Morning everyone!

Dawn and I have just got back from some time out, a mini sabbatical if you will and in this time off I felt God speak to me clearly about rest.

Not rest as in kicking feet up, with some Netflix and popcorn or towels on the sand by the ocean. (although those things are needed at times) The rest I speak about is the rest we find in Jesus. The rest from striving and anxiety found in fear and the manifested actions that come from this way of thinking.

Adam and Eve were completely righteous when they were created. They walked and talked with God as regularly and as naturally as they walked and talked with each other. They were at rest, in its original and its fullest sense.
They relied on God for everything. They had no anxieties, no worries, no pain, no frustrations, no heartaches. They did not need God’s forgiveness, because they had no sin to be forgiven of. They did not need His consolation, because they were never grieved. They did not need His encouragement, because they never failed.

They only needed His fellowship, because they were made for Him. This was their “rest” in God. God completed His perfect work and He rested. They were His perfect work and they rested in Him. But something terrible happened. When Satan began to dispute God’s word and integrity and love, Adam and Eve chose to believe Satan. They trusted him rather than God. And when they lost their trust in God, they lost His rest. And from that time until now, humanity apart from God not only has been sinful but restless. The entire purpose of the Bible and the entire working of God in human history have one theme: bringing man back into His rest. To accomplish that, God had to remove the barrier to their rest, the barrier which separated them from Him.

He sent His Son to do just that, to provide again for humanity’s rest in His Creator. Through Jesus death, people are again offered life. Rest is another name for life, life as God meant it to be. Even the people who lived before Jesus were saved on the basis of what God was going to do through His Son. Jesus bore sins past and future, and through Him, God’s rest has been available to anyone who believes.

Friends, as we push on into 2024, know this, Jesus gave His life and completed the work shouting on the cross in His last breath IT IS FINISHED!

What is finished? Striving to fix our lives, striving through our own effort to bring wholeness to ourselves, feeling like we don’t measure up and the Lord is never pleased with us, striving to “make” ourselves holy! Living in constant fear that God doesn’t care and we are adrift on our own in the ocean of life!

He paid the ultimate price to bring us to Himself, He is our God and we are His royal children. He has already made us winners and set us up for success, all we have to do is believe this and walk in confidence and by faith live in THAT rest!

Bless you all

Craig Glenn

Leading Pastor