Stop Striving
Lately, I’ve felt the weight of the world on my shoulders. Perhaps you’ve felt this burden too. It presents itself in constant striving, worry, and doubts. You feel as though you have to find all of the solutions, make all the plans, be the glue that holds everything together.
You struggle to feel like all you do is enough…that YOU’RE enough.
But what I’ve learned is that if we think we’ll get what we want by feeling like we’re enough, we’ll be sorely and perpetually disappointed. Because we’re not. And we never will be.
And that’s the most freeing truth we can ever learn and take to heart.
The Gospel - the Good News - that God has given us in His Word is that even though we’ve turned against Him and instead sought to be our own gods and captains of our own fate, He has shown and is continuously showing us that His will is to bring us back, to redeem us, and to once again fill us with the hope of eternal life, and in that hope is the rest that we crave at our core.
Every sick and heavy heart of grief…every tear of frustration, of disappointment, of hurt…every longing to find rest and be made whole - even when we’re not exactly sure what that means or looks like…
It’s all resolved when we do the one thing that is so simple, yet for some reason so difficult for us:
TRUST GOD.
Not a blind trust. And also not a trust that is seasoned with doubt.
But a trust that believes, and has even seen, that God is powerful to keep the universe perfectly spinning and is sovereign over every cell and every detail of our lives. Not only that, He deeply cares for you. He is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in love.
HE’s enough. He’s all we need. His transforming presence is what gives us the rest we are constantly fighting for.
In the Old Testament, the nation of Israel, which God had chosen and set apart to declare His hope and glory to the world, failed miserably time and time again to show the beauty and victory that is available by simply trusting in Him and His plan. He had repeatedly reminded them:
“In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and confidence shall be your strength” (Isaiah 30:15).
A returning, or repentance, to finally realize that their own way was not the right way. That protection and salvation and rest came from trusting in God alone.
Rather than constant striving and anxiety, it was in quietness and confidence in who God is that strength would come.
“But you would not,” God said of them. Instead, they chose to trust in “swift horses” - which we may apply to our own situations as those things that we think will give us an edge, or our plans that are made based on our failed logic or wayward hearts rather than on God’s way that leads to life.
Such decisions only end in our destruction. Ironically, all the things we strive for and grasp for become like grains of sand sliding through our fingers.
Are you ready to finally obtain the rest that you desire? Then pray along with the psalmist:
Truly my soul silently waits for God;
From Him comes my salvation.
He only is my rock and my salvation;
He is my defense;
I shall not be greatly moved.” (Psalm 62:1-2)
Wait. Trust. Lean.
And you will stand tall through any situation.
Without the weight of the world on your shoulders.
Because the Lord already has it on His.