If you would take your Bibles in your hand and we’ll take a break this morning from our study in Psalm 119 to look at Hebrews chapter 4. It’s my privilege and honor to be able to open up God’s Word to us this morning. Hebrews chapter 4. You can find it on page 1002 in the pew Bibles. And we look today at the promise of rest.
“The world is divided into two types of people – those who can sleep and those who cannot!” That’s a quote from a memoir on insomnia that was written a few years ago by a French writer. And in a recent review of that book, Megan Garber describes what she calls as “the protestant sleep ethic.” Obviously, she is making a play on words with what we know as the Protestant work ethic – that tireless dedication to hard work that is, for so many years, it has really shaped and defined life in American culture. But what Garber says is that there has been a new ideal that has emerged, and that ideal is sleep. That sleep, or the lack thereof, affects all sorts of things about it. It affects our mental health, our physical health. It affects our ability to learn, our ability to empathize. It affects just our ability to do the things that we need to get done. And so there is this whole category of goods and services that have developed to assist in the pursuit of good sleep. There’s a weighted blanket; there are white noise machines. There are sleep tracking watches. There are sleep podcasts. There are medications and supplements, all in the name of getting good sleep. Garber says that conspicuous consumption has come to the off-hours.
And the notion is that you can win at sleeping, but on the flipside is that you can also lose at sleeping. She says that the goal is no longer merely to get rest; it is to get good rest. It is to get rest that is everbetter. It’s ever more restorative – more sumptuous, more diligent, more worthy, simply more. There’s a market out there for rest. That’s because we all have a deep need for rest. We all have a deep desire for rest. And not just the kind of rest that comes between 10 and 6, not just the kind of rest that comes when our heads hit the pillows. No, a deeper rest – a rest from our nagging ambitions, a rest from the stresses and the weight of the burdens that we carry, a rest from the consequences of the mistakes we have made. We need a rest from the disappointments of our lives. In other words, we need a rest for our souls. We need a deep, a solid and lasting rest.
And that’s what Hebrews chapter 4 is all about. It’s about that kind of rest. It’s about entering into and enjoying God’s Sabbath rest. But you see, what the writer of Hebrews tells us in these verses that we are about to read, is that that rest that we need, that rest that we so desire, it’s still to come. Because that rest that is still to come, even for those in Christ Jesus, because of that, there is a need for perseverance, for running the race with endurance, for pressing on in faith and obedience to God’s Word. In fact, that’s what the book of Hebrews is all about. The writer calls this letter or this sermon or this book, he calls it “a word of exhortation.” And what we have here is an urgent plea to keep following Jesus. It’s an urgent plea not to turn aside to anything else. And if you have been reading along at all with our church Bible reading plan over the past few months, then what you’ll find is that this chapter, Hebrews chapter 4, is scheduled for the week to come. Now maybe you’re not there that far along, and that’s okay, but what we find in this chapter is something about the importance of spending regular, daily time in God’s Word. Why is that? Because God’s Word is living and active and God’s Word points us to the rest that is offered to us that is ours in Christ Jesus. We can look for rest in many different places, but there’s only one place to find it.
And what I want us to see from Hebrews chapter 4 this morning is two things. I want us to see tomorrow’s hope and today’s faith. Tomorrow’s hope and today’s faith. Before we read, let’s pray and ask God to help us as we study and learn from His Word. Let’s pray.
Father, we thank You for this day that You have given to us, this day to set aside to rest and to worship, to be refreshed and to hear Your Word. We give You thanks that You have given us the fulfillment of all of our promises in Christ Jesus and that Christ has poured out on us the Holy Spirit for those who believe. And so we ask that Your Spirit would work in all of our hearts this morning, that You would open our ears. Help us to hear. Help us to understand. Help us to see what Jesus offers and promises in Matthew chapter 11 – to come to Him and find rest for our souls. We pray that You would do all of that for Your own glory. Speak Lord, for Your servants listen. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.
Hebrews chapter 4, beginning in verse 1:
“Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it. For good news came to us just as to them, but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened. For we who have believed enter that rest, as he has said,
‘As I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest,’’
although his works were finished from the foundation of the world. For he has somewhere spoken of the seventh day in this way: ‘And God rested on the seventh day from all his works.’ And again in this passage he said,
‘They shall not enter my rest.’
Since therefore it remains for some to enter it, and those who formerly received the good news failed to enter because of disobedience, again he appoints a certain day, ‘Today,’ saying through David so long afterward, in the words 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 of another day later on. So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.
Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience. For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.
Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”
Amen. The grass withers and the flowers fall but the Word of our God endures forever.
We’ll see first – tomorrow’s hope. The book of Hebrews has been called “the queen of the New Testament,” when it comes to a New Testament writer quoting from passages from the Old Testament. One writer says that more than any other New Testament book, Hebrews, from the beginning to the end, preaches the Old Testament. In fact, the longest quotation from the Old Testament that we find in the New Testament is found later on in Hebrews chapter 8. It’s from Jeremiah chapter 31. It’s about how Jesus is the Mediator of the new covenant, the one that Jeremiah had spoken of. Well in these verses, it’s not Jeremiah 31, it’s Psalm 95 that is the focus of the writer’s message. And there’s a longer quotation of Psalm 95 that you can find at the beginning of this section, back in chapter 3 verses 7 to 11, but you can see the way, in these verses that we just read, that the writer is weaving in Psalm 95 into his exposition. If you look back at verse 3, “As I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’” And again in verse 5, “They shall not enter my rest.” Verse 7, “Today, today if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.”
All of that is coming from Psalm 95. And Psalm 95 is a psalm of worship and praise. “O come, let us sing to the Lord! Let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!” It’s full of praise, and yet also, Psalm 95 is a psalm of warning. It’s a warning. To not be like the generation of Israelites who wandered in the wilderness, to not be like the generation of the Israelites who failed to believe the promises of God and who failed to enter into their rest in the Promised Land. Because that generation didn’t get to experience the rest. And what David is doing in Psalm 95, is he is calling on the people in his day, many centuries later, he’s calling on them to come and to worship God, to worship the Lord their Maker, to worship the one of whom it can be said, “They are the sheep of his pasture.” To worship Him. But at the end of Psalm 95, David is also calling on them to keep going and to keep listening and hearing the shepherd’s voice, to keep following His Word in order to find rest.
And here’s the point that the writer of Hebrews is trying to make. When David wrote that, the people already had rest. You see, the people to whom David was writing in Psalm 95, they were the ones who were living in the Promised Land. Joshua had already led the people into the Promised Land. Joshua had led the people to conquer the enemies who were there before them and to divide out and to settle the land among the twelve tribes. And it was a good land. It was a fruitful and plentiful land. That’s the land in which the people lived when David is writing Psalm 95. Joshua 21 says, “Thus the Lord gave to Israel all the land that He swore to give to their fathers, and they took possession of it and they settled there and the Lord gave them rest on every side, just as He had sworn to their fathers.” They had rest in the land. And here is David, and some time later he has been made king over the land and over the people. And 2 Samuel chapter 7 says that the king, that David, “lived in his house and the Lord had given him rest from all of his surrounding enemies.” He was king over all of the tribes; he reigned and ruled and administered justice and equity to all the people. The king and his people had rest. They were not slaves anymore in Egypt. They were not wandering around the wilderness anymore. They weren’t defending themselves from the attacks of their enemies. No. Instead, they were enjoying the freedom to worship God in the tabernacle in Jerusalem. They were enjoying the blessing of life together in the Promised Land. They were enjoying the prosperity of that land.
Why? Because God had given them rest. And yet, in Psalm 95, David, who is writing in this time of rest, he is warning the people, he is warning them not to be like the generation that wandered in the wilderness. And he is warning them not to harden their hearts in disbelief and disobedience. Why? So that they would not miss out on rest. You see, David is stirring up, David is exhorting the people, the people with rest, not to miss rest. And that’s the point that the writer of Hebrews is making – that this rest, the rest that David is talking about, that he is talking about, is a rest that is still to come. Look at verse 1. It says the promise of entering his rest still stands. Verse 9, “There remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God.” You see, Joshua did not give them that rest. Verse 8 says that if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on. And David didn’t give it to them either, or else he wouldn’t have said, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.” There’s something more that is still to come.
I was watching an interview once with a couple of well-known celebrities and one of them was talking about growing up in a dangerous neighborhood. He was growing up in a time where they didn’t have very much money. Things were hard; things were tough. And he said that his kids would never experience the kind of things that made him who he was because they had it too good. And then the interviewer said this. He said, “It’s going to be different for your kids. Your problem was, ‘Things are bad, I’ve got to make it good,’ but their problem is going to be, ‘Things are good, why do I feel so bad.’”
And maybe some of us can feel that way too because most of us have it pretty good. We have all of the things that look like rest. We have comfort and safety. We have our needs provided for with food and shelter and clothing. We have all of our needs in abundance in many ways. And even if we are here today and we can say that we are a part of, in some way, the community of God’s people, we are connected to God’s people in some way, and yet for so many of us we can feel very far removed from a sense of rest. And there’s busyness and there’s stress, there’s conflict, there’s anxiety, there’s worry, there’s anger, there’s grief, there’s pain. And those things for us can be so hard to shake from our lives. But then there’s so much work to be done all the time. I wonder if any of you ever have the feeling that you just can’t stop working. Not that you aren’t allowed to, but that you don’t want to stop working because in our work there is tied up in there a sense of who we are – our identity, our purpose, our worth is tied to what we do, how we work, and we just can’t stop working. We stress over it. We obsess over it.
I heard about one of our sister churches that when they are hiring, or looking to hire someone new for the church staff, they would ask one particular question to each candidate and it was, “What do you think about when you don’t think about anything at all?” In other words, where does your mind go? What does your mind go to? What about for you? What is that thing that you think about when you don’t think about anything at all? Is it always turning back to what needs to be done? Is it always returning to the responsibilities and obligations and the activities of our lives, the things we think, “If they don’t get done then we won’t find satisfaction”? You hear people say it all the time – people talk about things like, “You know, I just thrive under pressure and deadlines. I do better when I’m busy. The normal for me is a sense of low-grade chaos.” And you hear those kinds of things. That describes many of our lives. And yet that’s not rest and it’s not good.
And the writer of Hebrews, he is exhorting these believers, he is exhorting us to strive after rest. And he says that there are two groups of people – it’s not those who sleep and can’t sleep – but two groups of people – those who believe and enter into rest and those who do not believe and those whom God says, in verses 3 and 5, “They shall not enter my rest.” He is writing to those who believe and he says in verse 11, he says, “Let us therefore strive to enter that rest so that no one may fall by the same sword of disobedience.” You see, that’s tomorrow’s hope. It’s the rest of God. It’s like God’s rest on the seventh day of creation when God rested from all His works. Everything was good. Man and woman had peace with God. They had peace with each other; they had peace with the creation. They even had peace within. God’s blessing was on the whole creation. And yet what happened in Genesis chapter 3? Sin unraveled all of it and sin brought instead conflict and curse. Sin brought disease and disaster. Sin brought death and it cut us off from God, it cut us off from one another. That’s the tension that we all face. Yes, there is new life for all those who believe in Jesus, there is rest, for sure, and yet we still experience sickness and pain and sorrow and death. God has not yet brought in the fullness of His Sabbath rest. It is yet to come.
By the way, that’s why we continue to keep Sabbath. That’s why we continue to protect and to guard a Sabbath day in our lives. It’s to practice that rest; it’s to structure our lives around that rest of which we so much anticipate. And it’s to keep our longing and our anticipation ever before our minds of striving after that rest that God has prepared for us. It’s important for us to maintain a Sabbath Day of rest.
So then how do we strive after that rest? How does the writer of Hebrews tell us to strive after that rest? Well you know what he says? He says tomorrow’s hope, it matters what we do today. And so there’s tomorrow’s hope but there’s also today’s faith. He says in verse 7, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.” Do you know what is the most important day in a Christian’s life? I think there could be a case made that it’s the day when you first believe, when you first trust in Christ and you are given new life, you are born again. There’s also a case that could be made that the most important day in a Christian’s life is the day of death, when we depart, and as Paul says, we are “with Christ, which is far better.” But you know what I think we could take from Hebrews chapter 4 and even from Psalm 95 before that? It’s that we could make the case that today is the most important day in a Christian’s life. What is the most important day in your Christian life? It’s today. It’s right now. Because today, you have the opportunity to hear God’s Word. Today you have the opportunity to trust His promises. Today you have the opportunity to obey God’s Word. Today. And it would be so easy for us to harden our hearts. It would be so easy for us to let our minds wander, to let our focus drift. It would be so easy to get caught up with the distractions of our lives. Don’t you find that so often we want to drown out God’s Word? We want to push it back. We want to push it down so it doesn’t get in the way of our own desires, it doesn’t interfere with our sinful inclinations. And it would be easy to harden our hearts.
It would be easy to harden our hearts in another way as well. We could rest on what we have done in the past and think that that’s good enough, or we could look to the future and say, “You know there’s still time left for me to get serious about God and my own soul.” But what about today? And C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters, he is imagining different scenarios in which Satan might tempt a believer in Christ. And in one of the letters in which a senior demon writes to a lesser demon, he says, “Humans live in time, but our Enemy,” or God, “destines them for eternity. And He wants them to attend chiefly to two things – one, to eternity, and second, to this point of time in which we call the present.” And he says that, “The present is the point in which time touches eternity.” And that can be true for us. We can be oftentimes fixated on the past. We rest on past successes or we dwell on and obsess over past mistakes and failures. Or likewise, we can be tempted to focus only on the future and to worry about what tomorrow may bring to us, or to put off today what we could do tomorrow – procrastinate.” But you see the key, the writer of Hebrews is saying to us, the key to entering God’s rest is what we do today. Don’t delay. Don’t put it off. Don’t harden your hearts. Don’t give way to unbelief but hear what God says to you today. Trust Him today. Obey Him today. Strive to enter into that rest.
You know in a congregation of this size, there are all sorts of reasons of why you are here, why we are here today. It could be a deep love for God’s Word and a zeal to worship Him together with God’s people. But we have to know that there are some here that are here because of a family upbringing, because that’s the routine and the practice of a lifestyle that has been developed since childhood. Maybe you are here today because your parents made you come or your spouse made you come. Perhaps you’re here and you don’t know exactly why you are here, but you’re here, and you’re here for a reason. It’s not an accident that you are here today and you are here today to hear this word from God. And this passage is saying to every one of us – there is a promise of God’s rest that is available to you. Don’t harden your hearts. Don’t ignore God’s Word today, but hear what He is saying to you. And what you will find, what you will find in God’s Word is that it is living and active, it is sharper than any two-edged sword. It cuts through the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow.
In other words, God’s Word will lay you bare and it will expose your deepest desires and greatest needs. It will discern the thoughts and the intentions of your heart. Verse 13 says, “No creature is hidden from his sight but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” If you will just open your ears and hear and pay attention to what God is saying to you today and every day you hear God’s Word, you will find that it is true and it is relevant to your lives and to the needs of that day. And that’s one of the guidelines that I take before I stand up here and open God’s Word and preach His Word and any time before I can say anything to anyone else, God’s Word has to say something to me. I have to preach it to myself. It has to speak to me before it can speak to anyone else. And that’s true, and it always is. God’s Word always has something for me and I need to hear what this passage is saying today. I need to rest from trying to prove myself and trying to do what I think is right. I need to hear and to trust God’s Word today, and so do you. And so do you.
Because God’s Word shows us Jesus. God’s Word shows us the one who gives us a better way. God’s Word shows us the one who makes a way to God. His Word shows us the one who provides a true and a lasting rest; the one that we so deeply desire if we would only trust in Him today. And Jesus is that one who will provide that rest because Jesus is the one who came and took on the restlessness of our lives. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. He knows the brokenness and the sinfulness of this world and the pressures that we all face and He took the consequences of sin and death on Himself at the cross. And yet it was by His resurrection that He defeated all of those things. He defeated sin and death. He brings in a new creation. He is the one who brings in and establishes the true Sabbath rest of the new creation, eternal rest. And when we trust in Him, we can enjoy that rest right now, to be sure. We can lay down all of our attempts to work hard enough and to be good enough. We can lay down and put behind us the burden of our sin and the guilt that we carry around. It will harm us and condemn us no more. “There is therefore no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.” Our sins are forgiven. And we can enjoy being made right with God and growing in the fruits of righteousness.
And we can enjoy all of those aspects of the rest that Christ has secured for us right now, today, and yet there is also something about the fullness of that rest that is still to come. There’s still to come a day when there will be no more sickness and sorrow, pain, death, conflict, strife. There is still to come a day when we will be in the new heavens and the new earth, experiencing the fullness of that rest forever. And so don’t harden your hearts. Hear His voice. Hear His voice today and do all that you can to strive to enter that rest.
Kenneth Bailey tells the story of meeting a woman who had come from communist Latvia and she told him how she came to faith in Christ. She said that when she was growing up, she grew up in a time, in a context where there was no church, there were no Christians, there was no allowance of any sort of religion. There was no allowance of any sort of religion. It was an atheist and secular culture to the core. Except for at funerals, and at funerals, at a graveside service, the people were allowed to recite the Lord’s Prayer. And she didn’t know what that meant. She didn’t know what that was. She didn’t know what they were saying when they said the Lord’s Prayer together. But she said that when communism fell and she had the opportunity to go and to search out what those words meant, what was the Lord’s Prayer, and she said to this writer, she said, “When you are in total darkness, the tiniest point of light is very bright and for me, the Lord’s Prayer was that light.” She said, “By the time I found out its meaning, I was a Christian.”
It didn’t take very much. It didn’t take much at all. It was just a little bit of God’s Word that took her to Christ, and because God’s Word took her to Christ, she went from a place of oppression and atheism and the harsh living of her culture and she found rest. She found one who is able to sympathize with our weaknesses in every way because He was tempted just like we are, yet without sin. And she found one in Jesus to whom she found access to the throne of grace that she might find mercy and grace to help in the time of need. And that’s what we have too. And we have so much more than just a little fragment of God’s Word. We have the whole Bible open before us. Don’t harden your hearts. Don’t neglect it. Don’t put it away. But hear what God has to say to you. Hear what He has to say to you today, and let’s strive to enter the rest of the people of God, the Sabbath rest of the people of God.
Let’s pray.
Father, we thank You for this promise of rest. We thank You for holding it before our eyes and presenting it to us in all the goodness of the Gospel in Christ Jesus, that this rest is not something that we can manipulate, manufacturer on our own, but it’s something that Christ has secured for us and offers it to us as a free gift, simply to receive by faith. Give us that faith. Give us that faith today. Give us the faith to keep on believing, to keep on trusting, to keep on hearing and to keep on obeying. Help us to enjoy the rest that You give to us. Help us to spread that rest into the different aspects and relationships and the struggles and challenges of our lives that we would display Your goodness and Your glory to a world which so desperately needs rest. And we pray all of this in Jesus’ name, amen.