choice – REALITIES MINISTRIES

Finding rest

Beloved: grace and peace be yours abundantly from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour. I am pleased to welcome you into another week of the month of May 2020. My prayer is that your life will experience God’s rest in every way in the week and throughout the remaining part of the year, in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Now I offered that prayer for you because it is in keeping with God’s will for you. What I mean is that it is God’s will for you to have rest, absolute rest, in every area of your life. That is why He says to us, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” (Matt 11:28NIV) This is a free invitation to everyone who is troubled and is bearing loads of life that are crushing him. The Lord says to him, “Come to me, and I will give you rest.” If He did not have what it takes to give us rest, He would not say, “Come to me, and I will give you rest.” It is because He has what it takes to deliver rest to us from all the things that are troubling us and making us tired of life that He tells us to come to Him for rest.

So, you don’t have to allow any problem of life to destroy you or drive you mad. You don’t have to allow any situation to take charge of your life and turn you into a beast or a slave. All you need is to come to Jesus for rest, and He will give it to you. I mean that the Lord will give you rest right here on earth. Yes, the rest He intends to give to us is beyond something that we enjoy only in this world. Rather, His intention is to give us eternal and permanent rest from every problem of life.

However, while the earth and all the problems that are associated with staying in it still remain, the Lord wants us to have rest in it. And He has been giving those who come to Him rest in it. For instance, we are told this about King David: “After the king was settled in his palace and the LORD had given him rest from all his enemies around him, he said…” (2Sam 7:1-2NIV) Look at that. The Lord gave David rest from all his enemies around him. So, he settled down in his palace to enjoy his life and kingship. But that did not happen overnight. I mean that he did not come to this place of rest overnight. Only God Himself knows what number of miracles He had to perform in order to bring him there.

As we are told in the bible, this man was ordained to be king at a very tender age, when he was but a boy (1Sam 16:1-13). But did he ascend the throne the day after his ordination by God? No! Instead, even though he was a man after God’s own heart, he went through what many today would call ‘hell’ before he got there. He was persecuted, hunted, robbed, slandered and even betrayed on his way to the throne. And even after becoming king, troubles, wars and betrayals did not vanish from him overnight. They kept on coming for him. But because in all these things, he set the Lord continually before himself and lived according to His word, he was preserved (Ps 16:8). Then there came a time in which even those around him could say, “The Lord has given this man rest from all his enemies around him.”

Now the same God that gave David rest from all his enemies around him is the one we are dealing with. Yes, He is the one that says to us, “Come to me, and I will give you rest.” And if you have come to Him, then, rest is already available for you to enjoy. But someone may say, “I have come to Him. Yet I am not enjoying any measure of rest in my life. My life is still full of troubles that are weighing me down and seeking to utterly destroy me. What, then, is the problem?” Well, the problem is that you have not learnt how to take His rest and make it yours.

See, the Lord does not just say, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” He also says, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” (Matt 11:29-30NIV) Did you see that? The only way to find the rest that God has given is to walk with Him and learn to do things His own way. Even though you have come to Him, as long as you are trying to solve your life’s problems in your own way, you will never find the rest He gives. But the moment you quit using your methods and schemes and start listening to Him and acting on His instructions, you will start finding His rest in your life. Yes, He may have to daily perform a million miracles for you to experience His rest. But what does it matter? He will do whatever He has to do to make sure that someday you are able to look around and say, “Blessed be God, who has given me rest on every side from all that seeks to destroy me.”

Do have a very pleasant week.

You can be kept from destructive decisions

“Lot looked up and saw that the whole plain of the Jordan was well watered, like the garden of the LORD, like the land of Egypt, toward Zoar. (This was before the LORD destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.) So Lot chose for himself the whole plain of the Jordan and set out toward the east. The two men parted company: Abram lived in the land of Canaan, while Lot lived among the cities of the plain and pitched his tents near Sodom. Now the men of Sodom were wicked and were sinning greatly against the LORD.” (Gen 13:10-13NIV)

One of the prayers we must learn to offer in life is that God will keep us from making any decision or taking any step that will ruin our future or make a waste of our lives. It is true that we are always making decisions and choices. We make decisions about what food to eat or not to eat, what dress to wear or not to wear, what place to go or not to go and so forth. And even when we refuse to make a decision about something, that is still a decision.

But then, there are certain decisions that we make that can impart the course of our entire lives and even other people’s lives for good or for evil. For instance, the choice of Dinah, Jacob’s daughter, to visit the young ladies of the land of Shechem one day led to her defilement that same day – she was raped and her virginity forcefully taken. And this, of course, further led to the sacking of a whole city by her brothers, Simeon and Levi. Just one decision, a decision that seemed harmless at the time it was taken, ruined entire lives and generations.

Also, as we see in the bible, Lot’s decision to live in Sodom and Gomorrah ended up making him lose his wife and everything else he had laboured for in life as a young man (Gen 19). But when he was making that decision, it looked like the very right thing to do. He saw a legitimate opportunity to enlarge his livestock business by staying in Sodom, and he took it. But he had no idea at that time that God had already marked the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah for destruction. So, it was not a matter of whether those cities would be destroyed; rather, it was a matter of when they would be destroyed. And they were eventually destroyed along with everything Lot had. In fact, he barely escaped with his life and the lives of his two daughters.

Now remember that Lot was a righteous man, according to the bible (2Pet 2:7). Yet he made a decision that made a mess of his old age and lives of his wife and children. So, righteous people, godly people, can also make decisions that will ruin their lives, homes, future or generations of people. In Lot’s case, it was a moment of greed that led him to make that decision. And in Dinah’s case, it was a little desire for some pleasure that led to her defilement and disgrace. So, a single decision made out of our carelessness, thoughtlessness, greed, unclean desire for pleasure or insensitivity may result in a lifetime of shame or ruin.

All of this is why we must learn to always pray that God, who alone knows the future, will continually keep us back from making any such decision that will ultimately ruin our lives or others’ lives, regardless of the pressure to do so or of how harmless it may seem at the time in question. And supposing you are already suffering terribly because of certain decisions you made in the past, decisions which seemed harmless and right at the time you made them. As long as there is breath in you, you can still count on God to free you from the consequences of such decisions.

At least, He delivered Jacob from the consequences of cheating his brother, Esau, many years later, when he called upon him in his moment of fear and desperation (Gen 32&33). And He will deliver you too, if you will call upon Him for help. How He will do this I cannot say. But I know that the Scriptures that say, “Anyone that puts his trust in Him will never be put to shame and everyone that calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved,” are true. So, call on Him now, regardless of how messed up your life has become because of your bad decisions, and He will save you from your fears and shame. (Cf. Rom 10:11-13)