Rest

I greet you in Jesus’ precious name! It is Thursday morning, the 23rd of October, 2025, and this is your friend, Angus Buchan, with a thought for today.

We go to the Book of Exodus 23:10-11:

”Six years you shall sow your land and gather in its produce, but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow,…”

What does the word fallow mean? It means to do nothing with it. It means to leave your land and let it rest. It means to let the weeds grow. It means to let the earthworms do their work. It means to allow the ground to build up compost from the residue of the previous season. For six years we work the land, I’m talking as a farmer now, in the seventh year we must grow no crops whatsoever. 

As a young farmer, I really struggled with this scripture from the Lord because I have a rather small farm, and it’s an arable farm so we plant up the whole farm every year to grain crops. But becoming a Christian, I wanted to do the right thing, so I came up against this scripture, six years you plant, seventh year you rest, and so I said to the Lord, ”I can’t rest the whole farm for one year. I’ll go bankrupt.” And then I felt the Lord say to me, in my heart, ”Why don’t you rest one seventh of the arable land, and after seven years, the whole farm would have rested once.” I thought that was brilliant, so that’s what I did. I would leave one seventh of the land without touching it. No ploughing, nothing whatsoever. 

I’ll never forget, one day, a young agronomist came to see me on the farm. He was a very clever young man, and he was driving around my maize fields, I was growing seed maize at that time and he said, ”Your crop looks fantastic.” Then I took him past the one field that I was resting in and he said to me, ”What is going on over there?” because the weeds were about six feet tall and the grass was growing. It looked terrible and I went and parked our pickup right next to that field and I said to him, ”Do you really want to know?” He said, ”Yes, please, I do.” He was not a Christian by the way, and I said, ”The Bible tells me I must rest the land and that’s what I’m doing.” You know that he was so intrigued, we carried on talking and I ended up praying the sinner’s prayer with that young man and I’m trusting that maybe he’s even listening to this message at the moment. His name is Sean. Folks, I’m talking maybe over forty years ago.

I want to tell you, we also need to rest. The Lord says rest the land. Rest the animals, and we need to rest so that we can be strengthened. This modern idea of just go for it seven days week, it can’t be sustained. Something will break down.

Please, today, listen to God’s word and rest on the Sabbath. 
Jesus bless you and have a wonderful day, 
Goodbye