The following is an adaptation of Pastor Robbie’s sermon preached via livestream on Sunday, March 22 from Leviticus 25:8-17.
“You need to reset!”
That’s what I’d often hear from my basketball coach in high school. I was just fouled while shooting the basketball and heading to the foul line. As he’d yell, ‘you need to reset,’ My coach knew that I was angry and frustrated. If I went to the foul line and shot without reseting, I’d simply be throwing bricks at the board. He was telling me to take a moment, breath, and calm down.
This is actually a parenting strategy. Parents of young children softly encourage their little ones to take deep breaths and count.
What if God is calling you to a reset?
As Christians, we believe in the truthfulness of God’s word, which tells us that we have the natural inclination to break and mess things up because we ourselves are sinners. The reset that God is calling us to is not going back to how things were. The old normal was broken too, just in a different way. So the reset that God is calling us to is how He has always intended us to be.
This all begs the question - a reset of what?
Trusting God’s Work
The Israelites understood that time was sacred as God was both lord over their own lives and time. So they would work for 6 days, and rest on the 7th. They would not work aside from work that was either necessary or merciful. That was the sabbath day. But God also gave them the Year of Jubilee. The year of jubilee was meant to occur once every 50 years — but, if you read the OT closely, you’ll notice that the Israelites never observed and celebrated the year of Jubilee.
It’s one thing to trust that God will provide for you for 1 day after you’ve worked 6 days. But the year of Jubilee — you would not work for for 365 days, 52 weeks, for 1 full year.
Can you imagine that?
Certainly, you begin to wonder: How am I going to provide for my family? What am I going to do with my time? This is going to hinder productivity.
Trusting God is hard. It is hard because you need to believe some other things about God as well. You have to believe that he is good, that he is trustworthy, and that he wants the BEST for you.
But on whose terms? Who defines good, trustworthy, and best? It’s not us. If you look in the earliest pages of Scripture, where humanity was tempted by the devil, you’ll notice that Adam and Eve allowed the devil to sow doubt in God’s goodness to them. “did God really say…”
That difficulty is the reason why Israel never celebrated the year of Jubilee. It was incredibly counter-cultural to everything Israel knew, either in Egypt or in Canaan, and it is counter-cultural to our own hearts. Do you trust that God is good, that he is reliable, and that he wants the BEST for you?
We know that God is good, trustworthy, and wants the best for us — because his son died for us upon the cross. There is a picture of that in our text, as the year of Jubilee begun with the biggest celebration in Israel’s calendar: the day of atonement. We are able to trust God because he has rescued and forgiven us.
You’ve been given an opportunity, where you are forced to stay home, to lean into your relationship with God: to read Scripture, to pray, and to learn more about him. Consider this. The apostle John was forced into exile, and he learned so much about and from God. If we approach God through his word and prayer by embracing our solitude with intentionality, we’ll grow.
If you’re struggling to pray, read the psalms and embrace their invitation to you — they are honest expressions of people who wrestled with God. Consider Psalm 77, where Asaph says that God is responsible for his insomnia. His honesty and reflection on God’s provision leads to his transformation.