Faith and Values: A mind at rest is a mind surrendered to God

I work hard.

In fact, I like to work hard.

That’s not a boast. It’s just that working hard is a sort of default setting; it requires very little deliberateness or creativity to simply do the next urgent thing.

In a world full of urgencies – real and imagined – we workaholics find plenty of justification for our lifestyle, and plenty of people who will serve us one more sip of their intoxicating affirmation.

Let’s face it; no one gets props for how well they rest.

Yet the ability to rest well – not merely work hard – is a measure of spiritual maturity, an echo of God’s own pattern in creation: “… on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done,” says Genesis 2, “and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done.”

As a person made in the image of God, as a Christian whose witness is to reflect God’s nature, I’m convinced I need to work harder at rest.

Maybe you do, too.

Notice what the creation narrative makes clear: rest as God established it is not a weakness, a deficiency, a lapse into laziness.

To the contrary, God told His people in Israel that their own rest from labor one day each week would reflect their devotion and trust in Him, not themselves.

“This is what the LORD has said: ‘Tomorrow is a Sabbath rest, a holy Sabbath to the LORD. Bake what you will bake today, and boil what you will boil; and lay up for yourselves all that remains, to be kept until morning.’ ”

Rather than encouraging laziness, each approaching Sabbath urged God’s people to work efficiently, knowing a day without work was coming. And each Sabbath trained God’s people to entrust to Him the burdens that remained on their minds from the previous week’s labors, and their worries of the week ahead.

Don’t miss that last part. Rest is first and foremost a matter of the mind.

Rest demands our thinking first, then our doing.

That’s why rest, for many people, is hard work. It requires much more than simply getting away from a place of labor. The far greater need is for our minds to be disciplined to entrust to God all the urgencies that follow us around no matter where we’re located.

And if the mind is to be at rest, it must be weaned from relentless lesser inputs – the feigned urgencies of an endless news cycle, email alerts, texts, the insidious self-indulgence of social media – and redirected to something far better: God himself.

Surely this is the heart-cry of David, whose song we know as Psalm 19 in our Bibles: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O LORD, my strength and my Redeemer.”

For many of us, it is hard work to reflect upon God, to meditate on his word, to pray beyond the rote mantras we’ve come to accept as communion with God.

David embraced something we ought to recapture for ourselves: Meditation is not the emptying of the mind or directing the mind to self … it is the surrender of the mind to the worship and adoration of God.

Such a mind is truly at rest. For rest, in the biblical sense, reflects the gospel at its core – the glad surrender of self to God on his terms. To be a Christian at all is to be one who repents of sin and self-absorption and rests fully in God’s labors for us in Jesus Christ.

Do you need rest? Me, too.

Steve Massey is pastor of Hayden Bible Church. He can be reached at (208) 772-2511 or steve@haydenbible.org.