Sermon quotes on rest
Augustine of Hippo
God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.
Augustine of Hippo
Thou hast created us for Thyself, and our heart is not quiet until it rests in Thee.
Jacquelle Crowe
Rest makes us better workers and better worshipers.
Elisabeth Elliot
Work is a blessing. God has so arranged the world that work is necessary, and He gives us hands and strength to do it. The enjoyment of leisure would be nothing if we had only leisure. It is the joy of work well done that enables us to enjoy rest, just as it is the experiences of hunger and thirst that make food and drink such pleasures.
Jim Elliot
Rest in this – it is His business to lead, command, impel, send, call or whatever you want to call it. It is your business to obey, follow, move, respond, or what have you.
Nan Fink
Shabbat is like nothing else. Time as we know it does not exist for these twenty-four hours, and the worries of the week soon fall away. A feeling of joy appears. The smallest object, a leaf or a spoon, shimmers in a soft light, and the heart opens. Shabbat is a meditation of unbelievable beauty.
Stranger in the Midst
Craig Groeschel
But just as your body needs sleep, your soul needs time to rest in God. To learn more about Him. To talk to Him. To worship and praise Him. To fellowship with other brothers and sisters.”
Weird: Because Normal Isn’t Working
Craig Groeschel
Most of us think we’re too busy or too important to rest for a day.”
Weird: Because Normal Isn’t Working
John Koessler
Rest is a practice because the “work” of rest is rooted in the finished work of God.
Taken from The Radical Pursuit of Rest by John Koessler. ©2015 by John Koessler. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove IL 60515-1426. www.ivpress.com
John Koessler
Biblical rest does not make us passive or unproductive. It is the secret to all productivity in the Christian life.
Taken from The Radical Pursuit of Rest by John Koessler. ©2015 by John Koessler. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove IL 60515-1426. www.ivpress.com
John Koessler
I find it hard to be at rest and ambitious at the same time.
Taken from The Radical Pursuit of Rest by John Koessler. ©2015 by John Koessler. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove IL 60515-1426. www.ivpress.com
Woodrow Kroll
Rest is a matter of wisdom, not law.
Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz
Sadly, the need for recovery is often viewed as evidence of weakness rather than an integral aspect of sustained performance. The result is what we give almost no attention to renewing and expanding our energy reserves, individually or organizationally. TO maintain a powerful pulse in our lives, we must learn how to rhthymically spend and renew energy.
The Power of Full Engagement
Gillian Marchenko
Last night REM wasn’t a sleep cycle I sank into but a 1990s rock band encouraging me to “stand in the place where you are.” My hands throb.
Still Life: A Memoir of Living Fully with Depression, InterVarsity Press.
Gerald May
We know we need rest, but we can no longer see the value of rest as an end in itself; it is only worthwhile if it helps us recharge our batteries.
The Awakened Heart, HarperSanFrancisco.
Adam S. McHugh
Introverts move a little slower, speak a little less, and rest a little more.
Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture
Thomas Merton
As long as I am content to know that He is infinitely greater than I, and that I cannot know Him unless He shows Himself to me, I will have Peace, and He will be near me and in me, and I will rest in Him.
Shelly Miller
Rest provides fine-tuning for hearing God’s messages amidst the static of life.
Rhythms of Rest: Finding the Spirit of Sabbath in a Busy World
Shelly Miller
Extravagant wastefulness in time might prove the most productive thing you choose for yourself.
Rhythms of Rest: Finding the Spirit of Sabbath in a Busy World
Blaise Pascal
Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.
Blaise Pascal
Men seek rest in a struggle against difficulties; and when they have conquered these, rest becomes insufferable.”
Pensées
Josef Pieper
Rest is something that comes to us not without our own efforts but nevertheless not through those efforts.
Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation, Ignatius.
Oliver Sacks
I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.
Gratitude
James K.A. Smith (via Augustine)
We will find “rest” when our loves are rightly ordered to this ultimate end.
You are what you Love: the Spiritual Power of Habit
Julian of Norwich
For this is the cause why we be not all in ease of heart and soul: that we seek here rest in those things that are so little, wherein is no rest, and know not our God that is All-mighty, All-wise, All-good. For He is the Very Rest.
Hannah Whitall Smith
No soul can be really at rest until it has given up all dependence on everything else and has been forced to depend on the Lord alone. As long as our expectation is from other things, nothing but disappointment awaits us.
Charles Spurgeon
Rest time is not waste time. It is economy to gather fresh strength… It is wisdom to take occasional furlough. In the long run, we shall do more by sometimes doing less.
Teresa of Avila
Love turns work into rest.
Barbara Brown Taylor
Stop for one whole day every week, and you will remember what it means to be created in the image of God, who rested on the seventh day not from weariness but from complete freedom.
The clear promise is that those who rest like God find themselves free like God, no longer slaves to the thousand compulsions that send others rushing toward their graves.
Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith
William Wadsworth
Rest and be thankful.
Julian of Norwich
“In this little thing [a hazelnut] I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loves it, the third is that God preserves it. But what did I see in it? It is that God is the Creator and the protector and the lover. For until I am substantially united to him, I can never have perfect rest or true happiness, until, that is, I am so attached to him that there can be no created thing between my God and me.”
Julian of Norwich (1373), Revelations of Divine Love, in Devotional Classics, ed. Richard Foster and James Bryan Smith, HarperSanFrancisco.
Leonardo Da Vinci
Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen.
Ashleigh Brilliant
Sometimes the most urgent and vital thing you can possibly do is take a complete rest.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains and draws, at his need, inexhaustible power.
Taken from Michael Caputo’s God Seen Through the Eyes of the Greatest Minds, p 119.
Julian of Norwich
“In this little thing [a hazelnut] I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loves it, the third is that God preserves it. But what did I see in it? It is that God is the Creator and the protector and the lover. For until I am substantially united to him, I can never have perfect rest or true happiness, until, that is, I am so attached to him that there can be no created thing between my God and me.”
Julian of Norwich (1373), Revelations of Divine Love, in Devotional Classics, ed. Richard Foster and James Bryan Smith, HarperSanFrancisco.
A.A. Milne (Winnie-the–Pooh)
Don’t underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.
The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh
Diana Butler Bass
Our bodies move to a rhythm of work and rest that follows the rhythm originally strummed by God on the waters of creation. As God worked, so shall we; as God rested, so shall we. Working and resting, we who are human are in the image of God.
A.J. Swoboda
We worship the God who invented the weekend.
Subversive Sabbath: The Surprising Power of Rest in a Nonstop World, Baker Publishing Group, 2018, Kindle Location 364.
A.J. Swoboda
The biblical creation account essentially served as a theological rebuttal of all the other “gods” who never allowed anyone to rest. In a restless world, Yahweh required rest. Again, imagine what kind of first impression that would have given to an ancient person’s understanding of Yahweh. The God of Scripture not only rests himself but invites the world.
Subversive Sabbath: The Surprising Power of Rest in a Nonstop World, Baker Publishing Group, 2018, Kindle Location 366.
Aesop’s Fables
If you keep a bow always bent, it will break presently; but if you let it go slack, it will be the fitter for use when you want it.
Irenaeus
Submission to God is eternal rest.
Against Heresies
Pico Iyer
It’s the rest in a piece of music that gives it resonance and shape.
The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere. TED Books: New York. 2014.
Brenda Ueland
If your idleness is a complete slump, that is, indecision, fretting, worry, or due to over-feeding and physical mugginess, that is bad, terrible and utterly sterile. Or if it is that idleness which so many people substitute for creative idleness, such as gently feeding into their minds all sorts of printed bilge like detective stories and newspapers, that is too bad and utterly uncreative.
If You Want to Write (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1938, 1987), p. 33.
Kosuke Koyama
God walks “slowly” because he is love. If he is not love he would have gone much faster. Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It is “slow” yet it is lord over all other speed since it is the speed of love. It goes on in the depth of our life, whether we notice or not, whether we are currently hit by storm or not, at three miles an hour. It is the speed we walk and therefore it is the speed the love of God walks.
Kosuke Koyama, Three Mile an Hour God (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979), p. 7.
Joan Chittister
Leisure . . . is an essential part of Benedictine spirituality. It is not laziness and it is not selfishness. It has something to do with depth and breadth, length and quality of life.
Wisdom Distilled from the Daily (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), p. 97.
C. S. Lewis
The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and [pose] an obstacle to our return to God: a few minutes of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.
The Problem of Pain
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