The Radical Pursuit of Rest

Escaping the Productivity Trap

John Koessler

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780830844449
• eBook ISBN: 9780830899371
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

• Evangelical Christian Publishers Association Top Shelf Book Cover Award

We live in a culture that values activity, achievement and accomplishment. Whether in our careers, churches, schools or families, busyness is the norm in our lives, and anything less makes us feel unproductive and anxious. We have to work all the harder, then, to pursue true rest in a 24-7 world that is constantly in motion.John Koessler understands that rest is not automatic or easy to attain. He names the modern-day barriers to becoming people of rest and presents a unique perspective on how pursuing rest leads us to the heart of God. With honest, biblical reflections on trends in our culture and churches, he exposes our misconceptions regarding the concept of rest, as well as offering correction and practices to align our ideas with God's ideal.The book includes reflection and discussion questions designed for both individual and group use. You will discover the true meaning behind Jesus' idea of the yoke of rest and restoration for your mind, body and soul.

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RESTLESS FAITH

I do not go to sleep easily. When I do sleep, I sleep lightly. I often wake in the middle of the night, disturbed by the creaking of the house as it shifts on its foundation or startled by the rustle of the dog as she turns in her bed. My wife’s breathing beside me is quiet, rhythmic as an incoming tide. But in the distance I hear the shriek of an ambulance and I wonder whose misfortune it laments. I replay the events of the day in my mind, reviewing its conversations and improving my contribution with imagined repartee. I brood over the past. I fret about the future. As the clock on the nightstand counts down the remaining hours, I lie in the dark and wait for the window to brighten with the gray light of dawn.

Apparently I am not the only one who is awake. According to the National Sleep Foundation, more than half of all Americans say they have problems sleeping at night.1 We are a sleep-deprived culture.

The church suffers from a similar problem. Not from sleep deprivation so much as from a deficit of rest. Today’s congregation is a frenetic place. Our worship is marked by frenzied devotion that has full congregational participation as its primary goal. The drummer marks the tempo for the first song and we stand to sing. We remain standing through the entire song service. We are urged to lift our hands or clap in an approach to worship that sees it as a full-body experience. Between songs the worship leader tells us to fan out and find someone to whom we can introduce ourselves. The pastor reminds us to stop by the information desk and sign up for the latest congregational project and then spend time chatting over coffee with someone in the vestibule.

There is considerable enthusiasm in all of this but not much quietness or contemplation. Indeed, in such an atmosphere ­quietness and contemplation would be frowned on. Con­templation is liable to be interpreted as disengagement or, even worse, dead orthodoxy. Quietness is seen more as awkward ­silence than a mark of spiritual reflection.

In other churches the start of worship is signaled by the reedy call of the organ. Although there are no drums here, there is just as much activity. But in this case the pressure is focused on worship attendance and involvement in church programs. Those who love Jesus should be present whenever the church doors are open. To be about Christ’s business means to attend to the church’s business. This church’s members are expected to serve on committees, teach Sunday school and listen to children say verses on Wednesday night. At least some (about twenty percent) do. The rest feel ill at ease, trying not to look the pastor in the eye as he or she issues the latest appeal for more help in the nursery.

Both kinds of churches reflect an underlying assumption about our relationship with God and the nature of the Christian life. It is the assumption that busier is better. This assumption in turn is based on the supposition that devotion equals activity. The more we love Christ, the more we will do for him. Those who love Christ the most, whether churches or individuals, will do the most. Since our devotion to Christ should know no bounds, neither should our activity. No matter what we are doing now, we should do more. No matter what we have done in the past, it has not been enough.

The Culture of Productivity

The result is a highly driven church that constantly strives to exceed its current level of activity. If attendance has grown, it should increase further. If programs have expanded, they must expand even more. Every year the church rolls out new initiatives the way automobile companies roll out new models. Like the latest-model car, the latest project needs to be more impressive than the last. The church is driven by the bottom line just as much as a company whose lifeblood is sales revenue. Only in the church’s case the bottom line is measured primarily in people and what they do. It is only secondarily viewed in dollars and cents. However, the two are related. If you have more people, you have more resources. The most “successful” church has plenty of both.

These assumptions have had a profound effect on the church’s culture of leadership. Today’s church leaders have been shaped by the corporate world where productivity is the summum bonum of the organization. Business writers like Jim Collins, Patrick Lencioni and Seth Godin have as much to say about how the church operates as the Bible does. It might be said that they influence the church’s culture of leadership even more than the Bible, since the Scriptures do not speak with the degree of specificity that we would like on the pragmatic matters that are of greatest importance to us.

The community of believers is no longer a kingdom of priests but a service industry whose primary mission is to provide spiritual goods and services to the masses.

The Bible does not describe how to have a successful church—at least not as we define success today. As a result, where leadership and ministry strategy are concerned, we are more interested in results than in theological reflection. We adopt the latest ministry methods without critical appraisal. The only test we employ is to ask what the method has done for others and whether it will work for us. What’s more, our methods often work. But methodologies also impart ethos. Neil Postman’s observation about tools also holds true for methods. Postman warns that there is an ideological bias embedded in every tool, “a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another.”2

The ethos of the marketplace is one that combines utilitarianism with consumerism. In the marketed culture of the church, God is treated like a product. One might even say that he is less than a product since the marketed church is not really selling God or even the gospel. It is selling itself. The contemporary church is seeking to create an atmosphere that will attract worshipers and persuade them to return. The community of believers is no longer a kingdom of priests but a service industry whose primary mission is to provide spiritual goods and services to the masses. Visitors are treated like consumers and the church’s members are employees whose main job is to promote the brand. They do not worship; they produce. We call the things we do to get results “being effective.” But we call the results “God’s blessing.”

Busy Preaching

The church’s preaching is equally busy, chock-full of moral imperatives, practical advice and five-step methods. Every sermon poses a new challenge that can be resolved by applying the right combination of faith and effort. The problems vary but the solution is the same. Christ is the answer, of course. He always is. He is all-powerful. But apparently his unlimited power is of little help unless we learn how to apply the right mix of Scripture, faith, prayer and sanctified elbow grease. God is waiting for us to act. We sometimes feel when listening to these sermons that although we are saved by grace, it’s really the effort that counts.

Each week the pastor urges the congregation toward greater exertion. Congregants are told that they must round the bases from mere attendance to full involvement. They are Christ’s hands and feet. Church attendance is good, but it is not enough. Fully devoted followers of Jesus join a small group and engage in service projects. They serve in the nursery and come out on weekends to rake leaves for the elderly. They spend their vacation doing short-term ministry. They run for office or become political activists. They join the school board and support the arts. It goes without saying that in all of this real Christians keep the family a top priority. And the time they spend in God’s Word should be measured in hours rather than minutes.

These are the shadowlands of grace, where the line is blurred between what God alone can do for us and what we must do for ourselves. We may not be legalists in the technical sense, but we do inhabit a region that shares a border with legalism. As writer and Christianity Today editor Mark Galli has observed, “What I’m hearing time and again, in every corner of the church I visit, is not the soaring message of grace but the dull message of works—that I have to believe a certain theological construct, or have a certain feeling, or perspire in effort before I can be assured of God’s radical acceptance and my future salvation.”3

What the church needs is rest. But it is a special kind of rest. We need the rest that only Christ can provide. The rest of Christ is both a remedy and a relief. But more than anything else it is a gift. Jesus describes its character in Matthew 11:28-30: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, 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.”

We should not take lightly the fact that Jesus addresses this invitation to all who are “weary” and “burdened.” Jesus was a laborer. He was a carpenter and the son of a carpenter (Mt 13:55; Mk 6:3). He knew the weight of a load and shared the experience of all who ply a trade. Jesus was familiar with the roughhewn contour of unshaped wood and the pleasing weight of the proper tool. He felt the weariness that comes at dusk when strength ebbs along with the light. Jesus was also a wanderer who knew the rigors of travel. It was Jesus who sat down by Jacob’s well, “tired as he was from the journey” (Jn 4:6). Yet the weariness he speaks of in his invitation does not come from ordinary exertion. Common labor may tire the body but there is also a weariness that afflicts the soul.

Weariness of the Soul

In 1901 a scientist named Duncan McDougall believed he could ascertain the weight of the soul. He tried to accomplish this by measuring the weight of six patients as they died. Based on his experiments, he concluded that the human soul weighed twenty-one grams. Unfortunately subsequent attempts to reproduce McDougall’s experiments were unsuccessful, leading scientists to conclude that his methods were flawed and the results invalid.

Yet even if the soul is weightless, it is clear that it can be weighed down. Our personal experience is proof enough that such burdens are real, even if they cannot be calculated in grams or pounds.

The soul can be burdened by anxiety (Prov 12:25), a state of mind in which concern is amplified by fear. The concern itself is often legitimate, which is the very thing that enables fear to grow so easily. When Jesus warned his disciples not to worry about what they would eat, drink or wear in Matthew 6:25, he was not implying that such concerns were trivial. If we don’t eat, we die. Food is necessary to life. Clothing is necessary too, required by most cultures for both warmth and modesty. Even God recognizes this—food and clothing were among the first things he provided for those he created. When God placed Adam in the Garden of Eden, he gave him the freedom to eat of all the trees but one (Gen 2:15-17). After Adam and Eve sinned, God replaced the makeshift garments they had thrown together with garments of skin he crafted especially for them (Gen 3:21).

Jesus acknowledges that food and clothing are necessities in Matthew 6:32. And it is this very recognition that underlies his instruction to cast worry aside. Why shouldn’t we be anxious about such things? Because God already knows we need them. He always has. Anxiety as Jesus diagnoses it is not the result of misdirected concern so much as it is a consequence of misaligned confidence. We feel the weight of anxiety because we have placed our trust in the wrong thing. We depend on the means of production. Or we rely on the things that are produced. Jesus says all these things come from the hand of God. As he puts it, there is more to life (literally, the soul) than food and more to the body than clothing (Mt 6:25).

Jesus indicates that we have more important things to worry about. There is a life that is greater than physical life and a death that is worse than physical death. We have better things to pursue than food and clothing. It is the pagan who runs after these things; this is what people do when they have no God.

But more than anything else, Jesus’ words direct our attention beyond our daily concerns to one who is greater than they are. He redirects our focus from the concerns themselves to the one who is concerned for us. We do not need to be anxious about food and clothing because our heavenly Father knows we need them. Thus the weight of anxiety is the soul’s misapprehension. It is the thinking of people who see themselves as orphaned. Such anxiety is the anguished cry of a soul that has forgotten it has a Father in heaven.

All Who Labor

The overburdened soul does not always manifest itself in depression. It can also go to the opposite extreme. In Luke 21:34 Jesus warns, “Be careful, or your hearts will be weighed down with dissipation, drunkenness and the anxieties of life, and that day will close on you unexpectedly like a trap.” The Greek word translated as “dissipation” referred in Jesus’ day to the giddiness that comes with drinking too much wine. It is interesting that dissipation and drunkenness are linked here with the anxieties of life. In this case it would seem that the heart is not depressed but overstimulated. The agitation that comes with anxiety can be just as paralyzing as depression and often leads to it.

It is often tempting to resort to artificial means in an effort to cope. The drug of choice mentioned in Luke 21:34 is alcohol. But not all artificial means of coping are chemical. Many of us rely on our careers to define who we are as persons, to order our world and to satisfy our desires. In its ordinary and healthy form, work serves as a means to an end. But in its narcotic and distorted form, work turns into a distraction and eventually becomes an end in itself. The nature of the task may not change at all. The work we do may be virtuous and even necessary. It is our relationship to work that has become destructive.

This distortion of work sometimes manifests itself in the addictive behavior known as “workaholism.” But it also reflects an approach to life itself. The resulting inversion creates a world where work exists for work’s own sake. It is what Josef Pieper calls “the world of total work.”4 He observes that this kind of world is always poor and impoverished, even when its inhabitants are rich in material goods. This is because everything and everyone in it is subjected to the rationalist and utilitarian principles that shape its values. Work is more than a distraction. It is more than an addiction. Work has become a religion.5 In a world where a person’s worth is measured by usefulness, all things are subordinated to work.

In such an inverted world, it is not enough for worshipers to contemplate the beauty of Christ. Those who gather for worship must justify their presence by doing something useful. Believers who come to church intent only on worship are treated like spiritual slackers. Meanwhile congregational worship itself is described from the pulpit in terms that suggest that it is the lowest and least valued form of spiritual devotion. Many pastors and worship leaders urge church attenders to get more involved by suggesting that the worship service is only the “first base” of devotion. This gives the impression that the worship service is primarily for visitors and beginners. The truly committed will volunteer for the nursery or join a small group.

There are certainly motives that can defile our worship. Jesus denounced the prayers of those who were more intent on being seen by others than being heard by God (Mt 6:5), and he spoke scornfully of the kind of blathering prayer offered by those who “think they will be heard for their many words” (Mt 6:7). These two approaches to prayer have different audiences. One is a display intended to impress fellow worshipers. The other is addressed to God. Yet both place the emphasis on performance. In the former it is not enough to speak to God; one must be seen speaking to God. In the latter it is not enough to speak simply; we must bowl God over with our words to gain his ear.

But ministry too can be defiled. It is possible to be engaged in ministry and be self-absorbed at the same time. Paul’s observation that in Corinth everyone had a hymn, a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation was a description of the church’s ministry style but it was also an implied criticism (1 Cor 14:26). His assertion that such things “must be done for the strengthening of the church” was as cauti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Mark Galli
• Introduction
• 1 Restless Faith
• 2 The God Who Rests
• 3 Beyond the Day of Rest
• 4 False Rest
• 5 Rest and Ambition
• 6 Worship as Rest
• 7 Rest and the Digital Age
• 8 Rest and the Future
• 9 Final Rest
• Acknowledgments
• Questions for Group Discussion
• Notes
• Praise for The Radical Pursuit of Rest
• About the Author
• More from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright