God’s Rest Is Available For You Today

Many times when you ask people how they are, their answer is: “busy”. A lot of people seem to be always tired, running around frantically doing, doing, doing!! I have been there myself.

The world tells us that more is better and that the more we do the more we’ll achieve. As Christians we can keep busy doing too much with the excuse that we are serving Christ and with the desire to see ministry work succeed, but it is not about quantity but about quality.  

During the latest CAP conference I attended, one of the speakers said: “let’s stop doing things for Jesus and let’s start being more like Jesus.” That statement really spoke to me.

We are called to not be conformed to the pattern of this world. We are to be set apart for God. He has called us to enter His rest. In Hebrews 3 and 4 the writer explains that we can only enter God’s rest through faith and obedience:

‘So God’s rest is there for people to enter, but those who first heard this good news failed to enter because they disobeyed God. So God set another time for entering his rest, and that time is TODAY…’ Hebrews 4: 6-7 (NLT)

‘For this good news – that God has prepared this rest – has been announced to us just as it was to them. But it did them no good because they didn’t share the faith of those who listened to God’ Hebrews 4:2 (NLT)

So let’s think about obedience. Our Lord Jesus gave us one commandment: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. He called us to imitate Him in loving.

In our many commitments, are we making sure all we do we do in love? Are our ‘good deeds’ rooted in selfless love or do we have our own agenda? Our Lord Jesus said: Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friend. That’s the kind of love we are called to live in!

Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. If we are truly confident of our future hope we don’t need to spend ourselves trying to get there by our own strength. If we have assurance (certainty) of the promises of God for our life that we are yet to see, we don’t need to fill our schedules with things to make them happen.

I invite you TODAY to enter God’s rest. God wants us to remove strive from our life and replace it with love and faith in action. Our Heavenly Father, who made this rest available since he made the world, wants to bless us abundantly if we dare to believe Him! He wants us to rest in Him. He wants us thriving not striving!

Why don’t you join me this week and take some time to pause, let’s check our heart, are love (for one another) and faith (in Christ) the drivers of all that we are doing? This is something we should do regularly, so our Heavenly Father can show us if there are any adjustments we need to make to ensure we are dwelling in His rest!