It doesn’t matter how much you worry about something, worrying isn’t going to make any difference to your situation, except of course, by tiring you out. Isn’t it amazing how much energy we pour into something that has no possibility of making a positive difference? Worry … Hmm …

Here we are beginning of another week. Time marches on doesn’t it? Welcome, it’s great that we can get together again today. Now I hope you had a great break over the weekend if you’re one of the many people that have the weekends off.

But you know something, even if we have a couple of days off we don’t always feel restored and there’s a reason for that. It’s because physical rest, stopping work, doesn’t always mean emotional rest. We can be resting our bodies, we can look as though we’re resting but our emotions, our thoughts, can be running at a 100 miles an hour.

We can appear to everyone else to be relaxed on the outside but on the inside we can be on a roller coaster ride. Lots of different things that can happen but one of them, one of them is worry. Worrying is a bigger problem than you may think. And it’s a funny thing, you never hear people talk much about this problem of worrying.

We hear commentaries on stress. People acknowledge stress as being a big problem in life but stress has to be caused by something and one of the things that causes stress is worrying. So, what exactly is worry? What are we doing when we’re worrying? Why do we do it? And what, if anything, can we do about it? That’s what we’re going to be talking about today on the program.

I have a good friend, Graham, who just recently celebrated his 70th birthday. Now you may have heard me talk about him before. Graham and I met when he was a Colonel in the army and I was a Captain. He was my boss. Despite the gap in our ranks and age we kind of hit it off and eventually, together with a couple of other military ties, we left the army and we formed a consulting company in the IT industry.

Now Graham was the senior guy, older, wiser and after all the Colonel. So we made him the head of the company even though we were all shareholders. Now something that Graham did which looking back on it was absolutely pivotal to the success of the company. He used to think a lot. If I had a dollar for every Monday morning when he’d come into the office and say to me, ‘Berni, I’ve been turning such and such an issue over in my mind’, you know what? I’d be rich. He had this knack of thinking things through, difficult things, cash flow problems, people problems, complex issues with projects for clients.

He’d think through them overnight or over the weekend and come up with these brilliant solutions. But even though he did that he wasn’t someone to worry. Thinking things through isn’t worrying, it’s part of it but not all of it. Graham didn’t come to work stressed because he’d been thinking things through. He came to work relaxed because he’d come up with solutions to problems.

No, worrying is something more than thinking things through. Worrying is when we think and think and think and think but with anxiety and unease. Worry is what we do when all that we do is focus on the problem and we imagine and work through and think through all the things that can go wrong. We allow our mind to dwell on the difficulty or the problem and its consequences without ever coming up with the solution. That’s what worry is and it eats away at so many people. Some people worry about everything. You probably know one or two in your life. Absolute worrywarts. Can I tell you? That is a miserable, miserable way to live.

Some of us aren’t quite up there in that league but we still worry a lot. Others worry less but when it hits them it knocks them over. Here’s the thing about worry, firstly it doesn’t make an ounce of difference to the outcome. It causes huge stress and finally it stops us from using our creativity and our abilities to come up with solutions to the problem:

Jesus said, “Who by worrying can add a single hour to their lives?”

The answer is no one. Worrying isn’t about trying to improve the situation so why do we worry? Well, when a curve ball comes at us right out of the blue and hits us in the solar plexus its natural to get a shock. It’s natural to be concerned if there are retrenchments happening here at work, ‘Am I going to be next? What if I lose my job? How will I pay the mortgage?’

That level of initial concern is absolutely natural. Worry though is what happens if that’s where we stop. If we just go round and around and around the problem, if we focus on the problem not with the intention of coming up with a solution but just stuck there, stuck on the problem. Imagining every negative consequence and imagining somehow that all those different bad things that are going to happen all at once, that’s what worrying is. Now it’s a possibility they’ll all happen at once but that’s not what usually happens.

And so here we are stuck in the worry over the problem. Over and over, round and round, all night, all day, all weekend. Every moment it seems, without being able to move on to thinking about some solutions. ‘I might lose my job, money commitments, rent, food, bills, what am I going to do? Worry, worry, worry.’

Instead of taking the time to think, ‘Okay, I better be prepared. I’ll put my resume together. I’ll get that up to date. I’ll start looking around. I’ll see if there are any referees. What jobs are going at the moment? What are the possibilities? Do I maybe want to do something different to what I’ve been doing all these years? How can I minimise the impact on my life if I were to lose my job?’

Over the last few weeks we’ve been talking about entering into God’s rest and so many people are so exhausted because they worry all the time. Several times Jesus told His disciples ‘Don’t do that’. Interesting, they had reason to worry but He told them not to. Have a listen to one of those instances. It begins in Matthew chapter 6, verse 25. He said:

Therefore I tell you don’t worry about your life, what you’ll eat or what you’ll drink or about your body, what you’ll wear. Isn’t life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns and yet your heavenly Father still feeds them. Aren’t you of more value than them?

And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? And why do you worry about clothing? Look at the lilies of the field, how they grow. They don’t toil or spin but I tell you not even Solomon in all his glory was clothed like one of these.

But if God so clothes the grass which is alive today and tomorrow it’s thrown into the oven, won’t He much more clothe you, you of little faith? So don’t worry saying ‘what will I eat? What will I drink? What will I wear? It’s the Gentiles who strive for all those things and indeed your heavenly Father already knows that you need those things.

Instead strive first for the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these other things will be given to you as well. Don’t worry about tomorrow, tomorrow will bring enough worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today. (Matthew 6:25-34)

Well, why according to Jesus here shouldn’t we worry? Because God has it all under control. He knows what we need. He knows what’s going on. See people say they believe in Jesus, great. Maybe they believe in Him for eternal life but so many of those same people don’t believe in Him to help and to provide right in the middle of the situation or the circumstance they’re worrying about.

Okay, so here’s a problem. Okay, so I’m shocked initially and concerned about what the consequences might be. Pretty quickly I can stop being immobilised by fear and worry, that’s what happens, we’re immobilised, we’re blocked out from figuring out the solutions. I can stop that and put my faith in this Jesus who said ‘Don’t worry’. I can pray. I can ask Him for help and guidance and time and time again you know what happens? Ideas come, possibilities, our creative juices start to flow or God brings someone else along with an idea or a solution. I can’t tell you the number of times that’s happened to me.

Change, they say, is the only constant in life. Things sometimes change for the better. And things sometimes change for the worse. And whichever it is, we all struggle with change – and it’s struggle that leaves us completely exhausted.

A few years ago I read a brilliant little book called Who Moved My Cheese. It’s by a man called Dr Spencer Johnson and it uses a story, a parable, of a little mouse who lives in a maze. And every day he goes to the same place to get some cheese. One day he gets there and the cheese isn’t there, hence the title of the book ‘Who Moved My Cheese’.

It’s all about coping with change. If you ever have the opportunity grab a copy. It’s one of those incredibly insightful books and it reminds me that most of us don’t like change. Not real change.

Change in job responsibilities, in boundaries between who does what at work. As an IT consultant I guess over almost 20 years I worked in close to 300 different organisations. And most of what I did in helping clients implement new technology was to help manage the change that the new business processes and new technology would bring.

And without a doubt in 99% of cases the biggest obstacle to change was the resistance of people to change. Without a shadow of a doubt and it turns out that only a small minority of us embrace change. The rest, the rest naturally practice various levels of resistance to change from moderate to extreme.

Now we don’t mind a bit of variety in life, at least in the trivial and inconsequential but when it comes to profound change that’s something that causes most people a lot of stress. And that stress robs us of the peace and the rest that God wants us to have.

That’s what we’ve been talking about over these last few weeks on the program. Entering the peace and the rest of God. Actually having a deep sense of rest in our lives. I’m not sure I know a single person who doesn’t want some peace and rest in their lives.

Losing a job is about coping with change. Getting married. Being single again through the death of a partner or through divorce. Having children. Starting a new job. A child growing up and leaving home. Moving house. A new person in our little group at work. All those things are about change.

And many, many people find that change stressful. I believe God doesn’t want it to be so. Now a certain amount of stress is not a bad thing. An athlete before a big competition experiences some stress and that sharpens their focus and helps their performance. But when all of a sudden something significant in our lives changes, particularly when that change is completely outside our control, well that can be debilitating.

I want to share a story with you today about a man who had to go through significant change in his life. That mans name is Elijah. Now let me read you a small part of his story. It begins in the Old Testament in the Book of 1 Kings chapter 17, verse 1:

Now Elijah the Tishbite of Tishbe in Gilead said to Ahab, ‘As the Lord, the God of Israel lives before whom I stand there shall be neither dew nor rain these years except by my word.’ The word of the Lord came to him saying, ‘Go from here and turn eastward and hide yourself in the Wadi Cherith which is east of the Jordan. You shall drink from the Wadi and I have commanded the ravens to feed you there.’

 So he went and did according to the word of the Lord. He went and lived in the Wadi Cherith which is east of the Jordan. The ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat in the evening and he drank water from the Wadi.

But after a while the Wadi dried up because there was no rain in the land. Then the word of the Lord came to him saying, ‘Go now to Zarephath which belongs to Sidon and live there for I have commanded a widow there to feed you.’ So he set out and went to Zarephath.

When he came to the gate of the town a widow was there gathering sticks and he called to her and said, ‘Bring me a little water in a vessel so that I may drink it’. As she was going to bring it he called to her and said, ‘Bring me a morsel of bread in your hand.”

But she said, ‘As the Lord your God lives I have nothing baked but only a handful of meal in a jar, a little oil in a jug. I’m now gathering a couple of sticks so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son that we may eat it and then die.’

But Elijah said to her, ‘Do not be afraid. Go and do as you have said but first make me a little cake of it and bring it to me and afterwards make something for yourself and your son for thus says the Lord God of Israel the jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the Lord sends rain on the earth.’

She went and she did as Elijah had said so that she, as well as her household, ate for many days. The jar of meal was not emptied neither did the jug of oil fail according to the word of the Lord that He spoke by Elijah. (1 Kings 17:1-16)

Now I’ve read this story many times in the past and thought, ‘wow, pretty amazing stuff here God’ and then just moved on. What did I get out of this story? Well God’s an amazing God, and that’s not a bad thing to get out of this story. In fact it’s one of the main things.

But just stop for a minute and lets put ourselves in Elijah’s shoes for just a moment and consider the stressful change he had to go through. The first thing is, God speaks through him and creates a drought and obviously an ensuing famine. All of a sudden through him God declares this massive drought. No water therefore no food therefore suffering.

The first thing that happens is that he has to leave the comfort of home in Tishbe and go to a Wadi which has water in it, to be fed by birds. From home to a Wadi. Where would you rather be? Well okay, so he goes to the Wadi, finds water, finds food, other people are starving so he’s pretty well off.

He settles in to ride out the famine when all of a sudden the water in this Wadi that God sent him to runs out. This was God’s provision but it runs out. So more change. How could God’s provision run out? That’s what I’d be wondering to myself. And so God sends him to a poor widow with a death wish. Thank you God, that’s just brilliant.

She has almost no food left but through the word of the Lord that comes through the Prophet Elijah, God miraculously provides not just for Elijah but for the widow and her son. Elijah was called to go through huge change. See how easy it is to miss that if you just skim over the story. Huge change.

When we put ourselves in his shoes and imagine going through what he went through we realise how stressful it must have been. Now we don’t learn anything about what he was feeling. What we do see is that here he was right in the middle of God’s will just simply by trusting in God. Remember this was life and death stuff. Trusting in God.

He’s able to move from home to the Wadi to the widow and discover that God’s already gone ahead of him and provided. God has already figured it out. And my friend that’s what I’d like to leave in your heart today. That’s what I believe God wants us to take away with us today from His Word. He’s already got it figured out.

Sometimes it seems as though God’s doing some strange things, like this drought. Sometimes it seems as though God’s provision is running out like the Wadi. And sometimes the way that God provides for our needs, the direction that He leads us in is nothing short of bizarre in our eyes like the widow who had almost nothing except a death wish.

I guess we can all point to at least one instance of each of those in our own lives but God had it sussed, He didn’t drop the ball, there was no need for us to be afraid of the change. The quiet resolve with which Elijah stepped out into the unknown each time, that was a gift from God, that came from trusting God.

You see someone had moved Elijah’s cheese but Elijah didn’t have to wonder who. He didn’t have to worry about the change. He knew it was God, he knew that he’d be okay and he knew that God hadn’t lost the plot.

Can I tell you, I love sleeping. It’s not that I’m lazy, but by the end of a long, hard day that usually starts very early in the morning for me, getting into bed and closing my eyes is just the most wonderful thing. But sometimes sleep doesn’t come all that easily. I’m sure you’ve noticed.

Sleep is something that most of us take for granted. It’s just a natural part of life and if someone takes it away from us for just a few days we can become completely dysfunctional. But as simple and as logical and as obvious and as deeply pleasurable a thing sleep is, actually the biological nature of sleep is incredibly intricate and very finely balanced.

Sleep timing is controlled by the circadian clock, like an inner time keeping, temperature fluctuating, enzyme controlling device that works in tandem with different chemicals and hormones in our bodies. And all this is controlled by a particular gene which is why some people need less sleep than others.

Now the problem comes when modern life intrudes on this natural circadian rhythm. The problem comes when, for instance, we decide we can burn the candle at both ends. Going to bed late, getting up early, day after day, week after week and what we end up with is a sleep deficit and then, ultimately, sleep deprivation.

And that’s been linked to increases in Type 2 Diabetes, increases in body weight, it’s a factor in a significant percentage of motor vehicle accidents, it severely impairs our cognitive and emotional performance. In short a lack of sleep is draining the life out of many, many people.

Now we talked a bit about this whole sleep thing a couple of weeks ago on the program but today I’d like to spend some more time on this whole subject because as simple as sleep is, many people just don’t get enough of it and then, you know, they wonder why they feel like a wreck. When we stopped by this subject briefly the other week I shared this verse with you from the Old Testament. Psalm 127, verses 1 and 2.

Unless the Lord builds the house those who build it labour in vain. Unless the Lord guards the city the guard keeps watch in vain. It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil. For He gives sleep to those whom He loves.

So if you were able to join me that day on the program hopefully you’ll remember that verse which is as practical as it is beautiful.

I think sometimes what we tend to do in our lives is that we set off building the house, guarding the city, whatever it is that we do. Bringing up children, studying, working, whatever and we do it all in our own might. We do it over and over and over again and we become so caught up in the mundaneness of the doing of it, that we labour so hard that we start thinking it’s all up to us.

We start believing the lie that we have to do it all. It’s up to our labours and our abilities and our resources. Just the other day, literally as I was preparing for this program, I received an email from a dear friend of mine, Bob Beasley. Now he’s the Director of Teaching ministries for the Bible league in Canada.

He was sharing with me and some other of our colleagues in different countries a kingdom principle called All By Itself. Have a listen to what Bob wrote to me:

‘There is a mystery to how God has continued to bring fruit from lives and ministries. It reminds me of the ‘all by itself’ principle that comes out of Mark chapter 4, verses 26 to 29:

This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up the seed sprouts and grows though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain. First the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe he puts a sickle to it because the harvest has come.

‘Our responsibility’, writes Bob, ‘Is to keep the soil of our hearts rich and healthy. Then, all by itself, our lives will grow. It’s a kingdom principle’.

Don’t you love how Jesus uses the very simple, the very practical, the very ‘every day’ to explain the powerful reality of God’s involvement in this world. The Kingdom of God, the reign, the rule, the power, the influence of God in this world (says Jesus) is like this.

It’s like the seed that the farmers scattered out there and then eventually, all by itself, the ground produced the grain. I wonder whether a few of us today don’t need to wake up to the ‘all by itself’ kingdom principle. Sure the farmer had to plough and to weed and to scatter but the fruit, the harvest, that happened all by itself and he had absolutely no idea how it happened. Let me take you back to that Psalm and lets read it again with the ‘all by itself’ kingdom principle in the forefront of our minds:

Unless the Lord builds the house those who build it labour in vain. Unless the Lord guards the city the guard keeps watch in vain. Because it’s in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil. For He gives sleep to those whom He loves. (Psalm 127: 1-2)

 Anxious toil is what happens when we think we have to do it all on our own. Rest and sleep, that deep rest, the sort of rest that happens when, knowing full well, all the challenges that confront us, all the challenges that will still be there when we wake up in the morning, knowing those full well, we’re able to lay them down at the foot of the cross knowing that there are some things we can’t do.

Knowing that there are some things that only God can do. Knowing that, in any case, unless God’s in it we’re wasting our time away. And just like the farmer with his seed what we discover is that when we labour for God as well as trust in Him and rest in Him, the things we can’t do, the fruit we can’t produce sprouts forth all by itself.

In other words, without our brilliance, hard work or talent my friend, all by itself because God did the bits we couldn’t do. In fact He always made things that way so that we would learn to trust in Him. So that we could discover His faithfulness. So we could behold His glory. That’s where we find true rest. The sort of physical rest which includes emotional rest.

My friend let me come back to the question of sleep. We can’t live without it. Many people in this world are sleep deprived, even people who believe in Jesus Christ because they’re labouring under the lie that they have to do it all themselves. Let me tell you, unless God is in what we’re doing then we’re wasting our time. Get it!

So let’s get over ourselves here a bit and start to operate, sitting back looking at the whole picture, not just our little bit. That’s when anxious toil turns into what it should have been in the first place, an honest hard day’s work and a deep rest, a deep sleep at the end of it. God’s rest comes at the end of the day. Just the way He rested on that seventh day when He’d finished His work of creation:

So then a Sabbath rest still remains for the people of God. For those who enter into Gods rest also cease from their labours just as God did from His. Let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest so that no one may fall through such disobedience as theirs. (Hebrews 4:9-11)

Let me ask you this, do you believe God loves you? I mean really loves you with the sort of love that would cause Him to send His Son to die for you. Do you believe that? Well if you do that makes you one of the people who He loves and you know what? He gives sleep to those whom He loves.

If you’re struggling to get enough sleep, the sort of sleep that God’s talking about, deep sleep, deep rest. Then it is time to take a look at your world from a different perspective. If God’s in it all we need to do is our bit and He will do the rest. The fruit will grow, seemingly, all by itself.

It is time for each one of us to get a goodnight sleep, resting in God, trusting in God. Our body, our soul, our spirit, we need sleep and in any case God wants us to have it because He loves us.

If you’re anything like me, then you probably really enjoy eating. I mean there are so many different foods these days to choose from. Problem is, not all of them are good for us, some of them make us tired and sluggish, and some of them, are killing us.

There are two equal and opposite mistakes we can make in relation to our faith in God. The first is under spiritualising things and the second is over spiritualising them. See lots of people under spiritualise and what I mean by that is that we’re so focused on the things that we can see and hear and touch and smell and taste and feel that we completely lose sight of the fact that there’s a spiritual dimension to life. That there is a God, that there is a devil, that there is a battle raging for our souls in heavenly places. We lose sight of that powerful reality completely at our own peril.

But the opposite mistake is over spiritualising things. I’ve heard people and seen them and know them, they relate everything to the spiritual side and they completely ignore the physical side. I mean, you and I, we have a body. It’s a physical body. We need to feed it, rest it, work it and look after it.

We have a budget, we have to live within the budget or suffer the consequences. We have 24 hours in the day, we need to manage that time. We have people we work with, we’ve had to work on those relationships. See there’s a physical dimension to life and if we’re off with the pixies over spiritualising everything then that too we do at our peril.

Over these last few weeks we’ve been looking at how to enter into God’s rest. How. How to live a life that sure involves challenges and hard work, but that also involves that deep rest that God wants us to have. And getting that rest, well there’s a spiritual dimension, we talked about that, and there’s a physical dimension.

Yesterday on the program if you were able to join us, we were chatting about getting enough sleep. Because without sleep we end up a complete wreck. There’s a physical dimension to sleep but there’s also an emotional and a spiritual dimension. We can’t sleep well if we’re tossing and turning, “Eating the bread of anxious toil” as Psalm 127 says.

But there’s a physical side to that too. We need to get enough sleep. Somewhere between 7 and 8 hours every day. Now today, today we’re going to chat about something else that’s physical. It’s the food that we put into our mouths.

The Bible doesn’t talk a whole bunch about eating bad food, junk food, obesity, diabetes, coronary heart disease, because I guess back there in the 1st century and before junk food wasn’t so much of a problem. They didn’t have hamburger chains and pizza franchises and fried chicken shops producing high salt, high fat, high cholesterol foods that were killing people.

They didn’t have soft drink saturated with sugar or packaged chips on the supermarket shelves to kick off bad eating habits with our kids. And so the Bible doesn’t talk too much about those things. The one thing that it does talk about is consuming too much alcohol or getting drunk. Let’s have a look at just one of the passages that talks about exactly that. Ephesians chapter 5, verse 18:

Do not get drunk with wine for that is debauchery but instead be filled with the Spirit.

In other words don’t abuse your body and your behaviour by consuming so much alcohol that you’re going to get drunk. That’s the principle, don’t abuse your body by what you consume. And exactly that same principle applies to what we eat. Our eating habits, as it turns out, have a huge amount to do with entering into God’s rest which is what we’ve been talking about these last few weeks.

If we eat too much it’s called gluttony and again that’s something God’s Word tells us not to do. We become tired and lethargic, we just do. I’ve had to watch my weight all my life, all my life, and I can tell you at those times when I’ve carried too much weight on my body in the past, it hugely affects how I feel.

We have less energy, our emotions become depressed and life heads into a downward spiral. Lots of sugars and carbohydrates and over processed foods, they take their toll on our bodies. Just a muffin with a cup of coffee can have more than a whole days recommended fat consumption for an adult inside it. Just one muffin.

Over eating at night, you know the big meal with rice and mashed potato’s and creamy sauces at night. With that sitting in your gut it’s going to give you a terrible night’s sleep. You know how bloated you feel after a big meal where your eyes were bigger than your stomach?

Now you might be squirming a bit here but I’m not being judgemental, I’m just telling the way it is. I’ve been there too you know. And you can’t over spiritualise this stuff. We can’t be carrying an extra 10 kilos or 20 pounds on our waist and hips and sitting down in the morning and pray that God will take it away. See, when we behave our way into a problem by eating too much of the wrong foods, the only way to deal with it is to behave our way out of it again with a sensible diet and exercise.

Let me tell you an interesting story. Over the last year I’ve been shooting some short TV spots. You can see them on youtube, the URL is www.adp.tv, that stands for A Different Perspective, adp.tv. And one of these spots is called ‘The Salad’ and it’s about this very thing we’re talking about right now, what we eat.

Anyhow if you’ve ever had anything to do with television you’ll know that shooting a short two and a half-minute spot like that takes several hours to do. Now what I was doing during that spot was putting together a salad, hence the name of the TV spot ‘The Salad’.

Lots of colourful vegetables, tomatoes, different lettuces and corn and radishes and onions and capsicums, all sorts of stuff. Some healthy oil, vinegar and to top it off a quickly stir-fried lean chicken with a bit of garlic and salt reduced soy sauce.

Well the crew were mostly young guys, Chris the cameraman and young Damien, our director and producer. These guys, well my hunch is probably they don’t always eat this sort of food. They’re more into the fast takeaways on the run the way young folk are.

By the time we’d been shooting this for a couple of hours and we were coming to the end bit where we’d sit down and eat the meal together, these two guys couldn’t wait. They were salivating. ‘Are we there yet?’ And we had this stunning, incredibly healthy, incredibly simple and straight-forward salad with a couple of slices of olive bread and a glass of mineral water each.

It’s interesting how simple healthy food is and interesting how attractive and tasty it actually is. And what I know is when I’m eating plenty of vegetables and grains and healthy muesli for breakfast and snacking on fruit instead of sugary, fatty, chocolaty, salty junk, what I know is that I have twice as much energy.

And here’s the thing, not only am I healthier, not only do I feel better, not only can I do so much more during the day but I sleep much, much, much better. Food, what we eat, when we eat it, has a huge, a huge impact on how much rest we get.

Yes there are emotional and spiritual aspects of entering into God’s rest, absolutely there are. But there is also, very much, the physical dimension. A good healthy diet is not only an incredibly simple thing to do, it doesn’t have to be expensive and it gives us the physical where-with-all, the energy, the positive emotions to live out the sort of life where we can enter into God’s rest, into God’s peace.

This is just not rocket science. If we over spiritualise it, if we say, ‘you know, I’m feeling down, I’ll pray to God and then I’ll go eat some more junk food’. My friend, let’s get a bit wise here, let’s get a bit smart here, I’m not just talking to you, I’m talking to me. Good food, healthy food is part of God’s plan for the rest of our lives.

I don’t know how long I have left on this earth, and chances are, neither do you. But I know this, I want to live my life out to the full. But that’s something you can’t do, when you’re tired all the time.

You know God has an amazing sense of humour. A couple of weeks back when I was preparing my thoughts for the programs this week I managed to get Monday through Thursday’s programs prepared and written by Wednesday. Now that’s pretty good and Thursday, Thursday I had to fly interstate to meet with some radio stations.

Up at 4.00am on Thursday, hire a car at the other end and then the stations were quite a few miles apart. Long drives, meetings, back to the plane. I landed home that night at 10.30 at night and I didn’t get back into bed until 11.30pm.

It was kind of a long day. A good day but a long one. So up the next morning, it’s Friday by now and I just wanted to get this weeks programs finished, you know, and it was just this one to go. You know what it’s called? Having The Rest Of Your Life For The Rest Of Your Life.

You have to laugh, I mean I can’t say I was feeling that rested as I was gathering my thoughts for this message. So I sat and thought, ‘Okay God, 4 weeks, 19 messages so far on entering into your rest and here we are, the very last one. I’ve just kind of had a 20-hour day, I’m not feeling the sharpest tool in the shed today, what should it be about? What do you want me to discover from your Word and share with a tired world?’ It’s funny that, it’s funny how God works.

And it kind of hit me how we have these powerful realities in our lives. A 20-hour day is a 20-hour day. There’s nothing you can do about it. I mean you don’t do it every day but it had to be done. Young parents with a baby that keeps them up half the night, that’s their reality. There’s actually not a whole bunch you can do about it right then.

A person with chronic pain or the elderly person who just doesn’t need that much sleep anymore so they’re up half the night. And then, then we just have to front up and live whatever the next day in our lives happens to be, good or bad, busy or quiet, happy or sad. Man that’s the reality. That’s life.

And in the middle of that all some joker, me, gets on the radio every day and says, ‘Hey, God has this great idea for you. He wants you to have a rest, a real rest, an amazing rest’. And you think, ‘What planet’s that guy living on’? He wants to come and walk in my shoes for a couple of days before he talks to me about having a rest.’

And so God gives me a 20-hour day and a whole bunch of other pressures surrounding me, probably just like your life but in a slightly different setting. He gives me a 20-hour day to share with you and a message to prepare called Having The Rest Of Your Life For The Rest Of Your Life.

So, if you ask me, ‘Berni, how did you feel that day when you were preparing this program? What were your emotions doing? What was your body doing? What was your mind doing?’ Well, to tell you the truth my body and my mind were just a bit on the tired side, they were.

But in my heart, you know, deep in that place where you live, deep down there I was so rested, I was so relaxed. I somehow just knew that God was in control, that I’d done my best yesterday and I was doing my best today too and I was just at peace when in reality that didn’t make sense.

There were some very real pressures that should have been stressing me out but they weren’t. I should have been struggling to prepare this program but I wasn’t. It was just flowing the way it normally does with me.

A bit like Job. Now I’m not sure if you’ve read his story in the Old Testament, Job. He went through a really rugged time. He should have been so discouraged and lost and distraught. Have a listen to what he says, Job chapter 19, verse 25:

I know that my redeemer lives and that at the last He will stand upon this earth.

In other words God’s in control folks. That’s where my confidence lies. Not in circumstances, I can rise above my circumstances and still find rest and still find peace because my Redeemer lives. Sometimes we don’t expect God to show up. We don’t expect Him to deliver on His word. Or perhaps we do in theory but not in practice.

Had an email from a man I’ve only met a couple of times the other day. His name is Harry and he lives just outside Winnipeg in Canada, gets cold up there in Winnipeg. We were chatting about something difficult that was going on in life that we’d both been part of and he feels like a really close brother to me, Harry.

Anyhow he shared this Scripture with me, have a listen, Numbers chapter 23, verse 19:

God is not man, one given to lies and not a son of man changing his mind. Does He ever speak and not do what He says? Does He ever promise and not come through?

When the going gets tough, when our circumstances scream at us we can’t have a rest. It is time to remember my friend that God is a God of His word. He is faithful and His Word says,

Come to me all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest. (Matthew 11:28)

And again He says,

So then a Sabbath rest still remains for the people of God. (Hebrews 4:9).

His Word says about His people:

The Lord gave them rest on every side just as He’d sworn to their ancestors. Not one of all their enemies have withstood them for the Lord have given all their enemies into their hands. (Joshua 21:44)

You know why I think I had that 20-hour day the day before I had to prepare this last message on rest? I think God wanted to make a point to me and a point to you and that point is this. That His Word stands forever. What He says goes irrespective of our circumstances and His rest is available to His people 24×7 whatever our circumstances.

The Apostle Paul, sitting in a Roman dungeon on death row has this to say. He writes this very thing. Philippians chapter 4, verse 6:

Don’t worry about anything but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God and the peace, the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

You know just the other day I had an issue that was playing on my mind, it was so easy to worry about it and I thought, ‘I can’t do anything’ so I took this Scripture and I quoted it back to God and I said, ‘God, you know, I need the sort of peace at the moment, the sort of rest that doesn’t make sense in the middle of my circumstances’.

When I got up this morning I prayed. I was so full of the peace and the rest of God. That’s why I think God means for you and me to have rest in our lives. The biggest, most wonderful, most peaceful, most delicious rest that we can ever imagine right in the middle of every storm for the rest of our lives.

It is time to stop living life in turmoil. It is time to stop living in fear. It is time to stop living with a nagging sense of inadequacy. It is time my friend to take God at His word and to enter into His rest.

If it’s sleep we need, God will give us sleep. If it’s eating the right foods instead of junk, well how about it? If it’s taking a holiday, take a holiday. If it’s shifting our focus from circumstances here below, the things that daunt us, to lifting our eyes up to behold the Lord of all the universe.

This God who loves us, who cares for us, who holds us, who holds our lives, every circumstance, every storm, every twist, every turn in the palm of His hand then, hey lets do that. Let me ask you, do you actually want the rest of your life for the rest of your life?

Well then, let us therefore make every effort to enter into that rest. Let’s start taking God at His word and experience the peace that surpasses all understanding.