God’s rest is not something to sit back and enjoy. How can it be? Our bodies deteriorate with every passing breath. We approach the end of our lives with the fleeting of every moment. God’s rest is for us, but it is through repentance that we find it. God is not commanding us to chill. He is not asking us to kick back and watch him work. He is asking us to do the work. When we hear his teaching, we should hear our own sins revealed and be moved to action because our lives are fleeting. There is no time to bask in the beauty and peace and love of daddy god. There is a tremendous amount of work to do. God loves us. He commands repentance, and through that repentance we are moved to action. This action brings rest, but when we chill out and enjoy it, we end up falling back into sin and we have to go through the whole process again. The rest should energize us. We can’t become fat and lazy having a nice time, enjoying how much we love God. We have to be on the move. It’s a poetic contradiction. Repentance brings rest, but the scriptural rest drives you toward action, movement, expending energy toward helping others: the sick, the lowly, the widow, so that you can multiply that rest which is the product of God’s mercy. This is the story. Intro and outro music Copyright © Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Brookline, MA, used by permission. All rights reserved.