Get Some Rest – The Rest of Your Life – Grace Street Fellowship

On the day before Labor Day – Sunday September 2^nd, 2018, Pastor Jim’s topic was “the Rest of Your Life.” You might think he was keying off of the Labor Day holiday and yeah, that was mostly true, but what he discussed was the rest that God wants us to experience by Not trying to earn His approval.

Hebrews 3:15
“Today when you hear his voice,
don’t harden your hearts
as Israel did when they rebelled.”

This is a reference to Psalm 95, verses 7 & 8, and of course that refers back to the people who died in the wilderness, Israelites who left slavery in Egypt through a stunning series of miracles, and yet refused to truly believe that God wanted to befriend them. Their disobedience was a failure to trust him and to respect his word as reliable/trustworthy.

Opening up Hebrews 3 again, verse 15 thru the end of the chapter is rich:

¹⁵…don’t harden your hearts as Israel did when they rebelled. ¹⁶ And who was it who rebelled against God, even though they heard his voice? Wasn’t it the people Moses led out of Egypt? ¹⁷ And who made God angry for forty years? Wasn’t it the people who sinned, whose corpses lay in the wilderness? ¹⁸ And to whom was God speaking when he took an oath that they would never enter his rest? Wasn’t it the people who disobeyed him? ¹⁹ So we see that because of their unbelief they were not able to enter his rest.

And then chapter 4 continues:

¹ God’s promise of entering his rest still stands, so we ought to tremble with fear that some of you might fail to experience it. ² For this good news—that God has prepared this rest—has been announced to us just as it was to them. But it did them no good because they didn’t share the faith of those who listened to God. ³ For only we who believe can enter his rest.

. . .

⁶ So God’s rest is there for people to enter, but those who first heard this good news failed to enter because they disobeyed God. ⁷ So God set another time for entering his rest, and that time is today. God announced this through David much later in the words already quoted:

“Today when you hear his voice,
don’t harden your hearts.”

⁸ Now if Joshua had succeeded in giving them this rest, God would not have spoken about another day of rest still to come. ⁹ So there is a special rest still waiting for the people of God. ¹⁰ For all who have entered into God’s rest have rested from their labors, just as God did after creating the world. ¹¹ So let us do our best to enter that rest. But if we disobey God, as the people of Israel did, we will fall.

The Sabbath rest is ours! THANK You O God our Father!!
I am SO thankful for it, because I know myself well enough to realize and to admit that I could never earn a place in His Kingdom purely on my own efforts. Never in a million years…