Invited

 Matthew 11:28. Most of us know it. Many of us use it to invite people to Him. "Come unto Me all you who labor and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest." A powerful invitation, and a true one. But is it really true for you..for me? This invitation has a prominent place in most Bible believing churches. Does it have a prominent place in the hearts of Bible believing Christians? I'm not so sure.

The Book of Hebrews says, "there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God." This is a rest that lives in the very center of His peace. It's a rest that too few of His people know anything about. Wesleyans have always seen this promise in Hebrews as His invitation into a rest that comes from a deep, all-encompassing surrender to Him. When He comes into a heart He does save, He does cleanse, and He does bring peace, but He doesn't stop at this. There is a deeper call upon us. A deeper surrender. A complete one. And the fruit of it is His peace, His joy, His abundant life. It comes from the complete laying down of our will and the full entrance into His. It's a scary invitation because to enter into that rest is to leave behind all our desire to control and direct our lives, which will always be accompanied by much stress and strife. To know the peace, He speaks of means we have to yield all to Him.

T. Austin Sparks said that we have no right to invite unbelievers into His rest unless we too know it, that His rest is "the practical outworking of the belief that He is Lord," and that His Lordship is struck at by "the unrest of His people." How often has His Lordship been "struck at" by my own unrest? By yours? How often have we allowed the stresses and pressures of life so fall upon as to harm the witness of the peace we say we have in Him? In so many ways, we in the church are as exhausted, stressed out, and worn down as the world around us that we're seeking to reach. This is so because we're still trying to work out our affairs in our own strength, wisdom, and understanding, and it's crushing us. Anxiety, irritability, frustration, and hardness of heart and spirit will always be the fruit of that. We're living outside of His heart and life, and it's obvious to all...except...too often to us.

Jesus describes Himself as a Door and a Gate that He calls us to come to and go through. We come to that Door, we even go through, but do we do so fully? Sparks wrote that, "The Door is essential, but it's what it leads to that justifies going in at all." On the other side of that Door is all the depth and wonder to be found in Him. Christ is the Door through which all the fullness of that Sabbath rest that remains is found. We have to leave our will, our self-life there to enter into that Sabbath rest that awaits us. Too many of us can never do so. We know the Doorway, but we don't truly know the depths of what the Door leads to. 

Satan, the thief, is always seeking to steal from us that which has been given to us in Jesus Christ. Our peace is one of his most prized trophies. Where is he stealing yours and mine? Where is our unrest? How much of that Sabbath rest is still unknown to us? His invitation does not just leave us at the door, standing with hat in hand. His invitation takes us into all the fullness of the life He has invited us into, and He goes with us through all of its depths. That invitation is given to us each day. May each day we accept it, as we journey ever deeper with Him.

Blessings,
Pastor O