The Lord’s Rest

Hebrews 3:14 - 4:11a

For if we are faithful to the end, trusting God just as firmly as when we first believed, we will share in all that belongs to Christ. But never forget the warning:

"Today you must listen to His voice.

Don't harden your hearts against Him as Israel did when they rebelled."

And who were those people who rebelled against God, even though they heard His voice? Weren't they the ones Moses led out of Egypt? And who made God angry for forty years? Wasn't it the people who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? And to whom was God speaking when He vowed that they would never enter His place of rest? He was speaking to those who disobeyed Him. So we see that they were not allowed to enter His rest because of their unbelief.

God's promise of entering His place of rest still stands, so we ought to tremble with fear that some of you might fail to get there. For this Good News—that God has prepared a place of rest—has been announced to us just as it was to them. But it did them no good because they didn't believe what God told them. For only we who believe can enter His place of rest. As for those who didn't believe, God said,

"In My anger I made a vow: 'They will never enter My place of rest,' "

even though His place of rest has been ready since He made the world. We know it is ready because the Scriptures mention the seventh day, saying, "On the seventh day God rested from all His work." But in the other passage God said, "They will never enter My place of rest." So God's rest is there for people to enter. But those who formerly heard the Good News failed to enter because they disobeyed God. So God set another time for entering His place of rest, and that time is today. God announced this through David a long time later in the words already quoted:

"Today you must listen to His voice. Don't harden your hearts against Him."

This new place of rest was not the land of Canaan, where Joshua led them. If it had been, God would not have spoken later about another day of rest. So there is a special rest still waiting for the people of God. For all who enter into God's rest will find rest from their labors, just as God rested after creating the world. Let us do our best to enter that place of rest.

No teaching flowing out of the Sabbath principle is more important than the centrality of our resting in God. Instead of striving to make this or that happen, we learn trust in a heavenly Father who loves to give. This does not promote inactivity, rather it promotes independent activity. We no longer take things into our own hands, but now we place everything into His divine hands and then act out of the inner promptings of the Spirit.

Today we are invited into God's rest, which the people of the Exodus failed to enter. " It remains open for some to enter it," declares the writer to the Hebrews. The literal translation for "pray always" is "come to rest." Through the Prayer of Rest we enter this intense stillness, this quiet alertness.

But how? How do we enter the Prayer of Rest? It is here that we face a serious dilemma. Our tendency is, on the one hand, to take firm control, or, on the other hand, to do absolutely nothing.

We most often begin by tackling prayer in the same way we have been taught to tackle every other problem - by hard work. We grit our teeth, intensify our will power, and try, try, try. In reality this is a pagan concept of prayer in which we rouse the gods to action by our many incantations and vain repetitions.

Anthony Bloom tells the story of an elderly woman who had been working at prayer with all her might but without ever sensing God's presence. Wisely, the archbishop encouraged the old woman to go to her room each day and “for fifteen minutes knit before the face of God, but I forbid you to say one word of prayer. You just knit and try to enjoy the peace of your room.”

The woman received this counsel, and at first her only thought was, "Oh, how nice. I have fifteen minutes during which I can do nothing without feeling guilty!" In time, however, she began to enter the silence created by her knitting. Soon, she said, "I perceived that this silence was not simply an absence of noise, but that the silence had substance. It was not absence of something but presence of something." As she continued her daily knitting, she discovered that "at the heart of the silence there was He who is stillness, all peace, all poise." She had let go of her tight-fisted efforts to enter God's presence and, by doing so, discovered God's presence already there.

Warren D. Carter

26.9.97