In the month of August, I was invited to share with a small group of homemaking mothers. These ladies gather regularly to meet and share their needs with each other. One of the ladies asked if I could share a devotion and any other topics that I felt was appropriate with these ladies.
As I prayed and thought about it, the word “rest” came to mind. And I thought it was appropriate since as mothers, we are too often guilty of neglecting and ignoring our need to rest.
This was what I shared :
In the book of Hebrews, we are reminded that the Lord Himself rested on the Sabbath. Here are the verses that I shared :
For He has spoken in a certain place of the seventh day in this way: “And God rested on the seventh day from all His works” … There remains therefore a rest for the people of God. For he who has entered His rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from His. (Hebrews 4:4, 9-10)
Not that He needs to rest. Psalm 121:4 tells us that the Lord neither slumbers nor sleeps. And yet, He did rest. And if He did, shouldn’t we, His creation, follow His example?
But how can we rest from our works? Especially as SAHMs with no helpers? How are we to really cease from our works?!
Is it to just not doing any work on the Lord’s Day? Do we have to pre-cook all meals the day before and clean the house the night before? Just so that we don’t do any physical work on the Lord’s Day?
We all know that is only the physical aspect of it. What about the spiritual aspect? How do we rest IN the Lord – the spiritual aspect of rest?
We do by stopping the fretting. Stopping the worrying. Instead, we turn to Him and rest IN Him. Trusting that He, a faithful God, will do what He says He will do. He can be trusted to fill in the gaps in our mothering journey.
Physically resting but not spiritually resting in the Lord is being Pharisaical. We are missing the principle behind the purpose of the Sabbath. Sure, there is value in physical rest* since we are physical beings but the rest the Lord wants us to take is more than that.
When my husband and I met with the pastor that married us recently, he reminded us that the purpose of resting from our works, to have a Sabbath, is to remind ourselves that our work is not OURS but God’s. Otherwise the tendency is for us to assume a the-whole-world-is-depending-on-me pose. Which is a proud stance to take. The whole world does not depend on us. We need to do our part, yes. And there are consequences if we do not uphold our responsibilities. But how the world or our family turns out is not dependent on us. God is the one in-charge.
We do what we need to do, the responsible things we must do and then we rest IN Him. If you ever watch Veggie Tales’ Moe and the Big Exit, there’s part where Moe’s brother (Aaron) says to him, “I do the talking, you do the thing with the stick, God does the rest; and we all go free.” And that’s how it should be.
God graciously invites us to join Him and we should do all we can to get the job well done. But the final result is not up to us or due to us.
So rest in the Lord!
* I will address how we can get more physical rest in the next post.