Permission to Rest

Welcome to today's encouragement from Our Daily Bread. I'm Elisa Morgan, and I titled our reading, Permission to Rest. We sat atop some beach boulders, my friend Susie and I, watching the foam send up sea spray in arched curls.

Looking at the incoming waves crashing one after another against the rocks, Susie announced, I love the ocean. It keeps moving so I don't have to. Isn't it interesting how some of us feel we need permission to pause from our work to rest? Well, that's just what our good God offers us. For six days, God spun the earth into existence, creating light, land, vegetation, animals, and humans. Then, on the seventh day, God rested. In the Ten Commandments, God listed His rules for healthy living to honor Him, including the command to remember the Sabbath as a day of rest.

In the New Testament, we see Jesus healing all the sick of the town and then early the next morning retreating to a solitary place to pray. Purposefully, our God both worked and rested. The rhythm of God's provision in work and His invitation to rest reverberates around us—springs, planting, yields, growth in the summer, harvest in autumn, and rest in winter.

Morning, noon, afternoon, evening, night. God orders our lives for both work and rest, offering us permission to do both. Today's Our Daily Bread devotional scripture reading is from Genesis chapter 1, verse 31 through chapter 2, verse 2. God saw all that He had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning, the sixth day. Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. By the seventh day, God had finished the work He had been doing.

So on the seventh day, He rested from all His work. Let's pray. Dear God, thank You that You made us to follow after Your heart to both work and rest for Your glory and our good. In Jesus' name we pray. Thanks for listening today. My name is Elisa Morgan, and today's encouragement was provided by Our Daily Bread Ministries.