Resting In God's Quietness

What is the object of your heart—your very being—from which spring all of the other issues of life?

 

Is it resting in God?

 

Or is it weighted with the burden of suppressed tension?

 

As Christians, it is our privilege to pass through this world in the serenity of a quiet faith in God, but all too often the rest we should be experiencing is shattered by the strife and hurry of the world.

 

This is nothing that God did not anticipate, however.

The Bible is full of exhortations to quiet our souls before Him, to silence the urgent wail of the outside world and drink in the strengthening tonic of stillness. We can be still, as Brother Lawrence learned, in the midst of loved duties, as well as in the round of tasks that are our lot but which lack outward dignity: "I am more united to God in my outward employments than when I leave them for devotion and retirement."

 

Strife is the great enemy of rest.

 

Resting in God means that we have accepted the claims of all of His promises as they apply to our daily lives, and that we have allowed the peace of Christ to literally rule in our hearts. Strife takes God's responsibilities upon our own shoulders, even in the imagination.

 

But there is one type of striving that God commends, the untiring persistence for Christ-likeness that Paul speaks of in Philippians 3:12,

 

Not that I have already attained, or am already perfected; but I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me.

 

So rest in God and notice His strength in the quietness as you actively press on in becoming more Christ-like daily!