Grace Baptist Church, Nokomis, IL.

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It’s amazing how busy people are today. If God were a police officer, He’d be giving many of us speeding tickets. We often keep ourselves way too busy, and we need to learn to slow down, and rest.

One of the ten commandments is that we take one day off every week to rest. And while the Sabbath day isn’t exactly the same as what we observe when we come together as a church, there are some parallels. We are to rest in Jesus. He is our Lord. He is our Savior. He is the reason we come together.

But even as we come together, I fear so many are doing so not to rest in Him, but just as another work they do in order to try to please God.

When Jesus went to Mary and Martha’s house, Martha got busy for Jesus. She cleaned the whole house. She cooked a great meal. She served all the guests. And she did all these things because she wanted to please God. But all the while, God was teaching in her house, and the only thing that was necessary was to sit at His feet, and rest.

How often do we treat church that way? Do we sometimes get so busy, but miss the necessary thing? It’s great to get to work for Jesus, and God wants us to serve Him, but that should come out of having a real, and joyful relationship with Jesus. And we can only have that kind of relationship with Jesus when we rest in Him.

Read Luke 6:1-5

Already in Luke we’ve seen how the Pharisees questioned Jesus and His disciples several times. It’s like they’re following Jesus around just to be critical of Him.

It’s kind of like how, today, a lot of people seemingly go to church just to complain about church. Somehow, in America especially, a lot of people have gotten the impression that church is a spectator sport. But it’s not. Football is a spectator sport. When you attend a football game, or just watch it on tv, you sit down and watch. You watch it to be entertained. You get excited when the game goes the way you want it to, but you complain when it doesn’t. You criticize the players if they make mistakes. You criticize the referees if they make bad calls. And you can safely do these things because you’re not really part of the game. If you did those things consistently as a player in the game, you’d get thrown out for bad sportsmanship. Or your coach would pull you out and have you sit down and calm down.

But in so many churches, this kind of behavior is commonplace. They criticize the pastor and worship leaders from their seats. They criticize the Sunday school teachers and deacons. They complain about every little thing, and they leave churches they just don’t like. And they think all this is okay because, for them, church isn’t really about coming together to serve God, but about being entertained.

But church is not a spectator sport! We’re to come together to worship God. We’re to come together to serve both God and one another. And every single Christian ought to be involved in the ministry of the church, and when that happens, it’s hard to be overly critical of the ministry that you’re a part of.

But it’s not just churches that people are often critical of. We’re often critical of other people. The Pharisees seemed to just follow Jesus around criticizing Him. I mean, find something better to do with your life, right?

But do you ever do that, too? Is there a certain person that you just love to see fail? Maybe they’ve offended you, or their lifestyle offends you, or you just don’t like them or they just don’t like you. So whenever you see them, maybe it’s not that you wish harm on them, but you secretly hope that you’re doing better than them.

Listen, we’re all in this together. We’ve got to rejoice when others rejoice and weep when others weep. Otherwise, when you weep, there may be no one to weep with you. And when you rejoice, there may be no one to rejoice with you. Don’t be critical of others, but come alongside them and love them.

But this concept was so far from the Pharisees. Instead of being humble before Jesus, they questioned Jesus (v. 2). But, of course, this wasn’t merely a question, but a judgment.

It’s not wrong to ask Jesus questions. God created us to be inquisitive. To wonder. To think. To search the Scriptures so that we might grow in our faith and be in awe of Him. God loves when we take all of our questions to Him in faith. It’s not wrong to ask God questions. But it is wrong to doubt God’s authority and judge Him, because who are we to criticize God?

So Jesus answered them with a story from the Scriptures (v. 3-4). Before David was king of Israel, he was often running from King Saul, who was trying to kill him because David was rising in power and people were looking up to him even more than the king. So one day when David and his group were on the run, and didn’t have time to stop and prepare a proper meal, they entered the temple in Jerusalem and ate the bread of the Presence.

Now, the bread of the Presence was a very interesting foreshadowing of Jesus Christ, who is the true bread of life. The Jewish priests would make this bread out of flour and set it out each Sabbath onto a table made of gold into two piles of six loaves of bread, for a total of twelve loaves of bread. And it would sit there for six days. And on the seventh day, the priests would eat it, and replace it with new bread, which would sit there for six days, and the cycle would continue that way, so that there was always fresh bread, called the bread of the Presence, in the Holy place. And it reminds us of how Christ’s presence is always with us to sustain us. He never gets stale. He nourishes us with Himself, so that we can always be filled with His peace.

And yet part of the regulations regarding the bread of the Presence was that it could only be eaten by the priests. It was not common bread. It was holy, set apart. Yet when David entered the temple and was hungry, the priests there made an exception for him and his men, and they were given the bread of the Presence for food, and they ate it.

You see, David had a very significant role in the history of Israel. He was highly regarded. So the Pharisees didn’t know what to make of this story, because on the one hand, the law said that the bread of the Presence was only to be eaten by priests, but on the other hand, David, whom they loved, ate that bread. So the reason Jesus told this story to the Pharisees was to make this point: verse 5, “The Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.”

You see, the Pharisees had tunnel vision on obeying the letter of the law. But they completely missed that the law wasn’t meant merely to be obeyed, which was impossible to get perfect, but that it was to point us to Christ, who fulfilled the law perfectly for us. When David and his men ate the bread of the Presence, they weren’t displeasing God, but were being sustained by Christ in their time of hunger. And when Jesus’s disciples plucked and ate some of the heads of grain, they were not displeasing God, but were praising God for what God was providing for them.

You see, we dishonor God when we reduce following Him to a checklist, but we glorify Him when we continually rejoice that Jesus is always with us, in our presence, and He is Lord.

Is Jesus the Lord of your Sabbath? What I mean is this: when you come here to worship, do you truly worship? Or is it just something you do out of routine? And even more than that, do you rest in Jesus? You see, the Sabbath in the Old Testament was all about rest. The word “Sabbath” literally means, “stop!” Stop working! Get some rest!

Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is take a nap.

The Bible says, “Be still and know that I am God.” And it says, “In peace I will both lie down and sleep, for You alone, oh Lord, make me dwell in safety.” Part of being a Christian is recognizing life is not all about work, but about resting in the grace of God.

Even God rested on the seventh day. It wasn’t because He got tired, and needed to rest, but it was to establish a pattern for us, because we do need the rest. God declared that we should do no work on the Sabbath. It was a holy day, to be used to rest from work, and to worship God. It was to remind us that all that we have, and all that we need comes from God, so we must rest in Him.

And then there were also years of resting. Every seventh year, the Jews were to observe a whole year of Sabbath rest. They were not to sow seed, or to plow. They were to allow the land to produce whatever the land produced naturally, and they could live off of what God provided for them. This gave the people a prolonged period of rest. And it gave the land an opportunity to rest, so that the soil would be more healthy. It’s extremely important to rest!

So it’s interesting how for so many people today, our days of rest are often anything but restful. We’re busy doing so many things. We rush to see family. We try to get a few things done around the house. We squeeze in a church service or two. We’re often rushing around so much that when Monday morning comes, we’re so tired from the weekend that we hardly have enough energy to get up and start our week!

Sometimes the problem is that we’re just too busy. And many people need to take a look at what they’re doing to see if those things really need to be done, or can be left undone. We don’t have time for everything, so let’s spend our time doing the most important things: worshiping God and training our children to worship God.

But sometimes the problem isn’t necessarily that we’re too busy, but that we’re looking at our busyness the wrong way. When the Pharisees criticized Jesus, their criticism basically came down to, “You’re doing too much on a day set aside for resting!” But they didn’t even consider the possibility that Jesus and His disciples were actually resting by plucking the grain and eating it. Jesus and His disciples weren’t intensely laboring over the fields. They were enjoying that which God provided for them. And sometimes the answer to our feeling of busyness is simply to be in awe of how God is providing for us.

To have Jesus as Lord of your Sabbath means to have Jesus as Lord of your rest. That means that even when life is hectic, since you have Jesus, you have rest. And therefore, the work you do isn’t work that drains you, but is done to the glory of God, and therefore fuels you to enjoy Him and the rest He gives you.

When Mark quoted these words, he wrote, “The Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.” In other words, Jesus was saying, “I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, because I’m Lord of all things!” And it’s interesting that in saying that, Jesus was explaining not His own actions, but the actions of His disciples.

Did you get that?

When we’re associated with Jesus, we share in Jesus’s authority and privileges. Because Jesus is lord of the Sabbath, His disciples could walk through the field and pluck grain on the Sabbath and eat it. And because Jesus is Lord, we, His disciples, can walk by His power, not fearing future persecution, not fearing our past sins, but living to the glory of God because of His Holy Spirit inside us.

But this is only true when Jesus is truly your Lord.

The bigger picture here is that we enter the Sabbath rest of Jesus when we trust in Jesus. What we’re saying is that we cannot work hard enough to earn God’s favor. We can’t earn our place in Heaven. So we simply rest in what Jesus did for us on the cross.