It seems if you talk to anyone and ask them how they're doing, one of the most common things they'll say is that they're feeling tired.
I think that's true of Christian and non-Christian alike.
What we all need is rest.
In this episode, I'm talking to Jocelyn Bignill about some recent thinking she did in a talk on rest
and how we can rest spiritually, physically, mentally, and emotionally.
It's a really helpful discussion.
I found it challenging.
I find it helpful.
And I hope you enjoy our conversation.
Welcome to Moore College's Centre for Christian Living podcast.
I'm Peter Orr, and today I'm joined by my friend, Jocelyn Bignill.
Joss is an assistant minister at All Saints Petership, where I happen to go to church.
Welcome to Moore and it's great to have you on the podcast, Joss.
I wonder if you could start by telling us a little bit about yourself and how you became a Christian, how you came to be in Christian ministry.
Thanks so much, Pete.
My name's Jocelyn.
I grew up in a Christian family, wonderful, faithful Christian parents.
And I spent all of my childhood going to church with them and they really showed me a great example of what it means to be a faithful Christian.
What it looks like to live out the Christian life.
So it's through their influence and their example that I became a Christian.
I'd say around year seven was the time that I said, I need to make this decision for myself.
I'm a follower of Christ, not just because of my family, but because I believe he's called me to be one of his children.
And from there, after high school, I trained to be a teacher, I was teaching in Tamworth and was asked by my wonderful church, St.
Peter's in South Tamworth, would I like to come and do a traineeship?
And did that, ended up deciding it would be a good idea to go to more college and studied here.
And since then I've been working full time at All Saints in Petersham as the assistant minister.
That's great to hear.
Just recently you gave a talk at our church on rest.
Why did you think that was an important topic to address?
It's a topic I've been sitting on for a little while, actually.
I wanted to think about it more.
I wanted to do a talk on it and share that with other people.
It's definitely a felt need.
You see people's need for rest.
We all feel this hunger for rest, and we're not quite sure exactly what it means to rest.
We're not very good at it often, and we're certainly not sure about what it means to rest as a Christian.
What difference does Following Jesus make in the shape of my rest.
So I thought this is something that is going to be helpful for me personally, but also for our congregation as well.
The privilege of being a minister is that you get to pick a topic, read a bunch of
stuff about it, think about it and distill it down and share it with other people.
Yeah, I think that's very helpful.
Even this morning, I was reading about this idea of urgency culture where things like text messages and emails.
Many of us have this kind of felt need, as you said, to respond to everything immediately.
And it creates this kind of Feeling of urgency and inability to rest because there's always something more to do.
So, as you said, I think it's a really helpful contemporary topic.
As you said in the talk, you didn't just give practical tips, you grinded the issue in the Bible.
In terms of the Old Testament, what does the Old Testament tell us about the concept of rest?
Way more than you would think.
The topic of rest, the subject of rest is huge in the Bible, way bigger than I realized.
But a couple of points that I picked out and that I found really interesting that the pattern of rest is set in creation.
We all know that on the seventh day, God rested from the work of creating.
And later when he's putting in place the Sabbath law, he references his rest after creating as the pattern that he set.
for us to follow in having a Sabbath rest.
So even before the fall, we see rest is part of the way that God has created the rhythms of our world.
You know, we have a week and one of those days is set aside for rest.
That's not part of a sinful world.
That's part of how he created the world.
I think being exhausted and overtired is part of a fallen world, but rest is not.
Rest is part of the way he created the world.
Something I particularly loved was when God's giving the law after the Exodus.
So he's already saved them and then he's giving them the law.
And this is a group of people who have been in slavery for hundreds of years, for generations and generations.
Palava started because Moses asked for a long weekend to go into the desert and worship God.
And Pharaoh said, no way, you are so lazy.
I'm not going to give you straw for your bricks anymore.
You have to get that for yourself.
So this is the person who's been running their lives, who just has to have this tight
grip on them that they cannot have a weekend to themselves to worship their God.
And then God rescues them.
He takes them out into the wilderness.
He gives them this law.
It just would have been mind blowing to go from being a slave where your only worth is in
what you produce to having your God say every week, I want you to take a day and do nothing.
I want you to worship me.
I want you to spend time together, but no one's going to be preparing food.
No one's going to be working.
You're going to take a day out where you produce, I just can't even imagine how mind blowing that would have been for an Israelite in that moment.
To go from Pharaoh to God as the person who's ruling their lives.
And you see that the Israelites, as the same as us, are pretty bad at rest and pretty bad at obeying the Sabbath rules.
They have been set this pattern and it's a gift from God.
And entering that rest is a This ongoing theme all throughout the Old Testament.
We might come back to the Sabbath in a few moments, but obviously Old Testament, as you say, gives us the foundation of rest.
How does the New Testament develop that idea?
Well, as soon as we enter the New Testament, pretty early on in the Gospels, we see that rest has really been corrupted.
The Sabbath has been corrupted.
Instead of this beautiful, life giving, freedom giving day.
It's instead become a new kind of slavery where there's all these rules that you have to obey that are so restrictive
that rest has become this whole act of work and justification in itself and the Pharisees are loving that.
And so Jesus comes in and he blows that out of the water and he doesn't say we don't
rest on the Sabbath, but he points out that they've lost the heart of the Sabbath.
He calls himself the Lord of the Sabbath
and he will very intentionally heal people in front of the Pharisees in a very pointed way, going, What are you going to do about it?
Do you think this was bad that I did this?
That giving life on the Sabbath, that healing on the Sabbath is that evil in your eyes?
And he reminds us that the heart of the Sabbath is rest.
And not slavery.
And he reminds us that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
We're not in servitude to the Sabbath.
God has given us this day as a gift.
And that is a really good thing.
So as Christians, are we obligated to keep the Sabbath in the same way that Israel was in the old Testament?
I'm going to be very unsatisfactory and really hedge in this answer.
I think the New Testament, first of all, gives us a much bigger picture of Sabbath, of entering into God's rest.
We are given rest because we no longer need to sacrifice.
We no longer are bound by the law.
We have been given freedom from our sin, and so we can rest in the knowledge that we are saved, we
are safe, we are loved, but there's no act that we can do that will make Jesus love us more or less.
So in that way, We've entered into God's rest, and we look forward to a time in the new heavens and the new earth when rest will mean
something much bigger and much fuller, when we'll no longer experience exhaustion that our whole lives will be characterized by rest.
Now this doesn't mean there's no work, but it is a full, all encompassing kind of rest.
But, having said that I don't think that's an excuse for Christians to throw out the Sabbath.
I think that there is still a good rhythm of rest that God has set in place, it
was in creation, this is not something that was come up with in response to sin.
The Sabbath tells us something about how God has created us.
So if we are not able to set aside a day to do restful things, and I think what our interpretation of restful things is.
can be quite open and wide.
We don't want to be like the Pharisees saying it means this, this and this only, but setting
aside a day a week where we can do restful activities is something really wise and really good.
And I think we can stray into sin and disobedience when we reject that we need rest.
And when we say, no, I'm above that, or I'm too important, or the things that I do are too essential for me to take time to rest.
Because we are making ourselves God in that situation.
God does rest, but the Bible is very clear that he doesn't need to rest.
He's always awake.
He's always working, not doing the work of creating, but still working.
And when we rest, we're acknowledging his sovereignty.
So we're not bound by the law in the same way, but we are still bound by the good rhythms that God has created.
And I think rejecting the Sabbath completely can mean that we stray into the realm of sin and idolatry if our hearts are in the wrong place.
That's very helpful.
And Paul, in a couple of places, Romans 14, Colossians 2 or 3, seems to sort of assume
that different people will have different views on the Sabbath as a day, an individual day.
But as you say, that call to rest.
I want to say something a little bit about Jesus call to come to him at rest and how that's, in a sense, is the fulfillment of that idea.
I started my talk off with that famous verse from Matthew 11, Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened.
And I will give you rest.
The word rest in itself, it's almost this exhalation, this deep breath.
And this is such a beautiful and precious thing that Jesus offers us, that we do not need to prove ourselves to him.
He does not need us.
He's coming to us, offering us rest.
He's offering us this gift.
And we find that in him in a way that we can't find rest apart from.
Because everywhere else, we need to prove ourselves.
Everywhere else, we need to hold up our end of the bargain.
But with Jesus, we have no end to hold up.
He has, on the cross, in his resurrection, completely and fully given us adoption
into God's family, made it so our sins are completely forgiven, and given us new life.
There's nothing that we can give back in that sense.
Yes, we want to serve him.
Yes, we want to give him love and worship and adoration.
For But when we come to Jesus, we don't need to come proving ourselves.
That's the thing I keep coming back to.
We don't need to work our way into his good graces.
It's not like every other relationship where there's a reciprocity.
They give this much and you're giving in this way.
It's very one sided in a way that is so good and so wonderful.
I love that verse that says.
That when we pray and we don't have the words, the Holy Spirit intercedes with groaning.
And when we come to God to communicate with him, we don't even need to have the words.
Just coming is enough.
And that's us entering into a relationship with him.
What a restful thing.
Our minister always talks about how great dogs are.
We both love our dogs.
And he says, dogs don't have any expectations of you.
There's no critical feedback with your dog.
They just are so happy you're there and they just love you.
I don't want to compare God and dogs, but there is a sense in which we come to God and he's not demanding from us.
Jesus is saying here, you will find rest for your souls.
when you come to me.
It's a restful relationship and we can distort that so easily because our hearts want to be able to earn our place.
The Priscilla and Aquila Centre is the Centre of Moore Theological College that aims to encourage the ministries of women in partnership with men.
Every year, the Centre holds a conference to encourage women in ministry and to assist ministry
teams to think more creatively about how men and women can work better together in ministry.
In 2025, the Centre's annual conference will be held on Monday the 3rd of February.
Paul Grimmond, Dean of Students at Moore Theological College, will be speaking on the topic of "Is Godliness Complementarian?"
and Titus 2.
And author Claire Smith will be speaking about her new book,
"The Appearing of God our Savior: A theology of one and two, Timothy and Titus", which will be published by Crossway in February, 2025.
To find out more and to register, visit the Priscilla and Aquila Centre website, paa.more.edu.au.
That's paa.
moore.edu.au.
And now let's get back to our program.
Wonderfully, you've teased out the richness of the Bible's teaching on rest and that theological foundation.
And it's on that basis that then we can think about the practical aspects of what it means to rest.
So in your talk, you analyze rest in four different ways, four different ways that we can rest.
You want to say something about physical rest.
What does it look like for us to physically rest?
Yeah, I think it's important to think about rest in different aspects and different facets because we are multifaceted, complicated beings.
And so if we just think of rest as one thing, then we're never going to rest well, or only that one facet of our beings is going to be rested well.
So physical rest, I think, again, can look different for everyone.
This is part of why digging into the goodness of the Bible's teaching on rest is so important.
And what that spells out for each of us is going to look very different.
But physical rest, I think sleep is such a huge thing.
And it's something, again, that we can be quite poor at.
And there are seasons in our lives when rest in that way, sleep, is not possible.
It's out of our control.
Whether we're experiencing anxiety, whether we're experiencing insomnia, whether we're a parent that
has a child that keeps us up in the night, if we experience chronic pain that means that we can't sleep.
But I think a lot of us are making poor decisions around our sleep and actually not allowing this good gift of God.
You know, if I had any device that needed eight hours of charging a day, I would
think it was pretty rubbish and there was something wrong with the battery.
But God's created us to spend a third of our day resting and sleeping, specifically, unconscious.
And when we reject that, we're rejecting his sovereignty in a way.
And we're so caught up, I think especially after you've finished work and maybe you've done your chores around the
house and it hits nine o'clock, ten o'clock, whatever it is, And you go, finally, I can do something I enjoy doing.
Finally, I can do something fun.
And so then we stay up way too late watching those episodes, scrolling on our phones, whatever that activity is.
And that leisure becomes more important than the sleep that God has told us that we need.
And we have so much on offer leisure wise, that it's hard to say no to it and go to sleep.
Sleep is this great acknowledgement of God's sovereignty.
We can rest because
he doesn't.
One of the books that I read that I loved was by Geoff Robson.
It's called "Thank God for Bedtime".
And he says, "Staying up late may be worse than folly.
It may be sinful.
It may be a sinful attempt to wrest back the control that should gladly be relinquished into God's hands.
A sinful denial of our God given human limitations."
Sleep is a precious gift from God.
And we so often choose not to get enough of it and show that there are other things more important to us.
It's almost an act of faith to say, I have lots of these things I need to do, or I have
things I want to do, but actually I know the way that God has designed me is to get sleep.
And so I'm going to go to sleep and trust in him that the world or what I'm doing doesn't depend on me.
Now that's very, very helpful.
So that's physical rest.
What about intellectual rest?
I don't think any of us need to be told that we should be on our devices less.
We all know it and yet we struggle so much to actually implement anything that gives us any discipline.
Again, this is something you could talk about in a lot of ways, but I think a key one is that we are constantly inputting.
I'm talking about myself and I'm just assuming other people do the same thing, that I'm not this weird anomaly.
I constantly have an audiobook, a podcast, a TV show going on my iPad, any activity where I don't need to be focused in that way.
Whether it's chores, walking, driving, doing craft, something I love to do, I will have something else going at the same time.
And our brains can't cope with that.
We're not designed to cope with that.
So we have this constant overload of information and our mind never gets the chance to just tick over and sit in neutral.
And there's something that's so valuable about just letting our minds wander.
That's how we process our emotions, it's how we process events, it's how we plan and remember things.
I think maybe the reason we keep forgetting that we have things on or things we're supposed
to do is because our brains never get a chance to actually think and remember anything.
So then, often what can happen is that you start doing all that processing when you go to bed.
And so you can't get to sleep, because your brain's ticking over all of these things that it should have had
the space to do during the day, but you never took your AirPods out to and so it never had a chance to do that.
Having that brain space gives us room for creativity and for planning and for thinking ahead, for thinking about people other than ourselves.
I think that constant highway of information, you know, those back catalogs of podcasts, those things that we constantly have going in our ears.
So something since I've done this talk and was thinking about this, I've been really conscious of where's my moment of quiet in the day.
Where is there something that I am doing that I normally would have my headphones in, I'd normally
have something playing that I'm going to choose to have silence and let my brain tick over.
And it's just creeping in as a habit, in a good way, that that's becoming more normal,
and so I'm not always reaching for my phone to turn on a podcast or an audiobook.
I'm not always putting my iPad on the kitchen bench while I'm cooking something because I'm just thinking about things.
And so I'm just going through the process of getting ready in the morning, going for a
walk with the dog, doing some of my craft that I love without having that constant input.
And I think it's just really good for our brains.
That is so helpful and insightful and a way of thinking about rest that we wouldn't necessarily
connect with the idea of rest, but it makes absolute sense, giving our minds the rest that they need.
Obviously, as you said, we have these different aspects to our personhood.
What about emotional rest?
What does that look like?
I mainly thought about emotional rest in terms of relationships.
Some of us spend a lot of time on our own.
Some of us are never alone and we don't have the space to be alone.
Some of us choose to never be alone.
We're not very good at it.
Some of us are not very good at being with people.
I think relationships come under that category of emotional rest, and there's balance.
How can I take some space, carve out some time to spend on my own, whether that's the walk to the train station, whether
that's the drive home after dropping a kid off for this thing, whether that's getting up half an hour early when the
house is quiet, whether that's spending a night at home alone, when I could invite someone over, I could make plans.
That's a good emotional rest to learn how to spend time on your own and to be used to your own company and enjoy it.
But then I think there's also the aspect of investing in our relationships.
And that will mean making plans ahead of time, that will mean choosing activities with other people that are helpful for our relationship.
Something I haven't mentioned, but I think is a really important concept when it comes to rest is that good rest takes work.
It doesn't happen by default.
If you wake up on that day off and you plan nothing, often you end up with a very unsatisfactory free day.
So having a default activity on that day, that if I haven't planned anything else, I'm going to do this restful activity is really good.
And if you don't plan to see your friends, if you don't, you know, some of us it's a month ahead, two
months ahead, some of us it can be tomorrow, making plans with people and putting them in the calendar.
Then often that won't happen.
Even the people you live with, you don't plan quality time together, then your whole relationship can end up being logistics.
And that means your spouse, your children, your housemate, whoever it might be, your
relationship with them becomes very functional and not an emotionally restorative place.
Because it's just functional.
So I think relationships are a key place for emotional rest, both learning to be alone and spending quality time with people in our lives.
I think that's really helpful, that idea of working to rest or being intentional.
It is important, and I think you're right, we don't give thought to it, we're not intentional.
Obviously, as Christians, we're spiritual beings as well, so what does spiritual rest look like?
Well, we talked a little bit about a bigger concept of spiritual rest and the rest we
enter into by faith and that we're looking forward to in the new heavens and the new earth.
But we can experience spiritual rest now as well.
These little moments of rest, these good restorative activities, are glimpses of heaven.
Isn't that a really beautiful way to think about it?
When I'm sitting out in my back deck and I'm reading a book, it's a little glimpse of heaven.
And one of the ways that we have spiritual rest, have one of those glimpses of heaven now, is in church.
So church can definitely and should be part of our Sabbath rest.
It doesn't mean that church is always a particularly restful activity in every aspect, but I think we
can put in the work to think about how to make and to plan to make our Sundays or our church services.
A restful experience.
And part of that is preparing.
Is the rush to church just a harried chaos, getting into the car and out the door?
Am I constantly sleeping in so that I don't get to church on time?
Am I coming to church unprepared for the ways that I'm serving?
Am I coming to church not really thinking about anything except myself?
All of these things mean that church is not restful.
I can speak about this at length, but I won't.
A couple of things that I think make church.
more restful is coming early so you're not harried and you're ready to look out for and serve and invest in relationship with other people.
Having one of those quiet moments.
before church.
For me, I like to, again with the dog, go out early in the morning and walk along the Cooks River without my headphones.
And I find that a really restful activity and something that sets me up well for a day at church.
Maybe it's 10 minutes with a cup of tea, whatever it is, having that moment of quiet and peace to prepare your heart and your mind for church.
Just being fully present, listening to the sermon, taking notes.
Looking for, what is God teaching me today?
What good truths and beautiful glimpses of grace are there in God's word today that we can share?
And even participating fully in the singing.
Singing can be such a restful, restorative activity alongside our brothers and sisters in Christ.
So don't pull your phone out or get distracted with things that are happening around you.
Look at the words that you're singing, write them on your heart, sing with gusto no matter how off key you are.
Amen.
And fully invest in that activity of singing.
I think church can be a really restful place.
spiritually, might not be physically, might be tricky relationally.
There's things that make church really difficult or really good and often they overlap,
but church can be a really restful place if we put in the work to find that rest.
And you know, you might be in a season where that is really difficult.
You might have a toddler with you in church.
Your mental health might be really poor.
Maybe there's a fracture in relationships at church that mean walking through the door is just a bit of a nightmare, but you can still find a moment.
Whether it's all you're up to is joining in with this song, and that's your moment of rest, spiritual rest during church.
Whether your mind has been wandering through the sermon, you're struggling to concentrate,
But you just grasp hold of one phrase, that's your moment of rest in the service.
It's not an excuse to be lazy, but sometimes that's all we can do.
And that's good.
Again.
So helpful.
Just this idea of being intentional, working hard, thinking about rest.
You've so helpfully shown us the importance of rest in the scriptures, but also how this is not something that we
kind of fall into automatically and we need to be thoughtful, intentional, and even ironically work at resting.
You've given us some really great insights, any other resources that you can recommend if listeners want to think more about the idea of rest?
I particularly loved Adam Mabry's book, "The Art of Rest".
I found that really helpful.
It's quite a small book.
It's not hard to read.
But was really good.
And I referred to it, or got a lot of thoughts from it for my talk.
I just thought he was really insightful.
Another great book is "Gentle and Lonely", which a lot of you might have read already.
It is like a hug from Jesus.
It's a really wonderful reminder of the rest that we find in Jesus.
And I think the last thing I would want is for anyone to listen to this and then feel really guilty or burdened.
Rest is a gift from God, it's something good.
And the rest we find in Jesus, we can still find when our eyes are hanging out of our head or we're just feeling pressed from every side.
I hope we feel challenged to think about rest better and to practice rest better.
But a book like Gentle and Lowly I think is such a great reminder that even when we fail, we have this rest in Jesus.
And I cannot say enough about what a precious, wonderful book it is.
It's not a hard one to read.
The chapters are really short.
It really digs into that verse in Matthew 11 about finding rest for your souls.
So, I'd highly recommend that.
Brilliant.
Thanks, Joss, so much.
Really helpful.
And thanks for coming on the podcast.
Thanks, Pete.
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