Rest

We need rest; that's a basic rule of human life, isn't it?  We excuse ourselves for working all the time by saying "The Lord put me on earth to accomplish a certain number of things, and right now I'm so far behind I will never die!"  But God never meant for us to live without rest.  And the physical rest he gave the Israelites in Exodus 20:8-11 (a drastic change from generations of slavery in Egypt) was meant to lead them, and us, toward the true eternal rest.

I'm reading through the Gospels again, and was struck this morning by how Jesus discusses rest.  In Matthew 11:25-30 Jesus has just been talking about John the Baptist, "the one the prophets said would come" and sighing over the people who hadn't responded to his teaching and miracles.  Then he points to the Father's revelation in Jesus himself, and encourages us to come to him to find rest.  When Jesus said "if you're carrying heavy burdens" he wasn't just talking about physical loads.  The religious leaders of his day "crush[ed] people with unbearable religious demands" (Matthew 23) instead of freeing them to love God.  (A little like the Egyptians, who told the Israelites in Ex. 5:6-9 to make bricks without having straw provided, and God delivered them from that toil too.)  But Jesus doesn't give us here a looser set of rules for keeping the Sabbath -- instead, he offers us himself as the source of rest.  That is continued as Matthew stacks two more Sabbath-principle incidents in 12:1-21 to show how the leaders of his day misunderstood God. 


Why did Jesus do this?  For multiple reasons.  First, he was here to "reveal the Father" (Mat. 11:27) to his disciples.  Next, in that revelation of the Father, through Jesus, we find that the heart of God is not about getting more performance out of us but about resting in his Son.  Because we are "in Christ" we are able to rest in the perfection of Jesus' obedience to the Father, instead of trying to perform well enough which we never will anyway.  In fact, if we insist on trying to show God how obedient we can be, we will miss the point of trusting in his Son altogether. 


Every day I think about the work I believe I have to do, and all the plans I'd like to see come together, and it's easy to get burdened and stressed.  But when I realize that the work itself gets done by Jesus, and only through me, not because of me, then I can learn to rest, at least some, and let him work.  Do you know how to rest in him?  If not, let's talk. 


What then is the reason for responding in faith, in a life of obedience?  Paul talks about that in Romans 5 and 6, and we'll unpack that a little at another time.