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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Talking Points, 3rd Quarter 2021: Rest in Christ

Kameron DeVasher

Mark Howard

01 Living in a 24/7 Society

04 The Cost of Rest

03 The Root of Restlessness

02 Restless and Rebellious

05 Come to Me

06 Finding Rest in Family Ties

07 Rest, Relationships and Healing

08 Free to Rest

09 The Rhythms of Rest

10 Sabbath Rest

11 Longing for More

12 The Restless Prophet

13 The Ultimate Rest

I'm Cameron DeVasier and I'm Mark Howard and this is Talking Points.

We are now on the third lesson of this third quarter all about rest in Christ.

And this week's title is the roots of restlessness.

And Pastor Howard, I'm going to tell you, I'm seeing this word rest or restless or restful.

A lot of, there's so many references to rest and restlessness and what not and different manifestations, iterations of this term.

You would think the Bible would be just soaked through with this word and we're really taking, but it comes across, well, you and I were discussing this before we even started today, that this word restlessness is kind of a broad, squishy, vague term that's, It's hard to find it exactly so specifically defined in scripture.

What was the word you were using, eisegesis?

It comes across or could come across in such a way.

It's not that it's not a scriptural concept, but then again, it's used so nebulously.

Even in our first lesson, we looked at the Bible uses the word rest in many different ways.

And then we come away with restlessness that we never really defined which 1 of those definitions.

And then we try to back that into every Bible story.

So it's like I feel like we're driving down the freeway in reverse, trying to back into everything and then taking that concept of rest or restlessness and putting it into the stories.

And not that there isn't an element in there, but I can imagine where some of our Sabbath school teachers would just...

They're either going to do 1 of 2 things.

They're going to have a real problem trying to figure out how to get any kind of linear thought.

Or it lends itself to what we've constantly talked about against in the Sabbath school.

And that is just like, OK, Sunday's lesson, Monday's lesson.

And everything is kind of a whole new topic anyway.

And so you don't really have to have connected thought.

It's like, here's going to be our open-ended discussion on Sunday, and here's going to be our open-ended discussion on Monday.

But if you're a teacher who's really trying to come through with a linear thought and come away with a conclusion, it could be a challenge.

Yes, but challenge accepted and at least for you and I we like to think in these A leads to B therefore C kind of lines.

And if you totally love love like this is the best quarterly we ever have ever, A.

But as we go through our talking points, we're trying to do that more linear like drawing out a continuous thought.

So having said that, I want to go through this week's lesson and then our talking points that go with it.

But why don't you start us with a word of prayer and then we'll dive in.

Heavenly Father, we are so thankful for the privilege we have of knowing you and Jesus Christ whom you have sent and being able to have that rest that comes only through that relationship.

We just pray now you would guide our talking points presentation, that it would be a benefit to those Sabbath school teachers and students, Lord, as we're all students of the word, to help us grow closer to Christ.

Okay, let me very quickly walk through what I saw in this week's lesson and I'll show you how we got the talking points out of it.

First of all, Sabbath Afternoon has a great illustration about the aspen trees that you see on the surface are actually the smaller part of the organism which the network of roots underneath is much longer and much older.

And similarly in our lives we see surface restlessness and symptoms but there's a deeper underlying thing.

Kind of like an iceberg only the roots they spread out.

Exactly, it's a whole bigger thing underneath.

And that's what we're, the purpose of this week's lesson titled The Roots of Restlessness is to try to get to underlying causes.

Well, Sunday then said Jesus brings division, and then Thursday says uprooting restlessness, and it says overcoming restlessness always begins with Jesus.

So the cure and the addressing of the problem is found really on Sunday and Thursday.

And then it's only Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday that you get the actual underlying causes, which are selfishness, ambition, and hypocrisy.

So with all that being said, how I've reorganized it, at least in my mind.

Yeah, let's hear our talking points this week.

Well, the introduction says, this week our lesson examines some underlying causes of spiritual restlessness, namely selfishness, ambition, and hypocrisy.

It's going to sound a lot like sin as we go on.

Furthermore, we'll see that the cure for those afflictions is found only in Jesus.

Okay, so number 1, restlessness is a symptom of deeper disease.

And that, again, primarily from Sabbath afternoon, where it gives us that illustration.

That's a first kind of, I think, a primary point from Sabbath afternoon.

Now we did add a text in there that we'll get to in a minute, but restlessness number 1.

We had 4 talking points in our last presentation and now Sabbath afternoon and yet you came away with a talking point from Sabbath afternoon and kept it to 3 talking points.

Selfishness is the root cause of restlessness.

The root cause of restlessness is selfishness.

That is going to come from Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

We look at selfishness, ambition, and hypocrisy.

Finally, talking point number 3, only Christ can treat our true spiritual disease, those root causes, those resolutions, anything else we do is gonna be putting a bandaid on things, but not healing the problem.

Restlessness is a symptom of deeper disease.

Now, in the church and probably in our lives, even apart from the church, we tend to have this thing, we have a problem.

We might have a headache or we might have some other symptom physically or emotionally or socially, and we try to put our finger right on that when the real issue might be some much larger, like some disease process or tumor or something underneath, right?

And So I've written here that we often treat restlessness or similarly negative conditions like anxiety, fear, or discouragement as a problem to be addressed itself when there are merely symptoms of greater spiritual problems beneath.

And the analogy given here in the lesson there is about the Aspen tree.

And it was interesting, it talks about how in the second paragraph there, individual Aspen trees can live up to 150 years, but the larger organism below the ground can live for thousands of years.

So it's very large, it's very long, and likewise in our lives we might have little symptoms of sin, like restlessness or whatever, pop up and be an agitation in our life.

But there's a significant problem underneath.

Right, this is a very well developed root system.

So let's look at, well, why don't you read the Sabbath paragraph 3 quote that we have there in the lesson.

There are many things that can prevent us from finding true rest in Jesus.

Some of These are obvious and don't require much attention.

Others may be less obvious to us, as with the huge aspen organism seen beneath the ground.

We may not always be conscious of the attitudes and actions that separate us from our Savior." Interesting.

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Talking Points, 3rd Quarter 2021: Rest in Christ

03 The Root of Restlessness

Transcript

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