01/25/2026
FROM THE PASTOR'S DESK:
Hey, Church family!
I hope you are all at home, snuggled up in your softest blankets with a hot pot of coffee! Given that we aren't meeting this morning and lack the capability to do a quality video service, I wanted to simply share an something with you I've been personally wrestling with.
Can I confess something to you? I might be a workaholic. Now, by that, I don't mean that I'm tempted to lock myself away at the office all hours of the day and night. In fact, it's quite the opposite. I struggle to just sit and stay in one place for too long. This proves problematic on weekends like this one where there is literally nowhere I NEED to be and nowhere I CAN be but home. And yet, instead of viewing these last couple of days as a good gift of God to take the chance to rest, my first instinct was to start making a massively unrealistic to-do list of things I can do while trapped at the house.
Then Mark 2 came to my mind. At the end of Mark 2, Jesus and the disciples were walking through the grainfields on the Sabbath (Saturday), and the disciples were hungry. So what do they do? They start picking some of the grain as a snack for the road. Here's the problem: nearby were some Pharisees, and they ask Jesus, "Why are your disciples doing what isn't lawful on the Sabbath?!"
Now, keep in mind, the Pharisees took the command from God to "Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy," VERY seriously. The problem is, they took it SO seriously that what was meant to be a day of rest as a gift of God became for them a day of restLESSness. Instead of being a day to do good for others and rest in the Lord, it became a day of rigid rule-keeping and regulation. The Pharisees even had rules about how many steps a person should take before it was considered "work." And it wasn't like they had iPhones that tracked their steps for them!
But Jesus is more than ready to answer their objection by reminding them of a principle that should still be good news for us today: "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath" (Mark 2:27, NIV). That God designed us to NEED rest, and that he COMMANDED rest, is not bad news! It's GREAT news! That we need rest is the reminder that we aren't God. We aren't sovereign, and we can't conquer the world. In the Sabbath, we are reminded that the world goes on without our labor because we're not the ones who hold it all together.
But even more than that, there's even better news in this passage: "So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath." In Jesus, we find a better, more complete rest that the Sabbath of old never could've accomplished for us (especially in light of the fact that we tend to make rest an activity to be fulfilled rather than a rest FROM activity). The rest we find in Jesus is a rest from trying to accomplish what we, apart from him, could never accomplish: the rest of our souls from trying to find salvation, life, and belonging in what we do and who we are. Instead, in him, through his life, death, and resurrection, we find all of those things apart from us. And through our faith in him, we can rest and know that our King is the one who will hold things together.
So here's my challenge for you this morning, church: rest in Him. Take this day as a good gift and a reminder that you're not in charge and the world can and will go one without you for a bit.
Praying for your warmth and safety this morning,
Pastor Devin
