A lot has changed in a year. 2020 – the year of the Corona – has been a year of a lifetime. Health scares and concerns as COVID death tolls mount, economic woes skyrocket as workers are laid off and businesses close, as well as quarantines and distancing alter how we meet. As if all this wasn’t enough, our leadership cannot put aside differences to plan a united strategy for overcoming these challenges.
Just as lack of sleep or intense physical exertion makes us exhausted and weary, stress, uncertainty, depression and battling the devil makes us spiritually weary. Spiritual weariness ties our spiritual, mental, emotional and even physical health into knots. The fruit of our spirits become withered and spoiled. The distance between God and man seems insurmountable. Rest is desperately needed.
Perhaps no one knows weariness better than God Himself. Humbly put to earth and a cross to alter the eternity of humanity, Jesus prayed to the intense level of sweating drops of blood in the garden. Grace and unconditional love allows weariness to be overcome.
The same God who understands being weary, teaches us extensively about rest. To a people where the culture wears busyness as a badge of honor, God urges us to breathe easier under a banner of rest. God’s heart for rest goes deeper than just a respect for the Sabbath, it teaches us the eternal value of ceasing from our labor.
Jesus offers an incredible invitation with the power to free the spirit and to release the burdens that we carry. “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28 NASB).
The world labels us by what we can do, who we know and our potential to perform. It seeks to shackle us to our past – we are who we are because of it, and we will never be able to escape it. Sounds like rhetoric spewed from the lips of the devil, doesn’t it?
Since the sin in the Garden, human have spent their lives trying to “work” their way back into God’s graces. Man has hoped that if he could just cultivate enough from the soil, somehow it would make up for the sin and God would be pleased. Woman hoped the same for her contribution to the toil, but also prayed the day would come when one of her children would be better than her.
Isaiah offered a prophetic ray of hope. “The whole earth is at rest and is quiet; they break for into shouts of joy” (Isaiah 14:7 NASB). The day would come when we would rest from thinking we could work enough to please God. He accepted us graciously.
Let’s train our spiritual eyesight to focus on strength for the weary, finding and understanding God’s rest by seeking His guidance from some of the Psalms.