Resting in Christ

Come to me all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.                                      Jesus, Matthew 11:28-30
So then there remains a sabbath rest for the people of God.     Hebrews 4:9


Jesus promises us rest for our souls.  This promise is not intended only for the rest that comes after we pass from this earth; it is for our earthly life. The writer of Hebrews warns us that we can miss this rest through "the same sort of disobedience" that caused the Israelites to fall short of the Promised Land, which was their lack of faith [Heb. 4:1,11 ].
What does this rest mean? How is it attained?
Soul rest is deeper and more restorative than body rest. One can get rest for his body and still be weary of soul. Some people have deep roots of anxiety that penetrate into the unconscious and emerge, for example, as disquieting dreams that keep them from resting properly. Jesus' Love and Truth penetrate into that depth with healing and rest. The labor and heavy laden-ness that Jesus spoke of refer to striving in the flesh for rewards that never come, or else they briefly appear, and evaporate, leaving us hungry or empty. God compares this type of work to trying to hold or gather water in a "broken cistern". [Jer.2:13 ] I read somewhere that one could spend his whole life strenuously climbing a ladder, only to discover that it is leaning against the wrong wall. Not all mans' efforts are worthy and productive in the final analysis. This should give us pause. And while we are pausing, we should consider Christ's words: "I will give you rest."
This rest is not rest from responsibility. Jesus was and is responsible; and so should we be.  It is rest from the dreariness and dread of responsibility--into the joy of responsibility. In Christ we desire to do good in the world, as He did infinite good for the human family. We realize there is no better way to live than to be doing the good works for which we were created. [Eph.2:10]. 
This rest is not freedom from tribulations; Jesus told us we would have them as long as we live on this earth. It is rest from worrying about tribulations, fearing them, or wasting energy trying to avoid them or get to the imaginary place where they do not exist. It is the freedom that comes in knowing none of our tribulations will destroy us--that Christ will sustain us through all of them, and that all of them are being allowed by the God who loves us more than we love our children--the God who created us with this love for our children.
This rest is a by-product of a growing faith in God that penetrates ever more deeply into the core of our psyche. In that core, because of the Fall, we have been infiltrated with worry, anxiety, doubt and fear; misguided striving for fulfillment that can only be obtained though faith. Because we have suffered hurts and losses, we are braced up against possible future re-occurrences of hurt and loss. In our spiritual blindness we fail to realize that being braced up against them does not prevent them from happening; it only drains us of precious life-energy uselessly, and prevents us from being at peace in the present moments of our life.  Jesus delivers us from this wasteful expenditure of life-energy, and frees us to rest in every moment. His Spirit penetrates our soul, cleansing us from the delusions that resulted from the Fall, cleansing and healing and liberating those enslaved parts of our personality, bringing Light into the darkness that we did not even know was within us. He awakens us from our zombie-like existence into "abundant life", "peace" and "joy"--all according to His spoken promises. For most of us, these are merely words or concepts. Jesus means for them to be inner, felt experiences.  And this gets to the warning in Hebrews Ch. 4--How can we fail to attain this rest?
By stopping short of the Promised Land.  By failing to have the Faith that penetrates deeply into the core of the soul.  By half-believing, or sort of believing, but not pushing deeply into the possibility that Jesus really did arise from the grave!  That we really are here because of  Love that transcends all human love--the Love that created and infuses all human love!  That we really are in the hands of a loving Creator Who is not holding anything against us except what we deny.  That flowers, birds, butterflies, sunrises and sunsets, manhood and womanhood, all beauty, the fact that we can recognize truth and deception, good and evil, the night sky, the feelings that we have for our children, the fact that we have feelings at all, the magnificent nurturing earth--that all these and so much more are not lying to us!
You can get lost in this world! All of us are, and have been to some degree. And to whatever degree we are lost in the world, we are blind to the Truth that sets us free from the murky, enslaving, parasitical, deceptive, mind-numbing manifestations of evil that cause us to fall in the desert, before reaching the Promised Rest for our Souls. Our only hope is Jesus! He is our Guide and Friend. He loves all of us, and He has overcome the world, as He stated. If we do not keep our eyes on Him and our heart open to Him, we can drift in a thousand deadly directions. We don't have a compass, and we will not even know that we are drifting and lost.  In Him we are delivered from every aspect of evil--all of it!  And the fear of it! In Him is only love for God and love for man [Mt. 22:37-40. This is the "yoke" He spoke of.]. In Him is eternal peace. In Him is the deepest and securest foundation of confidence that we have found the True Way of Life. In Him we become safe for ourselves, safe for others, and safe from the world. [But those in the world who fear the Truth see us as a threat. They are offended by us, as they were by Him, though neither He nor we have any desire to be offensive or threatening.] We are not deterred by the difficulties of life nor the opinions of man. They change nothing about us or what Christ is shaping us to be. We are free. We rest in His eternal, overcoming Love.