LEARNING TO REST
(Thursday, December 19)
“There remains therefore a rest (σαββατισμὸς, a Sabbath rest) for the people of God. For he who has entered His rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from His. Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest, lest anyone fall according to the same example of disobedience. For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” (Hebr 4:9-12)
We are called to enter the kind of “Sabbath rest” into which God entered on the Seventh Day, which did not mean He became inactive. God “rested” in the sense that He was now allowing others the freedom to act, namely, us, without controlling our choices. We are invited to “be diligent” to enter God’s kind of not-inactive rest; it’s a learning-process that lasts our whole lives, this learning to rest in God and like God. It takes daily work and attentiveness (to the word of God), because our freedom entails difficult choices and decision-making, along with the potential for making the wrong choices. These poor choices lead us to exile from God’s “rest,” as it happened with Adam and Eve, so we need to scurry back into communion with God and re-enter His “rest,” time and time again.
Our entrances and re-entrances into God’s kind of “rest” can be a painful learning process, but we have the word of God to guide us back, when we have “obedience” to it; when we listen in to it. “Obedience” (from the Latin “ob” meaning “to/toward” + “audire,” meaning “to listen, hear”) involves an active choice, of (re)directing our attention or lending our ear not to every voice in our heads or in our midst, but to God’s voice.
Let me let myself enter into God’s rest today, by also letting others have the freedom to act, without me controlling their choices. Thy will be done with all of us today, our Father, and let me not fight unnecessary battles, that I may grow more beautiful, in usefulness to You, myself and others.
