Haven Today - The Rest We Were Made For

0:00Do you know what your sleep score is? This fashionable trend is taking over the conversation in the health industry as people turn to wearable tech like the Aura Ring to track their sleep in hopes of improving their sleep score. The technical term is sleep maxing and in some circles this is all the rage. People aim to improve their sleep score through smart mattresses and drinking special sleep cocktails and so no surprise more companies are hoping to cash in on the trend. Some experts are concerned about this hyper fixation on tracking sleep and question how accurate the tracking data really is. However, sleep is more than yet another life hack. It's God's idea and his word has something to say about it.

1:02In Christ we can rest knowing that while we slumber our God does not. He watches over us. Welcome to Haven Today. I'm David Wolland sharing the great story that's all about Jesus. We're in a series called God's Gift of Sleep. Have you ever thought about how sleep intersects your walk with God? What you do with sleep is in some ways a litmus test for your relationship with the Lord. And it's especially true in the seasons of life when output and stress is at its greatest. In those times we may find ourselves tempted to forego sleep. Even though it's unpleasant to be tired yet still it's tempting because we feel a desperation to accomplish more, fix more problems. Perhaps to do what we are unwilling to entrust to God and leave it with Him. And when you're in a season of life like this, what does choosing to get a good night's

2:07sleep signify about your relationship with the Lord? That I trust God enough to relinquish control and just surrender to sleep. I don't trust in myself burning the midnight oil every night on my laptop working. I don't have to be like getting the bare minimum of a seat because I need to stay up late and rise up early. Like Psalm 127 says, you're eating the bread of anxious toil, those who rise early and go to bed late. It stems from this anxious kind of overestimation of our own importance. It's ultimately pride that leads us to resist rest. That's Brett McCracken, my guest for the first three episodes of this series. And that's a conversation you can find on the Haven Today website. And there also you will find the newly released book written by Brett McCracken called The Wisdom of Sleep. How rest reveals God's truth and revives weary souls. This is a great encouragement and I would love to send you a copy of this resource.

3:11You can request it when you make a gift of support to Haven Today. Just be sure to request The Wisdom of Sleep when you make that gift. Either by phone at 865 Haven, 865 Haven or online at HavenToday.org HavenToday.org. This is Haven Today. I'm David Wollin and we're talking about the parallel themes of sleep, Sabbath, and rest this week. And these days, every time I talk about this topic, my mind drifts to the profound contrast between God's creation of humanity and humanity's creation of AI. And I promise I will return to the biblical theme of rest in a minute, but let's take a moment to consider what's happening around us. There are insights to gain that do relate. And so right now, the news is exploding with Doomsday predictions about what will happen as AI technology continues to expand.

4:12Not everyone agrees. Some say AI could annihilate humanity within a decade. Others say it's all a hoax. Some are embracing AI with unbridled enthusiasm. Absolutely convinced this incredible technology will usher in a new era of prosperity and peace for all humanity. People are all over the map and they cannot all be right. Now, I talk about AI enough on Haven Today that you may already know where I stand that I do have some doubts about how good AI will turn out to be for humanity and for the world at large. But my suspicions are not primarily rooted in the nature of AI itself, but in the nature of humanity and the pervasive sinfulness of humanity. Biblically, Christians should be the first to proclaim this if we truly believe what God's word says, namely that human beings are not innately good but innately sinful with hearts that are self-centered,

5:16self-glorifying, self-serving, and with a bent toward evil. There is a reason for the saying power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely. And AI concentrates incredible power in the hands of whoever can scale it and build it the fastest and then control it with the greatest ingenuity. So the question is, whose hands will most powerfully possess the incredible power of AI and then what will they do with it? Or one step beyond that, and this would be the greatest fear of AI doomsdayers that humanity might lose control of AI and then it will begin to program itself, improving itself, and become like a technological Pandora's box. Does anybody else feel like real life just turned into a sci-fi movie? There is a lot of anxiety out there about all of this. Very smart people are losing sleep. But as believers in Jesus, we are called to several things, wisdom,

6:23trust, and rest. We do not need to be anxious or losing sleep. We can trust that even if human beings were to lose control of AI, our God has not and will not lose control of history. What will come to pass is already written and the Lord will bring history to the conclusion that he has promised throughout Scripture. And what is that conclusion? Where is all of this heading toward? Scripture speaks of a glorious future in eternity to come. It talks about it as a kingdom, a city, a wedding, but just as prolific in all of Scripture and perhaps even the most dominant presentation of the world to come is the theme of rest and Sabbath. In Hebrew, these words come from the same root, Shabbat. And at times they are used interchangeably. And Sabbath, Jesus says, is not

7:23what humanity was created for. No, it's the other way around. Sabbath was created for humanity, for the benefit of humanity, for our good. It is a gift and it is woven into the warp and wolf of God's entire created order. We are creatures who need rest and God made humanity finite on purpose. And therefore our work and our output will never be unending and constant. Yes, we can get smarter, grow stronger, more self-disciplined, but as human beings we are not individually scalable. God made us this way on purpose. And so right now at this profound juncture in history with the advent of AI, the contrast is profound. You could say that AI is the pinnacle creation of humanity in all of history. You could say humanity created AI in its own image. Those parallels are profound,

8:26but I think so are the contrasts. Consider this. Whereas God is infinite and does not sleep, yet He wisely made us finite and unable to make it typically throughout a single day without sleeping. He made us not to do more than he can, which is impossible, but He made us to be dependent upon Him. Here's the contrast. Humanities creation of AI was and is an attempt to make us something more powerful. AI mimics us and yet surpasses our finitude in an almost God-like way. Our minds can only hold and process so much, but the capacity and speed of AI has already surpassed our abilities. And we must sleep. AI is designed to never sleep. Part of the appeal of agentic AI today is that the agents can go out and work autonomously and constantly with no break.

9:26They work while we sleep. And that's become a problem for some AI entrepreneurs building some of them attempting to build a company with an army of AI agents instead of employees. They say it's cheaper that way. And those bots work 24-7. In a recent news story, some of these entrepreneurs admit that they are on a collision course with burnout because they can't leave their AI agents alone for more than a few hours. They keep having to get up throughout the night every night to check their work and retask the agents with new instructions and they keep up that pace every day, seven days a week. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity. They say to secure their future and make a fortune, but even if they succeed, will it have been worth it? Increasingly, to me, it feels like with AI, our world has grabbed a tiger by the tail and now it's afraid to let go. But most of us are not in the thick of all this. We're merely spectators on the sideline and

10:30watching this drama unfold and it's exhausting. We live in a weary world. Paul says in Romans that it's groaning with longing for the day when it will be set free from its bondage to corruption. And we also who are in Christ, we feel this deeply as well. We're living here as strangers and aliens and this world is not our home and we long for rest. The promised rest of the world to come and yet we're also assured that we've already entered into that rest here and now. This is true today for those who belong to Jesus. So what does it look like to live in the rest? God grants us here and now while also looking with eyes of faith to the rest, which is promised and still lies ahead. For this, we need to get a whole Bible view on rest. And so starting now and continuing into the next episode, we're going to start tracing this theme of rest from Genesis to Revelation. The opening

11:35pages of Scripture, I'm sure, are familiar. In Genesis 1, God creates spaces and places and he fills them. Day 1, He creates the heavens and the earth. Jump to day 4, He fills that space with lights in the heavens to separate day from night. He creates the sun and the moon. Now back to the second day of creation. God gathers the waters and separates water from land. Jump to day 5 and He fills those spaces, those waters with life and the skies with birds. Back to day 3, God creates a habitat on the land. Plants and trees bearing fruit. And once again, He fills it. Jumping to day 6, God creates all the creatures that dwell in that habitat on the land and humanity, the pinnacle of it all, man and woman created in the image of God. Those are the six days of work in creation that God did, and it was followed then by what we read at the start of Genesis 2. And on the seventh day,

12:38God finished His work that He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work that He had done, and 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. The seventh day was unlike the others. On the other days, He created a space for something and filled it, but that seventh day He created it, and in a sense filled it with Himself, because the work was done. There's an echo, we can almost hear it. It is finished. And with the work that He had done, finished God rested. And that word for rest here is Shabbat. It simply means to cease from work and toil. But was God tired? No, of course not. Did He need a rest? No. Did He cease from working in the sense that God no longer was exerting His

13:40power in creation? Clearly not. All creation continues to exist moment by moment because God wills that it continue to be so. He upholds all of it by the word of His power, and He does not slumber or sleep. Like Jesus says in John 5, 17, after healing someone on the Sabbath, there the Jews are protesting and accusing Jesus of violating the Sabbath. How does He respond? My father is working until now, and I am working. So why does the Bible tell us from the very beginning that God rested when His work was finished? Well, we're going to answer that, but not with a simple one word answer. Now, what comes in the unfolding story of God's revelation of His salvation? Because what God begins by modeling for us in creation points us to His will for us, His will for those who are made in His image. There is a time for work and toil, but a rest

14:45yet remains always, a Shabbat, a Sabbath, a time that is and will be blessed, that is holy and set apart from all that came before. The progressive nature of God's revelation will pull us into this and show us marvelous things if we have eyes to see and ears to hear what God's word is inviting us, not only to see and hear and understand, but also inviting us to enter into. Because God's promised rest is glorious and wonderful. It is for those who enter into it. The apex of fulfillment of every longing of every human heart. But that may not be what comes to your mind when you think of Sabbath, when you hear the word Sabbath. Much of this will likely depend on your upbringing. Now, if you grew up in a Jewish home, there may be quite a lot that comes to mind when you hear the word Sabbath, or you might have grown up like my grandfather did. I remember him

15:49telling me a story of his boyhood in the 1930s, rural Wisconsin. He was born into a Norwegian family, a very, very strict one, and in his case, they subscribed to a very legalistic strain of Lutheranism. And as a young boy, he and his brothers loathed their weekly Sabbath observance on Sundays. For them, it meant dressing up in their most uncomfortable clothes, sitting through a long service that went over their heads and then coming home to an afternoon in which they were not allowed to play. One such afternoon, he and his brothers were watching the snow fall outside the window. They were quietly reading, and then they noticed across the room, their father had finally nodded off. Altogether, they stood up quietly and tipped toad out, grabbing their sleds, and they ran for the hills. And they had a grand old time until one of the brothers gasped in horror and pointed back to the house where their standing in the snow was a glowering father,

16:53there with his hands on his hips and glaring at his boys. They hung their heads in shame, walked back slowly and quietly sat back down. Not a word was spoken again that afternoon, they knew punishment would come after the Sabbath was over. Now, if you have a background like that, it is absolutely going to color the way you hear the word Sabbath and read about it in God's Word. And you're going to encounter it throughout Scripture. How does it appear to you? Is Sabbath a burden? Is it something unpleasant to endure? Or is Jesus telling us about something wonderful? And we've simply missed it. Like when he says in Mark 2, 27, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. And to answer that question, we have to start from the beginning. Because there, even before the fall, time was demarcated into seven-day rhythms of work and rest.

17:55And in this cycle, we see a tacit invitation for all of humanity to come in and experience God and the life of flourishing that he created for humanity. That invitation was right there. It was in place before the fall happened. And even there, Sabbath is a promise and a picture of the life yet to come. As the story of redemption begins to unfold, we see God instituting the Sabbath formally in Exodus as he rescues his people out of Egypt. And then in Lidvidicus, we learn more. A big portion of that book about the law is devoted to how the Sabbath should be observed. It's far more than a weekly rhythm of work and rest. It is far, far bigger than that. There are categories of Sabbath prescribed there that God's people, as far as the biblical record reveals, God's people never got to experience in history, not yet. And as we get into the book of Joshua, the conquest of Canaan, suddenly on the other side of that, God is speaking about a rest

19:01that will come when the enemies are finally cast down. Entering the land is spoken of as rest. And yet when that day comes, a future rest still remains. The book of Hebrews picks it up in the New Testament in the picture starts to get more and more clear. Sabbath and rest were always about and pointing us to none other than the Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior who invites us to rest in Him. And so today, if your soul is weary and there is much in this world to make us weary, whether it's the endless cycles of fear, anxiety, chaos, and confusion around us, or the many burdens of life that often feel too heavy to bear, or perhaps a spiritual weight, perhaps the burdens of your own failures and sin. All of these things, Jesus says, bring it to me. What you can no longer bear and were never meant to bear in the first place, bring it to me. Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

20:10This is Haven Today. I'm David Wollin. We'll pick it up again tomorrow, tracing this thread through Scripture, the promise of God's rest ultimately found in Christ, both now and fully in the life to come. And to go even deeper, I do recommend the wisdom of sleep by Brett McCracken. We'd love to send you this book as our way of saying thank you for your much-needed gift of ministry support to Haven. Would you respond today, either by phone at 865 Haven, again 865 Haven, or online at HavenToday.org. HavenToday.org. I'm David Wollin. Once you come back again next time, we'll be keeping it all about Jesus. It's the great story here on Haven Today.