One Hour With Nothing In It

She fell asleep sitting on the edge of the bath.

Not for long. Four minutes, maybe six. Fully dressed, shoes on, one hand still holding a towel she had come in to put on the rail, and she woke up because her head went sideways and knocked the tiles.

And her first thought, sitting there at twenty past nine in the evening with a mark on her temple, was not I need to rest. Her first thought was whether she had turned the oven off.

Four years. That is roughly how long it has been since she stopped on purpose.

She has stopped by accident plenty of times. She stopped for eleven days with the thing that went round the house in February. She stopped in a car park last autumn for twenty five minutes with the engine running because she could not make herself get out and go in. She stops most evenings somewhere between the sofa and the stairs, which is not stopping, it is running out.

There is a difference between those two, and the difference is the whole of this message. One of them is a decision. The other one is a wall.

You know which one you have been living on.

And here is the part that would be funny if it were not so expensive: if you asked her why she does not take an hour off, she would not say she is too busy. She has never once said that. What she would actually say, if you got her honest and late enough at night, is that she has not earned it. That there is a threshold of things being sufficiently under control, and she has not reached it, and when she reaches it she will rest. She has believed that for four years and the threshold has moved every single time she has got near it, because that is what thresholds like that are for.

Somewhere behind her, further back than she can see, there are people who waited on a hillside all night for something that did not come, and went home in the morning with nothing, in front of everybody who had watched them go. Some of them stayed. And what those ones built afterwards, over the years, was strangely practical: a life with rest in it, and attention to the body, and a hope they stopped trying to put in the diary.

People who have been publicly wrong about a date learn something about time that the rest of us never do.

Made for you, and not you for it

There is a short sentence Jesus says in an argument, and it is one of those lines that quietly rearranges the furniture in a person's whole life.

The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.Mark 2, verse 27

I am not going to tell you which day. That is not this message and it is not mine to settle, and people who love God with everything they have got have landed in different places on it, and you must not be able to fail at receiving rest because of a question you did not come here to argue about.

What I want you to hear is the direction of travel in that sentence.

It was made for you. It is a thing that was made, deliberately, and handed over, and the person it was handed to is you. It is not a test you sit. It is not a standard you meet. It is not a reward at the end of a sufficiently productive stretch, and there is no threshold anywhere in the design of it.

Which means the arithmetic you have been doing for four years is not humility and it is not diligence. It is a mistake about who the gift is for. Mark 2:27 says the sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that sentence in that order, which settles who the hour was cut out for in the first place.

Look at the shape of the original. Six days of work and then a stop, and the stop is not written as the recovery period for the work. It is written as the crown on top of it. And it was given to a nation of people who had just come out of a place where they had worked without stopping for four hundred years, and who therefore had no idea, none at all, how to have a day that was not required of them. They had to be commanded to stop, because people who have been used for a very long time cannot rest on instinct.

You cannot either. That is not a flaw in you. That is what four years does.

So the rest has to be commanded rather than felt, at least at first, which is exactly how it was given.

And the other thing, the one that is actually keeping you upright at nine in the evening: the world held together without you for a whole day before you were born and it is holding right now, at this moment, while you read a page on a screen. Nothing you are carrying is being carried only by you. If that were true it would already have fallen, because you have been asleep for some part of every night this week and it is all still standing. Colossians 1:17 says by him all things consist, and it is written of Christ holding the whole of it rather than of anybody holding their corner, and it is His Spirit who keeps a house through a night nobody is awake for.