Rest is part and parcel of living in God’s story. And this is a story that precedes us, a story we live in now and forever. The writer of Hebrews in the New Testament says, “There remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God.” This is why the Bible so closely connects the principle and practice of Sabbath with the invitation for rest. To devote one day of seven to wholehearted, embodied resting is to live more fully in God’s story. 

Karioshi suggests that the necessity of rest can be a matter of life and death. This Japanese word essentially translates as “death from overwork,” a tragically regular phenomenon in Japan in which men and women die, whether of natural causes or suicide, because of too much work and no rest. Even though this concept is given a name in Japanese, it’s not a foreign concept to the American worker.
We have a problem with rest. We don’t do it. In the United States nearly 50% of workers do not take full advantage of their paid time off. Further, Americans are half as likely to be taking vacation in any given week as they were 40 years ago. Even as we give lip service to the fact that rest is important, we have trouble actually stopping our work long enough to embrace rest.
As an international relations major in undergraduate, we read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: an early document drafted and approved by the United Nations to serve as a guiding frame for national legislation. I was surprised by Article 24, which declares, “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.”
Article 24 is, in fact, a decent distillation and summary of the biblical concept of Sabbath, with one glaring omission. The Declaration assumes that this right, and the other rights it enshrines, are self-inhering. That is, these rights rise out of us as human beings and have no external referent.
The Bible gives a different origin of our rest, not first in us, but first in God, and given to us:
Genesis 2:1-3
Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.
Exodus 20:8-11
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
In other words, we know rest is important, but we’ve forgotten the true source of and reason for our rest. And when forget where rest comes from—true, soul-satisfying, bone-deep rest—we fail to stop work long enough to rest, and we miss out on a truly full and flourishing life.
So, in a world that doesn’t remember why we rest, is less and less likely to stop work at all, and who increasingly has trouble understanding rest as a key part of life, what do we do? The Scripture offers a threefold practice in response to our unwillingness to rest: remembering rightly, stopping intentionally, and embracing the life God offers.
The fourth commandment is the lengthiest of the 10 commandments. Further, it is one of only two that do not begin “Thou shalt not.” Instead, the first word of the fourth commandment is “remember.” What does remembering have to do with rest? In rest, we first and foremost remember who God is. Everything in the true and better story starts with God. And what do we remember about God? God is a God who created, a God who works, but beautifully, wonderfully, almost surprisingly, he is also a God who rests (Gen. 2:1-3)—a God who completes what he started, who brings to fruition all his plans, and as a result can step back and enjoy all that he has made.
My brother-in-law is a civil engineer. Specifically, he works as a Director of Traffic Engineering and Survey. In other words, he makes roads. In his case, he spends a lot of time taking bad roads and turning them into good roads. Speaking of driving on a road that he designed, he says, “It feels like completion and immense satisfaction. I constantly look left, right, and ahead at all the features my team designed over the course of months and years. I think about all the challenges we overcame to make the road function in a way that the public can enjoy it without even really thinking about it.” After all, we only really notice that road when it doesn’t work for us.
We all know the difference between a task checked off the list and a job well done. Creation is God’s job well done. On the seventh day, God looked left, right, and ahead at all the wonderful beauty of his creation and was glad. God is not an exhausted worker or a detached clockmaker; the God of the Bible is a delighted craftsman.
But the truth of rest does not simply require remembering who God is; it requires remembering who we are. To get the frame of reference on this, we must look even earlier in the book of Genesis. In Genesis 1:26-27, God says, “let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” And what God says, God does: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
Who are we? Humans are image-bearers of the almighty God who created all things by the word of his power in six days and rested on the seventh. As image bearers, we are called to work in this world to the glory of God and for the good of our neighbor. When we experience rest from that good work as a job well done, we are, momentarily, looking like God. It is an integral, inescapable part of being a human being—we were made to rest because we were made in God’s image. True rest is not a picture of laziness or inability but a picture of sufficiency, joy, and delight.
Yet, even this is not the full picture. We are not simply in the image of God, but also we are creatures, created by God. All too often, we rest not out of a job well done, but out of a desperate necessity, a deep exhaustion. Remembering who we are in rest is remembering that we are not God, that we cannot care perfectly for our children or our aging parents, that we cannot perfectly love our roommates, that we cannot work at our maximum limit one hundred percent of the time. Eventually, as they say, our bodies keep score and we shut down and sleep.
And, sometimes, as one pastor put it, sleep is one of our greatest acts of faith, because sleep is the declaration that God is God and we are not, and that is good news.
Rest starts with remembering, but it does not end there. Consider the remainder of the fourth commandment: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work…”
The second pattern or practice of rest is to stop. We are meant to rest by stopping. Sabbath, the word that appears throughout Scripture in connection with rest, has as its most foundational meaning “to stop.” In Genesis 2, it says that God finished his work and rested. A more basic translation might be that God finished his work and stopped. Exodus 20:8 reads “Remember the Sabbath day.” We could also say, “Remember the stopping day.” God gave his creation, and specifically his people, the gift of Sabbath as one day of seven to embrace the practice of stopping.
True and better rest means stopping work.
This is, after all, what God did. What did Genesis 2 say?
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They are sneaky, sensual, self-centered, and self-willed. While any true teacher might lapse into one or more of these sins periodically, the false teacher is consistently marked by these defects. His life and ministry are characterized by rejecting the authority of God’s Word, establishing himself as the authority, and promoting himself for his own wealth and gratification. Furthermore, these rebellious and selfish acts are done secretly to preserve the ruse of authenticity. 

To identify false teachers, we must understand that they come disguised as true followers of Christ. Exercising discernment, therefore, demands that we examine those who claim to speak God’s Word to distinguish who is true from who is false. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught us that one way we distinguish between true and false teachers is by looking at their fruits. What is the product of their lips, their lives, and their leadership? Good fruit indicates someone who is a genuine follower of Christ speaking His Word faithfully. Bad fruit, conversely, exposes someone as a false teacher.
One person present when Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount was the Apostle Peter, and he also gave instructions to help us identify deceivers in the church. Peter knew that his time remaining on this earth was short, so he felt a significant urgency in writing this letter, with the ultimate goal of preserving his readers’ faith in the truth of the gospel (2 Peter 1:12-15). However, merely giving a positive exposition of the truth was insufficient for the task. If his readers were to remain faithful to the truth as it is in Jesus, they also would need to be armed with the ability to identify and avoid false teachers who would seek to distort, pervert, and corrupt that truth. Peter, therefore, spent most of chapter two in his letter exposing the characteristics of false teachers. While we cannot cover everything Peter wrote in this chapter, let’s consider four of these destructive traits.
First, false teachers are sneaky. 2 Peter 2:1 tells us that false teachers introduce destructive heresies secretly. Like Jesus warned the disciples in the Sermon on the Mount, Peter urges his readers to realize that false teachers are deceptive by nature. They do not advertise their false teaching, and most of the time they do not place it front and center. False teachers will look for vulnerable members of the church who might be open to false teaching, and they begin to sow the seeds of their false doctrine with them first. They try to keep what they are doing under the shadow of secrecy so as not to be discovered until they have formed their own following. Another tactic they use to hide their destructive heresies is that they seek to add to the truth rather than take away from it. When Peter says that they “secretly introduce heresies,” the language used speaks of bringing something in addition to something already there. False teachers do not always speak against what is accepted as Christian doctrine, but they sometimes seek to add to what people in the church already believe. They introduce novelty that they claim will only enhance what a Christian practices. By seeking out the vulnerable and pretending to believe the same things the church believes but with a few innovations, false teachers craftily sneak in their destructive heresies, often undetected. Christians need to beware of those who innovate with God’s Word or who seek to isolate younger believers as unsuspecting targets.
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Written by Saji P. Thomas |
Wednesday, December 8, 2021
There was never a greater crisis of faith for the disciples as when their Lord was crucified on the cross; but God has never been more at work in that very moment of weakness and suffering of his very Son!

Recently a close relative hosted a believing family who visited Bangalore to treat their five-year-old daughter for a few weeks. The little one had been suffering from bone cancer, enduring an indescribable amount of pain. Doctors advised bone marrow transplant. All the tests for compatibility cleared the father as the donor. The surgeries on both the father and his darling daughter were carried out on the next day satisfactorily. But within a few days, the child got infected, and she did not recover. Watching the little one’s funeral was one of the most heartbreaking experiences in recent times.
During the course of the treatment of their child, they also found out that the mother is at the fourth stage of bone cancer herself. The intensity of their trial is all the more because they are a very young family in the Lord.
I took time to reflect on how we Christians grapple with the reality of suffering, especially those that come to us due to no apparent fault of ours. Why would God allow the curse of suffering to come upon His own children, especially because Christ has paid for the curse of sin? The subject is awfully perplexing and yet what the Scripture has to offer is both assuring and rewarding.
Let me share with you five of the many New Testament truths that I came across about why the suffering of Christians is not a curse, but a blessing!
Suffering is a Test of Our Faith
Almost every paragraph of 1 Peter has something to say about Christian suffering. In addition to the general sufferings of the world, the ridicule and scorn, and being ill-treated, the apostle Peter anticipated the state-sponsored persecution that was imminent on these believers. The set of instructions given to the believers to submit to various non-Chrisitan authorities (2:13-3:6) underscores this situation.
He begins the letter by warning the church not to be surprised by various sufferings (1:6-7). Strong encouragement is given to us to be prepared in the light of the coming “fiery trials.” Peter gives the first theological reason for our sufferings. “The tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire” (1 Pet 1:7a). It is a test of our faith, a faith that endures in spite of the trials, faith that will  “result in praise and glory and honour” (v.7b).
Suffering Signifies Our Union with Christ
Peter reminds his readers not to be surprised at the fiery trials (4:12ff.). Instead, he says we are to rejoice in them. The second reason why we suffer as Christians and can rejoice in our suffering is that it signifies our union with Christ: “to the degree that you share (fellowship, koinonia) the sufferings of Christ” (v.13a NASB). “Their sufferings are not a sign of God’s absence but his purifying presence.”1 This too will result in our joy and exultation at the coming of Christ … so that also at the revelation of His glory you may rejoice with exultation (v.13b).
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