Rest

Rest is a central concept in the Christian life embracing, on the personal level, sleep, serenity, sabbath and salvation. On a creational level, rest is the goal of creation and the result of salvation. As we will see, resting has theological and spiritual overtones: our rest patterns express our real beliefs about God and life. Restless people have not found peace with God or with themselves. Restless societies are out of sync with God’s purposes. Rest is a discipleship issue and a matter of Christian growth for the individual. From a more comprehensive perspective we should see rest as the goal of creation as the threefold rest of God, humankind and creation, which is best expressed in the concept of sabbath. This involves social rest (instead of social instability), economic rest (instead of economic slavery), creational rest (instead of environmental rape).

On the personal level, rest in sleep is a temporary cessation of activity in order to refresh body and soul, sometimes through dreaming. Of course one can oversleep. Oversleep, like overwork, is moral sloth and a spiritual disease. But for most people sleep, like other forms of rest, is a problem. Indeed, insomnia is probably the number one physical problem in Western societies today. Many do not bless themselves and God with a good night’s sleep. Some cannot. One cannot sleep if one bears the world’s problems on one’s shoulders, in other words, if one is playing God. “He grants sleep to those he loves” interprets the first part of the verse in Psalm 127:2: “In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat.” It also explains Psalm 127:1: if you work at night to get things done, it is not the Lord who is building the house but just your own efforts. Justification by grace through faith leads to justification expressed in sleep: resting in Christ’s finished work, resting in God’s sovereignty, resting in the Spirit’s ongoing creative ministry. Failure to sleep may have physiological causes, but more often than not, insomnia has roots in one’s theology and spirituality. The gospel of Jesus literally puts a person to sleep.

Serenity, another form of rest, comes largely through leisure and play. In this case rest means “repose,” “refreshment” and “restoring equilibrium to one’s body and person.” It is not merely taking a “pause that refreshes” (in order to get back to work as soon as possible), as Robert Johnston once characterized the Protestant view of play. Rest is good simply for its own sake. We should avoid trying to buy this rest.

Leisure is defined negatively as “time free from alienating and oppressive work” and positively as “time liberated for creativity, social interaction, self-realization, fantasy and play.” But in the Western world a tragic exchange is made. People work for money and try to buy rest: a media experience, a gourmet meal or an expensive vacation in an exotic getaway. The problem is that when we get “there,” we bring our work with us. Many people say they have to get back to work to feel rested again! “Leisure,” Gordon Dahl says, “has come to mean little more than an ever more furious orgy of consumption. . . . This `virtuous materialism’. . . offers men the choice of either working themselves to death or consuming themselves to death—or both” (Johnston, p. 11). The day of rest has become another day of work (see Consumerism).

We need both leisure and sabbath. But we need sabbath more than we need leisure. Sabbath—daily (as we live contemplatively) and weekly (keeping a day for recreating worship and play)—is both a divine principle and a gracious gift. In a sense we do not keep sabbath; sabbath keeps us—keeps us focused on the really real, keeps us centered on meaning and purpose, keeps our priorities right. Sabbath is not only a day but a lifestyle lived in harmony with God’s purpose for everything there is: the threefold harmony of God, humankind and creation.

Death is the final rest in this life. Often described as “sleeping,” death is not the annihilation of life but true rest. It is relinquishing this life’s burdens, restoring full bodily life in the resurrection of the body and renewing life in the new heaven and the new earth (Rev. 21-22) in the presence of God forever.

Not surprisingly, Jesus chose the word rest to describe salvation. Gathering up biblical concepts that encompass serenity, sabbath and salvation, Jesus gave his gospel invitation: “Come to me . . . and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). In a translation of an Aramaic version of this verse the sabbath allusion is more apparent: “Come to me and I will rest [sabbath] you; you will find sabbath for your souls.” Rest encompasses both creation’s purpose and salvation’s goal. The author of the letter to the Hebrews invites us paradoxically to “make every effort to enter that rest” (Hebrews 4:11). Rest is what we are saved for; rest is the way we are saved. People who cannot retire, who cannot relinquish anything in this life, who cannot stop working, who cannot put down a task, who cannot let someone else take over, who have never done enough to feel prepared to enter that rest or, in the words of the psalmist, cannot let the Lord “build the house” (Psalm 127:1), do not know the meaning of rest. Augustine’s much-quoted line is apt: “You [God] have made us for yourself, and our hearts find no rest until they rest in You.” This great insight applies not only to eternal but also to temporal rest.

» See also: Creation

» See also: Ecology

» See also: Leisure

» See also: Play

» See also: Recreation

» See also: Sabbath

» See also: Sleeping

References and Resources

R. Banks, The Tyranny of Time: When 24 Hours Is Not Enough (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1983); P. A. Heintzman, A Christian Perspective on the Philosophy of Leisure (Ottawa: National Library of Canada, 1985); R. K. Johnston, The Christian at Play (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983); J. Oswald, The Leisure Crisis: A Biblical Perspective on Guilt-Free Leisure (Wheaton, Ill.: Victor Books, 1987); L. Ryken, Work and Leisure in Christian Perspective (Portland, Ore.: Multnomah, 1987).

—R. Paul Stevens