Enter

“Let us therefore strive to enter that rest.” – Hebrews 4:11

“For we who have believed enter that rest.” – Hebrews 4:3

Sabbaths feel sometimes like fasting: the first thing you notice about stopping your work is how much you work, like how the first thing you notice about fasting is how much your life revolves around food. When we fast, we learn to hunger after God the way we hunger after food. When we Sabbath, we learn to receive meaning from God the way we receive meaning from work. The truth is, we have a distorted relationship with work. In southern Virginia, no one ever asked me about my work, but around here, the most common follow-up to an introduction is, “what do you do?” It is nearly impossible to not let our work come to define us, to be the central source of our identity, purpose and meaning.

When we stop from our work, we start to see all that. We see the work under the work, the “ceaseless striving” for meaning and credibility that drives so much of our working. Ceasing the act of work is not the same as entering rest. When Joshua led the Israelites into the promised land, they stopped working as slaves and wanderers; there was a kind of social and physical rest, but they had not yet obtained true, deep rest. Hebrews says, “For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on.” We can only enter the deeper rest we need by believing the gospel, by believing that all that we strive for is achieved for us already through God’s work. 

Richard Lovess writes, “If we start each day with our personal security not resting on the accepting love of God and the sacrifice of Christ, but on our present achievements, such arguments will not quiet the human conscience and we are inevitably moved either to discouragement and apathy, or to a self-righteousness or some form of idolatry that tries to falsify the record to achieve a sense of peace. But the Gospel faith that is able to warm itself at the fire of God’s love and what Jesus has done for us, instead of having to steal love and self-acceptance from all these other places, is the very root of peace.”