In our troubled world, peace should not be sought somewhere in a quiet corner, where everything we want can be found, because we still take our troubled hearts with us.
True rest is found, even in the face of strife, disappointment, and illness, in God. Jesus Christ not only preached the truth of this, He also experienced it.
When all seemed to fail Him, when His people had rejected and despised Him, He spoke the words:
Come to Me all you who labor and are heavy laden
and I will give you rest;
take my yoke upon you and learn from me,
for I am meek and lowly in heart,
and you will find rest for your souls,
for my burden is light and my yoke easy ”.
It makes a big difference when and by whom a word is spoken.
Either a healthy person talks about joy in God, or whether a sick person expresses his joy in the Lord with great pain. The latter is much more impressive than the former.
With Jesus Christ we see perfect rest, revealed in extremely difficult circumstances for Him.
Twice He spoke of rest: an unconditional and a conditional.
He wants to give the former rest, we must find the latter.
▪︎ The first is a gift. We are only required to come to Him with our sinful consciences.
▪︎ We receive the second on the condition that we want to take the yoke of the Lord Jesus upon us.
No one can find this second, until his conscience has found rest with Jesus Christ, by virtue of his finished work of redemption on the cross of Golgotha.
How many people long for peace with God.
And how few have found it.
That is because people look for peace in their own heart, but cannot find it there.
As soon as a man realizes that he is a sinner before God and thus is lost, he becomes restless and tries everything to get some rest. But it is as if things are getting worse with him, because he is always discovering new sins in his heart.
He does them too, and he does not do the good he wants.
Jesus Christ died on the cross more than nineteen centuries ago.
There He finally said, “It is finished!”
The hard work for sinners was completely finished, so that we no longer need to do anything that can make ourselves plausible or acceptable before God. We just have to come up with acknowledgment and confession of guilt and believe with faith in what the Lord Jesus has done.
When we do this, we have the assurance that we are reconciled to God, that our sins are forgiven. The rest we get then is unchangeable, because it is based on the work of Jesus Christ and on the Word of God.
“You will find rest”.
Many people look for rest, but forget that the way to rest, which Jesus points out, goes along very different lines than they think. The peace He speaks of is not idleness and sitting still, not laziness or selfishness, not being unmoved or indifferent to what happens to us.
This is sometimes called resignation. But it does not really give peace, no inner silence.
The rest that the Lord Jesus had consisted of fully agreeing with what God, His Father, gave Him to do and to bear.
“Yes, Father!” was his life motive. In this way we also receive rest. Agreeing with the will of God in our lives, however difficult that may be. “Yes, Father!” say it like Jesus did.
This is only possible by following Him, by doing and accepting the will of our God and Father, like Him and in His strength. Then we will go through this sometimes eventful life as happy children, with the rest that the Lord Jesus Himself gave us.
Twitter: @SchoemakerHarry
Website 1: https://devotionals.harryschoemaker.nl
Website 2: http://bijbelplaatjes.nl
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