How the Principle of Rest has Affected our Lives

How the Principle of Rest has Affected our Lives

At the beginning of our journey together as a couple – We received this verse from Isaiah 58. It didn’t make much sense to us, then. Years later, when we heard the teachings on ‘Rest’ from Jacob, it began to make sense.

Isaiah 58:13–14 (NASB)

“If because of the sabbath, you turn your foot

From doing your own pleasure on My holy day,

And call the sabbath a delight, the holy day of the Lord honorable,

And honor it, desisting from your own ways,

From seeking your own pleasure

And speaking your own word,

Then you will take delight in the Lord,

And I will make you ride on the heights of the earth;

And I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father,

For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

We understood that we had to honour God’s rest (Sabbath) above doing our own thing, seeking our own pleasure, speaking our own word and going our own way. Rest was to be our delight! Hearing coupled with obedience began to be the cornerstone of living within the boundaries of rest!

This is how rest has and continues to translate into different areas of our life:

Personal Lives:

Rest has brought about the idea of “God in-charge of the oars” and replaced us from the driver seat of our lives and has extolled the Holy Spirit instead. Rest has located us correctly in God’s plan for us and not our plan for ourselves. Practically, this has increasingly brought about a child-like dependence on God on our everyday personal life, where we ask God, wait, hear/sense, and if in doubt – check with others who hear God better.

One of the things that we’ve been practicing over the last few years, has been to prepare our minds and thoughts in rest, before we step into a new week. Rest sets our pace for the week ahead. While weekends are generally seen as days of physical rest after a busy week of work, we use weekends to spiritually rest our hearts in God before we begin the new week. It’s in fact a time of preparing our hearts to receive direction, expect and anticipate God adventures during the week in all areas of our life- family, church, business etc.  We also try to approach our personal gym workouts from a place of rest as well and we’ve seen that a little bears much fruit.

Family/Home:

We are a family of four with one more on the way. We have two boys and must admit that we still have a lot to grow in this area of our lives.  However, one of the things that we try to do is to raise our boys by hearing what the Father wants for them in different stages of their life. We are learning to do only that which we hear and invite God into our schedules to disrupt them and we choose to yield to His work in our home.

Work/Business:

We run a veterinary practice in Bahrain. In the last 2 years, we have seen how rest has eliminated the concept of  “living by the sweat of the brow”. There’s a dependence on hearing God even for veterinary work, especially when our knowledge is incomplete. We learned that obedience is the seed for rest and we’ve also come to see that rest is the seed for fruitfulness. Work that comes out of rest brings about greater fruit with lesser human effort. Contrary to what the world says “hard work leads to success” – the kingdom principle of rest establishes that “work born out of rest brings fruitfulness!”

Finally, in order to continually remain in rest, we actively seek to re-align our ways/patterns and thoughts to fit God’s plan (Kairos). If not, we begin to chart out our own Chronos (the chronological events of our lives) rather than allowing His Kairos (God’s plan at His appointed time) to become our Chronos. We are also learning what it is to separate reality from truth in every situation. The reality might look like a storm raging all around us, but the truth is that Jesus is in the boat with us. Reality is not our finality and rest will keep our eyes fixed on Jesus as we walk over the waters.