Unless the LORD builds a house,

the work of the builders is wasted.

Unless the LORD protects a city,

guarding it with sentries will do no good.

It is useless for you to work so hard

from early morning until late at night,

anxiously working for food to eat;

for God gives rest to his loved ones.

       Psalm 127

I am wondering why this seems so hard in this world. As I read these words, I am looking out the window at the blowing snow, and feeling apprehensive because I need to get to work. Not because the work is so important. If I don’t go at all today, no one will die. No one will even be hurt. But because we are in a bad financial place, provision becomes a burden. The failures and debts of the past, as well as the expenses for pursuing future hopes have combined to leave us in the present very short of money. Is this not the very thing God is speaking to us about? A long time back David had become a king, he recognized it was God who had put him there, and he had a dream to build a temple for God. It was a way of saying thank you, and showing the honor and respect he had for God. But it missed the point, and God had to come back and remind him. “You can’t build a house for me. Heaven is my throne, and earth is may footstool. Where do you think you could build something to hold me? You don’t build a house for me. But I am building a house for you.” (2 Samuel 7)

I know this, yet it seems I continually fall back into the place where I am trying to build a house for God, rather than living in the house he is building for me. It is one thing to talk about checking your worry, but it is another to truly live in the rest of Jesus. 

Therefore, since the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us be careful that none of you be found to have fallen short of it. For we also have had the good news proclaimed to us, just as they did; but the message they heard was of no value to them, because they did not share the faith of those who obeyed. Now we who have believed enter that rest. (Heb 4:1-3)

As I was writing, a little bird was flitting around the tree outside the window. In the midst of the snow storm it seems to be pecking at, perhaps eating something off the tree. It doesn’t seem worried about the weather. It’s just being a bird and trusting to it’s creator. I think that’s Jesus point when he says, "Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? (Matthew 6: 26)

Belief is a choice to obey, to act in agreement with truth that God reveals to me. Living in God’s promised rest means the daily obedience to choose to lay aside the cozy blanket of my own provision and abilities that is really a coffin smothering me in worry and striving. Instead I take up what Jesus called the easy and light work of pursuing and walking with Jesus. Only that will produce the life and rest my soul hungers for.