Where exactly am I heading?

Let’s face it: sometimes going “all the way” with Jesus is a challenge, and we find ourselves lagging behind where we feel like we should be. In times like these, it might make sense to tell ourselves to work a little harder, to devote ourselves more fully to God. But the gospel diagnoses things differently. Ironically, the gospel tells us that when following Jesus gets difficult, the answer is not to “work harder” but to “rest better.” Only by learning to rest in Jesus will we have the strength we need to thrive.

I cannot imagine a more relevant concept for our culture. We have a culture that chronically overworks. We know it’s bad for us, but we feel compelled to keep up the frenetic pace. After all, work is how we put food on the table. More than that, however, work provides many of us with a source of identity. And since work is our source of identity, we are constantly striving to prove ourselves. We determine our worth by our work—but the striving never ends.

The good news is that the gospel offers a rest from all of this. One proof that we have found the gospel, according to Hebrews 4, is that our lives are characterized by a profound rest. Only Christ can provide that inner rest. Without Christ, we will work even while we are resting; with Christ, we will rest even while we are working.

We spend our lives trying to justify ourselves, to diminish our faults and to exaggerate our virtues. We feel guilty. We feel unimportant. We feel naked and exposed, so we cover ourselves with titles, personas, and accomplishments. We can never rest if we find our identity in our work. Too many of us do, which is why we are always fighting to prove our value. One of the hardest lessons to learn is that we cannot control everything, that we cannot provide for every contingency—in short, that we are not God. We are tremendously stressed because we carry around a burden of security that God never intended for us to carry.

It surprises me how rarely we stop to ask ourselves, “Where exactly am I heading?” Too often our lives lack a priority, a unifying purpose for our decisions. So we labour over every fork in the road, not sure how to weigh each choice, and never confident that we have made the right one.

If Christ is our priority, however, that gives us a compass for decisions. Not only that, but it provides rest. If we honour Him above everything, He promises to take care of the rest (cf. Matt 6:33). We no longer need to worry and obsess about money, about relationships, about work. We focus only on faithfulness. When Christ is the priority, when He is first, we get everything else we actually need. Put other things first, and not only will we lose Him; we will eventually lose them, too.

Christ offers us inner rest: He will be our righteousness, identity, security, and priority, if we simply believe in His gospel.