I think we know the Master of the wind. Often, though, our eyes are always looking for the calm. But I honestly have to say that I think I have found the Lord more in the storm than I have in the calm.
He is the Master of the wind. I do not know—maybe you have a storm in your life. Let us not forget who the Master of the storm is.
Let us begin with a word of prayer.
Lord, we have come to Thee today. Lord, we want to see You. We want to see You in a new way today. I pray, Lord, that You will open our eyes. Lord Jesus, we hear so much, we learn so much, and we get excited about many things. Our soul gets stirred up.
But, Lord Jesus, today we want You to touch us deep in our spirit, that we might see Jesus. Lord, open our ears, open our eyes, open our hearts to Thee. And, Lord, that is where we find our peace.
As our brother has shared, I do not think there is any peace apart from gazing upon our Lord Jesus Christ. So, Lord, we would pray for the anointing upon the word and upon hearing today. We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Well, we are a little bit behind already, but may the Lord be gracious to us. I do have to just share one thought.
Some of you may or may not have noticed this morning, but when I came in, I came to the table and readjusted a few things. I took some of the bread loaves over to the table over here, and I did it with purpose.
I think it is a good illustration of why we gather on Sundays. The reason I did it was because there were about four or five loaves stacked together.
Now, when we come together on Sunday morning, brothers and sisters, it has always been our heart to see Jesus and to see Him only. That is why, when we gather around, we put the cup and the loaf out: because we want our hearts and eyes to be focused upon the Lord Jesus Christ and His work of Calvary.
He died for us. And, brothers and sisters, I do not think we could ever gather enough times around the table of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is a marvelous experience.
As we gather, it is a testimony to the Lord—to Who He is and what He has done at Calvary for us. That is why there is the cup and the loaf. There is one cup, and there is one loaf—not many loaves. There is one loaf.
There is one body of our Lord Jesus Christ. There is only one blood that can atone for your sin, and there is only one body that was broken on our behalf.
So, when we come and take of the bread, we take the loaf. What we really do is—and I always purposely do this when the bread comes to me—if there is a loose piece, frankly, I never pick it up. That is just me. You can pick it up if you want to. But I always want to break off a piece.
And I say, “Thank You, Lord, for Your life given to me. I now have Your life in me.” Another brother or sister will break off another piece of that loaf. It is the life of Christ. If you take all the pieces, it makes one loaf.
That one loaf, brothers and sisters, has been continually broken because of Calvary throughout all the ages, and every saint is a partaker of that one loaf: Christ.
It is still one loaf, because the Lord has declared that we are one body in Him. We may be separated by distance, by miles, but we are one body in Jesus Christ. What a marvelous testimony—something that only the Lord could do, to make you a part of His body.
Well, I just wanted to reinforce that. That is why I did that this morning. It is one loaf, and that is our testimony: one blood, one body.
This morning, our brother opened on this matter of peace—the Lord being our peace. I would like to share on rest: entering God’s rest.
Let us begin by reading some Scriptures. I hope the Lord’s rest will be upon me, because there is a lot to share and so little time.
Hebrews chapter 1. I will read some Scriptures; you read along with me.
God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world.
God has spoken in these last days in His Son.
Go to Hebrews 2:1.
For this reason we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it.
Now go to Hebrews 3:7.
Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says,
Today if ye shall hear His voice,
Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation,
As in the day of trial in the wilderness,
Where your fathers tried Me by proving Me,
And saw My works forty years.
Wherefore I was displeased with this generation,
And said, They do always err in their heart:
But they did not know My ways;
As I sware in My wrath,
They shall not enter into My rest.
Go to verses 18 and 19.
And to whom sware He that they should not enter into His rest, but to them that were disobedient?
And we see that they were not able to enter in because of unbelief.
Hebrews 4:1–2:
Let us fear therefore, lest haply, a promise being left of entering into His rest, any one of you should seem to have come short of it.
For indeed we have had good tidings preached unto us, even as also they: but the word of hearing did not profit them, because it was not united by faith with them that heard.
Verse 10:
For he that hath entered into His rest hath himself also rested from his works, as God did from His.
Let us therefore give diligence to enter into that rest, that no man fall after the same example of disobedience.
God’s rest. We see here the writer of Hebrews warning the Hebrew believers that there was an issue of God’s rest, and they needed to enter into God’s rest.
The reason he was concerned, and wanted to encourage, instruct, and warn the Hebrew believers, was that Hebrews is not just a book of encouragement but also a book of warning. It warned them about the crisis they were in.
Part of the crisis was that the Judaizers had come into their midst. In fact, they followed Paul everywhere he went.
They were always saying, “Look, you new believers in Christ: you believe in the Lord Jesus. You have accepted Him as your Savior. You now have your ticket to heaven.
“But have you forgotten the traditions? Have you forgotten what God has shown us through the prophets? Have you forgotten all the new moons, the animal sacrifices, and all the precious things that God has shown us? Have you forgotten what God showed on the mount?
“Have you forgotten all these things that the prophets have shown us? Surely, in order to be complete in your Christianity, you need to go back and begin to observe the things that your fathers have taught you. You need to go back to what we would refer to today as the Old Testament and observe those things.”
They were given by God.
Now, brothers and sisters, is that not a fairly compelling argument for returning to the law and the prophets? Yes, you have Christ, but you need to keep the law. You need to keep these things in the covenant that God gave to His people.
Yes, you need Christ. He is the Messiah. He came to deliver us, and now we have been delivered. Now we need to observe what God has taught us.
I think that is the most compelling argument. Maybe I could even convince some of you to go back and begin observing some of these feasts in the Old Testament ways. Maybe we should become Seventh-day Adventists.
But that is not what I am talking about this morning.
There was a crisis in their midst, because some were beginning to listen to this.
Brothers and sisters, it was not as obvious to those Hebrew believers as it is to us today that what was happening was an attempt to get them to leave grace and go back under the law.
For us, it is fairly obvious. But for them, it was not, because they had been brought up in it. They had not been brought up in the age of grace; they were brought up in the age of law. They understood it so well, and it was given by God. They were being encouraged to return to that.
Very subtly, what was happening was that the enemy was coming in and saying, “Christ is not enough.”
There is something more. Yes, you need Christ. You need the salvation that His sacrifice provides. But to live the life—to live the Christian life—you need to return to the law. You need to return to the observances of the feasts, the Old Testament sacrifices, and the observance of new moons and days.
It was subtle. For them, it was very subtle. The Hebrew writer recognized the crisis that Christianity was in: clinging to Judaism and mixing it with Christ.
The Hebrew writer was also preparing them for a crisis that was to come—a major crisis that no Jew could ever consider.
A few years after this Hebrew writer wrote these words—we do not know the exact number of years, but it was not too many after that—Nero destroyed the temple.
The temple: that building represented everything to them. God allowed it. But that crisis lay ahead of them. Would they make it through the storm?
Had they learned enough through the apostles’ teaching of Christ? The apostles’ teaching of Christ was really what Christ had taught and taught them. It was not their own teaching or their own doctrines. It was the doctrine of Christ. It was Christ that they taught.
Had these Hebrew believers learned enough to recognize the difference between what the Judaizers were saying to them and the path down which they were being led?
Were they firm enough in that foundation of Jesus Christ that they could recognize the difference and not falter in this crisis? Would they be rooted and grounded enough in Christ in the days that lay ahead, when the temple would be destroyed and the Jews scattered to all the nations?
Would their faith survive? Would what they had learned of Christ be enough? Or was it just learning? Did they actually have the reality?
That was what this Hebrew writer was dealing with and trying to prepare God’s people for: the crisis.
Is Christ enough?
Brothers and sisters, I will just say it right up front. Maybe it is the ending message, but I think that is the crisis of the hour in which we live.
Today, the church is full of Judaism. Most of Christianity still calls the church a building.
Most of Christianity, frankly, lives under the law. They have never really come out and lived by grace in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Most of Christianity clings to traditions and things of man that are not even in the Scripture.
Brothers and sisters, the Lord allowed the temple to be destroyed and His people to be scattered because He wanted to break them from clinging to Judaism.
Let me put it this way: the New Testament is very clear. All that we see in the Old Testament are types. They are not the real thing. Paul calls them shadows of things to come.
The tabernacle and the temple were shadows of things to come. Our Lord Jesus said, “You tear this temple down, and in three days I will raise it up.” He was speaking of the real temple of God. He was the temple of God. But they were clinging to the building.
Oh, it is not a light matter that this Hebrew writer was trying to deal with. It is so subtle.
Brothers and sisters, if, in the light of God—and I say, in the light of God—you allow the Holy Spirit to work in your heart, you will probably find that much of your own life may still be tied to Judaism, to living under the law and not in the life of Jesus Christ.
Well, we must go on.
The Hebrew writer was trying to warn the Hebrews and prepare them. As an illustration of what he was trying to say, he uses the history of the nation of Israel leaving Egypt and going to the promised land.
We already read these words about how the Lord became so angry with His people that He finally said, “This first generation will never enter My rest that I have for you.”
We know that, out of that first generation delivered from slavery and bondage in Egypt, only two made it into the promised land. Moses was not one of them. It was Joshua and Caleb.
Out of the millions who left Egypt—I do not know how many there were—only two of that first generation actually made it into the promised land, God’s rest.
Sobering. A sobering thought.
They had been delivered by the mighty hand of God from Egypt. Brothers and sisters, have you not been delivered from Egypt?
They experienced God’s miracles. They followed the Lord all those years in the desert. Now, you cannot say they were not following the Lord. They followed Him for forty years, wandering around in the desert, in what I call the hand-to-mouth experience of the Lord.
His final assessment of that generation, after those forty years, was that they were a people who provoked Him—a people of sin and unbelief—and that they had failed to enter into His purpose. They would not enter into His rest because they were unbelieving.
Now, you would have thought, “Man, if I had made it through the Red Sea—if I had been there when those waters rolled back, walked through on dry land, and turned back to see my enemies destroyed—I do not think I could have been an unbeliever.”
If I came to those bitter waters and saw the Lord put a tree in them, and the waters were healed and made good for me to drink—when I cried out, “Lord, I am hungry,” and He gave me manna from the sky—how could I not believe Him?
The Lord said—this was His assessment—“You have seen My miracles. You followed Me for forty years in the desert, but you never learned Me. You never learned My ways. You never understood what it was all about. You have failed in unbelief, and you will not enter My rest. You will not enter the promised land.”
You see, brothers and sisters, in being in bondage for four hundred years, they were slaves. But God miraculously delivered the people out of bondage and slavery.
They thought that was what it was all about. They thought they had achieved God’s purpose when God brought them through the Red Sea.
They had been delivered. “Thank You, Lord. It is all about me. I have been saved from bondage.”
Brothers and sisters, we have all come to salvation in our Lord Jesus Christ—I think probably most everybody here—and we can do like these people in Israel and settle down with that fact and with that life. We can follow the Lord in that way, wandering around in a wilderness way.
“Lord, I need this.” The Lord provides. “Lord, I need this.” He provides. “Lord, I need this.” He provides.
Let me say it this way, and I hope I do not offend anybody: they got into a welfare state of mind.
A welfare state of mind.
Now, I worked for the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority for twenty-eight years, which is public housing in Richmond. I saw what that mentality does to people, and it is disturbing.
They eventually get to the point, brothers and sisters, where they do not want to get out of that system. They are afraid even to attempt to leave it.
They become satisfied with it, and it goes on from one generation to the next. We had as many as the fourth generation living in our public housing.
The welfare state of mind—what it boils down to, what it is about—is about me and the Lord delivering me and the Lord providing for me.
Brothers and sisters, even Moses made that mistake. Remember when he was awakened in Egypt and said, “My people—these are my people”? He went out and slew an Egyptian, and eventually he had to be exiled from Egypt. They caught him, and he was exiled.
Of course, he was in the desert for forty years. He realized that his people were to be delivered and that God had called him to be a part of that deliverance and to lead the people. He thought that was what it was all about.
But when God confronted him in the burning bush, the Lord did not just say, “Moses, I am going to send you back to deliver My people.” He said, “You are going to take them to the land of milk and honey.”
In other words, there was purpose behind the deliverance. God had a purpose. He never wanted His people just to wander around in that wilderness for forty years.
You know, brothers and sisters, it was actually an eleven-day journey. Even the way they journeyed, my understanding from the scholars is that it should have taken them only eleven days to get from the Red Sea to the promised land.
I think the Lord led them around for about two and a half years, and then He brought them up to the border. Remember, they refused to go in. Then, for another thirty-eight years, they lapped the mountain, so to speak, in the desert.
God never intended us to live a wilderness life. Brothers and sisters, He never intended us to live a life without purpose. He never intended us just to be babes, always looking for deliverance—just the hand-to-mouth kind of experience with the Lord.
I do not want to demean that, because there is nothing more precious than to lean totally on the Lord and expect Him to be your provision and provide what is needed.
But, brothers and sisters, what we think is needed and what the Lord knows we need are quite often very different. Sometimes we misunderstand the Lord, like the nation of Israel did.
Basically, they became kind of satisfied. No, they were not happy with this desert life, but they began to accept it, go along with it, and just live it.
But God was not satisfied. God was not satisfied.
God did not deliver them for the sake of deliverance alone. He delivered them that they might enter into His purpose and enter into His rest. That first generation never did.
So we come back to the Hebrew writer. He says, “Look, they faltered in the wilderness. They faltered under the test, because the Lord said, ‘I brought you out here to show you what you really are.’”
The Hebrew writer was saying, “Look, your fathers who were brought out and delivered, they heard Moses, a prophet of God. Down through the ages, you have heard the prophets, and they spoke in pieces and bits.
“But God has sent His Son. Hebrew people, God has sent His Son—His only Son, His only begotten Son. He has spoken. God Himself has spoken to you through His Son, Jesus Christ.
“In fact, ‘through’ is not an adequate verb. He has spoken in Son.”
In other words, everything that the Son has spoken to you is because of Who He is—His nature and character. “You have seen My Son; you have seen Me. You have seen God. If you have heard My Son, you have heard Me. You have heard directly from God.”
That is Who has spoken to you, believers. It is God Himself, directly, Who has spoken to you in the person of His Son—not just prophets who were given the word of God, but the Son Himself has spoken.
There is no other word. There is no higher word. There is no new word.
All that the apostles have taught you since then has only been what Christ is, what Christ has done, and what Christ has spoken.
You need to hear. Do not let it slip away from you, or you will not make it through the crisis, and you will not be in God’s rest.
The Hebrew writer kept encouraging them that they needed to enter God’s rest. If they were going to make it through the storm, they needed to be in God’s rest.
What is God’s rest? What is God’s rest?
Let us look at Genesis chapter 1, right at the very beginning. I think it is very interesting that right at the very beginning, we are confronted in God’s word with this.
Genesis 1:31, and then Genesis 2:1–3:
And God saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
And the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.
And on the seventh day God finished His work which He had made; and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made.
And God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it; because that in it He rested from all His work which God in creating had made.
God said it was very good. He had completed this work of what I call creation—the restoration of this original creation—and prepared it for man. Then, on the sixth day, He created man, and He said, “It is all very good.”
Then He said, “I am going to rest.” It is a day of rest, the seventh day. He set that day aside as a day of rest, a day that He sanctified and that we should honor.
Why was it that God was able to rest? For a couple of reasons. First, He had completed the work. It was a complete work. There was nothing to be added to it.
I just cannot believe that God would have left something undone. He said, “I have done everything. I have completed the work.” And it was very good.
In other words, He was satisfied. When He was satisfied, He rested.
I like to call it the rest of satisfaction. Sometimes we rest because we become totally exhausted. Well, this was a lot of work, but I just cannot imagine God being exhausted.
No, this rest was because He was satisfied. Man is precious. When He created man and all that He did for man, He looked at it and said, “I am satisfied,” and He rested.
The rest of satisfaction. That is the rest that God wants you and me to enter into, brother: the rest of satisfaction.
Now, God treated this matter of the Sabbath day and His rest very seriously, brothers and sisters. One writer pointed out that this is really the oldest covenant in existence.
Right in the beginning, He said the seventh day would be a day of rest. Though we do not have anything to indicate it in Scripture, I cannot help but believe that Adam and those descendants who were really following God observed that Sabbath-day rest, because it was a covenant made with man and with the earth.
You do not really hear about the Sabbath—which means rest—again until Exodus 16, when they were in the wilderness. They were hungry, had no food, and said, “You have brought us out here to kill us, to starve us to death. What have You done?”
The Lord did not respond in anger. He provided manna.
When He did, He instructed them, “Look, you can gather for six days. On the sixth day, gather enough for the seventh, because you need to honor the Sabbath-day rest.”
When you read the context, the sense I get is that this was something observed in the past that God needed to reinforce. After all, for four hundred years they had been in Egypt, and I just do not think the Egyptians gave them much rest.
But God had done something: He had delivered them, and He was providing food and water. He wanted them to honor that.
In Exodus 20:8, it is the fourth commandment in the Ten Commandments:
Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
That was one of the Ten—the fourth one, I think. Pretty serious.
The original tablets, God actually wrote with His own finger. God took this matter of the Sabbath rest very seriously.
Then, in Exodus 31:14, something very startling: He said if anybody desecrated the Sabbath day, they were to be put to death.
I do not know what else to say except that God was serious about this matter of His Sabbath rest.
In 2 Chronicles, the Lord extended this matter of Sabbath rest not only to His people but also to the land. He said, “When you come into the promised land, every seventh year you are not supposed to sow any seed at all. You are to let the land rest that seventh year.”
Was God serious about that? Well, in 2 Chronicles 36:21, Jeremiah the prophet prophesied that Israel would be taken into captivity by Babylon for seventy years.
This was the cause: because His Sabbaths had been violated. The captivity would be for seventy years so that the land could enjoy its Sabbath.
In the book of Nehemiah, when the testimony was being restored and the wall was being built—and Kenny has shared on this matter of the testimony of God, that we are to be the testimony of God—very key to that restoration was this issue of the Sabbath being restored.
Twelve times, at least what I counted—another brother said fourteen times—the Sabbath is mentioned. Restoring the Sabbath became a critical part of restoring the testimony of God on this earth.
So serious was Nehemiah about this that he said, “On the Sabbath day, you will close the gates. You will run the merchants out of the city and close the gates.”
The merchants, of course, said, “This is our living.” They were bringing in something foreign to God.
They camped out right on the wall, at the base of the wall, waiting for somebody to open the gate so they could get back in. Nehemiah ran them off. He said, “Do not you dare even camp at the gate. You get away from here.”
God’s Sabbath is holy, and His people are going to honor it. As a matter of fact, Nehemiah even assigned guards to keep the gate so that no merchants could come in on the Sabbath.
God is serious about this matter of His Sabbath and the Sabbath rest.
Now, I need to be clear: I am not really talking about a day. Really, in God’s heart, it never was the day that was the issue. It is the principle of the Sabbath.
The Old Testament is a type, brothers and sisters. So we do not keep the Sabbath today. But the principle of the Sabbath—the principle of God’s rest—we as Christians need to keep.
God is serious about our keeping His Sabbath rest, about our entering His Sabbath rest, and about not violating the Sabbath rest.
So, what is this Sabbath rest that I keep talking about? I am going to have to go back one more time. Bear with me.
God created the heavens and the earth. On the sixth day, He created man. On the seventh day, He rested.
So, what was man’s duty on the first day after he was created? Did God wake Adam up that morning and say, “Adam, it is the seventh day. You need to get out and start tending the garden”? We know he tended the garden. That was something he was supposed to do.
God did not do that.
Adam’s first day—you would think, “Hey, I am the Lord’s. I need to be out doing this. I need to be doing that. I need to be very active in the things of the Lord.”
But the first thing the Lord did with Adam was say, “I want you to just sit down. This is a day of rest.”
“Adam, what you need to think about is what I have done. You need to think about this creation, Adam. You need to think about the fact that I have created you.
“This is a day, Adam, in which you need to honor Me and think of Me.
“Yes, this creation—I created it and laid it all out for your sake, for the sake of man—but it is not about you. It is about Me. I have done this marvelous work, and you need to rejoice in what I have done.”
So, brothers and sisters, the Sabbath day was really man’s first day.
Of course, he was created on the sixth day, but the first day he had an opportunity to do anything, he had to enter God’s rest. That was the first thing God wanted him to do.
So, what is the principle of the Sabbath?
We know that Adam fell through temptation in the garden. What a temptation it was. God had created all things, given it to man, and made him ruler over all the creation.
But you know something, brothers and sisters? He was not satisfied. He and his wife were not satisfied with that. Think about that: they were not satisfied.
God wanted them to sit down and appreciate what He had done, appreciate Him, and realize that God was the real Creator and Worker. But they wanted something more.
That is what the enemy tempted them with. He said, “Look, eat of this tree, and you will be like God.”
That is a temptation that is shared with us every day of our lives, brothers and sisters: when we want to operate out of the flesh, when we want to do things our way instead of the Lord’s way, and when we bring man’s way into God’s things.
We are really saying, “It is all right, Lord. I can handle this.”
Anyway, man fell. The old creation that God had said was very good was now not only very bad, but incurable. It remained that way until Christ came and died on Calvary’s cross.
Brothers and sisters, the work of Calvary was a redemption work not only for man but for creation itself.
The fault in man was incurable. I said this in a recent message: Christ, in the Word, is called the last Adam and the second man. What does that mean?
It means that, in God’s eyes, that creation—man as he was—no longer existed. It is over. It is done.
“I am not going to try to reform this old man. I am not going to try to make him over. I am not going to try to extract anything out of him to make him better or add anything to him to make him better. My judgment is upon this old creation, old Adam, and he is gone.”
That is God’s judgment. I do not know if that is your judgment yet, but that is God’s judgment. It is no longer good.
Brothers and sisters, Christ came as the second man—God’s man. In Christ, you are a new creation.
Do you see what has happened with Christ? Christ has brought in a new creation, the heavenly creation—the creation that God is after.
God is now satisfied. God is now in His Sabbath rest because He is satisfied. What is He satisfied with? He is satisfied with Christ and the work of Calvary.
It is a complete work. This new creation is a complete work. You are a new creation in Christ.
I know we, in the way we are now, say, “Well, I do not understand it.” But the Lord says we are complete in Him.
Now, on earth as we are right now, we know we have not come into that completed work. That is something for another message.
But we need to see that the first thing God wants us to do is to enter His rest—His completed work. We need to see His completed work. We need to see that we are a new creation in Him, that He has created a new thing.
Brothers and sisters, that is why it is important for us to see that our old man has been crucified on Calvary. God has taken that old creation out of the way—that old man, that thing you come up against so much in your life: that man who gets angry, that man who is unloving, that man who is unforgiving.
I want you to know that he has been crucified in Christ.
Unless we are able to enter God’s rest in God’s completed work, we will never get out from the bondage of the old man. When you see what Christ has done, it is new and it is complete.
The word complete should ring in our ears. It is true: we are coming into completion. But in God’s eyes, it is already complete.
How important is it that we come into that completed work of Christ? That is why the first thing God did with Adam was to give him a day of rest.
“You need to enter into My completed work. You need to appreciate My completed work. You need to see My completed work, because that is your foundation.”
Yes, people will come and say, “You need this, and you need that.” But I want you to know that in this new creation, in Christianity, it is a completed work that is the foundation of your life.
As long as you stay on that foundation, you will not be shaken. You will see that Christ is everything, and there is nothing that needs to be added or taken away from this completed work. It is a complete work.
If you can just see that, brothers and sisters, you will be liberated from that old self, that old man. If he ever tries to rise up in your life, you are able to just rest.
You say, “Lord, thank You. This thing is gone. It has been crucified in Christ. Hallelujah. Now, Lord, You live in me.”
Well, I have gotten way to the end in the middle, but so be it.
This is what I need to emphasize: Christ is God’s Sabbath rest. We need to honor His Sabbath rest.
The Word said they could not enter into His rest because of unbelief—the sin of unbelief.
Brothers and sisters, psychology today has even changed the Christian mind. Today we see ourselves as victims: victims of this, victims of that. We are just victims, Lord, and You need to have compassion on us in all these things.
Let me be very, very clear. The Lord sees us as sinners. He knows we are flawed with the sin nature. He knows that nature can never be changed or altered. That is why He crucified you on Calvary’s cross. That is why He took you out of the way.
Until you accept that, until you believe that—let me say it another way: until you can rest in that fact—that is what real believing is. It is resting.
God has done it, and I can rest in it. God has done it.
Brothers and sisters, let me ask: how many of us are dishonoring the Sabbath? I certainly have.
It is Christ. When we are in the flesh, when we are doing it our way, when we are doing our thing—even if it is a so-called Christian thing—we are dishonoring the Sabbath, because the work is complete in Christ.
Just very quickly, this completed work, brothers and sisters, should bring you to peace and rest.
The blood of Jesus Christ has paid the price for your sins—the sins that you have committed and the sins that you are going to commit. Once we become Christians, all God has asked of us is to repent, take the blood, and put it under the blood. He says, “I will forget it forever.”
I know, brothers and sisters, there are some who go under the load of this. But today I would say, please enter God’s rest. Rest on the fact that Christ has forgiven you.
When the enemy assails you, it says in the Word that they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb.
When the enemy assails you, can you rest in the power of the blood against the enemy? Or do you struggle with the enemy until he wins? Because that is what he will do. Once you start struggling, he is going to win.
It is kind of like a bear. They say that if you are ever in the woods and a bear attacks you, the best thing to do is not run.
It would be hard for me not to do it, but they say, “Do not run. Just fall to the ground, get in a little ball, and just lie there.” As long as you just lie there and rest, most likely the bear might paw you a little bit, but if you do not get frightened, jump up, and run, he will probably just leave.
I am sure that is not true in every case, but the principle is there. We need to rest in God’s Sabbath: Christ.
Brothers and sisters, it is Christ Who lives His life. Kenny said it very recently: it is not you.
Brothers and sisters, we have been set free from the law. We are in grace. Christ has completed everything about the law.
You say, “Well, Lord, I cannot forgive this person.” Well, good. I hope you really realize that you cannot, because if you do and think you have, you are probably still carrying a grudge.
Rather, what we need to say is, “Lord, this unforgiving person has been included in that completed work on Calvary. He has been crucified. That is where I rest today, Lord. Now, Lord, You live through me.”
Let me carry it a step further. Often, I think we dishonor the finished work when we say, “Lord, I cannot love this person. Give me love. Lord, I cannot forgive this person. Give me forgiveness. Lord, I just cannot be patient. Give me patience.”
You know what we are doing? We are separating the character of God from Christ.
We are saying, “Lord, I need this. I need this love. I need this patience.” Indeed we do. But do you see what we are doing? We are dishonoring the Sabbath.
The Lord says, “I am not going to give you love apart from Me.” I thank the Lord that He usually does not answer that prayer, because He wants you to see Him. He wants you to enter His rest.
God’s rest is Christ—His completed work. Brothers and sisters, He can forgive. He forgave you. He said He forgave us while we were still rebels.
He can love the unloving. Brothers and sisters, they spat in His face. They pulled His hair. They slammed that crown of thorns on His head. They put spikes through His hands and feet.
What was the Lord’s response?
Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.
Well, I do not know what kind of life you want to live. But, brothers and sisters, in the day in which we live, I think trials and things are coming that will say, “Yes, you need Christ, but look at your mess. Your life is a mess. Yes, you have Christ. You have accepted the Lord, but your life is a mess, and you need this. This is what you need.”
Or they will say, “You are not really a sinner. Oh, you have lived a terrible life.” That is true for some. I am not demeaning that. “You have had a terrible upbringing. Your parents were cruel. You are just a victim.”
I wish that we could put that out of our hearts and minds and just say, “Lord, my past was crucified with Christ.”
It is over. My past was crucified with Christ.
“Lord, I just want to rest in that today. I want to rest in the fact that I cannot do it, but You in me can do it.” That is why it says there is nothing impossible with God.
Brothers and sisters, I pray in some way that the Lord may have shown us that God is now at rest again. He is at rest because He is satisfied.
He is satisfied with this new creation that has come from His Son—this new creation born out of Calvary: the blood and water coming out of His side, the blood for our sin and the water for His life.
A new creation. God is satisfied with it. He says it is very good.
He says to you and me, “Now, look. I want you to rest in that. I want you to rest. I want you to enter My rest.”
Lord, we just come to Thee today. Oh, how great is Christ. How great is Calvary. Lord, how marvelous is this new creation.
Lord, we often find ourselves struggling, but we find that, Lord, we have not entered Your rest. Oh, Lord Jesus, awaken our hearts.
Lord, may we see clearly in this day of crisis, Lord, that we not falter; that we would not just end up being a people wandering around in a desert way with a welfare mentality, but, Lord, a people who see that God has a purpose.
That purpose is Jesus Christ. We need to enter that.
Oh, Lord, it is a living way. It is living, Lord. It is not law. It is not rules. It is not regulations. It is Christ, and Christ alone.
How we worship Thee. In Jesus’ name. Amen.