Doing God’s Work and Devoting Everything to God is True Joy (Leviticus 25:1-12)
The content of today’s scripture from Leviticus 25 is talking about the Sabbath year and the year of Jubilee. The Sabbath year is talking about a year of not farming anything after six years of farming. Up until this point, when the Israelites were living in Egypt, they just kept working, 24 hours a day. The people of Israel and Egypt lived every day, working their hardest to eat and survive without worship.
As evidence that they did not have God, they lost hold of the worship of God. The fact that they lost hold of worship is the same thing when we think we can live our lives by working hard and being successful by ourselves. That’s why after the Exodus, God told the Israelites to make the Tabernacle. Now, worship becomes the very central point of our lives.
From the Isarelites’ perspective, they were asking, “How can God ask us to make a Tabernacle?” That’s the reason why the Israelites were destroyed. The people of God, whom God created, the people of Israel, lost hold of God, in other words, they lost hold of the covenant. If you lose hold of the covenant, you’re spiritually destroyed. It doesn’t matter how talented you are, I’m sorry, but you cannot block spiritual disasters.
If we didn’t have a spirit, we can just live like animals with our mind and our body. But because we’re created in God’s image, we need to be spiritual to be with God. That’s why God told us to make the Tabernacle and the five sacrifices in the Tabernacle. Who is it for? It is for the Israelites’ spiritual things, but the Israelites lived completely independent of this while in Egypt. That is why they had the Tabernacle in the wilderness, and once they go into the land of Canaan, God speaks about how they are to live, and he speaks about the year of Sabbath and the Year of Jubilee.
Leviticus 25:1-2 says, “The LORD said to Moses on Mount Sinai, “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: “When you enter the land I am going to give you, The land itself must observe a sabbath to the LORD.” You know what the Sabbath day is, where you work for six days and on the seventh, you rest and have sabbath to the LORD,it means we are people who aren’t created to work. However, if you lose hold of this Sabbath, we have no choice but to revert back to living for ourselves, eating and surviving, then such a person’s life will not go well. That’s how God created us. On the seventh day, do no work, but just receive God’s spiritual grace and strength, and for the rest of the six days, live a life receiving God’s spiritual strength, giving glory to God, and living a life for world evangelization.
But if we lose hold of this, we live our lives just to eat and survive. That is why worship takes a back seat and eating and surviving becomes our main object. Everyone says they’re busy, but God can make you not busy. If you’re busy, God can make you not busy. I had corona for a few weeks and God made it so that I wasn’t busy. If God puts you into the hospital for 6 months, God will take away your busyness; it’s not up to you.
If you become homeless, you won’t become busy because I look at homeless people and all they do is sleep all day. Up until then, they live such busy lives in order to live and survive, so God makes them not busy so they can keep resting, why? Because their spiritual things have collapsed, and that’s why we must keep the Sabbath.
The Sabbath means you need to let go of everything regarding yourself, physical things in order to live and survive and you receive God’s spiritual Word, grace, and strength. You receive that spiritual strength and grace from God and you live the rest of the week in the field with that. That’s why worship is so important. If you’re not able to worship, I’m sorry to tell you, but you shouldn’t even think about your future, because you cannot decide the future; God decides the future.
When will the coronavirus end? That’s in God’s hand. It doesn’t matter how many vaccines we come up with, if there’s a different strain of the virus, it will take many more years to come up with a vaccine again. We cannot conquer anything with the science of man. Don’t you think God is sending a message to all mankind? We are coming to a timeline of the end of days, terrible times where man loves man and themselves more than they love God.
Believers will receive grace from God through this, but don’t you think this is a very clear message from God to unbelievers? They thought they could live their lives just by building the Tower of Babel, but just by facing a disaster like this, they realized that human beings cannot do anything.
In Leviticus 25:3-4, it says, “For six years sow your fields, and for six years prune your vineyards and gather their crops. 4 But in the seventh year the land is to have a year of sabbath rest, a sabbath to the Lord. Do not sow your fields or prune your vineyards.” Every week, they have to keep the sabbath day, and in the midst of that, every seventh year, they keep the year of the Sabbath where they do not sow or tend to their farms. First, the land must rest. Before the land rests, the humans must have rest. God’s Word tells us about the order of God’s kingdom. God created mankind, and when we are in obedience and one with the Word of God, the land itself will be blessed. After human beings sinned against God in Genesis 3, the land itself was cursed, and they were cast out of the land of the Garden of Eden. In Genesis 4, after Cain sinned against God, he was also cast out of the land.
Why does the Bible keep talking about land? In the Old Testament, God represented the Kingdom of God by representing the people and land as the people of God. Looking in Romans, it says that because the people sinned against God, the land is parched. When mankind sins against God, the land itself will bring curses and disasters to mankind. However, when mankind has a secure covenantal relationship with God, then the land will bless the people as the people rule over and subdue the land. That is the content of Genesis 1:27-28, when we have the correct spiritual relationship with God as in verse 27, then we receive the blessing of 28 where the land becomes abundant, and we rule and subdue over the land.
However, when they wandered the wilderness in the desert for 40 years, the Israelites did not have land; they just had to keep moving. Before they received salvation, when they were slaves to Egypt, they had land, houses, and possessions, but after being saved, God changed their idea of what land is. He’s changing their lifestyle to be centered on worship.
After 40 years, they go to the land of Canaan which is also the land that God gave them. Before they go into the land of Canaan, God splits up and divides the land based on tribes when they cast lots. They didn’t go in because they worked hard; God gave them the land, and they cast lots for it. There’s nothing very fancy to it; they just haphazardly cast lots, and whatever lot they got, they got that. If their tribe was a little bigger in number, their land was a little bigger, so the 12 tribes received their allotment of land.
The elder was the head of each tribe. They are the oldest grandfather of the Tribe, and that family line took a bigger portion of the land depending on the number of people in their tribe. God said, “For 6 years you should farm and on the seventh year do not work and let the land rest,” then how are they going to eat and survive? You need to have true faith to do that. When you break this faith, you end up sinning. Then you keep working diligently, but the land loses its nutrition, so the harvest becomes smaller and it becomes a repetitive cycle.
If somebody is stuck in Genesis 3, they think the land belongs to them, so they will work the land 24 hours, every week, one year, ten years, regardless. Among the group of developed nations, the highest percentage of sick young people is in Korea, why? Because they live so diligently. They emigrate, and they never take a rest, and from morning to night they work all day. The Korean people never take a break, then they ask for Sunday worship to be at 6 or 7am, why? Because they have to go back to work, and then from 9am, they have to work very diligently.
What I’m saying is that people think that if they work their hardest without taking a break, something will take place. Today, when God says to take this year of rest, it means that the human principles are not right. “I have given you this land,” and you are not people created to live your lives working diligently; you have to receive rest from God. Even the land must rest. If mankind disobeys that word and keeps working the land when it should be resting, the land loses its fertility.
Now, because humans are never letting their crops rest, they farm it every year, especially using human chemicals on hormone-laden crops, the food we have is way less nutritious than what we used to eat. The quantity might still be high, and the fruits may still be produced, but because the land had been completely strict of all nutrients and we’re just farming with all these man made chemicals then the fruit, for example, an apple, has 10-20% of the vitamin that it used to have long ago.
Then, what are they supposed to eat during the Sabbath year? In Leviticus 25:6, it says that , “And whatever the fruit produces may be eaten by yourself, your male and female servants, the hired worker, and temporary residents who live among you, and as well as your livestock and wild animals in your land.” Therefore, you are utilizing this produce for other people. Until now, you have only been living for yourself, but for the sabbath year, you are sharing your produce with everybody because it is not anything you’ve grown by yourself.
There are many different meanings to this year of Sabbath. First, it is the spiritual sabbath for that individual themselves. If you don’t work for one year, you become very deep spiritually. If you don’t farm a land for a year, that land is restored. Then with the produce that the land actually produces, you’re able to feed and save many different people. Even the animals and wildlife will come to life and eat, that’s the year of the Sabbath. Do that Sabbath year every seven years. You need to have faith in order to do that. That means if you no longer have faith in God, your life itself will be broken.
The next verses talk about the Year of Jubilee which is enjoyed every seven Sabbath years, so it’s every 49 years. So, the sabbath year takes place every seventh year, and on the seventh sabbath year, you rest for two years, these are the 49th and 50th year. Why do they call it the year of Jubilee? Jubilee means joy. These people celebrated Jubilee by blowing trumpets when they were happy. The year of Jubilee begins in Leviticus 25:9, on the tenth day of the second month is the Day of Atonement, the beginning. Then on July 10th, every year all the people of Israel receive atonement for their sins from God.
Receiving atonement for your sins isn’t just God saying that He forgives you of your sins. The day of atonement happens when the people of Israel have to sacrifice a lamb, goat or calf for their sins, and it has to be one without any defect if you can’t think of a lamb or a goat think of a dog you are raising, you have to stab it, in the throat, skin it, cut it into its part, and you say, “This animal is dying for my sins.” Then from the perspective of the owner, what would you think? If you’re killing a puppy, just one year old, would you do it? Would you kill the puppy? You have to, why? Because the puppy has to die because of you.
If you raise a cat instead of a dog, you have to kill the kitten, and you personally have to kill the fluffiest and cutest kitten without any defect, and you have to skin off all its fur. You have to cut up all the different innards and burn it. You have to do that. This thing called “Atonement” is regarded so lightly, “Oh yes our sins are forgiven” but you personally have to do this thing. That’s why there’re so many different sacrifices, like the burnt offering and sin offering and atonement offering, but if it is your sin you have to kill the animal you raised.
The only thing the priest does is sprinkle the blood; you have to pray as well. You have to pray that this lamb will die on your behalf because of your sin. Because you raised a newborn puppy and you have to kill the puppy because of your sins, I have this guilt, then after the day of atonement where you receive atonement for your sins, you receive spiritual liberation, strength, and everywhere around the nation, they blow these trumpets and make a great noise, “Because I’ve been forgiven from all my curses and sins and disasters from God,” and then that begins the fiftieth year, the year of Jubilee.
So, if you don’t have this joy that comes from receiving the forgiveness of your sins, the year of Jubilee isn’t a year of Jubilee. What do you do in the year of Jubilee? On the 7th year of sabbath and on the 50th year of Jubilee, not supposed to farm the land, but what are you supposed to do in the year of Jubilee? On the 50th year, that’s two years of not farming the land, so it restores the land to its original God-created state, and because you’re forced to not work the land for two years, you have to have incredible faith.
If you don’t farm for two years, how will you live and survive? It’s only possible if you believe in God; what happens if you don’t believe in God? You wouldn’t obey, and what happens when you don’t obey? If you don’t obey, that’s the sin of disobedience, and that’s how the land is cursed. That repetitive cycle is why it’s only possible if you have faith.
Are you living for work or are you living for God’s glory? In this land today, there is no principle of God’s kingdom. In today’s land, the church is God’s Kingdom. Even in the Old Testament, there was a lot of representation of God’s Kingdom through the land, that, through the land of Canaan, they would do world evangelization. You have to understand the idea of “land” very well.
As you farm your land, as you’re having a difficult year, you may have to borrow money from your neighbor, and there are times you can’t repay your loan. On the fiftieth year, they forgive all your debts. So, the debt doesn’t get worse and worse; it restarts back to zero on the fiftieth year, because when you borrow land, you can sell the land you have, and because you don’t have any money, you may sell your land and borrow someone’s money.
The Bible says that each land has been allocated based on the tribes, so the person who’s selling the land should sell their land to their closest relative for money, because He allotted the land based on the tribes. If the person doesn’t have a close relative who can buy the land for them, then they have to sell the land to someone else, then live off the land and pay it back, or they get the land back in 50 years when all the debt is wiped out.
There are some situations where an entire family is sold off as slaves because they’re so poor, and even that, after 50 years, they return back to their normal state, so the year of Jubilee is very joyful. We are restoring everything back to the original state. Why do you think we do this? Because the land belongs to God. It’s not yours. God restores everything back to the original owner every 50 years because God has to do world evangelization through the Israelites.
This is the sense of the Gospel. The Lord has repaid everything for us on the cross. The debt, the cost of our sin, has been repaid on our behalf, and that mentality is stuck in the 50th year of Jubilee. It’s the same thing for your house. There are houses inside the Temple of Jerusalem, and if you can’t pay for that back, then you lose it forever because there aren’t a lot of people who could build their houses within the walls of the Temple of Jerusalem. However, any land outside of the Temple of Jerusalem had to be returned to the original owner because there was a lot of land.
What does this mean? It means that the land of Canaan, all the land, belongs to God. You think you’re the landowner, but you’re actually borrowing the land from me, farming it, therefore your life doesn’t belong to the land; your life belongs to God; your life belongs to God. Your life isn’t lived to just work hard; your life is lived for God. That is why you’re used in the work of saving and raising up people, that’s what it means to return everything back.
That is how God’s Kingdom will continue to spread. There’s no talk about the land in the New Testament. The work you’re doing, you work, but not a lot of professions will allow you to have a Sabbath year. Some professors have that. The head pastor of Saddleback church that has two sabbath months every year or so. The pastor can’t take an entire year off for sabbath every 7 years because the church is going to shake, so the pastor takes two months off every year. As they rest, they go deeper into their faith, and the church becomes spiritually more revived. Even missionaries will take a sabbath year off.
I don’t know much about that, I don’t know whether that’s right or not, because I live my life regardless of those things, but what i’m saying is that you don’t enjoy your sabbath year, because in the New testament, there’s no Levite tribe, everyone’s the same, so every day is Sabbath because Christ is with us. There’s no need for you to back and forth to the Tabernacle, because you yourselves are the Temple.
Now, God raised up the church as the body of the church like Mark’s Upper Room, and the covenant is with the church. So, you receive God’s Word, God’s strength, and you take that back to your tents and booths and you live the rest of the week with God’s strength but the ideology of the Sabbath year and the Year of Jubilee are still present. Because, on the Sabbath year, you share with a lot of people, right? So, God is telling you to stop taking everything for yourselves, but share it with other people. The members of the Early church did that, those who had more money would give it to the church and share with everyone. Those who had land would sell their land, why? Because it wasn’t theirs.
You live for God, so whatever you have, you use it for God’s Kingdom. It’s the same for the Year of Jubilee, the fiftieth year. There are unbelievers who will be unified in the Kingdom of God in oneness. So the fact that we’re doing missions and evangelism means that we’re sacrificing all our time, and money, and our efforts to save those people, so the ideologies of the Sabbath year and the Year of Jubilee are melted into these things.
Your money isn’t yours. It’s true that you need to make money in order to live, but God asks you in the Bible, “Who gives you the sunlight?” You think you have the produce because you farm very hard, but who gives you the sunlight? “I gave you the sunlight,” God said, and God gave you the land. All you did was farm. I’m not saying to not work; you do your work, but you realize that the original owner is God. You work but you acknowledge that all the work is only being accomplished for God and by God. This is why you do your work, receiving spiritual strength for the sake of saving lives and doing world evangelization.
If that concept is broken, then you yourselves will die and the work you’re doing will die too. However, there are way more unbelievers in the world than believers, so when you go out into the world, you’re being implanted with unbeliever ideologies. Unbelievers look for physical rest, and we need that too because that’s how God made us, but we must have spiritual Sabbath rest. That is how we can live our lives, following God’s Word, living for God.
Stalin was one of the forerunners of Soviet communism, and the main point of communism is that you share everything equally. Even then, the Eastern Orthodox church was very widespread in Russia. They also worked for six days and rested on the seventh day. They thought about this, “These people are playing too much, so let’s make them work 9 days and rest on the tenth day.” From our perspective, we think, “If we make them work longer and give them shorter breaks, we will have higher productivity,” but actually their productivity crashed. Even now, everywhere in the world people work 6 days and rest on the 7th it’s the principle that God created; it doesn’t matter if you’re a believer or unbeliever. Even if you work more, you won’t be more productive; that’s how God designed humankind, so you don’t get higher or become better by working more diligently.
That’s why Korean people get diseased earlier and have the most incidences of cancer, especially in their 40s, and it’s even worse now because they keep working all the time, and people need rest, but nobody is able to get any rest. Ever since their children are super young, they kill their kids with tutoring lessons, spending so much money so they just kill their kids. There are so many Korean people who leave the country because it’s so hellish to raise their kids there, but they educate their kids the same way in America.
Did you know that sixth graders in Korea are getting ready to study medicine? Starting from sixth grade, they study for medical school. In the past, you did your studies in your junior high years, and you play later on. But all the moms that grew up like that are making their kids study medicine while they’re young. Do you think these kids can grow up normally? Ever since they’re young, they’re forced under the power of their mother so they study their lives away; they can’t grow up normally. Do you think if you study that way, you can become a correct doctor? Then when you grow up and have kids, you’ll make your kids study from the time they enter preschool. God didn’t create us to study like that, we weren’t created as people to live for work and money, but we were created as people to live for God.
You may consider certain things to be a problem right now. The problem you’re facing is because you’re not rooted in these aspects of life yet. Some people think, “Why can’t I work well?” Yes, it is true, you must have workplace specialization, but even before you do that, you need to have the proper spiritual foundation set. You can fool people with words, but you cannot fool God. The idea that you live for the Triune God, you live only for God, needs to be rooted firmly and deeply within your soul.
If living for the Triune God is not deeply rooted in your soul and you work hard with your ulterior motives, ambition, and greed, do you think God and Satan don’t know? Quickly change your roots. I said this on Sunday, too, but if you are going to do anything, you have to begin from the basics, from the bottom. Especially nowadays in this developed land, you can’t get by by cutting corners and taking backdoors. If you still have the ideology of living in an underdeveloped nation like Korea, and you’re trying to make money by under-the-table dealings, that will not fly. That’s what people do in Myanmar. If you still have that kind of beggar mentality in America, it’s going to be a headache. You still haven’t broken out of that.
Especially we, children of God who believe in God, must stand properly before God. If I begin any work, I must begin from the very bottom and I must stack things up, one by one. Especially Koreans and business people, they have this kind of strategic mentality where, “If I just meet the right person, my business will take off,” because they’ve read a lot of books like that. These are the kinds of pitiful things they learn from underdeveloped nations.
But what does God say? That’s why you have to look for the Word. The work you have is the work God gave you. You’re using that and living to give glory to God and to save people. Then if you receive this work and begin, then of course, you must begin from the bottom up. Starting from the bottom means you polish the most basic, fundamental elements of what you’re learning, and you stack then up one by one.
If you’re not good at studying, it doesn’t mean you’re not good at studying; it means you don’t have the basics down yet. You can see it with athletes, there’s a difference between people who continuously grow, and there are others who stop in the middle. It’s because they have the fundamentals down. Because they don’t have the definition of their work and studies set before God, they try to go fast or quickly, or try to work from their position. But it doesn’t matter what work you’re doing, because there’s always a way to get to the greatest position, no matter what you’re doing.
Even if you’re an ice cream salesman, you can be the greatest ice cream salesman, but the characteristic of people for whom things won’t work out is, “ Why do I have to sell ice cream?” Even if you bake bread, you’re not just baking bread, if you’re beginning baking bread you have to research why? You do all of this because you have to do world evangelization. If you aren’t able to do this, you won’t be competitive, and you live your life saying, “God, God,” but your life is always crumbling because you believe in God religiously. You just have a religious mentality where you think, “If I go to this temple and spin this top, don’t you think it will help me?” You learned all this coincidental religion where you think, “If I spin this top, I’ll meet the right person and my business will take off.”
God is guiding my life, but to whom will God attach these people? You must be aligned physically and spiritually. When somebody else invests in you, they have to see the right qualifications to invest in you. If you didn’t have the right qualifications, they wouldn’t invest in you unless they were crazy. That’s why people get conned.
Even for me, I would invest in something that has the potential to work out; I wouldn’t just invest in something where I would have my money stolen. That’s what the remnants have to focus on, it doesn’t matter if you’re good at studying or not, you have to polish the basics and fundamentals, very solidly otherwise you’re going to fail in the world, you shouldn’t cut corners. It’s the same with the work you’ve been given in the church. You shouldn’t cut corners; you research everything you must do so that you can become the greatest before God, because if you cut corners in church, you’ll cut corners in the world, why? Because you have something incorrect rooted within you.
“Maybe something will work out coincidentally and I’ll be lucky,” that comes from the ideologies of mankind and evolution. It’s because you’re filled with these weird ideologies, “Oh maybe I’ll be reincarnated as a better person,” but no you won’t; you’ll go to either heaven or hell, but you’re filled with so much useless nonsense. Whatever God has given to you, receive God’s grace and strength. Start from the very bottom and work towards the highest place with great breath for sake of world evangelization and saving lives and saving the church. This is where you find the journeys like Joseph and David. Do you think when Joseph went in as a slave, he thought, “Oh I just have to meet the right person and make it up?” That person will stay a slave their whole lives.
Today, we learned about the Sabbath year and the Year of Jubilee, and even though the land may be irrelevant, God’s meanings and ideologies are very relevant to us. Just because you’re old doesn’t mean it’s too late. You might think it’s too late from your perspective, but if God is using you, your age is irrelevant. So, if it were me, I would start from the very lowest place, start with prayer, so that I can save lives, because the work that I have is given from God, for God
Time belongs to God and blessings are given by God. You might try to give your effort, but unless God gives you the blessing, you can’t do anything. Therefore, the land is God’s and even you who are trying to possess the land, you are renting it from God and you belong to God too. You came to this earth with nothing; nothing belongs to you. You try to leave an inheritance to your child, but it can’t go beyond three generations. Among unbelievers, they say, “Three generations rich, three generations poor.”
Your thoughts must be aligned with God’s Word. Whatever God has given you must be used for the Kingdom of God and you’re going up to heaven without anything anyway. I’ll never give anything to my kid because she needs to receive blessings from God, too. I will pour everything to God and go. My mother has called me a few times saying she wants to give me money. I told her, “If you want to give me money, wire it into the church’s bank account.” Instead, I give that offering in my mom’s name. I ask my mom, “ How much offering do you give?” She says, “Oh, stop it, I give offering every week. I wanted to build a house, so I gave a $30,000 offering.”
So, I told her, “Mom, you don’t have to give this money to my daughter because your granddaughter has enough. What you should do is give this to your church, my church it doesn’t matter but give offering in your name and enjoy that reward in heaven.” The reason she does that is because she has money in her bank account so she can’t receive welfare from the government. I asked her, “How much is the welfare benefit?” “$10,000 or $20,000.” Even the amount she’s trying to give me keeps getting smaller. At first it was $5000 and now it’s $3000, but in my mind, I give it as construction offering anyway.
I should give money to my parents, why receive money from them and even for her granddaughter, God should take care of her granddaughter, not her, so we have this thinking where we give it all to God. Either way, we come to this earth empty-handed and we leave empty-handed, so if you think this way, it’s very comfortable. If you try to break open your skull to try to work on your business, then in your 40s, you will have much rest. It is more comfortable inside your heart to do the work for God to save people and to save the church.
Whatever you have, don’t be stingy with it because your reward is given by God. Stop calculating. Just give everything for world evangelization. Then God will take care of everything, He’ll attach people to you, He’ll give you everything, and He’ll do it all.
May you enjoy this blessing. Let us hold onto the Word God gave us and pray. Let us have a time of prayer before God to ask God, “How should I run my business with the Word You have given me about the Sabbath Year and the Year of Jubilee?”
We should pray one more time, God, please use my entire life and everything I do to save the church and world evangelization, to save the 237 nations. May my short life on earth be used for eternal things. Let my life be just like Paul’s confession, that I race towards my heavenly reward.