What’s your favorite Bible verse? Or, as us Christians like to ask it, what is your “life verse?” The answer more than likely varies depending on your stage in life. As a kid growing up in Sunday school my favorite verse was Judges 3:31. No need to look it up because, as you will see, my favorite as a good ol’ American boy was filled with violence and had all the elements of a good superhero story:
“And after him was Shamgar the son of Anath, which slew of the Philistines six hundred
men with an ox goad: and he also delivered Israel.”
I mean, come on. Forget “it’s a bird, it’s a plane.” It’s a stinkin’ cattle prod!
But as we get older our superhero-loving minds begin to be less imaginary and more, how do I say it, mundane. Weighed down by the cares and responsibilities of this life our sleep becomes less about dreaming and more about a pause from reality. Our life becomes less about adventures and more about survival. Our gaze becomes less about future horizons and more about present obstacles.
This change within us reveals itself in our idea of rest as well. As a kid our idea of rest was a day at an amusement park filled with the sights and sounds of costumed characters, roller coasters, and the smell of cotton candy. Now as a “grown-up”, that same day at the very same place comes with the sights and sounds of screaming children, heat exhaustion, and the auctioning of a kidney to pay for it all.
That brings me back to our favorite verse. As we grow older we like to think our life verse matures as well. Our selections now contain the lofty values of the Golden Rule, Psalm 23, or the Philippians 4:13 flavor. But do you know a life verse I never hear from anyone… including us adults?
It’s not a verse of the try-harder, work-smarter sort. It’s not even one of great wisdom taken at face value. It’s more of a slap-you-in-the-face-while-both-cheeks-are-fully-exposed type. It’s probably the hardest verse of the entire Bible for us more-mature folk and it goes like this:
“Be still, and know that I am God.”
Psalm 46:10a
Ironically enough this is a verse that deals with rest and that’s probably why none of us choose it as our favorite. Because let’s admit something—we struggle with rest, don’t we?
You see when it comes to rest,we typically have two misconstrued ideas of where to find it. First, a vacation to a favorite place—a beach, a cabin in the mountains, or a trip to Grandma’s. Second, something that’s done sparingly and sometimes only to recover from something—a sickness, a surgery, the aforementioned vacation to the amusement park.
These ideas of rest are misconstrued because they both almost always fall short of providing the rest that we desire and probably need. Putting aside the amusement park example for a moment, every other place we seek for our idea of a restful vacation can be anything but that in a single moment. Why? Because our world is broken due to the presence of sin and that includes our search for rest.
A vacation to the beach can be filled with stressful worries of sunburn, jelly fish, sharks, and the dreaded drowning of someone we love. A vacation to a cabin in the mountains is filled with a constant lookout for bears and mosquitoes, and, in my case, fighting constant allergy attacks to the Great Outdoors. Even if we bring back our example of the amusement park and we splurge on “The Most Magical Place on Earth” (aka Disney World) we’re still constantly praying that kidney of ours sells for more on eBay than the tickets you just bought for your family of five.
So that leaves us with our second idea of rest to recover from a sickness or surgery. How many times have you woken up feeling sick and wanting nothing more than rest? Then it dawns on you that the over-the-counter medication is not enough to cure what ails you so a trip to the doctor is in store. After a wait in the waiting room, filling out an entire tree’s worth of paperwork, and being probed and prodded, you then get to go wait in another line at a pharmacy. It is then and only then that you get to rest. Just kidding. A side effect of your prescription is: insomnia. Great!!! You can’t wait to get to feeling better so you can go to work and finally rest at least in some normalcy.
I struggle with this too. Even now as I am writing this I’m having a problem with this verse and this redefining of rest to include doing nothing and allowing God to do everything. My wife is currently in surgery while I wait in a parking lot until the surgery and recovery is complete. I can do nothing to help her.
That truth kicks me in the seat of the pants, drops my ego a couple of notches, and loudly screams that I am NOT in control of as much as I sometimes think. All I can really do in these moments is live out a paraphrase of this verse, “Rest, and know that He is God, not me.”
Yet when I truly do this and live this verse out something amazing happens. I actually find the rest I was hopelessly searching for in vacations and recovery. It’s as if when it comes to defining this word, God knew all along where true rest could be found.
Someday we will get to heaven and find out that God made sleep inevitable for us so that we might rest in the One who never slumbers. We will find that He allows circumstances in our lives that are clearly out of our control so that we might rest in the One who is all-powerful. And when we accept and embrace this fact that He is in control, we will find the rest we have all been searching for. And the good news is this God of rest was honest about that too.
“Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God (aka rest), which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”
Philippians 4:6-7
Rest.
In.
That.
I’m certainly going to try.
P.S. The surgery was successful. And I didn’t do a thing.
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