Rest in the Arms of God

Matthew 11:28 says, “come to me all who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest.” What does this mean for us? How can we apply this to our lives. I had never really thought about the principle of rest in the sense that my devotional book describes it. When we think of rest we think of relaxing, maybe taking a nap, getting reenergized for the rest of the day, so what does that mean when we are referring to our spiritual lives? We obviously can’t just take a break from being the Christian example that we are called to be. In the book My Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers says this,

·      “ A complete life is the life of a child. When I am fully conscious of my awareness of Christ, there is something wrong. It is the sick person who really knows what health i. A child of God is not aware of the will of God because he IS the will of God. When we have deviated even slightly from the will of God, we begin to ask, ‘Lord, what is your will?’ A child of God never prays to be made aware of the fact that God answers prayer, because he is so restfully certain that God always answers prayer. If we try to overcome our self awareness through any of our own commonsense methods, we will only serve to strengthen our self-awareness tremendously. Jesus says, ‘come to me, and I will give you rest.’ That is Christ’s awareness will take the place of self-awareness. Wherever Jesus comes He establishes the rest-The rest of the completion of activity in our liives that is never aware of itself.”

I don’t know what this means to you, but what I found in it is that, as children of God, we need to act like it. We need to be able to rest in the arms of our father, who knows everything. We need to be able to go to him and not doubt that he is in control. We don’t need to question whether he will hear our prayers or not, because he has promised us that. We can come to him no matter what, and he will give us rest. Rest being, we don’t have to worry about this life or what is going to happen, because it is all in his plan, and he has us in his hand no matter what. We can relax about life. We can chill, because He is in control. I think the picture of rest is one that really sums up how our attitudes should be towards our lives as believers. God expects so little of us, and takes care of so much, yet we put so much of it on our own shoulders. We need to be able to come to God and give it to Him.