This essay was written for the Spirituality unit of the MTh, and my question was: How might the sovereignty of God frame the spiritual discipline of rest, and how could that be applied to those in church ministry? This basically means I’m asking why and how pastors should rest. As with my other submitted work I’ve published here, if you would like to read the full essay, please get in touch with me and I’m very happy to send it!
I go among the trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet … My tasks lie in their places where I left them, asleep like cattle. … After days of labor, mute in my consternations, I hear my song at last, and I sing it. As we sing, the day turns, the trees move . -Wendell Berry, Sabbaths (I)
Berry’s poem on the Sabbath speaks to the soul’s deep need to be still, away from tasks set aside, and it describes how those tasks are again taken up. However, this state of rest is difficult to enter, and as a result, work is more often slog than song. Without rest, pastors are inhibiting gospel work in their lives and ministry, so their work, meant to be fulfilling and glorifying to God, becomes first self-serving, then toilsome and draining. The relationship between humans and their work and rest have been broken and must be restored in order for pastors to do kingdom work.
Work is biblical, and vital to being human. However, work, when it becomes one’s way to find fulfilment and significance, leads to burnout. Vocational ministry is especially in danger of burnout, since pastors often have difficulty establishing boundaries between work and personal life; a pastor’s spirituality and relationship to God could be inseparable from the work of ministry. Pastoral burnout is therefore a vicious cycle of corrupted work and potentially breakdown of self, since ministry calling, identity, and spirituality are intertwined. This problem cannot be solved by giving pastors more time off; it is a deep-seated issue of a pastor’s holistic spiritual state, as Peterson, a pastor himself, questions, “if I vainly crowd my day with conspicuous activity or let others fill my day with imperious demands, I don’t have time to do my proper work…How can I lead people into the quiet place beside the still waters if I am in perpetual motion?”[Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor, 19] The cure for burnout is rest from work “beside the still waters” to regain a sense of self and purpose of work, found in Genesis’ creation account.
Genesis 1:28 shows before the Fall, humans were tasked with work to do, according the inherent image of God. Their dominion, given by God, required attending, and included the gift and task of creating life. Humans in the garden were commanded to pattern their work after God’s and establish dominion over the earth by naming it and tending it so that it too creates life. Fulness of being was found through satisfaction in working in complete freedom toward their end of glorifying God.
Life in the garden was not meant to be solely work, however. The image of God and the creation mandate includes periods of rest from the work of creation, demonstrated first by God in Genesis 2:1-3. He stopped his creative work, recognizing the goodness and completeness of his work. Augustine describes God’s rest: “God knows how to be active while at rest, and at rest in his activity. He can apply to a new work not a new design but an eternal plan; and it is not because he repented of his previous inactivity that he began to do something he had not done before.”[Augustine, City of God, XII.18] God’s rest on the seventh day acknowledged the completion of creation and his new work to sustain it through man. He rests in his activity because he knows his eternal plan, and humans are meant to rest in the same way.
Before the Fall, humans did not need to rest because of weariness or exhaustion; instead, rest was a recognition of completed work. Humans did not identify themselves by their work, nor did God. By resting, God declared that it is good to enjoy what has been accomplished, not for the sake of accomplishing more after the period of rest, and God is still God when resting. To experience Sabbath, this period of kairos time that has been blessed and set apart as a time to not create, is to experience the fulfilment and completion of work, and humans are created to enjoy this divine blessing.
However, humans’ relationship to work and rest changes after the Fall, damaged by pride. Humans now bear a curse; no longer is work a joyful, worshipful experience. It is now wearying and fruitless. Humans’ enmity with God, each other, and nature, makes the work of tending the earth a struggle that more often than not ends in failure. Because human’s relationship to God is broken, humans no longer desire or know how to glorify God through their work. Instead, humans redefined work as an attempt to create significance, in other words, glorify the self. Humans are created to matter and be fulfilled, but finding significance and definition in solely work, making work its own end, is a symptom of the Fall.
Post-Fall, God invites humans rediscover the true purpose of their work by giving them a command to rest.[Exodus 20:8] Israel has just liberated from slavery in the land of Egypt under a Pharaoh who thought himself God, so this new command to remember the hallowed day of the Sabbath is a declaration that the true God is not one who demands productivity from slaves, but who gifts his creatures with the ability to create. The fourth commandment was a gift to humans to recall the original created state, where it was good to stop labouring for a time, and to remind them of God’s provision in their newfound freedom, expressed through his covenant.
Because of their fallen nature, however, trying to keep the Sabbath holy became another constraint, rather than an invitation back to the freedom of the Garden. Dressler writes, “Instead of understanding it to be their privilege to rest on the Sabbath, they viewed it as deprivation; instead of recognizing their opportunity to commune with God, they saw only inconvenience and hardship. Rather than discovering freedom to worship, they felt in bondage to a law, and instead of grasping the idea of renewal of their covenant relationship to God, they experienced the tragedy of legalism.”[Dressler, “The Sabbath in the Old Testament” From Sabbath to the Lord’s Day, 34.] We are still in danger of legalistic Sabbath practices if they focus on producing more, rather than renewing a relationship with God and remembering his covenant. Work and rest need redemption; otherwise, work becomes our identity and rest becomes an enslavement.
Jesus, by his proclamation of the kingdom of God come, offered a way for both work and rest to be redeemed through an invitation: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”[Matthew 11:28-30] With these words, Jesus reminds them of the original purpose of the Sabbath and redefines it under his new kingdom rule. Rest for the weary is laying aside their burden to take on Jesus’ yoke. This rest keeps us free from imposing more rules and laws on ourselves that only add to our burden, which is the freedom Jesus came to give us. Sabbathing with Jesus Christ as Lord of the Sabbath is now not only a reminder of God’s past creation and provision; it is an anticipation of the future kingdom.
The key then to rest is an eschatological kingdom orientation, as Hebrews 4 reveals: “while the promise of entering his rest is still open, let us take care that none of you should seem to have failed to reach it…So then, a sabbath rest still remains for the people of God; for those who enter God’s rest also cease from their labor as God did from his.”[Hebrews 4:1,9-10] This promise of rest is presently open to experience for those who “received the good news”[Hebrews 4:6] by faith and reminds us of God’s rest in Genesis. By participating in Sabbath rest now, we anticipate the coming of God’s kingdom, which means completion of our work and perfect rest. In this kingdom there is no need to create significance for oneself out of pride or insecurity because humans rest in the faith that they are significant.
Here, I embarked on a rather long discussion on the sovereignty of God debate. The purpose was to show that God is certainly sovereign and fully reigns in his kingdom, but it is a sovereignty that allows for creativity and active participation from us as creatures. By aligning our will to God’s through spiritual formation, we are free to rest and work as we were created. Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy was most helpful in considering this.
Turning to application, ‘rest’ needs a definition. The ‘spiritual discipline of rest’ is differentiated from ‘Sabbath rest’. The discipline is juxtaposed to activity, requiring a cessation of regular work. It can consist of many different Rules of Life, depending on what is life-giving for individuals, but the purpose of them should be to set apart the period of time from regular work. Sabbath rest, on the other hand, is the spiritual reality towards which the discipline of rest aims. It is a state of spiritual being where the soul is at rest in God, after Augustine’s well-known prayer, “our heart is restless until it rests in you.”[Augustine, Confessions, 3] Someone in Sabbath rest can be working, since Sabbath rest is not mutually exclusive to work, but it is working with the completed end in mind and in alignment with God’s kingdom.
Pastors especially must be intentional in their rest since everyone else’s Sabbath day is a pastor’s busiest, and ministry demands are not limited to a normal 9-5 schedule. Spiritual rest cannot be dropping from exhaustion; that would be burnout from corrupted ministry work. Instead, rest is choosing to set aside time to “practice the presence of God”. Slee writes Sabbath is not “space for a different kind of doing…Sabbath is a different kind of space altogether, when we are invited into not-doing, not-knowing, not-intending, not-working, not-pursuing.”[Slee, Sabbath, 81] The spiritual discipline of rest is instead “not-doing”, a bodily engagement in a spiritual reality. Pastors need this space if they are to do ministry so their self does not get inhibit kingdom work.
A heart at rest in God will turn to its work, acknowledging God’s presence and movement of his sovereign will. We anticipate a final rest, but that does not negate the goodness of work now. The discipline of rest contributes to work done in Sabbath rest. It is still good to work, but living under the sovereignty of God changes our posture towards work. In the same way that rest necessitates an eschatological mindset, so fulfilling work requires a view toward transformed creation. Work is in cooperatio Dei, which trusts that even daily ministry operations contribute, through the effective nature of God’s love, to the coming redemption of creation. The work of ministry takes on a new meaning because it is not done for its own sake, nor is it done to satisfy a need in a pastor. Burnout poses no threat to the pastor who works in a Sabbath because that pastor knows the end of his or her work is not fulfilment or glorification of the self through accomplishments. Rather, the end of pastor’s work is rest, so ministry is resting in activity, as God did, and expresses of God’s gift of creativity and co-operation according to his eternal kingdom. Only then can they take up work with a Sabbathing spiritual state, “to hear our song and to sing it.”[Slee, Sabbath, 155]
What I most enjoyed about writing this essay was learning about spirituality traditions and disciplines. If you are interested in reading more on rest or other spiritual disciplines, I’m happy to share some of the books I found most compelling and formative!
Hopeful Wanderer 