rest on Doubt

Almighty God, we pray for your blessing on the church in this place. Here may the faithful find salvation, and the careless be awakened. Here may the doubting find faith, and the anxious be encou...

Ignoring God's Stop Sign Have you ever been driving and inadvertently blown right through a stop sign?  It happened to me recently. Anne and I were down in San Francisco meeting some friends, I w...

Where did the observation of a Sabbath come from? Nahum Sarna points out that it is never instituted within Scripture. Instead, it is taken for granted that the people already observe it: “There can...

No soul can be really at rest until it has given up all dependence on everything else and has been forced to depend on the Lord alone. As long as our expectation is from other things, nothing but disa...

Almighty God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit: We ask Your blessing on the people in this place. May the despairing find hope—and proud be humbled. May the doubting find faith—and the anxious be encouraged...

Holy God–Father, Son and Spirit: We come with our agendas in order to enlist you in our causes but You won’t be co-opted for our small visions. Instead, You hold out a greater vision and purpose and i...

We can rest knowing the Lord’s presence transcends what we feel. Just like the flow of the air, he is moving even if his movements cannot be perceived. And where God is not just felt but known, faith ...

I find it hard to be at rest and ambitious at the same time.

Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be...

This busy world will surge about you with the tread of restless feet and the throb of restless hearts. And little that you will do will seem to make a pause in the rush of things. But you may in Chris...

Rest is something that comes to us not without our own efforts but nevertheless not through those efforts.

Rest in this - it is His business to lead, command, impel, send, call or whatever you want to call it. It is your business to obey, follow, move, respond, or what have you.

Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness.

For this is the cause why we be not all in ease of heart and soul: that we seek here rest in those things that are so little, wherein is no rest, and know not our God that is All-mighty, All-wise, All...

Don’t underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.

Good God, We have a lot going on. You are a God of grace, And we are made in your likeness. Let us then be people of grace. Meet our human concerns with the fruit of your Spirit: Love for ourselves...

If your idleness is a complete slump, that is, indecision, fretting, worry, or due to over-feeding and physical mugginess, that is bad, terrible and utterly sterile. Or if it is that idleness which so...

When my eldest son, Drew, was a toddler, bedtime was a battleground in our house. I think he felt cheated by the prospect of sleep. He hated the thought of going to bed while the rest of the world con...

One of the dangers of living in a constant state of distraction is that we never go to the bottom of our pain, our sadness, our emptiness, which means we never find that rock-bottom place of the peace...

Gracious God, Your yoke is easy, and your burden is light. You say you will give us rest, yet we don’t always believe it. Forgive us for being distracted by our doing. Instead of finding rest in Your ...

Come Thou and dwell with me,  Lord of the holy race;  Make here Thy resting-place, Hear me, O Trinity.  That I Thy love may prove,  Teach Thou my heart and hand,  Ever at Thy command Swiftly to move....

God walks “slowly” because he is love. If he is not love he would have gone much faster. Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the tec...

Rest and be thankful.

The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we ha...

Failure is a gift. When we are forced to drink the dust of our idols, we can begin to turn our sights toward home.

As long as I am content to know that He is infinitely greater than I, and that I cannot know Him unless He shows Himself to me, I will have Peace, and He will be near me and in me, and I will rest in ...

“In this little thing [a hazelnut] I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loves it, the third is that God preserves it. But what did I see in it? It is that God ...

Gracious God, for many of us, the notion of Sabbath-keeping is foreign. It suggests old-fashioned traditionalism or constrictive legalism. Yet, your example in Genesis 2, not to mention other portions...

Do not let Sunday be taken from you. If your soul has no Sunday, it becomes an orphan.

We know we need rest, but we can no longer see the value of rest as an end in itself; it is only worthwhile if it helps us recharge our batteries.