Rest Reconnects

We need rest to reconnect us to God.  It is not God who is too busy to hear us, it is we who are too busy to hear God.  –Jennifer Megan Varnadore

Have you heard the term “hangry”? Urbandictionary.com defines it as a state of anger and irritability resulting from being hungry or an amalgam of hungry and angry invented to describe that feeling you get when you are irritable from being hungry. For most of us, that doesn’t mean we didn’t have food to eat, either. It’s actually a self-imposed condition because we haven’t taken the time to eat.

Barb talked this weekend about misalignment and used the...
acronym HALT – Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired – to describe the condition we find ourselves in when we haven’t rested. It’s easy to get out of sync. When we get busy, we forget about God. When exhaustion sets in or we feel discouraged, sin starts looking better and better. We become misaligned and those HALT symptoms are often the results—sometimes just one or two of them, but often all together at once. Each of these disconnects us in some way from each other and from God. We start to battle with things like worry, control, the need to try harder, exhaustion, discouragement, burnout and more—all things that are the opposite of what rest and the Sabbath does for us.

Rest fills the need for us to connect, to realign our minds, hearts, bodies and souls to God first and then to each other. The Sabbath reconnects us with His promises and purposes, putting things back in order. We experience love, peace, joy and a heart that is aligned with His will first.

READ and THINK… What does the Bible say?

By the time Jesus came, keeping the law, including the Sabbath, had become an end in and of itself, a way to ensure you were doing the right thing rather than a way to fulfill God’s ultimate law of love. The disciples were breaking the heads off of the grain to eat but the Pharisees asked Jesus why he was letting them harvest on the Sabbath. He uses the example of when King David did the same thing to point out their self-righteousness.

Question: What does Jesus teach and reinforce about why the Sabbath was created?

Mark 2:23-27 (New Living Translation)

²³ One Sabbath day as Jesus was walking through some grainfields, his disciples began breaking off heads of grain to eat.²⁴ But the Pharisees said to Jesus, “Look, why are they breaking the law by harvesting grain on the Sabbath?” ²⁵ Jesus said to them, “Haven’t you ever read in the Scriptures what David did when he and his companions were hungry? ²⁶ He went into the house of God (during the days when Abiathar was high priest) and broke the law by eating the sacred loaves of bread that only the priests are allowed to eat. He also gave some to his companions.”²⁷ Then Jesus said to them, “The Sabbath was made to meet the needs of people, and not people to meet the requirements of the Sabbath.

Answer:

Peter, a disciple of Jesus, is giving specific instructions to both elders and young people about how to lead both themselves and the people around them.

Question: Note how humility and giving your worries to God are connected here. Why does Peter ultimately say we should give our worries and cares to God?

1 Peter 5:6-7 (New Living Translation)

⁶ So humble yourselves under the mighty power of God, and at the right time he will lift you up in honor. ⁷ Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about you.

Answer:

LIVE… What will you do now?

In 1 Peter 5, Peter teaches us to humble ourselves and in the very next verse, says give your worries to God. Why do you think that is? How does this relate to reconnecting with Him?

Review the exercise from this weekend again. Mark an X where you think your current alignment is. Where are you furthest out of alignment? In what ways can having your own Sabbath realign that area first, and then the others?

In the “Back to School” series, so far we’ve discussed Bible reading, prayer, praying Scripture or a Psalm, journaling and now the Sabbath. Which one of these do you need to make a commitment to in order to put things back in alignment and reconnect with God?

PRAY… God, what do you want me to know and do?

Pray for God to show you where you need to realign with Him. Give Him your worries, struggles, exhaustion, burnout, discouragement and anything else that is creating a disconnect. Ask Him to help you with whatever you are dealing with and take time for yourself to be present in the Lord.

 Digging Deeper with this week’s teaching pastor:

Click here to go deeper using the Life Group DVD by the teaching pastor or view the message, including bonus discussion questions.

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