The Faith Beyond Trauma Podcast

When We Surrender, We Find Rest and Freedom (Leviticus 25)

• Pastor Reggie

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What if surrender is not losing control but finally finding it? We dive into Leviticus 25 to trace a pattern many of us have ignored: rhythms of rest that shape souls, heal communities, and let the earth breathe. From the Sabbath year to the Jubilee, the text turns rest into a lived theology—one that links trust, provision, and justice in a way that challenges the grind and comforts the weary.

We walk through the Sabbath year’s counterintuitive command to stop planting and stop hoarding, then sit with the bold promise of a triple portion in the sixth year. That promise doesn’t celebrate laziness; it confronts the scarcity mindset and reveals a God who funds obedience with abundance. Jubilee widens the lens: debts reset, land returns, and dignity is restored to the poor. Redemption gets priced to hope, not despair, and mercy gets scheduled into the calendar so no one is trapped forever. Holiness turns practical as we talk about economic ethics, creation care, and resisting cultural drift from Egypt’s idols to Canaan’s convenience.

From there, we connect the dots to Jesus—our living Jubilee—who invites the burned out to learn the unforced rhythms of grace. We share how rest clarifies our thinking, softens our reactions, and closes the cracks where anxiety and bitterness sneak in. You’ll hear practical ways to build a rhythm of rest without legalism: choosing a flexible day, honoring your limits, listening for God in quiet moments, and treating neighbors with the dignity Leviticus demands. Surrender, then, becomes a pathway to wholeness where nothing is missing and nothing is lacking because grace finally has room to work.

If this conversation helped you breathe a little deeper, share it with a friend who needs a reset, subscribe for more soulful, practical theology, and leave a review to tell us how you’re practicing rest this week.

Be sure to like and follow the Faith Beyond Podcast w/ Pastor Reggie on YouTube and Faith Beyond Trauma on Facebook

SPEAKER_00:

Alrighty. So today, um, if I had to put a title on this, it would be surrender. Surrender. And so one of the words or one of the definitions for surrender is from the 1828 dictionary of Webster. It says yielding or giving up. And so in Leviticus 25, that's what we're going to be coming out of today. And this is such the agriculture society, yielding mean the qual the quantity of crops harvest from the giving land. So this is such a good example of yielding. Even the land has to obey or surrender to God, right? To yield the harvest. And so Leviticus picks up where Exodus uh left off. You know, we know the children of Israel are going through the wilderness to Canaan to the promised land. And so the most high God is giving the instructions of rest, renewal, and trusting in him and his provision, the power of surrendering, right? And to me, the whole Bible is trusting God, surrendering our will, our wants, our way of doing things to the most high God. So um, we're gonna talk about the Sabbath year of rest, the year of Jubilee, the provision of the seventh year, redemption, and lending to the poor and the laws of concerning slavery. So Sabbath year or Sabbath, it's a time of rest. It's the like we just I just said it's a re-incurrent theme throughout the scripture, symbolizes not only physical rest for our human bodies, right? That we need also spiritual rest, right? We are spirit, soul, and body, and we need both spiritual part and the physical part, we it um brings that spiritual rest and that peace that only as believers that we can get through our Lord and Savior, that relationship. And we also know in Genesis 2, God rested, right? And we made an image and likeness of him. If he rested and he thought everything was good, I think we need to rest, right? Amen. So when we look at this scripture, um coming out of verse 1, it said, While Moses was on Mount Sinai, the Lord said to him, Give the follow instructions to the people of Israel. When you enter into the land I am giving you, the land itself must obey a Sabbath rest before the Lord every seventh year. Um, for six years you may plant um your fields and prune your vineyards and harvest your crops, but during the seventh year, the land must have a Sabbath year of complete rest. It is the Lord's Sabbath. Do not plant your fields or prune your vineyards during this rest. Don't don't uh store up or store away crops that grow on their own or gather grapes or unpruned vines. The land must have a year of complete rest, right? But whatever you the land produces on that Sabbath day, you can eat it, right? And then it goes on to talk about the year of Jubilee, right? On the 50th year. So it says seven sets of seven, adding up to 49 years in all. Then on the day of atonement in the fifth year, blow your horn and loud and and loans throughout the land, set these years, set this year apart as holy, a time of proclaimed freedom throughout the land for all who live there. This is a year that slaves was free, right? And properties was given back to their original owner. And then we go on to talk about the provision um for the land for the seven years, right? He says in verse 18, keep my decrees, observe my laws. You will live secure in the land. The land would yield its fruit. You would have all you can eat and will live safe and secure, right? And then he said, Do I hear you ask, what are we going to eat in the seventh year if we don't plant or harvest? He said, I assure you, he said, trust me, I will send such a blessing in the sixth year that the land will yield enough for three years. I looked at that scriptures. I said, We always talk about double portions. He's saying triple portions on here, so proclaim triple portions, right? So then he goes on to say, if a poor person leases his land because he falls on hard time, he has the right to redeem it. A close relation relative also can help him out. And then he talks about the poor and how the brothers and sisters, how we are responsible or they are responsible to help them out, not to treat them like slaves, but to treat them like you know, hired servants, um, helpers. And then he goes on to say the price to buy his freedom was based on the number of years until the next Jubilee. You know what? God loves us so much, you know, it is just amazing. Even in we look at the laws as as at a certain um way, but even in this law, even the law of the land, he just loved us so much. He thought of it all, right? Even the land got to to uh uh uh to rest, right? And we can we can tell because it's slowly um being damaged by mankind, but but God knew his children, right? Um, this is just one of the many perpetual cycles um of 430 years of Egyptian culture, of worshiping idols, and then uh um he knows they're coming to another group of people, the Canaanites, right? Because we know if we look a little bit further as we read on through the Bible, that we know that he didn't drive all them out of the land, but it was some that was living among them. But he expected us to live, I say us, but he expected them to live holy and set apart because of course we are holy and set apart and we are his chosen vessels, but he expected them to um live uh holy in a way that God pleased him because God is holy and God has a standard, and and just like the earth is, you know, there's laws in this earth. It's all laws in this world, right? The law of gravity, right? So the land needs to rest. Um, Genesis 8:22, 20 and 22 or 21 says, and the Lord was pleased with the aroma of the sacrifice and said um to himself, I will never again curse the ground because of human race, even though everything they think of or imagine is bent towards evil since the childhood, but I will never again destroy all living things. As long as the earth remains, there will be planting harvest, or we hear the time seed time and harvest. Um, there will be cold and heat, summer and winter and day and night. So there are laws in the land that we must um abide by, right? We all know it's a set time, a curls time. We have to be patient. Patient is resting in God. Um, even though if it's uncomfortable, we need to surrender. And we know that sometimes, you know, as individuals or, you know, even with them, we forget, right? We we we get distracted. You know, it's so much noise can be up in here, right? And so that's why we enter into God's rest. Like I said, physically and and and spiritually, um, we enter into his rest. We even know that even the situations of the um the Israelites, right? They forgot, they they got so distracted by different things, you know. Um, and King Josiah, right? He was just going to fix up the temple and he looked and found scrolls of like the laws. He's like, Oh my god, we've been doing this all wrong. So things can distract us if we're not surrendering total to God and entering into his rest. Um, one of the things that um uh the Lord's uh well, but thank God for Jesus, right? We're under the new covenant and in our hearts, we are set apart. When we come to Jesus, he gives us rest, he gives us provision, redemption, he gives us our year of jubilee, right? He gives us uh uh uh uh he demolished strongholds and slavery, and and and at the end of the day, guess what? We're gonna go back and tell our testimonies and our stories and help pull somebody else, Father God, into the Father faith family. So Matthew 11, 28 in the Message Translation tells us, Are you tired, worn out, burnt out on religion? Come to me, get away with me, and you'll recover your life, and I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me. Watch how I do it. Learn the unforced, not the law, but the rhythm of grace, and I will won't lay anything heavy uh or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me, and you'll learn to live freely and lightly. The spirit, soul, and body. This is both spiritually and naturally. Um, Luke 4 18, Luke 4 18 through 19 tells us the spirit of the Lord is upon us. He has anointed me, he has anointed you to be the hope and for the poor and healing for the brokenhearted, who we know is Jesus, but he has given us that command, right? And this dispensation: healing for the brokenhearted, new eyes for the blind, to preach depressed to the prisoners, to you are to set you are set free. I have come to share the message of the jubilee, the good news. For the time of God, great acceptance has begun. When we surrender, we are in our Sabbath, we are in our rest in Him. We have a great covenant with God, right? In the name of Jesus, and He has we have we found rest in Him. You know, He says, Why are you struggling? Why are you laboring to get what is already yours? Yes, it can be uncomfortable. Yes, my sons and daughters, but yet come to me, you will find rest, and I will do the rest as you come. Surrender. Lack of surrender may equal a little bit of pride, right? One of the things Pastor Reggie said, I'm almost closing up here. He tells us that, and this was talking about emotions and fears without it. This is such a good thing. I think it just linked to everything. We must go to him without hesitation about it all, right? Don't prolong it, don't fester it, just go to him, period, and he will give us rest in our spirit, body, and soul. It is uncomfortable at times, right? But we go to him, right? Even in our wilderness moments, right? You know, even Pastor Carrot, his rhythm of rest, he said that, you know, we don't have to make a lot of it. We can pick a day to rest. You think about we can one week we might pick Tuesday, the next week we might pick Wednesday. We're not making a religious out of religion out of it. We just want to, he wants our bodies to rest, right? Physically, when we rest, we can think clear, our blood flow, even certain things are made while we're resting, our thoughts can be organized, right? You ever realize when you're first getting up in the morning, how you think? You know, God is talking to you because you're you're actually coming about that rest. You're you're still resting. You think about Solomon when he was dreaming, right? You think about Mary. I mean, Joseph, he was had a dream. God was giving him detailed plans because he was resting in God, right? You're not as snappy, you're not cussing people out. You're like, well, I don't cuss with our body language, our facial expression tells a whole different story. But when we surrender to it all, when we give God everything, right, we will have our jubilee, we will have enter into rest. Everything that the devil stole from us or tried to steal from us, right? That's our jubilee. We're taking that back back when we rest. When we when we're actually resting in him and we're not all over the place, because when we're not in rest with him, the devil can see it's like a crack in our armor of God, right? It's like that crack in the armor because when you're not resting, you're not thinking straight, right? And so when we are when we are resting him, when we are totally surrendered to him, right? We are free from slavery. Slavery just meaning just doing the same thing over and over again, thinking you're gonna get a different result, right? And then we are we have the redeemer, the redeemer is here, right? Our Lord and Savior. So when we are resting him, both physically and spiritually, we can still do good, love on people, right? Refrain from all that religion mentality, right? We just rest to him, we're not in pride, and then the I'm closing, and when we're arresting him, and when we surrender at all, we're walking in wholeness, nothing missing, nothing lacking. Yeah, oh it's gonna be uncomfortable, but when we're surrender, nothing missing, nothing lacking, and we can redeem the poor, meaning the poor, the brokenhearted people who's out there don't even know him, right? We can redeem them, we can help our brothers and sisters, our family, whoever that is, who bring them into the family of faith. That is all my time. Thank you, everyone.