[AI translation] A few weeks ago I was talking about work here. I told you that work is a characteristic of man's humanity, man's creative destiny to work, to subdue the earth. Work, then, is by no means a curse on man, as superficial Bible readers imagine, not something that reminds man of his sin: indeed, it reminds man of his fellowship with God! Work is something that man brought with him from paradise. It is a reminder, a piece of the greatness of man's vocation. God's first command to man is to work, to create culture out of nature. Work is therefore man's God-given vocation, his duty!Do you know what the second commandment of God is? That man should rest! Take his time of rest seriously! God calls man not only to work, but also to rest. It is also a God-given duty that man owes to God, to his neighbour and to himself, to rest! Now I would like to talk about this often forgotten duty!
1) First: man is obliged to rest in order to be able to do his work better! It is not for nothing that God said that after six days of work, there should be a day on which one should do nothing. God knows how much man needs a day of rest, for He created him! Man is His own creation, the work of His own hands. Even for an ordinary machine or a complicated instrument, the one who constructed it gives instructions, otherwise it will break down. So God gave instructions for his own creation, man, and it sounds like this: Six days you shall do all your work, and on the seventh day you shall rest. If a man does not use himself according to the divine instructions, if a man does not live according to the rhythm of work and rest that God has given him: he will break down before his time, his parts will be destroyed, the whole machine will become useless. This is the cause of the typical disease of our time, heart disease in its many forms, overwork, the intensification of the pace of work at the expense of rest. In other words, it is the failure to obey the divine instructions to oneself, the failure to relax, the failure to truly rest. In order for man's brain and muscles and hands and feet to function properly, that is, in order for man to fulfil his vocation at all, he needs rest as much as he needs work. If a man works when he should be resting, if a man keeps his engine running when he should be quiet, his work is not a blessing either!
The man who can never rest knows neither the restfulness of rest nor the greatness of work. Such are the men who achieve much by their hard work, but never catch up with themselves. They may earn more with a lot of work, but they lose themselves. And those who lose themselves have lost everything. Everything that is truly human in life! One of the biggest problems of today's driven man is the lack of time, one of the most often uttered statements is that he doesn't have it. Not enough time to be quiet, not enough time to rest, not enough time to play, not enough time - to live! It is very characteristic that the ancient Greeks wrote Time in capital letters, they considered Time as a deity: Chronos was its name. This Chronos was a harsh, cruel deity. He ate his own children, he devoured people from skin to skin. And how wonderful: this cruel deity of the ancient pagan Greeks still lives today: for millions of modern people, there is only one true lord: his watch! Or his pocket watch! Just look at it and you can't sit still any longer. The god Chronos chases, drives, swallows, devours his children... No rest, no breathing space, no freedom, no vacation - no life! The heart hospitals, hypertension wards, neurological clinics, mental hospitals are full of the unfortunate victims of this Chronos-god...
You see how much you need what God commands you to do: work six days, do nothing on the seventh... One of the best pieces of advice I ever received from a very experienced believer was when he said, "You owe it to your family and your church to walk alone for at least half an hour a day..." You owe it to those around you who are forced to put up with you. You owe it to the work you have to do well by taking seriously the duty that people forget in the modern age: rest!
I really do not want to make propaganda for worship, God does not need any propaganda, but I just want to tell you the following case as a lesson. A regular church-goer was once asked by a friend, "I just want to know, how do you manage? After all, one has so many other personal things to do besides one's official work. And I always do it on Sunday. How do you manage to do your work, since every Sunday you spend the whole morning with the church? How can I do my work and still have time for church?" Well, you'll laugh: I'm in church every Sunday! It gives me strength, concentration and peace. When I come out of church, I feel like all the storms of the past week have passed. And then I don't do any work for the whole Sunday. On Monday afterwards, when other people are tired and start working again, I wonder how it is possible, they had a Sunday too! But what kind? Yes, my brethren, he who takes his work seriously must take his rest seriously, otherwise his work will soon be worthless.
2) But there is an even greater danger of not knowing how to rest: that work will grow over you like a whale, a demonic power. You see, everything that man does not put under God's dominion becomes a whale, rises above him, dominates him. So it is not only with passions, with pleasures - such as the pleasure of drink, or smoking, and, as we have seen, with time - but so it is with work itself. Work, too, can degenerate and turn from a blessing into a curse. Today, all over the globe, mankind is horrified to see that civilization, detached from God and out of measure, is growing on man's head, that men are slowly ceasing to be masters of their own situation, but servants. They are becoming slaves to their own devices, their own enterprises, their own technology, the work of their own hands. Well, "sabbat", a time of rest, a time of relaxation; a sign that work is not an end in itself, but a means. Work belongs to serve man and life, not to dominate it! Remember, the first divine commandment of work is: Rule over the earth and the things of the earth. This means: do not let earthly things rule over you. That is why it is man's duty to rest, for it is in his ability to rest, to rest from his work, that he shows whether he is still master of his own work, or whether work has become master of him. Whether man is still master of his work or obsessed by it? He who cannot rest, relax, quieten down, is already a slave to his own work, is already obsessed by his own restless activity, is already held captive by demonic forces... Rest is needed not only to recharge our batteries for work, to rest from the fatigue of work, but also to prevent work from taking over! Do you see how right God is when He makes it man's duty to rest, to work six days and to rest from all his labours on the seventh?! This statement of the creation story, "And when God had finished his work which he had made on the seventh day, he shall rest on the seventh day from all his work which he had made," means that God is not a slave to his work, but is master of it! He is at ease over it and delights in it. That is why He calls us not only to work, but also to rest!
But God calls us to rest! God, in Jesus Christ, has opened his arms and his heart wide to the tired, weary, bowed down, sad, discouraged, weary people and cried out, "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest!" God calls us not simply to rest, but to a holy, joyful rest in which we can find our true selves again! Sacred rest is true rest because it is full of the secret of life: God! So if one really wants to rest, if one wants to relax, to be refreshed in body and soul: go to God. Rest in the arms of Jesus. For we are created in such a way that our hearts are always restless - whether at work or at rest - until they rest in God! True rest is not only a break from work, not idleness, not laziness, but a recharging with the life-giving powers of God! You need not only to stop working for a while, but also to stop the accompanying phenomena of work: the annoyance, the worry, the anxiety, the disappointment, the failure, the envy, the misunderstanding, the sins, so that you may meet Jesus in a true, great spiritual calm, who takes from you everything, sin, burden, dirt, that has accumulated during the day or week, and frees you, cleanses you, renews you; He will tune you up and make you fit to go on with your work, your service, your life!
Even the diver, working down below, underwater, needs the air above, with which he is in constant contact through an air pipe. We too need a connection with a higher world, a life-giving air from it through prayer, to do our work down here. In fact, it is not enough just to breathe in some of that upper divine region, but from time to time one must also rise up into that other atmosphere, close to Jesus, into the fellowship of His followers, take off one's diving helmet and breathe deeply, freely and calmly, otherwise one will drown! This is what God calls us to do when He says: "In six days thou shalt do all thy work, but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God, and the sabbath of thy God is thy rest: thou shalt do nothing in it...
Isten hív a pihenésre, a napi, vagy heti, vagy évi vakáció pihenésére, a csendre, a megbékélés, az Őbenne való elmerülés jóságos, teremtő csendjére! To a blessed encounter with the Source of Life, Jesus! There He gives strength to the weak, refreshment to the weary, peace to the troubled heart. There He prepares you for service, for blessed work, free from hurry, from effort, from nervousness! And to eternal life!
Amen!
Date: 19 June 1960.