Because that's what our life is like.
[19:17] It provides incisive commentary on the human condition. That we are restless. And the greatest works of literature repeatedly point us to this fact. We as a people, and I don't care how long your holiday was, how long that holiday is that you take every year, I don't care how stress-free your job is, I don't care how well behaved and how well your kids sleep at night.
[19:36] We are people who are restless in our souls. And you and I need this true rest from God more than we possibly know.
[19:48] Let me try and illustrate this with a negative illustration, and then I'll try and flip it around and see if it makes sense. When you have a very, very serious fight with somebody who is very, very dear and close to you, like a family member or a friend, often there might be times where you can't reconcile straight away.
[20:05] You can't have the fight and then solve it and everyone be okay with each other because of circumstance, because of whatever. You can't resolve straight away. You can't fix the problem straight away. So imagine that you have an incredibly deep and emotional fight like that with the person who is closest with you in your life.
[20:22] You can't reconcile straight away, and you have to go to work the next day. So now you've got to go into the office. How do you approach work the next day? How do you deal with your colleagues?
[20:36] How's your level of enthusiasm? How's your focus? How's your productivity? All of those things get disrupted, right? Horribly disrupted.
[20:48] They get disrupted by the fight. It casts this big cloud, this big shadow over every single thing that you do that day. Simple mundane tasks like going to the shop and buying some food is now covered by this cloud, this shadow, this unresolved fight.
[21:05] There's no part of your life that's not touched by it. Now because we've probably all had some sort of an experience like that, we know how a negative experience like that can dominate us in all of our activities, in thought, in action, in deed, our attitude.
[21:27] We know what a difference it makes our lives negatively. Now flip that around. Imagine what it would be like to have one positive thing dominate us in thought, in attitude, in action.
[21:47] Imagine what it would be like to wake up in the morning, every morning, wake up in the morning with a very, very, very tangible sense that your heart, your soul, your mind is deeply, deeply at rest in the good, holy, loving, merciful God who created you.
[22:10] That is, you find relationship with God to be your highest, highest satisfaction in this life. You find relationship with God to be your supreme contentment, your ultimate joy, your deepest peace, the thing that completes and justifies your existence, your reason for taking up breath on this planet.
[22:31] Imagine waking up every single day with that idea dominating you. Wouldn't it radically change a day?
[22:45] Totally change a day? Your thoughts, your attitudes, your actions? Wouldn't it make the highs even higher? Wouldn't it make the lows much more bearable? Wouldn't it make you more restful?
[22:58] Even in the midst of hard work, wouldn't it give you peace? Even in chaos?
[23:11] That's what it means to find rest in God. That's what we need more than anything this morning, I think. And not just at the beginning of the year, every day, every month.
[23:25] You don't ultimately need a holiday. You don't ultimately need a less stressful job. You don't ultimately need more compliant and peaceful children. You need to find your rest in God.
[23:40] St. Augustine knew this. That's why he famous, probably the most famous quote of St. Augustine. You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.
[23:52] You will be, you will be eternally restless without God. Now in some ways, that's a scary thought. Because if you think about that first, that beginning of chapter 4, chapter 4 verse 1, fear, he says, fear falling short of this rest.
[24:15] Because you'll be trapped in a life of endless unrest if you fall short of it. So that's the first point. Second point, how do we enter this rest? Well, the passage is pretty explicit on this.
[24:28] Look at verse 1. Therefore, since the promise of entering this rest still stands, let us be careful that none of you be found to have fallen short of it. For we also have had the good news proclaimed to us, just as they did.
[24:42] But the message they heard was of no value to them because they did not share the faith of those who obeyed. Now, we who have believed enter that rest.
[24:53] So you enter this rest through faith. It's explicit twice at the end. The desert wandering Israelites, they failed to enter the rest because they didn't have faith. They didn't trust the voice of God.
[25:04] Their lack of faith led to their disobedience and so they never entered the rest. They had the gospel preached to them, even there in the Old Testament. Did you notice that in verse 2? But their response to the gospel was not one of faith.
[25:18] Now, this is basic Christianity. This is Christianity 101. God has spoken His promises of redemption and salvation, His promises of true rest right from the very start of the Bible right to the very end.
[25:31] The only appropriate human response into that speaking of God to us is faith. Trust that those promises are true, that what He said is actually true.
[25:43] We enter salvation. We enter rest through faith. not through performance, but through faith. You don't work super hard at being a good person and then at some point God looks and says, okay, now you can have some rest.
[25:59] It's not how it works. You enter simply on the basis of faith in the promise of rest. But if you are a very observant reader of this passage, you might say, well, hang on, Stephen, what about verse 11?
[26:15] Let's look at verse 11. It says, let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest so that no one will perish by following their example of disobedience, the example of the Israelites.
[26:27] Let us make every effort. Let us strive to enter that rest. That sounds like performance, doesn't it? Yes? No.
[26:38] There's effort there. There is striving there, but it's not effort or striving to do kind of enough good works so that God finally grants you rest. It is effort and striving, and this is pretty consistent through the book of Hebrews.
[26:52] It's effort and striving to believe the voice of God when He speaks these gospel promises to you. That's where the effort and the striving goes in.
[27:05] Let me explain it this way. God's gospel promises don't come to us uninterrupted in a vacuum. Like there's nothing else there and we just get the gospel promises full and complete.
[27:16] It's not like they're the only thing that we have to focus on in life every single day as you get up. There are all sorts of lesser promises and voices coming at us every single day, every single moment.
[27:26] The minute you get out of here, you're going to open your phone and you're going to have different voices coming at you. You're going to think about what you have to do next week and there are different voices coming at you all the time. All sorts of lesser voices and truths and gospel promises coming to you.
[27:42] I've alluded to some of them already. So there's the little voice that comes to you and says, look, if I just manage to get a less stressful job, then I'll be a more peaceful and content person in life. Or there's the voice that comes along to you that says, when I get through this phase with the kids, where they're at this stage where they don't sleep, they don't believe in sleep, then I'll be a much more restful person.
[28:11] There are thousands of those sorts of gospel, and I put it in inverted commas, gospel promises, like that they come at us every single day. And the temptation is to believe those gospel promises over the voice of God that comes to us in Scripture.
[28:27] And so you need to strive. You need to strive. You need to make every effort to believe the gospel promises of God over and above those other lesser promises. Now some of those lesser promises, they're not actually bad things.
[28:39] Some of you should be looking to find less stressful jobs. Now some of you should be looking to build better routines with your kids, create a more peaceful home environment. Some of you should be scheduling better leave and routines in your work schedule.
[28:54] I mean we haven't even, it's mentioned there, alluded to at least, but we haven't even mentioned the issue of Sabbath observance. It's in the Bible. It's in the Ten Commandments. Even though I think, and I think it's clear from this passage that the Sabbath is ultimately fulfilled in the eternal Sabbath that God provides through Jesus, that doesn't, I think, nullify the obligation of us to observe one day in seven of rest and worship.
[29:20] I'm not persuaded that there's anything in the New Testament that overturns the Sabbath command. I think the gospel changes it radically but doesn't remove it. So even the Bible in that sense thinks that there are numerous practical things you can do in order to be a more rested person.
[29:35] But none of those things are ultimate. None of those things is the gospel. Even Sabbath observance, Lord's Day, regular weekly Lord's Day worship, points beyond itself to the gospel promise of rest in God.
[29:52] And so the striving, the effort that you have to put in is the effort to believe the promises of God over those promises as other promises of rest. Let me illustrate it this way.
[30:07] My daughter loves the water. Both my kids love the water. But my daughter particularly used to love the water, the swimming pool, she loves the sea. But there used to be a time when it was really hard for me to convince her that she loves the water.
[30:24] There were times when I'd want to say to her, it would have been the afternoon, I'd say, let's go to the beach. And then she'd say, no, I don't want to go to the beach. Back then it was usually because she was busy doing something else that she didn't want to go to the beach, like choreographing one of her many, many, many, many, many shows that her very, very, very, very lucky parents got to watch.
[30:43] And so she'd say, I don't want to go. And I'd say, but I promise you'll love it when you get there. I promise you'll love it when you get there. And she'd dig in her heels and she'd say, no, I'm not going.
[30:59] I don't want to go to the beach. Now sometimes I don't just want to go to the beach in the afternoon for her sake, I also want to go for my sake too, for my peace and my rest.
[31:11] And so I'd say, look, end of story, we're going as a family, we're all going to the beach now, but I promise you, I promise you that you'll love it. Just trust me, I promise you you're going to love it.
[31:22] And she might have thrown a little bit of a tantrum, complained about how she's not going to enjoy it, how I've ruined her life and her play, et cetera. But then we'd get to the beach and she'd get into the waves and everything would change.
[31:38] This big delight would kind of come across her face and she'd just get lost in the bliss of the water. And during those moments, I'd often go up to her and I'd say, see, what did I tell you?
[31:53] Trust me, I know what's best for you. And sometimes if I was very, very lucky, she would sheepishly acknowledge that before then she ran off and dived into the water again. Now friends, we have, we have God saying to us, I want to take you to the beach of eternal rest.
[32:14] I want you to swim in the ocean of true peace. All you've got to do is trust in my word. You've got to have faith. You've got to, you've got to trust that I know how to get you there trust that I know what is best for your heart.
[32:34] But often we dig in our heels and we don't trust. We don't trust Israel. We don't trust that we will find our ultimate rest in His gospel promises. Our hearts are often engaged in other things, other lesser promises.
[32:45] And like in my illustration, we can't, with the eyes of faith, see beyond our present to that beach of endless peace and rest.
[32:59] And so you need to strive. You need to strive to enter that rest. You need to make every effort to listen to the voice of God above the cacophony of all the other voices out there that are promising you rest.
[33:12] You need to strive. Make every effort, He says. Now quickly and finally, how are you going to be able to hear God's voice, trust God's voice over all these other appealing, tempting options out there?
[33:27] It's right at the end, verse 12. For the word of God is alive and active, sharper than any double-edged sword. It penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joint and marrow.
[33:39] It judges the thoughts and the attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of Him to whom we must give account.
[33:50] So the author says that God's word is alive. is alive. It's active, it's alive, and it's piercing when it comes to the human heart in a way that no other voice is.
[34:03] There's something so powerful, something so different about God's word that it'll grab your hearts, it'll pierce your hearts, even in the midst of all these other voices that are around trying to get a hearing from you. What is that something?
[34:16] Well, that something is the one who was pierced in the heart for the sake of His people, that He might lead them to eternal rest. You see, Jesus does what Joshua failed to do.
[34:30] He takes His people right into the true promised land of rest by dying sacrificially in our place, redeeming us from our unrest, the unrest of guilt and sin and shame.
[34:42] That's what's at the very core of God's gospel promise of rest to us. His Son entering into the unrest of the cross so that we might enter into eternal rest.
[34:57] That's the voice we need to listen for. That's the voice that's going to grab our attention above everything else because it's such a beautiful voice.
[35:09] When you understand what that voice is saying, it's such a beautiful voice. It's the voice of our forgiveness. It's the voice of our redemption. It's the voice of our justification. It's the voice of our true rest. In Longfellow's poem, he doesn't want to listen to all the other famous voices out there because they all just end up preaching restlessness.
[35:32] He wants another voice to be read to him. This is what he writes. Read from some humbler poet whose songs gushed from his heart as showers from the clouds of summer or tears from the eyelids start, who through long days of labor and nights devoid of ease still heard in his soul the music of wonderful melodies.
[35:58] Such songs have power to quiet the restless pulse of care and come like the benediction that follows after prayer. Friends, I know of only one such humble poet whose song of love and peace quite literally gushed from his heart when the Roman soldier pierced his side with a spear.
[36:20] I know only one person who truly through long days of labor and nights devoid of ease still heard in his soul the music of wonderful melodies.
[36:35] His name is Jesus Christ. He labored for you. He labored for me so that we might enter true rest.
[36:48] And so I say to you as you start this year make every effort to listen to the beautiful voice of God that comes to us in Christ Jesus that you might enter into that rest.
[37:00] Let's pray. Our Father and our King we want to know that rest this morning.
[37:15] We want to know the rest rest that comes only from the voice from your voice. The rest that can't be had through holidays and breaks.
[37:32] The rest that goes right to our souls that allows us to feel rested even in the midst of hard work. Lord help us not to believe in false gospels and false promises of rest thinking that if we just rearrange the furniture of our lives a little bit then we'll understand what true rest is.
[37:54] Help us to believe that that true rest comes only through Jesus because then Lord we will be able to face all the circumstances in our lives with courage with composure and with a deep seated peace a supernatural peace.
[38:09] Grant us that rest this year Lord as we begin to do the many things you called us to to love you love our neighbor serve our families to serve our city to work hard Grant us this rest Lord to undergird every single part of that and I pray for any person who's sitting here this morning who's saying I don't know that rest at all I've never known Jesus I've never known his love I don't know that rest I pray Lord that you would give them a sense of that this morning that you would bring them to a point of repentance and faith in Christ and that they would begin to enter into this rest have mercy Lord we pray for Christ's sake Amen