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Where is your rest?


Micah 2:10

“Arise and depart,
For this is not your rest;
Because it is defiled, it shall destroy,
Yes, with utter destruction.

Thought for the day – Where is your rest?

There’s a classic stereotype that comes up again and again in action movies. The hero or heroine thinks they can go no further and then a voice, or a memory or a vision tells them they have the strength to go on. It is not their time ,their job is not finished, yadda, yadda, yadda. And on a superficial level we can read that as how we continue as pilgrims living in a world that is not our home.

But there is a darker and more meaningful meaning in our verse today. In Old Testament understanding the rest of the people of Israel was the Promised Land. By God telling them that it was no longer their rest God is effectively evicting them.  And it got me wondering what we have done to remove ourselves from God’s rest for us? So recently I was talking to someone and the conversation came up about personal boundaries. And a comment was made about we choose to distance ourselves from what God wants for us when we refuse to accept that there are some boundaries that should never be crossed. Notice it’s not God who distances himself from us though. We choose to distance ourselves when we sin. And that’s a hard thing to hear and even harder to rectify because, let’s face it, we’re stubborn and we have somehow associated being stubborn with patience and perseverance, with pushing through the pain and going to the end. But at what cost? Our relationship with God and others. Maybe it’s time to admit defeat and repent. Maybe that’s where we find our rest.

This blog post is part of the Walking the Way Podcast series. All views expressed in this essay are those of the author. This essay is freely available under Creative Commons License with Attribution-ShareAlike, allowing users to share it in other mediums/formats and adapt/translate the content as long as an attribution link, indication of changes, and the same Creative Commons License applies to that material.

This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0


 

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