Meditating on God’s word is really so dope! There is something that feels magically enlightening about receiving clarity and confirmation about God’s heart. I spent some time reading and reflecting on Hebrews 4, at the direction of my Pastor, and wrote out my revelation. It has been very practical and timely in my life, and honestly something I feel like I have been struggling with.
I have been having conversations with people lately and saying things like, “I’ve exhausted my strength”, “this is feels so heavy”, “I work too hard”. The context was typically referring to difficulties with work or relationships that felt burdensome to invest in. I wanted to share my encounter with Hebrews 4 because I think it extends beyond my situations and circumstances and I wanted to offer it out as a reminder to anyone else feeling weighed down and at the end of their rope.
I have to be honest, in that when I read through the passage at first, I felt like everything went over my head. My Pastor seemed excited to charge us all with the assignment to read and meditate on Hebrews 4 and I was disappointed to feel like I didn’t receive anything from this. I barely even understood what I had just read! After reading and re-reading maybe four or five times, I decided to shift and focus on what I don’t understand. What does the writer mean by ‘rest’? I need to define rest in order to feel something.
So naturally, I looked up the definition of rest and found this:
Rest – (verb) to cease work or movement in order to relax or recover ones strength; (noun) an instance or period of relaxing or ceasing to engage in strenuous or stressful activity
Ok, so to experience rest means that you’re not working? If we are use to constantly working, in order to experience rest means that we need to disrupt our work. At this point, my mind shifted towards Physics! Work = Force x Displacement. Taking another step back into my early engineering coursework, we know from basic algebra, using the equation above, in order to make Work = zero, either the force or the displacement needs to also be zero.
What are the forces and displacements in one’s life? Well, I figured our lifespan is the displacement. This will always have a value, from birth to death – whether you live for one day, one year, or 100 years – there is a start and an end. In Physics, a force is a push or pull upon an object resulting from the object’s interaction with another object. When the interaction ceases, the two objects no longer experience the force. In my life, well my grief has felt like a weighted force. These challenging relationships and difficulties at work have felt like weighted forces. Extending beyond my specific obstacles, we know that commonly people refer to the weight of sins, guilt, shame, etc.
If you visualize a person traveling from birth to death, encountering hardships, sin, grief, guilt, etc. along the way – picking it up and being weighed down on their journey; that is work. How do we make this work = zero? We already said displacement will always have a value. So we need to make the force = zero in order to disrupt the work.
We far too often forget that we are not traveling on this journey or displacement of life alone. We in fact have the gracious presence of God walking along side of us. And to take it a step further, imagine God has a wagon or wheel barrow while he walks with us. So we’re out here picking up these weights along the way, and struggling, being weighed down, exhausting ourselves working so hard through life. But God is right there, ready to take the weight out of your hands and put it on wheels. It’s heavy for us, but essentially nothing to Him!
When we surrender our weights (the grief, the guilt, the sins, the shame, the hardships, etc.) to God we remove the force. So going back to the equation for work, it now becomes work = 0 x displacement. Anything times zero will equal zero! Once I release the forces on my life to God, I’m no longer working! I am moving through life with His promised rest.
The idea is not that we would never encounter any more weights or forces in our lives, but rather, that when we do encounter them, we nearly immediately hand them over to God to release ourselves from the work and live in the freedom of being unburdened. This is God’s promise to us.
Hebrews 4:1-3 (MSG) For as long, then, as that promise of resting in him pulls us on to God’s goal for us, we need to be careful that we’re not disqualified. We received the same promises as those people in the wilderness, but the promises didn’t do them a bit of good because they didn’t receive the promises with faith. If we believe, though, we’ll experience that state of resting. But not if we don’t have faith.
Per the text, the promise isn’t enough. God is going to fulfil his end of the covenant, but we must also fulfil ours. Which is to receive the promises with faith – complete trust or confidence in Him. Again, looking for clarity, I started with a question. How do I prove or exercise my faith in God in order to inherit His promise to me?
- It’s personal – my salvation. There is nothing I can physically do or say to bring me in “right standing” with God or earn my salvation. My salvation is only through relationship with Jesus. Romans 10:9 (NLT) If you openly declare that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
- What He’s done “to me” he will do “through me”. It’s not on me, or my own efforts/labor to “fix” the world or any person. My job is obedience! To “do the next right thing”, or “the last thing God instructed you to do” and trust that the results will come. To love all people the same way that Christ does, and trust him to bring resolve to any troubles. Obedience + Trust = Thy will be done!
“God of Abraham
You’re the God of covenant and of faithful promises
Time and time again You have proven
You’ll do just what You said
Though the storms may come and the
Winds may blow I’ll remain steadfast
And let my heart learn when You speak a word it will come to pass”
I love it…Amen!!!
❤️