Rest

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Welcome to Thrive. It's good to have you here on June 28th, our first day for a new series called Replenish. My sense is that you're feeling a bit like me right now. You're tired. You're stressed. You're anxious. You know, we've got all this social upheaval been in our society. We've got such anti-social media going on, let's say that, with all the stuff that you read on Facebook and Twitter and how people are responding to each other. We've got the fatigue over the pandemic and our response. We've got what's going on in our personal lives. We miss being able to freely connect with other people and have community and have meals together or even worship together and all the celebrations. We're working through all of this at the same time, and at the same time, we might be working even harder than ever if we are employed, and all the activities that we're used to refreshing us or renewing us, like watching sports or being involved in certain team activities or eating out or shopping or you name it, all have been taken out as well. And so, we're a bit tired. And that's why we need to be replenished and come back to some of the basics of what that means today. We want to rest. We want to rest in God's presence. We want to rest and be replenished. So, how do you rest? How do you rest right now? How do you rest in a very turbulent world during the COVID-19 pandemic? How does that work? And today, we're going to talk about rest as we look at our text from Mark chapter 6. The apostles returned to Jesus and told him all that they had done and taught, and he said to them, come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest for a while. For many were coming and going and they had no leisure even to eat, and they went away in the boat to a desolate place by themselves. Now, I think one of the big questions I want to ask at the beginning of this about being replenished in general is, why rest? Why rest in the first place? Why do we need to rest? Some of us act like we don't, and I'm going to tell you right away, both in the book, the Gospel of Mark, as well as what's throughout the scriptures. One of the big reasons why I need to rest, and I believe why you need to, is this. Simply put, you are not God. You are not God. Though we talked about in the last message on Shift, just this last week, that you are God's gift to the world, that still does not make you God, having to work and solve all the problems in the world all of the time. That's his job. Now, one time Jesus was healing in the Gospel of John on the Sabbath, and the Pharisees and the rabbis and teachers of the law were very upset with Jesus because he was working on the Sabbath, and the way Jesus responded to it was this in John chapter 5. But Jesus answered them, My Father is working until now, and I am working. So Jesus actually is showing his divinity, and his reason for working on the Sabbath was that he was not simply a human being. He was working alongside his Father, and here's the point I think Jesus is going to make, is if God were to stop working, if God were to stop relating to his creation for even one moment in time, it's all gone. Hebrews puts it this way about the Son of God himself, Jesus, he is the radiance of the glory of God, and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. You know what? My words, they don't uphold anything. They might describe something, but they don't accomplish anything of themselves. But Jesus being the word of God, upholds the entire universe with what he says and does. God's word preserve, God's word sustains, God's word create, God's word do what they say. Without God, there's nothing. Now some philosophers back in the 1700s and the 1600s believed and considered, called considered that God was kind of like the divine watchmaker. He creates this intricate creation, this earth and this universe, and then it's set up to run on its own, and he kind of walked off the scene and wasn't involved with that. And so we get involved in the watch itself, figure out how it's working and tinker with it the way we want. That's not what's really true. That's not a biblical understanding at all. It might have been convenient at that time so that human beings could do whatever they want because God was absent, left the building. But the reality is that God has always been involved with his creation. He is creating continually. He's actively engaged with it. He is giving bounty and blessing every day. His mercies, as the psalmist says, and as Jeremiah says in the Lamentations, his mercies are new every morning. Great is his faithfulness. But you are not God. You don't uphold the world. God upholds you. If you think you can work hard enough in this world to finally get to a point of security and uphold your life and put it all together, you are just foolin...