“In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat-
for He grants sleep to those He loves.”
~Psalm 127:2
My gut reaction to this verse is to shrink back in shame thinking, ‘well, crap. I never feel like I get much rest, and I certainly find myself staying up late and (trying to) wake up early ALL the time. So I guess that means that God doesn’t really love me.’ But then the light of Truth shines through the pages of God’s Word and radically transforms my understanding of this passage.
The Lord reminds me that I am loved- eternally and unconditionally (Jeremiah 31:3), not in the yeah-I-guess-you’re-pretty-cool kind of way (because even my little brother stopped thinking I was cool sometime around 1999), but in the I-would-die-a-thousand-deaths-for-you kind of way. In the sacrifice of His Son, God declared me loved (1 John 3:16).
So if I am irrevocably loved by God, why do I so often lack the sweet rest my soul longs for? I believe the answer to that question lies in very words that Solomon chooses to use in this verse. The NIV version of the Bible says that ‘[God] grants sleep to those He loves.’ The Message version puts it this way: ‘It’s useless to rise early and go to bed late, and work your worried fingers to the bone. Don’t you know He enjoys giving rest to those He loves?’
Both ‘give’ and ‘grant’ imply that rest is one of the many gifts that God freely offers to each and every one of His children (Matthew 7:11, Luke 11:13). The thing about gifts, though, is that they do us no good unless we choose to receive them.
We must choose to accept the gift of rest that God is offering us.
And so we will never experience the rest that we are promised as God’s beloved children unless we claim the rest we have been granted!
I had the privilege last summer of participating in a Summer Project with CRU (Campus Crusade for Christ) in Charleston, SC where I learned more about Biblical rest than I could have ever thought possible. One of the most profoundly influential truths that I learned on Summer Project was this:
We can rest because what Jesus has done is enough.
In the very same day that this truth was presented to me, I wrote in my prayer journal, ‘Lord, resting is scary.’ I tell you that because God gives each of His gifts with a purpose, and sometimes we find it difficult to accept His gifts when we don’t quite understand His purposes in giving them. Resting is scary. It’s also extremely scary when we live in a world that places so much value on productivity and constant striving. But the beauty of resting is that it allows us to more clearly see just how much God really is working in our lives. When we rest from our striving, we give our souls room to trust God with not only our salvation – but also with our to-do lists, with all of the people who constantly need something from us, and, perhaps even more importantly, with the our self-worth.
I would like to end this post with a quote from one of my favorite books called Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman’s Soul by John and Stasi Eldredge. In a chapter entitled Beauty to Unveil, they state:
“A woman in her glory, a woman of beauty, is a woman who is not striving to become beautiful or worthy or enough. She knows in her quiet center where God dwells that He finds her beautiful, has deemed her worthy, and in Him, she is enough…She exudes a sense of calm, a sense of rest, and invites those around her to rest as well. She speaks comfort; she knows that we live in a world at war, that we have a vicious enemy, and our journey is through a broken world. But she also knows that because of God, all is well, that all will be well. A woman of true beauty offers others the grace to be and the room to become. In her presence, we can release the tension and pressure that so often grip our hearts. We can also breathe in the truth that God loves us and He is good.”
This is the kind of woman that I hope to be, that I ask the Lord daily to shape me into. So I choose to rest, and I would like to invite to join me in resting intentionally in the Lord and in His love. Please let me know how I can be praying for you as you discover what it looks like to rest in the Lord!
Much love,
Cassady
