Soul Rest

 

          Soul Rest

“The LORD your God is commanding you this day to follow these statutes and ordinances. Follow them carefully with all your heart and all your soul. Today you have affirmed that the LORD is your God and that you will walk in his ways, keep his statutes, commands, and ordinances, and obey him.” Deuteronomy 26:16-17

God's promised to lead the Israelites into the promise land.  Not just knowing about it but knowing it in a way that would move them to respond with a heart obedience. God has always been about reaching our hearts and knowing him in a way of following him alone. God was teaching them that honoring him wasn't just about religious or ceremonial observance but about leading them in ways that changed their hearts to know him. God is still about that today.

 

Learning to depend on God alone will be a life long process. I was meant to live in wholeness, delight, and utter goodness and some of those days I will choose the opposite. It can come as me wanting to feel something and following my thinking to end up again in an uneasiness in my heart once again and restlessness in my spirit.

I am like the Israelites and forgetful to getting off course to find myself wandering getting a nudge within my spirit for God to reveal to me once again I am relying on my thinking. Been there?

So how I continue to learn to rely upon something that can't be seen?

Sometimes I feel the quiet of God's presence within me. I am learning what can't be felt at times is remembering that God is with me. Weariness can settle in and fatigue will wear me down but I am learning that is an opportunity to sit in the quiet and remember. I will speak to Jesus like he is right beside me telling him all my thoughts and resting in him knowing. His Word reminds me He knows my every thought before I speak it.

The Israelites were learning to depend on God as He led them through the wilderness into the promised land. On the way they, like us, experienced trials, struggles, problems, and God continued to remind them, “I will walk with you” like He does with us.  In the quiet is the endurance He is building in me when my feeling won't stop. The choice is mine to remember God's faithfulness or allow those thoughts to consume me.

What if I came to Jesus instead of trusting my feelings to direct me?

Where would that lead me?