Rest…
…Well I am about to go on holiday which as James Brown said “feels good”. I enjoy holidays as they allow time to live at a different pace, to relax, to get refreshed…to ‘rest’. However, I know when I speak to others they agree, that often the rest we enjoy through a holiday is quickly forgotten within a couple of days of being back to normal life. We can then find ourselves pining after our next holiday as life just seemed better then, but surely this isn’t how it is meant to be! Surely we are not meant to live for the next holiday!
The truth of the matter is holiday’s are good but we need to know ‘rest’ throughout our year.
God understands our need for rest. When Jesus walked the planet he said that he had come to give us rest, elsewhere in the Bible we are told that anyone who believes in Jesus can enter God’s rest. But what sort of rest does Jesus offer?
I listened recently to talk by Tim kellor on ‘work and rest’ that brings understanding to what is on offer here. In essence Tim reveals that we need to understand first what God’s rest look like, which we discover in the creation story at the beginning of the Bible. In the creation story we discover that God rested on the 7th day not because he was tired but because he was pleased with all he had accomplished.
To understand ‘rest’ like this begins to shed some light on why it can feel so elusive. If we are truthful at the core of our being that however hard we work we just don’t feel like we have accomplished enough, there is always more to be done, we need to try harder. We may know moments of satisfaction when we have completed something but it never lasts for long. What if we could know that deep sense of satisfaction in the core of our being, of achievement, completeness, of total acceptance regardless of all that we have yet to achieve, now that sounds like ‘rest’.
Jesus therefore invites us to enter this sort of ‘rest’. A rest where we understand he has accomplished everything and we get to know the satisfaction of that, the sense of achievement, completeness and total acceptance that it promises.
What an invitation, more than just a holiday an experience of ‘rest’ to be enjoyed daily.
This isn’t an invitation to do nothing but rather an invitation that amidst all the deadlines and never ending to do lists we can know at the very core of our being that our achievements are not what make us acceptable, Jesus is and that is ‘rest’.
So, if like me you are going on holiday I hope you have a great time! But whether we are going on holiday or not let’s make time to discover or remember the true ‘rest’ that is being offered by Jesus that is to be enjoyed.
