Dr. Ron Sumners
March 5, 2006
Through the Prayer of Rest, God places His children in the eye of the storm. When all around us is chaos and confusion, deep within we know stability and serenity. In the midst of intense personal struggle, we are still and relaxed. While a thousand frustrations seek to distract us, we remain focused and attentive. This is the fruit of the Prayer of Rest.
There is no more appealing invitation in all the Bible than Jesus' words, "Come unto me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11 :28).
Nothing is needed more today than this rest of body, mind, and spirit. We live so much of our lives in what Thomas Kelly calls, "an intolerable scramble of panting feverishness." All of the grasping and grabbing, all of the controlling, all of the manipulative dynamics of life exhaust us.
If only we could slip over into a life free from strain and anxiety and hurry. If only we could know that steady peace of God where all strain is gone, and Christ is already victor over the world! If only ... if only! I'm here to tell you that this way of living can be ours today. We can know this reality of rest, and trust, and serenity. We can know as a lived experience the words of this little poem:
Jesus, I am resting, resting
in the joy of what Thou art:
I am finding out the greatness
of Thy loving heart.
Today, this very moment, Jesus is inviting you, Jesus is inviting me, into His rest: "Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me; for I am gentle in heart, and you will find rest for your souls" (Matthew 11:19).
The Bible tells us that after speaking all things into existence from ant to aardvark, and after breathing into the first human being the breath of life, God rested. This "resting of God" on the seventh day became the theological framework for the Sabbath regulation that calls us to rest in God. Before we dismiss this Old Testament Sabbath rule as archaic, it is important to see that there is a lot more behind it than the desire for a periodic breather. For instance, it has a way of tempering our gnawing need to always get ahead. If we ever want to know the degree to which we are enslaved by the passion to possess, all we have to do is observe the difficulty we have maintaining the Sabbath.
No teaching flowing out of the Sabbath principle is more important than the centrality of resting in God. Instead of striving to make this or that happen, we need to learn to trust in the Heavenly Father, who loves to give. This does not promote inactivity but does promote dependent activity. No longer do we take things into our own hands. Rather, we place all things into divine hands and then do as God directs us.
The Children of Israel failed to enter God's rest even though He had brought them out of the Land of Egypt. Unable to trust in God, they rebelled and spent their remaining days wandering in the deserts of Sinai. With tragic finality God declared, "They shall not enter my rest" (Hebrews 4:3).
We are invited into the Sabbath rest of God, which the children of Israel failed to enter. We do this through the Prayer of Rest.
How do we do this? It is here that we face a serious dilemma. Our tendency is, on the one hand, to take firm control, or, on the other hand, to do absolutely nothing.
We most often begin by tackling prayer in the same way we have been taught to tackle every other problem - by hard work. We grit our teeth, intensify our will power, and try, try, try. In reality, this is a pagan concept of prayer in which we rouse the gods to action by our many incantations and vain repetitions.
Anthony Bloom tells the story of an elderly woman who had been working at prayer with all her might but without sensing God's presence. Wisely, her pastor advised her to go to her room and for fifteen minutes knit before God. "Do not say one word of prayer," he told her. "You just knit and enjoy the peace of the room."
The woman followed the advice, and her first thought was, "How nice, I have fifteen minutes in which I can do nothing and not feel guilty." In time, she began to embrace the silence of her knitting. Soon she sensed that the silence was not just the absence of noise, but the silence itself had substance. It was not the absence of something; it was the presence of something! She discovered that at the heart of the silence was the One who is all stillness, peace, and poise. She let go of her tightfisted efforts to enter God's presence and, by doing so; discovered God's presence was already there.
But we must not get the idea that total passivity is the answer to rest. Resting in God does not mean resignation or idleness. It does not mean that we sit back and hope that God will do something. That is the Hindu concept of prayer, in which the prayer sinks passively into the impersonal will of gods and goddesses.
Neither manipulative control nor listless passivity is an appropriate model for the Prayer of Rest. So, what approach do we take?
Eugene Patterson writes, "Prayer takes place in the middle voice." In grammar, the active voice is when we take the action, and the passive voice is when we receive the action of others. In the middle voice, we participate in the formation of the action and reap the benefits of it. We neither manipulate God nor are manipulated by God.
What I am trying to explain is this: while we are full participants in the grace-filled work of prayer, the work of prayer does not depend on us. We often pray in halting struggling ways. We do not know what to pray. We do not know how to pray. Often, our best effort at prayer is an inarticulate groan.
That is why the promise of scripture comes as such good news: "The Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too great for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God" (Romans 8:26-27).
Do you realize what a blessing this is? The Holy Spirit of God, the third member of the Trinity prays with us! When we stumble over our words, the Spirit speaks for us. When we pray with muddy motives, the Spirit purifies the stream. When we see through a glass darkly, the Spirit adjusts and focuses what we are asking until it corresponds to the will of God.
We do not have to have everything perfect when we pray. The Spirit reshapes, refines, and reinterprets our feeble, ego-driven prayers. We can rest in this work of the Spirit on our behalf.
But it gets even better! The writer of Hebrews reminds us that Jesus Christ is our great High Priest. The Job of the High Priest was to intercede before God on behalf of the people. (Hebrews 7-9) Do you realize what this means? As we carry on the activities of our lives, Jesus Christ is praying for us. Tonight, as we sleep through the long darkness, Jesus Christ is praying for us.
None other than the eternal Son of God is offering continual prayer at the throne of God on our behalf! You are being prayed for right now. The Spirit is praying that the truth of God will penetrate your heart. I am being prayed for as I attempt to preach. We can rest in the work of the Holy Godhead on our behalf.
But the best is yet to come. Hard as it may be for us to imagine, when we pray God, it is God who lives within us speaking through us to Himself. The dialogue of grace is really the monologue of divine love. Isn't that incredible? Isn't that beyond belief?
We have the activity of the everlasting Trinity focused on our prayers. God, the Spirit is interpreting our signs and groans before the throne of heaven. God, the Son is interceding on our behalf. And God, the Father, who sits upon the throne of heaven, hears our prayers, from our lips and from the Son and Spirit.
With such divine help, we can relax our tight-fisted hold on life. We can stop believing that we can succeed in prayer like we succeed in other activities. We can trust Him to lead us into richer, fuller communion. We are able to come to the Prayer of Rest.
There are three well-established practices designed to lead us into the Prayer of Rest. The first is solitude. In solitude we voluntarily abstain from our normal patterns of activity and interaction with people for a time in order to discover that our strength and well-being come from God alone.
In experiences of solitude, we gently press into the Holy of Holies, where we are sifted in the stillness. Painfully, we let go of the vain images of ourselves in charge of everything and everybody. Slowly, we loosen our grip on all those projects that seem so significant. Gently, we become more focused and simplified. Joyfully, we receive the nourishment of heavenly manna.
Have you ever noticed how many times Jesus experienced solitude? Mark 1:35 tells us, "In the morning, a great while before day, He rose and went out to a lonely place." This describes a pattern of life, not just a single event. Jesus needed frequent retreat and solitude to do his work. Yet we somehow think that we can do without what he knew was essential.
Hesychia is the Greek word for rest, and hesychasm refers to the spirituality of those who retreat to desert retreats.
Few of us would even want to follow the desert fathers in any literal sense. We have families, and jobs, and social responsibilities. But we can experience solitude. You will have to make the time and find the place away from your regular routine. But you can find solitude.
A second time-honored practice is the stilling of activity. This does not mean so much a silence of words as a silence of our grasping, manipulative control of people and situations. It means standing firm against our drives to control everyone and everything. We abandon every motion that is not rooted in God. We become quiet, hushed, motionless, until we are finally centered.
We strip away all excess baggage until all that is left is the Kingdom of God. We let go of all distractions until we let God reorder our priorities.
This stillness enables us to hear God. Francois Fenelon has written, "We must silence every creature, we must silence ourselves, to hear in the deep hush the voice of God. We must bend the ear, because it is a gentle and delicate voice, only heard by those who no longer hear anything else."
The third way we enter into the Prayer of Rest is "recollection." Recollection means focus. It means peace of mind, heart, and spirit. We remember all the ways that God has been faithful in the past. We recall His goodness and grace in our lives.
We rest in God’s hands. We have enough freedom that we can stretch and grow, but we also have enough protection so that we can be protected and healed. This is the Prayer of Rest.
Blessed Savior, I am not good at resting in the hollow of your hand. Nothing in my experience has taught me this resting. I have been taught how to take charge. I have been taught how to be in control. But how do I rest? I have no models here; all my friends are leaders and are just as frantically active as I am.
But I have you Jesus; you were always alert and alive. You lived in response to the will of the Father, and you still worked in unhurried peace and power.
Help me to walk in your steps. Teach me to see only what you see, to say only what you say, to do only what you do. Help me Lord, to work resting and to pray resting.
I ask this in your good and strong name. - Amen
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