Open your Bible to its first pages and count what God calls holy.
Not the light. Not the sky. Not the waters. Not the plants. Not the animals. Not even the man He formed with His own hands. The first thing in all of Scripture that God sets apart and calls holy is a day—a day where nothing was made. “Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made” (Genesis 2:3).
Sit with that before you keep reading.
The God who could sustain the entire universe without ever pausing—who was not tired, who never needed to recover—deliberately built a day of rest into the pattern of creation and called it holy. Not as a reward for finished work. Not as a soft privilege for the deserving. As a rhythm. As sacred architecture. The first sanctified thing in the entire Bible is a day where the doing stopped.
Now compare that to the world we actually live in.
Wake up at 4am. Do not sleep—sleep is for losers. Grind. Hustle. Rise and shine. If you are not up doing something at 5:30am, you are behind. If you are not answering emails at 11pm, you are unserious. If you take a Sunday off, someone else is overtaking you. Nigerian professional culture, on top of a global hustle culture, on top of a very real fear of poverty, has produced a generation of Christians who genuinely believe that rest is unspiritual and sleep is a failure of ambition.
But listen to what the Psalmist says: “It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows; for so He gives His beloved sleep” (Psalm 127:2). Read it slowly. The early rising and the late sitting up and the eating of the bread of sorrows—striving fuelled by anxiety—is called vain. Not admirable. Not spiritual. Vain. And the beloved of God? He gives them sleep. Not just permits it. Gives it. As a gift. As part of the relationship.
Wisdom literature agrees. “Better a handful with quietness than both hands full, together with toil and grasping for the wind” (Ecclesiastes 4:6). Two full hands of frantic accumulation are worse than one handful held in peace. The Bible does not congratulate you for how full your hands are. It asks, quietly, what your hands are full of, and whether you are still able to breathe.
Here is where it gets uncomfortable, because there is a deeper theology under all of this—and it explains why we cannot receive rest even when God is offering it.
Look at Israel in the wilderness. God had rescued them. He was feeding them daily with manna. He was leading them by cloud and by fire. His entire posture toward them was: trust Me, rest in Me, believe. It was a simple relationship—the simplest one in all of Scripture. And they could not do it. “Yes, again and again they tempted God, and limited the Holy One of Israel” (Psalm 78:41). They wearied Him with their unbelief. They could not just receive.
So watch what God did. Because they could not rest in Him, He gave them something to do. He gave them the Law — commandments, rituals, feasts, purity codes, endless precepts. Listen to how Isaiah describes what that felt like: “So then, the word of the LORD to them will become: Do this, do that, a rule for this, a rule for that; a little here, a little there — so that as they go they will fall backward; they will be injured and snared and captured” (Isaiah 28:13, NIV). Read that carefully. God did not give the Law only to bless. He gave it, in part, to exhaust them. To let them go rule by rule, precept by precept, until they fell backward, until they were injured, until they were snared and captured—until they came to the end of themselves. Because sometimes the only way a people who will not rest in Him can finally rest in Him is to be broken by the alternative first.
And here is where this stops being a Sunday school lesson and becomes your Tuesday afternoon. Because we are Israel too.
When we cannot trust God to sustain our lives, our income, our reputations, our futures, we do not just relax into unbelief. We build our own law. Our own precepts. Wake up at this time. Journal for this many minutes. Grind on this schedule. Do not sleep past six. Never take a full day off. Never say no. Never stop. It is a homemade Torah, and we obey it more devoutly than we ever obeyed anything God actually asked of us. We call the exhaustion it produces dedication. We even call it faith. But it is not faith. It is the opposite of faith. Faith would rest.
And Isaiah 28 is not just Israel’s story. It is the pattern God has been using on His people for thousands of years, and He is not exempting you from it. If you will not rest in Him, you will eventually be broken by the alternative. The homemade Torah will run its course. Do this, do that, a rule for this, a rule for that — until you fall backward, until you are injured, until you are snared and captured. Not because God is cruel, but because sometimes the only way an unwilling heart learns to trust is to be brought to the end of itself.
I know this. I lived a mild version of it in 2019, crying at night, dreaming about transformers, working a schedule I had written myself and could not stop obeying. God, in His mercy, did not let me stay there. But make no mistake—I was on the road Isaiah described. And if you are honest, you may be on it right now.
This is why Jesus said what He said: “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light” (Matthew 11:28–30).
He was not just offering comfort. He was reversing the entire posture of striving. He was inviting weary people back to the original design—before the Law, before the wilderness, before the hustle—to the rhythm God set in the first week of the world, when He worked, and then He rested, and He called the rest holy.
So the question is not, am I working hard enough? The honest question is, am I still able to rest? Because if you cannot rest—if the idea of a full Sabbath, a full night’s sleep, a full week without answering emails, makes you anxious—that is not commitment. That is unbelief. And it is the exact unbelief God has been trying to heal in His people from Sinai until now.
You are not more committed than God. He rested. So must you.
A prayer:
Father, You who worked and then rested, and called the rest holy—teach me to receive what I have been refusing. Free me from the homemade laws I have built because I could not trust You.
Do not let me be broken by the alternative before I learn to sit still in Your presence. Give me the courage to sleep, to stop, to be still, and to believe that You are holding the world while I do. Let me learn from Your Son, whose yoke is easy, and find rest for my soul.
Amen.
This week:
Take one full day this week—a real Sabbath and stop. No emails. No production. No performing. Sleep as long as your body wants. Eat with your people. Sit in the sun.
And when the anxiety rises up and tells you that stopping is dangerous, name it out loud for what it is: unbelief. And then rest anyway. Because a God who rested first is a God you can trust to hold everything while you do.
With love,
Bisola.
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