God’s Rest – Part II
Scripture Reading: Hebrews 4:1-11
Key Verse: Hebrews 4:1
God’s promise of entering His rest still stands, so we ought to tremble with fear that some of you might fail to experience it.
Picking up where we left off yesterday, I want to challenge us to understand what keeps us from entering God’s rest.
The fourth chapter of Hebrews gives us a couple of answers. First, we read that it is “only we who believe that can enter His rest” (Hebrews 4:3).
Like all of God’s promises, faith becomes essential for us to receive and enjoy this rest that God have for us. Much later in our study of Hebrews we will see that it is “impossible to please God without faith. Anyone who wants to come to Him must believe that God exists and that He rewards those who sincerely seek Him” (Hebrews 11:6).
Do you think that God deserves your trust? If you said “yes” to that question, then that tells me you do indeed see God as all powerful.
One more important question: Do you believe that God loves you and that He loves to give good gifts to His children? If your answer is “yes” to that as well, then you believe in a good God and that He gets pleasure from helping us.
These questions are important because sometimes we think we don’t have enough faith. I think the truth is that we do have enough faith, but we don’t know God’s will in each situation. In these cases, we know that God might say “no” because He knows something that we don’t. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have faith.
Part of God’s rest is our salvation by faith. When we believe that Jesus came to redeem us on that cross, then we can know that our sins are forgiven, and we can have rest from the fear of hell.
Most of the struggles that people have in receiving God’s gift of salvation is believing that they must work hard to earn it; that is the exact opposite of rest.
Hebrews 4:10 says it clearly: “For all who have entered into God’s rest have rested from their labors…”.
If you have the feeling that you never do enough for God to love you, then I invite you to rest from your labor of always trying to earn God’s love.
If you have a heavy weight hanging on you because of shame and guilt from past behavior, then I invite you to lay that shame and guilt down and rest in God’s Grace for you.
There is another aspect of God’s rest beyond forgiveness of our sin, and that is a rest from trying to figure out all of life’s problems. If we can’t trust God to show us a way when there doesn’t seem to be a way out of our problems, then we’ll never enjoy His rest.
Life is tough and isn’t always fair. Trusting God won’t take away all your problems but He has the answer for all your problems. Trust God’s love and power and enjoy rest!
Father, I choose trust over fear. I will rest in you! In Jesus’s Name, amen.