WHO PACKED YOUR PARACHUTE?

Plum began to end his lectures asking the question, who is packing your parachute? And while Plum might not have known the man that saved his life and who provided his rescue, we have the answer to that question for ourselves. 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. [00:52:10] (48 seconds)  #WhoPackedYourParachute

Jewish leaders, the Pharisees were in a hurry to try and remove Jesus' body from the cross because the body could not stay hung and punished over a Sabbath. So they quickly removed his body and placed him in a tomb. After Jesus had paid and sacrificed himself, after sin was finished and done, he rested. To make that victory complete and whole. He rested on the seventh day. And then the next day, the eighth day, the first day of the new week, light burst through the darkness again. Light and life and love was created again. Genesis one all over again, except this time it's better. [01:01:06] (56 seconds)  #JesusRestAndResurrection

Because Jesus wasn't just modeling rest for us. What he did made rest possible and guaranteed that there's a future rest that one day will never end. See, today, we're still in the wilderness. As Exodus described it, the in Hebrew. What that means is that we still today, we still struggle against the exhaustion, against the demands, the pain, the weariness of life. We still feel the grind. But Jesus' complete sacrifice guarantees that future rest, that future jubilee is coming. But even better than that, Jesus lets us have a taste of that rest now. [01:02:02] (58 seconds)  #TasteOfEternalRest

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. It all belonged to God. All the people belonged to God. God was restoring. God was protecting families. He was healing communities. This was so much more about than just taking care of their bank account. [00:57:16] (56 seconds)  #JubileeRestoration

Now this was something that was not rare to happen at this point in time. Whenever a new king would take the throne, often they would try and get the people, you know, to really like them, and so they had canceled their debts and set the captives free. That was something common that a new monarch would do, but God was not tying the people's hope to a person. Rather than hoping in a politician, God wanted them to hope in him. It was set on the calendar. Every seven years, there was to be a Sabbath rest. Could you imagine what it would be like to be broke, drowning in debt, maybe even cast into a debtor's prison, but knowing the seventh year was coming? 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. [00:49:05] (54 seconds)  #SabbathYearHope

And on the seventh day, he did what? Rest. He rested. There you go. It says in Genesis chapter two verse one, thus the heavens and earth were completed in all their vast array. By the seventh day, God had finished the work he had been doing. And on the seventh day, he Rested. Good job, spicy second. He rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it, he rested from all the work of creating that He had done. So this is why it was seven days. [00:35:53] (29 seconds)  #SeventhDayHolyRest

But the whole point was not to be out there trying to hoard and gather and have enough. Instead, it was to rest and trust that God would provide. If you struggle with having one day a week off, God cranks it up saying every seven years that the land was supposed to have a full year of rest. Do you remember what I said most of the Israelites did for work? They were farmers. That's a that's a that's a huge thing. But even in addition to that, it's not just that the land is getting rest. Deuteronomy 15 tells us that in the Sabbath year, that all debts were to be canceled for the Israelite people, and captives were to be set free. [00:48:27] (38 seconds)  #SabbathYearReset

God did not give up on this plan. Everything from Genesis chapter three to the last page of your bible, God was setting forth to try and restore the seventh day rest that he had created us and the planet to experience. But the issue was we're now sinful. 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. [00:39:20] (40 seconds)  #SpiritRehab