Ultimate rest is found in Jesus, not in vacations or material objects. Christ has already done everything for us. Just like the man with the withered hand, you have been restored by Jesus—maybe not through physical healing, but through something even better. Because of his sacrifice on the cross, we can rest.

In a culture defined by never-ending news feeds and social media at our fingertips, where do we go for rest? Vacations? I don’t know about you, but when I return from a vacation, I’m often more exhausted than when I left. That’s because true rest isn’t found on exotic beaches or mountain retreats. It’s found in Christ. Here’s what I mean by that.
In Luke 6, we encounter two events having to do with Sabbath rest. In the first, Jesus and his disciples are walking through fields of grain. As they go, they pluck the grain, rub it between their fingers, and eat it. This elicits a harsh rebuke from the Pharisees. They claim picking grain and eating it is a violation of the Sabbath command. Jesus responds emphatically, “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath” (Luke 6:5).
In the very next verse, Jesus is teaching in a synagogue on another Sabbath day. Knowing the Pharisees are again watching him, he calls forward a man who has a physical handicap, a shriveled hand. With all eyes on him, Jesus says, “I ask you, is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save a life or to destroy it?” Looking right at the Pharisees, Jesus then says to the man, “Stretch out your hand,” and the man’s hand is restored (Luke 6:6–10).
Both events infuriated the Pharisees while teaching us a very important lesson about Sabbath rest. Sabbath means rest for the restless and unburdening the burdened. The entire purpose of the Sabbath is restoration. Jesus could have waited to heal this man, but he didn’t. Instead, he restored the man with the withered hand on the Sabbath. Likewise, Jesus restores us as we find rest in him. Through his resurrection, Jesus became the truer and better Sabbath, allowing us to forever cease laboring to attain God’s favor and to rest in his mercy and grace.
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God’s Word is alive and the greatest way to prove its truthfulness is not by building arguments around it, but to unleash it, to proclaim it, to let it go on the offensive and convince all who have ears to hear that God’s Word is true! 

It’s been said that the best offense is a good defense. However, it is also true that if your defense spends too much time on the field, they will eventually fatigue and fold. For that reason, it is equally true that the best defense is a good offense.
And when it comes to apologetics, the art and science of defending the faith, it is important to do more than play defense, but also to go on the offensive. With firm confidence that God’s Word is unbreakable (John 10:35), firmly fixed in the heavens (Ps. 119:89), unfailing in accomplishing God’s will (Isa. 55:11), and always proving itself true (Ps. 18:30; Prov. 30:5), there is no reason to merely defend God’s Word. Instead, we should positively proclaim the Scriptures as the living and active word of God.
Articulating this point forcefully with respect to biblical inerrancy, the late Philip Edgcumbe Hughes (1915–90) reminds us that Christians should do more than defend the faith, we must also proclaim the faith positively. Here’s what he says,
We who cherish the orthodox and evangelical faith have become too defensive about the Bible; we have grown accustomed to jumping from a worthy premise: “The Bible is the Word of God,” to a conclusion negative in form: “. . . therefore it is inerrant.” This, of course, is not wrong in itself, but suggest that it reflects the position into which we have allowed ourselves to be maneuvered. We must move on to the offensive, boldly wielding this powerful weapon that we know to be the sword of the Spirit (Eph. 6:17), as we positively (and, I believe, more biblically) proclaim to the world that the Bible is the Word of God and therefore is living, dynamic, penetrating, and unfailingly effective as it cuts with the edge of redemption for the believer and with the edge of condemnation for the unbeliever (Heb. 4:12). (“The Problem of Historical Relativity,” in Scripture and Truth, 194)
Writing in a book that defends the truthfulness of Scripture, Hughes is clearly not questioning inerrancy. Rather, he is reminding us that the primary task of proclaiming Scripture is positive, not negative. This is seen in the pastoral duty outlined by Paul in Titus 1:9, which says that the overseer “must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it.” Notice the order: the faithful pastor-teacher-theologian must positively give instruction and then in service to sound doctrine, he must defend the faith by recognizing error and rebuking those who contradict the truth.
The defense of biblical inerrancy is a necessary endeavor, because there are many who question the complete truthfulness of Scripture. And thus, there is a place for defending the Bible from those who question it. Still, Hughes makes an important caveat, when he turns the defensive posture of biblical inerrantists into a positive proclamation of God’s living and active word. Recognizing the way many advocates for truth overreact and overcorrect in response to error, he observes a weakness in how many argue for inerrancy—namely, by immediately protecting inerrancy in the autographs, now extinct, of Moses, Isaiah, and Paul.
Without denying the important or inerrancy of the original autographs, he questions if immediately appealing to the autographs is really that helpful. Here’s Hughes’ seven-point argument:
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Expecting congregants to deplete their mental energy in efforts to prevent certain verbal descriptions from prompting mental images is counterproductive. I think it better for congregants to focus on the sermon’s message without troubling themselves about any mental images that may naturally occur in the process.

The Bible is not a logically organized collection of abstract propositional statements of theological and philosophical truths. The Bible is instead a divinely inspired account of God’s redemptive work in history. This infallible record of redemptive history progresses toward, climaxes in and reflects upon the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. Preaching that is rooted in this historical context often suggests to the mind of the listener mental images representing concrete historical realities. Among these concrete historical realities are the acts of Jesus described in the gospel narratives and the Old Testament descriptions of God’s appearing to people through created forms. How is a preacher to preach on texts such as these? There are different approaches depending on one’s understanding of mental images that are representations of deity.
Before going on, let me make clear that I am not talking about mental images that are attempts to depict the inner essence of God. The Bible never gives a verbal description of the inner essence of God, which no man has seen or can see. The inner essence of God is eternal and thus indescribable and undepictable. Any effort to depict the divine inner essence visually or mentally would be a serious transgression of the second commandment. All such efforts are futile attempts to do the impossible.
Yet what about the Old Testament accounts of God’s appearing to people in created forms through visions and theophanies and the New Testament accounts of the life of Jesus, who is God Incarnate? When preaching from such texts, what approach should the preacher take considering that verbal portrayals may inspire mental images? I will broadly describe three possible approaches and then recommend one of the three.
The first approach is simply to elaborate on the concrete details in the text. For example, a text may imply that Jesus’ head was stained with blood from thorn wounds. The blood of Jesus can be a synecdoche for Jesus’ human nature (the part for the whole), and a mental image of that blood can be a metonymy for the divine person subsisting in that human nature. A mental image of the blood could then be a mental representation of the second person of the Godhead.  Nevertheless, this first approach simply elaborates on the blood without concern that some may envision the blood in their minds. Mental images such as this, though not absolutely necessary to understand what was said, are often a natural and normal part of mental comprehension. Some ministers only elaborate on these concrete realities, and others sometimes go a step further and encourage their listeners to envision them.
A second approach is to emphasize and promote such mental images as channels of worship to God and as channels of grace from God. Some churches teach that one may venerate an image through a lesser form of worship and that the worship will terminate on the prototype of the image and not on the image itself. Some churches also teach that the sacrifice of the cross as an historical event is mystically present whenever they observe the Lord’s Supper. Some churches could similarly teach “that Christ and the events of his life become present to us here and now through the power of human imagination.” (See the section “The Genre of a ‘Life of Christ’” in the Introduction by Milton Walsh to part one, volume one of The Life of Christ by Ludolph of Saxony.) The Jesuits in the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation developed and promoted “spiritual exercises” that stressed the imagination’s use of all five senses as a means of being present at historical events in the life of Jesus.
A third approach is for the preacher to warn his congregants against mental images before preaching on certain texts. In preaching on the crucifixion, for example, the preacher could exhort his congregants to think of the crucifixion only in terms of propositional statements about the crucifixion without any mental imagining of what the crucifixion might have looked like. Or the preacher could advise his congregants that they may imagine a man on a cross in order to get a better sense of the crucifixion but only so long as they are careful not to identify that man with Jesus. Here are two sample warnings taken from Ralph Erskine’s book Faith No Fancy:
If therefore, when a believer hath his mind occupied about the knowledge and faith of this truth, That Christ hath a true body, an imaginary idea of that body should obtrude itself, and form an image of that body in his brain, and so shewing it, where it really is not, and where it does not exist, nor cannot be seen; he ought to deal with that imaginary idea as Abraham did, Gen. xv.11 When the fowles came down upon the carcases, he drove them away: So ought believers to drive such vain imaginations away, as they would do the devil himself tempting them, and diverting their minds from the faith of that truth, to an idle fancy about a human body. If he cannot rid himself of it as long as vain thoughts lodge within him, yet he ought daily to pray and plead with God, that he may be delivered from it; otherwise he cannot attend unto the Lord without distraction, 1 Cor. vii. 35. (p. 102, 1ines 29ff.)
An imaginary idea, for example, of his blood, is an idle vain imagination: because it cannot view the divinity thereof, as being the blood of God, Acts xx 28. (p. 312, lines 40ff.)
I agree with the first approach which accepts mental images when they are a natural part of comprehending a verbally delivered message. I strongly disagree with the second approach, which makes mental images functional idols and considers them to be mystical channels of transforming grace. I also disagree with the third approach, though not nearly so strongly. I think that expecting congregants to deplete their mental energy in efforts to prevent certain verbal descriptions from prompting mental images is counterproductive. I think it better for congregants to focus on the sermon’s message without troubling themselves about any mental images that may naturally occur in the process.
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