WHO PACKED YOUR PARACHUTE?

The one who packs our parachute is God. He packed your parachute. He planned your provision before your crisis, before the diagnosis, before the job change, before the sleepless nights, before the bills piled up. God already had your provision packed and prepared. You just might not see it yet. What God was doing with the Sabbath year was teaching the people to step away from what they thought was necessary to provide and trust in him. That stepping away from the field, it wasn't laziness. It was worship. [00:52:27] (44 seconds)  #GodPackedMyParachute

And I say that word slave intentionally because guess what the Old Testament word for work can also be translated as? Are you held captive by your career? Are you being forced into frustration by your future dreams, bound by the bills, restricted by your responsibilities? God did not recommend the Sabbath. He commanded it to teach his people to stop trusting in the endless grind and the attempts to control it all and instead trust in God's provision so that way we could truly rest. Every seven days, God commanded a Sabbath. [00:46:29] (56 seconds)  #SabbathOverGrind

He set the captives free from the shackles of sin. He healed the sick, restored sight to the blind. He paid the debt of our selfishness and our rebellion and our sin. He restored the outcast. He confronted darkness. He conquered death. He was the jubilee. He's what God had foreshadowed hundreds of years before when he was teaching his people in Leviticus to seek his rest. But even though Jesus was the Jubilee, he's not the Jubilee that the people wanted. He didn't fix their bank accounts. He didn't restore their land. [00:59:46] (41 seconds)  #JesusIsJubilee

So what God was doing was stepping in every fifty years with the year of Jubilee. So that way no family would be trapped in generational poverty. There would be no mistake that would define a bloodline. There is no season of struggle that would get the final word. What God was saying with the year of Jubilee was that your past does not own your future. This was restoration on a national scale that did not happen through revolution. It happened through obedience. And God was reminding them who really owned the land in the first place. [00:57:16] (34 seconds)  #JubileeBreaksCycles

That is what God is doing throughout the Bible is he is rehabilitating our spirits to be able to function and operate the way he created us to. He has to retrain our souls to be able to trust in him so we can rest in him. God couldn't put us right back into paradise because we were not prepared. We were not capable. So what he's doing is he's teaching us to get a small experience of that future rest in our present struggles. [00:40:36] (31 seconds)  #RehabForTheSoul

That no matter how bleak and how dark things might seem, you knew that God was going to reset it all? That even in despair, they could have hope. But the same thing that created hope in some people might have generated some fear in others. I mean, how are we supposed to make it a whole year without planting, without harvesting? How how am I going to take care of my family? How are we gonna have enough? I mean, God says he wants us to rest, but how are we gonna survive? It seems nice to say, yes, I trust you, God, but it's a very different thing to step away from the field. [00:49:44] (37 seconds)  #TrustThroughUncertainty

And in all the things that you have in your life, all your opportunities, all your relationships, your friends, your school, your job, your dreams, your successes, and your challenges, out of all the things that you have in your life, I could tell you there's probably something missing. And that thing becomes more apparent when you look at your schedule, at the demands that are happening on you, that never ending list that you can never get caught up on, the endless work, the chaos management, the constant exhaustion. I think a lot of us would admit that the thing that we're missing is some rest. [00:32:36] (32 seconds)  #MissingRest

We broke what we were made to do, and he could not just take us and place us back into perfect rest, into paradise. So instead, what God began to do was to retrain. You know, we had forgotten how to trust. Our souls no longer understood how to rest, and so God had to rehabilitate our spirit. It's just like whenever somebody has a major injury. Right? A torn ACL, a stroke, some kind of traumatic traumatic accident. They don't just go straight back to living the way they did before. First, they have to go to rehab. [00:39:36] (38 seconds)  #RestRequiresRehab