I'm Resting on His Laurels

​​Resting on His Laurels (Hebrews 4)
4 For He has said somewhere concerning the seventh day: “And God rested on the seventh day from all His works
 9 Consequently, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. 10 For the one who has entered His rest has himself also rested from his works, as God did from His. 11 Therefore let’s make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will fall by following the same example of disobedience. 
 14 Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let’s hold firmly to our confession. 
For the Christian, every day should be a Sabbath rest. We’re resting on His laurels. In a negative connotation, to rest on your laurels means that you become complacent or lazy basking in the memories of former glories. However, since Christ has already accomplished all that can be done or needs to be done, we rest in His victory. We rest in His completed work. There is no higher achievement that we can obtain concerning our salvation or eternal destination.

God rested (ceased from His work) on the 7th day. He ceased because He was finished. All of human history was written and finished. The history of every single human being was conceived and settled in the mind of God. Everything that was to be created was created. Every twist and turn of history was seen and known by Almighty God. God saw all the way through to the end from the beginning and when He was finished, He rested. He wasn’t tired. He ceased. He was finished.

And because God is finished then we also are to rest in His finished work. We do this by resting in the salvation of Christ and Him crucified. This is all that the Apostle Paul sought to know because in Christ is everything we will ever need for salvation.

For many years as a Christian, I believed that one could lose their salvation because of sin.  I still believe that, but through my experiences the last couple of years, I have come to know and experience the tenacious love of God. There is a  difference between temptation, presumptuous sin, and sins of the flesh. I realized that “most sinners are more lost than they know and most Christians are more saved than they know”-Loren Larson.

For years, I believed that one sin could separate me from God and that repentance from that one sin would reconnect me to Him.  As time moved on and I sinned and repented, I imagined that there must just be a hole worn through my page in the Book of Life from all the erasing and replacing of my name. I worried what would happen if the Lord returned in between my times of weakness- where my own resolve was not enough to keep me from being overpowered by the temptation- and my times of repentance.  I have found that I’m more saved than I know,  that there is provision for me anytime I sin, even if that sin has not come to light in my conscience yet. My faith in Calvary positions me in Christ by believing in His finished work. All that is left to do is to rest.

The reason for my trouble, both sinning and knowing my standing with God, was a result of a misunderstanding-  or rather an incomplete understanding- of the Cross of Christ. I realized that Christ was not as precious to me as I knew He should be and that puzzled me. Unfortunately, I know many Christians who struggle in the same way. It’s a miserable place to live, there’s no victory over sin or temptation, there’s condemnation from the devil, and a general sense of doom, pressure and fear. The good news is that it’s totally unnecessary!

When Paul spoke of the Sabbath rest, he was telling us that spiritual, emotional, and physical rest is ours. It is based on Christ’s works ours.  We couldn’t “do” to gain salvation and we can’t “do” to keep it. We are saved through Christ and kept through Christ, thus Christ is and will ever be the center of both our salvation AND our sanctification. Nothing comes to us from God unless it comes through Christ’s finished work on Calvary, thus Christ is the most important object of our faith and is what opens the door for the Holy Ghost to work in our lives. Think about it, all scripture points to Christ. All authority has been given to Christ. Christ now reigns and will forever reign. Christ is central and supreme in everything.

This does not mean that we “do” nothing but what we do is in response to what Christ has already done and is doing in our hearts and lives. These are the works that will remain for all eternity because they are authored and fueled by the finished work of Christ in our lives. So many Christians labor in spiritual activity to maintain favor with God and to increase their spirituality. Unfortunately, you can’t pray enough, read enough, fast enough, or serve others enough to gain anything. Even what rewards we do gain through following the leading and instruction of the Holy Spirit will be cast at Jesus’s feet because it is ALL Him! It was done for Him and by Him in us. The number of crowns we receive at judgement will not affect our salvation or standing with God at all. Jesus told the disciples to not rejoice in that the spirits were subject to them but to rejoice that their names were written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. They could DO nothing to be included in that book except to put their faith in what Jesus did on Calvary.

Our only labor is the fight of faith that must be fought to stay in the rest that was provided us through Christ’s death, burial and resurrection. We fight against the attacks of the enemy in our minds that try to convince us that there is something WE need to do or not do in order to stay in the place where God finds pleasure in us. It’s not by works. Our works are as filthy rags. It is by faith alone. The fight of faith that is talked about in scripture is not to gain anything; it is to keep what we gained freely through Jesus. We didn’t work for it and we can’t work to keep it. We gained it through simple faith, we keep it through simple faith.

I’m not saying that reading, praying, and fasting are not important, they are, but they will do nothing to either effect or increase us in salvation or in our legal and right standing with Christ who has now justified us once and for all. We are saved, justified and sanctified completely and totally by Christ’s work on Calvary. HIS WORK!

 Holy Ghost guided spiritual activity merely opens our hearts to allow the Holy Spirit latitude to work in our lives to bring our performance up to par with our position in God as the changes He makes in us spur us on to good works. That is the process that most call sanctification. There have been many definitions of sanctification through church history but I believe that we are sanctified at salvation simply because the Bible says we are. (1 Corinthians 7:14)  It is the work of the cross. However, there is a gradual sanctification that follows as we allow the Holy Spirit to work to change us into a representative of our new position. He can only do this because we are already sanctified through our salvation and justification.  

This has been eye opening to me and oh, what peace it has brought to me. As God rested in His work because it was finished, we also need to rest in our strivings because there is no work that needs to be done by us for salvation. It was all accomplished by Christ. For us to think that any works that we do affects our salvation or our standing with God is faulty because there is nothing in us or about us that could do that, ever! If there was, God would not have sacrificed His Son the way He did. By thinking that we need to somehow work to please God is a sign that we don’t believe that the Cross of Christ was enough. It is to believe that “It is finished”-almost, which essentially is unbelief. The resurrection is proof that God accepted the Christ’s sacrifice once and for all. It is how Jesus could pass through the heavens and stand before God and be declared the perfect sacrifice for all of mankind. Oh, what a debt of gratitude we owe the Lord Jesus Christ!
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This does not give us license to sin. We will be judged for our deeds but the pressure over salvation is over folks. When we believe that Christ finished it all, we believe that He effectively and forever defeated sin AND IT’S POWER IN OUR LIVES! This is how we can live in victory and walk in holiness. This is why we find joy in our Christian service. This is how we live a life of rest in God. Everyday is sabbath day!