If you live in the South, you know the phrase “dog tired.” It describes how your body feels after a hard day of yard work, garage cleaning, or other activities that make you feel like you’ve run a marathon. Placing one foot in front of the other requires substantial effort. Muscles ache and backs break. When it comes to the need for physical rest, our bodies send us significant signals. But what about our souls? Do they emit clear signals when we need a break?
In this series, we’ve looked at the needs of women. We need the security of being ROOTED in Christ to keep us grounded. To grow, we need the NOURISHMENT of God’s Word. SISTERS provide us with much-needed support because they understand our out-of-whack emotions. Our STRENGTH gets a boost when we remember that God loves us, Jesus stands beside us, and the Holy Spirit empowers us. And finally, even after these needs are fully met, our souls still need to find REST.
Many Scriptures mention rest, but perhaps none describe soul rest as clearly as Hebrews 4. To understand Chapter 4 well, we need to look back at Chapter 3. The author of Hebrews uses the story of Moses and the exodus to illustrate his point about soul rest. Because the freed captives failed to obey God during 40 years in the wilderness, God did not allow them to enter His peaceful place of rest. “It is clear that they could not enter into their inheritance because they wrapped their hearts in unbelief.” (Hebrews 3:19 TPT) They struggled with trusting God because they failed to believe He truly loved them enough to want the best for them. Even after Joshua led God’s people into the Promised Land, spiritual rest remained elusive. Their bodies rested from slavery, but their souls remained captive.
We, like the Hebrew slaves, might hear the good news of freedom but still fail to enter God’s rest. We work hard in our own spiritual yards, trying to make them not only presentable but also perfect. We mow, rake, weed, and prune so that our yards look better than our neighbor’s. We work up a sweat by failing to let the Master Gardener take charge. We need rest.
Stepping into our spiritual garages, our souls shiver at the many things we’ve kept, but no longer need—things like anxiety, depression, comparison, and insecurity. We’ve not taken the necessary time to cull the unnecessary. Our souls are bothered by our thoughtless collection, but we never seem to find the time or desire to make any changes. We need rest.
We reach mile 20 of our life’s marathon and realize we’ve pushed too hard to finish well. We’ve tried to keep pace with the faster runners ahead, instead of maintaining the pace set by the One who created us. We see we’ve missed tapping into the Spirit’s strength. We need rest.
When our souls become “dog tired,” we need to courageously hand the tools to the Master Gardener so the buds of soul-rest can sprout. Next, we watch Jesus put His hands on all our negative emotions and fling them as far as the east is from the west. Then, we can intentionally allow the Spirit to fill us with good things to sustain us until our race is done. Souls at rest are not inactive; they are reveling energetically in freedom every day.
“So we conclude that there is still a full and complete Sabbath-rest waiting for believers to experience. As we enter into God’s faith-rest life we cease from our own works, just as God celebrates his finished works and rests in them. So then we must be eager to experience this faith-rest life, so that no one falls short by following the same pattern of doubt and unbelief. For we have the living Word of God, which is full of energy, like a two-mouthed sword. It will even penetrate to the very core of our being where soul and spirit, bone and marrow meet! It interprets and reveals the true thoughts and secret motives of our hearts.” (Hebrews 4:9-12 TPT)
