Tomorrow morning Danielle and I are heading to Mexico for 5 nights of vacation with a bunch of our good friends. I'm excited about a lot of things, but what I'm really excited about is just chillin -- limited internet, no texting, just chilling on the beach with my bride and our friends. My personality is a worker. I make to-do lists and don't really do a very good job of sitting down and resting. My goal this vacation is to rest, but I want to do it very carefully.
My mind goes to the writer of Hebrews, where in the third and fourth chapters he describes salvation as an entry into the Lord's rest. That is a very interesting wording. I think what it's trying to communicate is that apart from Christ there is no such thing as true rest. Don't get me wrong, people "rest." They go on vacation, take breaks, etc, but that doesn't speak to the problem of the unrest in the human soul. Left to ourselves, we are broken and bent to sin. We don't naturally live for God, but for ourselves. We work so hard to clean ourselves up, be presentable, some even do it with the goal of trying to make God happy. Yet, apart from the redemptive work of God we will remain in our exhausted, busy, broken, and selfish unrest. All the while continually looking to the next thing in the hopes that it brings us the rest that only Jesus can fulfill.
So whether we are going on vacation, taking a day off or just sitting down to rest, it must flow out of and be saturated with Jesus. Left to ourselves, our own agendas, our own thinking, even our own naps, we will remain in our brokenness and miss the eternal rest that can only comes from the Savior. With that being said, I'm looking forward to resting in him this next week.
