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, Peter Orr talks 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 and challenging discussion, and we hope you enjoy the conversation.
Links referred to:
- Thank God for Bedtime: What God says about our sleep and why it matters more than you think (Geoff Robson)
- The Art of Rest: Faith to hit pause in a world that never stops (Adam Mabry)
- Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers (Dane C Ortlund)
- Priscilla & Aquila Centre 2025 annual conference
- Support the work of the Centre
Runtime: 29:57 min.
Transcript
Please note: This transcript has been edited for readability.
Introduction
Peter Orr: 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 and helpful, and I hope you enjoy our conversation.
[Music]
PO: 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 Petersham, where I happen to go to church. It’s great to have you on the podcast, Joss!
I wonder if you could start by telling us a little bit about yourself, how you became a Christian and how you came to be in Christian ministry.
Jocelyn Bignill: Thanks so much, Pete! My name’s Jocelyn. I grew up in a Christian family with wonderful, faithful Christian parents. I spent all of my childhood going to church with them. 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. It was through their influence and their example that I became a Christian. I’d say around Year 7 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.”
From there after high school, I trained to be a teacher. I was teaching in Tamworth and was asked by my wonderful church St Peters in South Tamworth if I would like to come and do a traineeship. I did that, and I ended up deciding it would be a good idea to go to Moore College, so studied here. Since then, I’ve been working full-time at All Saints in Petersham as the assistant minister.
PO: That’s great to hear, Joss!
Why speak on rest?
PO: Recently you gave a talk at our church on rest. Why did you think that was an important topic to address?
JB: It’s a topic I’ve been sitting on for a little while. 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. Often we’re not very good at it. In addition, we’re certainly not sure what it means to rest as a Christian. What difference does following Jesus make in the shape of my rest?
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 distil it down, and share it with other people.
PO: Yeah, I think that’s very helpful. Even this morning, I was reading about this idea of urgency culture, where because of things like text messages and emails, many of us have this felt need to respond to everything immediately. It creates this feeling of urgency and an inability to rest, because there’s always something more to do. So as you say, I think it’s a really helpful contemporary topic.
Rest in the Old Testament
PO: As you said in the talk, you didn’t just give practical tips; you grounded the issue in the Bible. In terms of the Old Testament, what does the Old Testament tell us about the concept of rest?
JB: Way more than you would think! The subject of rest is huge in the Bible—way bigger than I realised.
Creation
A couple of points that I picked out and found really interesting is that the pattern of rest is set in creation. We all know that on the seventh day, God rested from the work of creating. 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. 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.
The law
Something I particularly loved was when God is giving them the law after the Exodus after saving the Israelites. This is a group of people who have been in slavery for hundreds of years—for generations and generations. The whole Exodus palaver started because Moses asked for a long weekend to go into the desert [Laughter] 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” (see Exod 5). This is the person who has been running their lives—who has to have such a tight grip on them that they cannot have a weekend to themselves to worship their God.
Then God rescues them, takes them out into the wilderness and 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 is going to be preparing food. No one is going to be working. You’re going to take a day out where you produce nothing.” I 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 is ruling their lives.
Then you see that the Israelites are, like us, pretty bad at rest. They’re pretty bad at obeying the Sabbath rules. But they have been set this pattern and it’s a gift from God. Entering that rest is this ongoing theme all throughout the Old Testament.
Rest in the New Testament
PO: We might come back to the Sabbath in a few moments. Obviously the Old Testament, as you say, gives us the foundation of rest. How does the New Testament develop that idea?
JB: 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. The rules are so restrictive that rest has become this whole act of work and justification in itself. The Pharisees are loving that.
Jesus comes in and he blows that out of the water. 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 [Laughter], going, “What are you going to do about it? Do you think this was bad that I did this? Is giving life and healing on the Sabbath evil in your eyes?” (see Matt 12:1-14; Mark 2:23-3:6; Luke 6:1-11; 13:10-17; 14:1-5). 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” (Mark 2:27). We’re not in servitude to the Sabbath; God has given us this day as a gift. That is a really good thing!
Christians and the Sabbath
PO: So as Christians, are we obligated to keep the Sabbath in the same way that Israel was in the Old Testament?
JB: I’m going to be very unsatisfactory and really hedge in this answer [Laughter]. I think the New Testament, first of all, gives us a much bigger of the Sabbath—of entering into God’s rest. We are given rest because we no longer need to sacrifice, we are no longer bound by the law, and we have been given freedom from our sin. So we can rest in the knowledge that we are saved, we are safe, we are loved, and that there’s no act that we can do that will make Jesus love us more or less.
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 more fuller—when we’ll no longer experience exhaustion—when our whole lives will be characterised by rest. This doesn’t mean there’s no work, but it is a full, all-encompassing kind of rest.
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 has come in response to sin. The Sabbath tells us something about how God has created us.
We should set aside a day to do restful things. I think what our interpretation of “restful things” is can be quite open and wide; we don’t want to be like the Pharisees in saying, “It means this, this and this only.” Setting aside a day a week when we can do restful activities is something really wise and really good.
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”, “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. 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.
PO: That’s very helpful. Paul in a couple of places—Romans 14, Colossians 2-3—seems to assume that different people will have different views on the Sabbath as an individual day. But as you say, there’s still that call to rest.
Rest fulfilled in Jesus
PO: Do you want to say something a little bit about Jesus’ call to come to him and rest, and how that, in a sense, is the fulfilment of that idea?
JB: I started my talk off with that famous verse from Matthew 11:28: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” The word “rest” in itself is almost this exhalation—this deep breath. This is such a beautiful and precious thing that Jesus offers us. 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. We find that in him in a way that we can’t find rest apart from him, 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. On the cross and in his resurrection, he has completely and fully given us adoption into God’s family; he’s made it so our sins are completely forgiven; and he’s 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, worship and adoration. 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. Instead, it’s very one-sided in a way that is so good and is 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 (Rom 8:26). When we come to God to communicate with him, we don’t even need to have the words. Just coming is enough. That’s us entering into relationship with him. What a restful thing!
Our minister always talks about how great dogs are. We both love our dogs. He says, “Dogs don’t have any expectations of you. There’s no critical feedback with your dog. They are just so happy you’re there and they love you.” I don’t want to compare God and dogs! [Laughter] 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.
[Music]
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Karen Beilharz: The Priscilla & Aquila Centre is a 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 3 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 Saviour: A theology of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, which will be published by Crossway in February 2025.
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PO: And now let’s get back to our program.
Physical rest
PO: Wonderfully, you’ve teased out the richness of the Bible’s teaching on rest and that theological foundation. It’s on that basis that then we can think about the practical aspects of what it means to rest. In your talk, you analysed rest in four different ways—four different ways in which we can rest. Do you want to say something about physical rest? What does it look like for us to physically rest?
JB: Yeah, I think it’s important to think about rest in different aspects and different facets, because we are multifaceted, complicated beings. If we just think of rest as one thing, then we’re never going to rest well. Or only that one facet of our being is going to be rested well.
Physical rest, again, I think, 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.
I think sleep is such a huge thing. It’s something that we can, again, be quite poor at. There are seasons in our lives when rest in that way—sleep—is not possible. Sometimes it’s out of our control—whether we’re experiencing anxiety, whether we’re experiencing insomnia, whether we’re a parent who has a child who keeps us up in the night, whether 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 not allowing this good gift of God. If I had any device that needed eight hours of charging a day, I would think it was pretty rubbish and that there was something wrong with the battery. But God’s created us to spend a third of our day resting—specifically sleeping and being unconscious. When we reject that, we’re rejecting his sovereignty over our lives. We’re so caught up—especially after you’ve finished work, maybe you’ve done your chores around the house, and it hits 9pm—10pm—whatever it is—and you go, “Finally I can do something I enjoy doing. Finally I can do something fun.” Then we stay up way too late watching those episodes, scrolling on our phones—whatever that activity is. That leisure becomes more important than the sleep that God has told us that we need. 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’ve read that I’ve loved was by Geoff Robson: Thank God for Bedtime. 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 simple denial of our God-given human limitations … 1
Sleep is a precious gift from God. So often we choose not to get enough of it and show that there are other things more important to us.
PO: It’s almost an act of faith to say, “I have lots of things these things I need to do, or I have things I want to do, but actually I know the way that has designed me is to get sleep, 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.” That’s very, very helpful.
Intellectual rest
PO: That’s physical rest. What about intellectual rest?
JB: 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 assuming other people do the same thing—that I’m not this weird anomaly. I constantly have an audio book, a podcast or 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 (which is something I love to do)—I will have something else going at the same time.
Our brains can’t cope with that! We’re not designed to cope with that. We have this constant overload of information, and our mind never gets the chance to just tick over and sit in neutral. There’s something valuable about just letting our minds wander. That’s how we process our emotions. That’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. Then often what can happen is that you start doing all that processing when you go to bed. So you can’t get to sleep, because your brain is ticking over all of these things that you should have had the space to think about during the day, but you never took your AirPods out, and so your brain never had the chance to do that.
Having that brain space gives us room for creativity, for planning and for thinking ahead, and for thinking about people other than ourselves. I think that constant highway of information—those back catalogues of podcasts, those things that we constantly have going in our ears—is unhelpful.
Since I did this talk and have been thinking about this, I’ve been really conscious of “When is my moment of quiet in the day?” When is something that I am doing, for which I normally would have my headphones in and have something playing, that, instead, I’m going to choose to have silence and let my brain tick over? That’s creeping in as a habit in a good way. That’s becoming more normal. 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. I’m going through the process of getting ready in the morning, going for a walk with the dog, and doing some of my craft that I love without having that constant input. I think that’s really good for our brains.
PO: That is so helpful and insightful, and a good 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.
Emotional rest
PO: Obviously as you said, we have different aspects to our personhood. What about emotional rest? What does that look like?
JB: I mainly thought about emotional rest in terms of relationships. Some of us spend a lot of time on their 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. 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 or 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. 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 that I think is a really important concept when it comes to rest is that good rest takes work. It doesn’t happen by default. 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. If you don’t plan to see your friends (and for some of us, you plan a month ahead or two months ahead, whereas for some of us, it can be tomorrow)—making plans with people and putting them in the calendar—then often that won’t happen.
Even with the people you live with: if you don’t plan quality time together, then your whole relationship can end up being logistics. That means your relationship with your spouse, your children, your housemate—whoever it might be—will becomes very functional and not an emotionally restorative place, because it’s just functional.
I think relationships are a key place for emotional rest—both learning to be alone and spending quality time with people in our lives.
PO: 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.
Spiritual rest
PO: Obviously as Christians, we’re spiritual beings as well. So what is spiritual rest?
JB: We talked a little bit about a bigger concept of spiritual rest and the rest we enter into by faith—the rest 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—they’re glimpses of heaven. That’s a beautiful way of thinking of it. When I’m sitting out on my back deck and I’m reading a book, that’s a little glimpse of heaven.
One of the ways that we have spiritual rest—have one of those glimpses of heaven now—is in church. 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.
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, serve and invest in relationships with other people. Having one of those quiet moments before church. For me, I like to go out early in the morning with the dog and walk along the Cooks River (without my headphones!) I find that a really restful activity and something that sets me up well for a day at church. Maybe it’s ten minutes with a cup of tea. Whatever it is, it’s helpful 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?”
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 you’re singing. Write them on your heart. Sing with gusto, no matter how off-key you are, and fully invest in that activity of singing.
Church can be a really restful place, spiritually. It might not be restful physically. It might be tricky relationally. There are 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.
Of course, you might be in a season when that is really difficult. You might have a toddler with you in church. Your mental health might be really poor. Maybe there’s 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. It might be that all you’re up for is joining in with this song, and that’s your moment of rest—spiritual rest—during church. Or your mind might have been wandering through the sermon and you’re struggling to concentrate, but you grasp hold of one phrase, and that becomes 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.
PO: Again, so helpful, Joss—this idea of being intentional, working hard, thinking about rest.
Further resources
PO: You’ve so helpfully shown us the importance of rest in the Scriptures, but also how this is not something we kind of fall into automatically. We need to be thoughtful and intentional, and, even ironically, we need to work at rest. 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?
JB: 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 it was really good. I referred to it and got a lot of thoughts from it for my talk. I thought Adam was really insightful.
Another great book is Gentle and Lowly (Dane C Ortlund), which a lot you might have read already. It’s like a hug from Jesus. It’s a really wonderful reminder of the rest that we find in Jesus. 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. The rest we find in Jesus, we can still find when our eyes are hanging out of our heads or we’re feeling pressed from every side. I hope we feel challenged to think about rest better and to practise rest better. But a book like Gentle and Lowly is such a great reminder that even when we fail, we have this rest in Jesus. 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 in Jesus. So highly recommended.
PO: Brilliant.
Conclusion
PO: Thanks, Joss, so much. That was really helpful. Thanks for coming on the podcast!
JB: Thanks, Pete!
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PO: To benefit from more resources from the Centre for Christian Living, please visit ccl.moore.edu.au, where you’ll find a host of resources, including past podcast episodes, videos from our live events and articles published through the Centre. We’d love for you to subscribe to our podcast and for you to leave us a review so more people can discover our resources.
On our website, we also have an opportunity for you to make a tax deductible donation to support the ongoing work of the Centre.
We always benefit from receiving questions and feedback from our listeners, so if you’d like to get in touch, you can email us at ccl@moore.edu.au.
As always, I would like to thank Moore College for its support of the Centre for Christian Living, and to thank to my assistant, Karen Beilharz, for her work in editing and transcribing the episodes. The music for our podcast was generously provided by James West.
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Endnotes
1 Geoff Robson, Thank God for Bedtime (Sydney: Matthias Media, 2019), 35.
Bible quotations are also from THE HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by International Bible Society, www.ibs.org. All rights reserved worldwide.
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