Scripture: Matthew 11:28-29; John 3:16; Matthew 5:48; Revelation 21:1-4 Series: Welcome
A sermon on Jesus’ invitation in Matthew 11:28-29 (‘Come to me, all you who are weary… and I will give you rest’). Opening with the science of sleep and the 2019 Nationals’ sleep consultant, the pastor distinguishes good rest from mere time in bed, then maps two biblical rests: the nightly rest that readies us to rise again, and the final eternal rest. Drawing on Augustine’s restless hearts, he diagnoses the modern attention economy as a quixotic search for self in things and experiences, arguing our true end is not self-actualization but completion (teleion) in God. Eternal life, glimpsed in John 3:16 and Revelation’s new heaven and earth, is radical transformation, not ‘earth minus death’—and the goal of resting in Christ is to become fully children of God.
Illustrations: nationals-sleep-consultant, greinke-game-7, hrv-sleep-biometrics, augustine-restless-hearts, quixote-tilting-windmills, marathon-of-life
July 9 draft
Sleep is very important. In the last few years, many scientists have honed in on the importance of sleep and good sleep for athletic performance, mental performance, mental acuity. In 2019, the Washington Nationals beat the Houston Astros in Game 7 of the World Series. I was, unfortunately, at that game and didn’t understand why the manager pulled Zach Greinke at the time. He was pitching great and then the relievers proceeded to give up the go head run. I’m gonna let that dog lie just a little bit.
Something that happened to the Nationals that year and one of the reasons why they performed beyond expectations is that they had a sleep consultant come in and radically transform the team Locker room and the hotel configuration on travel and the sleeping situations of all of the players in order to maximize sleep. They took away a lot of blue light, which can make people stay up longer. They taught them how to use sleeping masks and noise machine and put in some red bulbs in certain areas, because red light doesn’t ruin your night vision. . When they got sleep, it was a good kind of sleep and the Nationals performed beyond expectation for the whole year, and when the time came, on the last game of the season, they were ready.
There are good kinds of sleep and bad kinds of sleep. You can lay in bed for nine hours and get a horrible rest. There are certain physiological factors that you can look at beyond just time and bed. One is your, your heart rate, the lower the heart rate, usually the better the sleep. One is your respiratory rate. How many breaths are you taking during the night? A small change can make a big, big difference. There is also your heart rate variability, which is the microsecond difference in the rhythm of your heart rate. It is more of a recent biometric but there is a high correlation between your heart rate variability, or HRV, and the kind of sleep you get. We each have our own HRV. Some athletes are going at 120 ms. A good night of sleep is an HRV of 40ms. If your HRV is higher than your average, you probably got a good night’s sleep, even if you didn’t sleep as long. We’ve all had nights where we have got to bed on time but tossed and turned and didn’t feel recovered at all in the morning.
Beyond that, you can look at factors deep sleep, rim sleep, light sleep, et cetera. But those all these different factors and when you get enough sleep, high H R V, low respiratory rate, low heart rate, you ready to act and to do Jesus,
Jesus calls people says, Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest.
It’s one of my favorite lines in the Bible. It is a beautiful and evocative verse. In scripture, there are multiple types of rests. There’s not just one. There’s the rest of the night of sleep, of dreams, and our eternal rest, final rest. Throughout the New Testament, Jesus speaks about both forms of rest. The eternal rest we long for and the rest which gets us ready to rise again. Better, stronger, faster.
Saint Augustine, the fifth century bishop of Hippo in northern Africa said, in his Confessions, our hearts are restless until they rest in you or Lord. Our hearts are restless unless they rest in God. This sentiment describes so much our modern condition of restlessness, the condition brought about by the attention economy that’s seeking our eyes, seeking our clicks, seeking our screen time on our phones, our social media, seeking our time when we go out the hottest restaurants, the best concerts, the best trips. Always seeking. Yes, trying to find ourselves in things or experiences. And yet we will never find ourselves in a thing. Objects and status are ultimately unfulfilling. It is a quixotic quest. We are all on donkeys tilting at windmills and we’re trying to find ourselves apart from who we are created to be. And in this sense, our final rest is in this moment of understanding, this moment of completion. When we are where we need to be, when we are who we need to be with Jesus Christ. It is not self-actualization but completion. The word used in the New Testament is teleion. Telos. Complete. Sometimes translated as perfect. In Matthew 5:48; be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect. The point is not be without mistakes but be complete in God. We are complete when we can fully rest in god. This is what eternal life looks like in the scriptures. It’s not like clouds and cherubs, but an eternity of praising God, our creator in the fullness of God’s light, which is all that is good. Everything good we have seen and understood and experienced is but a foretaste of the good that is found in Jesus Christ, and we can participate in that.
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. This is our final hope for our final rest.
John 3:16: For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him won’t perish but will have eternal life. And this eternal life will not be a simple continuation of the status quo. Eternity is not earth minus death.
At the end of revelation, we see a new heavens and a new earth, and the new Jerusalem descending from the clouds, and all our tears will be wiped away. It is a radical transformation of the universe.
The Christian life is not just about our future but our present and our past. It is about it all. It is great to imagine rest in the future, but when you are in the middle of a marathon of life and there are still miles to go. Some of us our closer than others to our eternal rest, but we all will sleep tonight. That is the other sort of rest of which Jesus speaks.
I started off this message talking about some new tools and techniques that people use in order to maximize recovery for performance. These are tools used by professional athletes, combat sport, athletes, others in order to maximize their athletic potential. The goal of rest for you in Jesus Christ is not to maximize your athletic potential, but to offer something more, to receive something more, to do something more, by truly being children of God in this world.
This the