Transcript
Tim Keller (0:04)
Welcome to Gospel and Life. Are you struggling to find meaning and purpose in your work? We spend much of our lives at our jobs, but our work can often be the area where we feel the most frustration and futility in our lives. Today on the podcast, Tim Keller helps us understand how the Gospel frees us to have hope and joy in our vocations.
Scripture Reader (0:33)
The scripture this morning is from Luke's Gospel, chapter 6, verses 1 through 11. One Sabbath, Jesus was going through the grain fields, and as his disciples began to pick some heads of grain, rubbed them in their hands and ate the kernels, some of the Pharisees asked, why are you doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath? Jesus answered them, have you never read what David did? When he and his companions were hungry, he entered the house of God, and taking the consecrated bread, he ate what is lawful only for priests to eat, and he also gave some to his companions. Then Jesus said to them, the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. On another Sabbath he went into the synagogue and was teaching, and a man was there whose right hand was shriveled. The Pharisees and the teachers of the law were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would he. But Jesus knew what they were thinking and said to the man with the shriveled hand, get up and stand in front of everyone. So he got up and stood there. Then Jesus said to them, I ask you which is lawful on the Sabbath, to do good or to do evil? To save life or to destroy it? He looked around at them all and then said to the man, stretch out your hand. He did so, and his hand was completely restored. But they were furious and began to discuss with one another what they might do to Jesus. This is God's word.
Tim Keller (2:17)
We're looking at the book of Luke and the life of Jesus in the Book of Luke. And for a number of weeks we've been looking at Jesus teaching about what it means to follow him, what it means to be his disciple. And of course, Jesus is essentially taking the Gospel, who he is, what he did. And he's saying his disciples are people who apply the Gospel to absolutely every single area of life. And today we come to an area that is referred to. It's covered in the fourth commandment of the Ten Commandments. It's in Exodus 26 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. For on the seventh day the Lord rested. Sabbath rest. Now I know that we all have somewhat different relationships to work. There are people here, for example, who are out of work and would love to have more work. There are people here who in general have said to me that they have a problem with work, with discipline. But by and large, in New York City, in the middle of New York City, the biggest problem we have, one of the biggest problems we have is Sabbath rest, the discipline of the getting of Sabbath rest. Why do we need it? Where do we get it? How do we do it? Why do we need it? Where do we get it? How do we do it? It's all here. First of all, why do we need it? Look at verse one to two. Jesus and his disciples were going through a field on a Sabbath day, and they picked some heads of grain, rubbed them in their hands to eat the kernels, and they were condemned, they were accused of breaking the Sabbath by the Pharisees. And that's because reaping, reaping grain was One of the 39 forms of work that was forbidden on the Sabbath day by the Halakah at the time, which is the religious regulations. And as soon as you hear that, that this was breaking the Sabbath to just take, you know, take the grains off heads off of grain and rub them in your hands and get the kernels out and eat them, right away we say, oh, we say, how legalistic, how moralistic, all those rules, how awful. We turn up our nose at it. But notice Jesus response is not the Son of Man has come to do away with the Sabbath or to get us beyond all this. That's not what he says. He says, the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. And we'll get to that in a second. But it means at least this, that I'm all about the Sabbath. The Sabbath is what I'm all about. Which means here's what we learn. To start with the most workaholic culture in the history of the world, it's us. Dare not turn up its nose at any effort, even misguided efforts to give to people one of the things most crucial to making life even human, which is rest. Judith Shulovitz, who is a writer for the New York Times Magazine, probably New York Times Book Review. She wrote an article in New York Times Magazine just this last month in the first week of March called Bring Back the Sabbath. And she says this. First of all, she gives a little bit of background on herself. She says she was raised probably in New York, I'm not sure, but she was raised in a religious community at a synagogue. But like the Average professional, secular New Yorker. She resisted and basically moved away from her religious upbringing. And then she began to experience a phenomenon. Here's what she how she describes it. She says my mood would darken every weekend until by Saturday afternoon, I'd be unresponsive and morose. My normal routine, which involved brunch with friends, made me feel impossibly restless. Then I began to do something that as a teenager, profoundly put off by her religious education, I could never have imagined ever wanting to do. I began dropping in on a nearby synagogue. Finally, I developed a theory for my condition. If formerly people suffered from the Sabbath, which means all the regulations, I now was suffering from the lack thereof. There is ample evidence that our relationship to work is out of whack. Let me argue on behalf of an institution that has kept workaholism in reasonable check for thousands of years. Most people mistakenly believe that all you have to do to stop working is. Is to not work. But the inventors of the Sabbath understood that it was a much more complicated undertaking. You cannot downshift casually and easily. This is why the Puritan and Jewish Sabbaths were so exactingly intentional. The rules did not exist to torture the faithful. Interrupting the ceaseless round of striving requires a surprisingly strenuous act of the will, one that has to be bolstered by habit as well as by social sanction. And what she's saying is simply this. In spite of the fact she knows about, she recognizes the potential for abuse. Our relationship to work as a society is so seriously out of whack that anyone who thinks that you're going to be able to get rested by simply knocking off whenever you feel tired is hopelessly naive. The ability to rest deeply rest is a life or death thing no one can do without it. But it is not natural, it is not simple, it is absolutely difficult, and it takes an enormous amount of discipline and practice. That's what she's saying. Now, why would that be? Why would it be so hard? Well, first of all, we have to look at our modern situation. I'll do that briefly. The modern situation means that the eternal human need for rest is enormously aggravated. Let me give you four trends. A, B, C, D. Trends. Trend 1A. Excuse me, an A trend is the fact that more and more, at least in Western culture, jobs are insecure. The idea of. I mean jobs, whole departments, if they don't perform, if they don't turn profit, they're eliminated. Job security has. There's never been a culture, never been a place where job security was so bad, I don't think. Number two, I'm saying big things kind of in nutshells here. There's been a lot of research done on the fact that where it used to be, the people making the money at the top of a company used to make maybe 10 or 20 times what people at the bottom of the company made. Now it's more like 100 to 200 times. And partly as a result of this, to some degree, increasingly, people who make large amounts of money are expected to put in enormous numbers of hours. It's just expected. And if you don't want to do it, there's a line behind you. Whereas people on the bottom are having to take multiple jobs. So everybody's overworked. Doesn't matter where you are on the scale, in order to make ends meet, they have to take multiple jobs. That's B, C, technology. Ah, technology. You can work anywhere, which means now we work everywhere. It means that you can't stop work from spilling out into every nook and cranny of your life. And that's C and D. The fourth trend, and this is a little more. A little more complex. Cultural analysts have said, and it's pretty much universal agreement on this, that whereas traditional societies said you got your meaning in life through your family, you got meaning in life through family and through basically fulfilling a fairly prescribed social role, either as a mother or father or brother or sister or husband or wife or son or daughter. And work wasn't as important in a situation like that. You just needed to find a way to make a living because family was what everything was about. But we are the first culture in history that says you define yourself by deciding what you want to be and attaining it, and then you have significance, which means that work. There's never been more psychological and social and emotional pressure on work to be either fulfilling or at least lucrative. There's never been a culture like that, which means A, B, C, D, A, B and C, you know, mean that we are more desperately in need of rest than we ever have, less time for rest than ever. And D means we emotionally on the inside, have less ability to rest and relax than anyone ever has had any culture's ever had. But as bad as that is, as aggravating as the modern situation is, the Sabbath is an ancient practice because there is an abiding human problem that has always been there. The Sabbath is obviously not a response to modern hecticness. There's something that's already been there, and what is that thing that's already been down there. There's something else that needs to be addressed by Sabbath and Judith Shulavitz, and this is just a terrific article, just want you to know she understands what that deeper thing is when she says, quote, when the Sabbath was still sacred, not only did drudgery give way to festivity and family gatherings and occasional worship, but the machinery of self censorship shut down too, stilling the eternal inner murmur of self reproach. The eternal inner murmur of self reproach, the inner machinery. Now what is she talking about there? Sleep experts know that in order to be restored, you don't just need amount of sleep, but depth of sleep, what they call REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep. And of course they say, I think that only happens after a certain period of time. In other words, if you would take eight, one hour naps or something like that, and you say, I slept for eight hours, the next day, you'd be absolutely fatigued. Because you have to, I think, sleep a certain period of time before you go into deep sleep, rapid eye movement sleep. And so it's not just so much amount of sleep, it's the depth of sleep that you need. And hear what she's saying. And what I'm saying is there is on the one hand your external work, and you do need rest from physical exertion. But there is a deeper problem. There is a work underneath the work. There is an eternal inner murmur. There is an inner machinery of self censorship. What does she mean by that? It's not guilt. It's the need to prove yourself to yourself, to others. And that work makes the other kinds of work incredibly weary. That's what brings the weariness and that work, which is very, very difficult. You're always trying to prove yourself. You're trying to make sure that you, you know, that work, it's never enough. You're never, it's never enough. And because of that, you see, that's rapid eye movement, deep rest of the soul that you've got to have, or else all the vacations in the world won't help. If you take your vacations, you knock off, but you're not able to deal with that. You're not able to get that deeper rest, able to get that spiritual rest. You're going to be in fatigue all the time. So under the big rest, under the physical rest is the need for deep spiritual rest. For example, you know, the only good Rocky movie, the first one, the question comes to Rocky, you know, why are you driven? Why are you doing all this performance? You know, why are you, why Are you, You know, why are all those trumpets blazing as you run through the streets of Little Italy in Philadelphia and go up the art museum steps? Why are you working so hard? And his answer was, I want to go the distance. Then I'll know I'm not a bum. So our hero is being driven by the eternal inner murmur of self reproach, the inner machinery. That's why he's working so hard. That's why he makes it to the top, et cetera. That's why he's gonna burn out. That's why the other movies are gonna be terrible. There is a deep need for deep soul rest, without which physical rest is not gonna help you. So we need Sabbath rest. We've never needed it more than we do now, but we need it. So that's why we need it, number one. Number two, where do we get it? Now, let's look at what Jesus says. They say he's violating the Sabbath. And how does he respond? Well, he says, have you ever read that what David did when he and his companions were hungry, he entered the house of God, and taking the consecrated bread, he ate what is lawful for only priests to eat, and then he gave some to his companions. Now, what's interesting here is Jesus takes an incident from 1st Samuel 21, where we're told that David, when he was on run for his life, he was running for his life. He went through the tabernacle. And in the tabernacle, there is the place where the showbread, which was the bread of the presence, it was in the holy place, in the tabernacle, was part of the Sabbath worship, and you were not allowed to eat it. It was part of the worship, and David ate it. And of course, as Jesus implies, he was never condemned for it. God never said there was anything wrong with what he did. He was never condemned for it at all. Now, Jesus is inviting us to think out the implications of that. If the Sabbath and worship regulations can be set aside in a pinch. But on the other hand, if there's absolutely no place anywhere in the Bible where the moral law can be set aside in a pinch, there's no place where God says, well, you were in a hurry, so committing adultery's all right, worshiping an idol's all right, stealing, robbing, armed robbery, that was all right. You know, you were in trouble. You. You were in. No. If there's no place ever where the moral law is set aside in a pinch. But the Sabbath and the ceremonial and the worship regulations are set aside in a pinch. What does this Mean, think of the reasoning. It means that they are provisional, meaning that means they're temporary, meaning that they will end when something comes along that makes them obsolete to which they point. And what would that be? He says the very, very next verse. Then Jesus said to them, you know, assuming that they're thinking along these lines, I am Lord of the Sabbath, which is astounding. Let me just say what. Let's think about what he's saying. He's saying actually quite more things than I'm going to be able to open up in this sermon. But he's saying this. I am the one that the Sabbath regulations all pointed to. I can give you the deep rest of the soul that you most need. I am the Lord of rest. Jesus says, I am the Lord of rest. And you know what this means? Two ways. If you want rest, you have to go to Him. And if you think you've gone to him, but you don't have any rest, you still don't know what you have. You still haven't taken hold of what you have. You still haven't understood what you have now.