Long after I was married and had kids, I would call my parents’ house (wherever it was) “home”. What mattered wasn’t the address or the specifics of the place and its furniture. What was important to me was the people I’d known most of my life through ups and downs. It was the people who could finish my sentences and burst into belly laughter with tears before after a few words into a joke everybody already knew, a structural beam that has always held up the family culture of storytelling we’d built over decades. It was the people who knew why I lost my temper or argued certain points into the ground. People who knew lasagna and movie night were my preferred vehicles on the way to healing after a painful crash and burn. What made my parents’ place “home” was my sense of being known wherever they were, so I could take off my shoulds and ought-to-be’s, hang them on the coat tree just inside the doorway, and just be me.

The twenty-third chapter of Leviticus says, 

3“Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh day is a Sabbath of solemn rest, a holy convocation. You shall do no work. It is a Sabbath to the LORD in all your dwelling places.

(English Standard Version). The verse made me look into the meaning of “rest” and “sabbath” and reminded me of the fourth chapter of Hebrews:

 “...good news came to us just as to them, but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened. 3For we who have believed enter that rest, as he has said,
 “As I swore in my wrath,
 ‘They shall not enter my rest,’”
 although his works were finished from the foundation of the world. 4For he has somewhere spoken of the seventh day in this way: “And God rested on the seventh day from all his works.” 5And again in this passage he said,
 “They shall not enter my rest.”
 6Since therefore it remains for some to enter it, and those who formerly received the good news failed to enter because of disobedience, 7again he appoints a certain day, “Today,” saying through David so long afterward, in the words already quoted,
 “Today, if you hear his voice,
 do not harden your hearts.”
 8For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on. 9So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, 10for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.
 11Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience. 

(ESV). Above, in the verse from Leviticus, rest is a “special holiday,” but in the same verse, sabbath means to “desist from exertion,” even if one must be forced to stop.

Hebrews is about the grace period that entered after the Christ came to reveal God the Father to the world in word and deed (John 5:19; 12:49). “Rest,” in that book of the Bible gives us the picture of laying down in one’s home.

LORD Jesus is home to we who choose to believe in His name. HE is our Sabbath. Our rest. Amen.