God of Rest

Every so often, you will come across someone who reminds you just how many promises of God were fulfilled in Scripture - from the Lord's promise to an aging Abram and Sarai to Jesus's promise to His disciples to send the Holy Spirit among them. Quite honestly, it's a very long list. 

And while it's really cool to be able to go through His story and mark off all the promises kept, it's even better news for those of us who are still waiting on His promises to be fulfilled in our own lives. After all, if He kept every word He spoke to a sinner like David, who are we to believe He won't keep every word to us? 

For many of us, the promise our souls most look forward to is the one in Hebrews 4:1: 

The promise of rest. 

Let's face it - this life can be rough. Between family and friends and work and responsibilities and bills and bodies and pets and problems, it can feel like we're stuck on a hamster wheel, running and running and spinning in circles and all of a sudden, going so fast that we're not sure we can ever get off. Our world used to build in rhythms of rest, blocking out Sundays for faith and family, offering three-day holiday weekends every now and again. 

Remember the three-day weekend? Oh, how we looked forward to that. It felt like the most precious gift. 

But with the advent of the internet, email, mobile phones, social media, and a 24/7 economy that doesn't ever seem to breathe for fear of losing its momentum, we increasingly live lives that feel like we're on-call all the time. Like we have to be within reach of everyone else's fingertips, ready to drop even the most important things to us to go do what is most important to someone else. 

And everyone else's lack of preparation suddenly becomes our interruption, our emergency. 

As I write, the news is telling the story of a dry cleaner whose establishment had a suit someone needed for a special event, but that person had failed to account for a holiday and hadn't picked up the suit. "I personally left my lake house to drive up and get the suit for the customer," the owner said. 

How are we ever supposed to get any rest? 

Yet, rest is one of God's most-repeated promises. Come to me, and I will give you rest. You will find rest for your souls. ...The promise of entering His rest still stands.

There will be rest. 

That's really one of the greatest gifts of faith, I think, in a time like this. This promise of rest gives us permission to get off the hamster wheel. It invites us into a holy rhythm instead of a hectic one. It lets us set our boundaries around what God has given us, what He keeps inviting us into. 

There's not another single thing in the world that God could give us that we would so freely give away, yet we so often give away our rest, as if doing so was holy. But we need not do this. We should cling to our rest the way we cling to every other good thing of God in our life, for it is just as much His gift to us as anything else, and it is His promise being fulfilled right now, right here. 

So take that rest. Take that three-day weekend. Turn that phone off. Disconnect. Re-engage. Relax. Rest. 

For every promise of God is fulfilled. That much, we know. 

It's time we start living it.