#DailyDevotion Be Diligent To Enter God’s Rest

Hebrews 4:1-11 We should be fearful then. While we still have the promise of coming to His place of rest, someone of you may be judged to have missed it. ²The good news came to us as it came to them, but the message they heard didn’t help them because those who heard it didn’t hear it with faith. ³We who have believed go to a rest, since He has said: “So I swore in My anger they will never come to My place of rest.” And yet God finished His work when He made the world, ⁴because in one place He said about the seventh day: “On the seventh day God rested from all He had done.” ⁵And here, too, He says: “They will never come to My place of rest.” ⁶Now, it is still true that some will go to His rest, and those who once heard the good news didn’t go to it because they disobeyed; ⁷so He sets another day — today — when long afterwards He says in David’s words, already quoted: “Today if you hear Him speak, don’t harden your hearts.”⁸If Joshua had given them rest, God wouldn’t later have spoken of another day. ⁹So there is still a Sabbath of rest for God’s people, ¹⁰ since anyone who goes to his rest finds rest from his work as God did from His. ¹¹ Let us then be diligent to come to that rest so that no one may disobey and fall like those people.

In ch. 3 Hebrews writes, “¹²See to it, fellow Christians, that none of you has a wicked, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God.” Now we are exhorted, “We should be fearful then. While we still have the promise of coming to His place of rest, someone of you may be judged to have missed it.” The Israelites heard the good new but it didn’t help them because they didn’t believe it. We have heard the good news of Jesus Christ and the rest we have in him from all our works. We have often spun our wheels trying to please him with what we thought he wanted us to do, but since we did not have faith, we were like the Israelites who ran headlong into Canaan after we disobeyed but were killed and turned back into the wilderness. They did not understand. They didn’t believe it.

Now God had made the Sabbath rest when he created the world. The unbelieving Israelites did not enter God’s rest. God made another day, Today. Today if you hear God’s voice, if you hear the good news of Jesus Christ, that in him you have the forgiveness of sins, the righteousness and holiness of God, don’t harden your hearts. Jesus Christ of Nazareth is the Sabbath rest for God’s people. There is no more sacrifice in Jesus. Jesus is our sacrifice which makes us pleasing to God. To go to God’s rest, his Sabbath, you must put your faith in him. Today replaces the Sabbath of which God spoke in the old Mosaic covenant. We have God’s rest, God’s Sabbath in Jesus. We rest from all our works in him.

“Be diligent to come to that rest so that no one may disobey and fall like those people.” How do we do that? Our Lutheran Confessions give us that answer in the Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration, Art. XI, 21, “That He will also strengthen, increase, and support to the end the good work which He has begun in them, if they adhere to God’s Word, pray diligently, abide in God’s goodness [grace], and faithfully use the gifts received.” So make use of the means of grace and believe what God has promised you there. Then you will have a foretaste of the rest God has prepared for you and you will enter his rest when he calls you home to himself and on the Last Day.

Heavenly Father, grant us a believing heart in Jesus Christ, so we may find our rest in him. Preserve us in the faith through your word. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.