Rest: Growing in Our Understanding of the Words We Think We Know

My grandchildren are learning to sing hymns, and I love it! There’s not much cuter than hearing a two-year-old’s rendering of timeless theological truth. And whether or not he understands it today, the words are in his brain just as all those crazy advertising jingles from the seventies will forever be stuck in my own gray matter.

Both children and adults need to grow in our understanding of the words we think we know. Take the word rest for example. I’ve been thinking about my need to rest and God’s generous provision for rest, but because of my 21st-century focus and perspective, the camera jiggles and the lens slips, and I’m back where I started.

An Old Hymn About Resting

Opening an old hymnal, I wonder if there are relevant lessons about rest for me from a hymn written in 1876? Let’s look at the lyrics from verse 1:

“Jesus, I Am Resting, Resting”–lyrics by Jean Pigott
Jesus, I am resting, resting,
In the joy of what Thou art;
I am finding out the greatness
Of Thy loving heart.
Thou hast bid me gaze upon Thee,
And Thy beauty fills my soul,
For by Thy transforming power,
Thou hast made me whole.”

The words are addressed to Jesus, and the focus is joy–joy radiating from his greatness, his love, his beauty, and his power. Some of us are inclined to run to friends with our worries. Others are more likely to draw inward and gnaw on a problem like a dog with a bone. Both approaches are insufficient!

Grown-up sons encounter adult-sized challenges, and when I know my kids are concerned about something, my first instinct is to add my worries to the mix. I am learning to refocus that energy into prayer, to address One who is all-powerful, but it’s a continual learning curve.

True rest is found in an outward focus that acknowledges God’s sovereign control and his good intentions toward me and his good intentions toward the people I love–even when his definition of good isn’t lining up with my own. That's when I most need to accept Christ's invitation: "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." (Matthew 11:28 ESV)

Rest amid a Riot

“Jesus, I Am Resting, Resting” was the favorite hymn of pioneer missionary Hudson Taylor. His tenure in China, beginning in the late 1800s, intersected a period of rioting that ultimately culminated in the Boxer Rebellion and many deaths. During one of the riots, he was whistling the tune to his favorite hymn when a colleague asked him, “How can you whistle in the midst of so much danger?”

“I roll the burden onto the Lord,” he replied, and in his classic biography, his son wrote that Taylor “had learned that, for him, only one life was possible – just that blessed life of resting and rejoicing in the Lord under all circumstances, while He dealt with the difficulties inward and outward, great and small”

Rest Yields Transformation and Wholeness

I may imagine that by striving and worrying and scheming solutions, I can fix problems and restore peace to the galaxy, but experience is teaching me, as the words to the old hymn testify, it is God’s “transforming power” that makes us whole.

• Are you feeling as if you are in pieces today because of some worry that’s stealing your rest?
• Are you experiencing “the greatness of” God’s loving heart? Or does he seem to be distant–somewhere on the far side of the problem you are trying to solve on your own?
• Would you say that your gaze is fixed upon Christ–or upon your troubles?
• What’s filling your soul these days? Are you making time to focus on God and the beauty of his truth?