will you rest?

oh..how i've been learning about "rest" these last few weeks...how we need it...how we should crave it...how it permeates our being and fills us and allows us to grow.

i'm NOT talking about laziness.
i'm talking about REST.
they are very different.

anyways...thought i'd share this with you today...it's from here and i love it.

“It was a ‘still small voice’ or the ’sound of gentle stillness.’ Is there any note of music in all the chorus as mighty as the emphatic pause? Is there any word in all the Psalter more eloquent than the one word, Selah (Pause)? Is there anything more thrilling and awful than the hush that comes before the bursting of the tempest and the strange quiet that seems to fall upon all nature before some preternatural phenomenon or convulsion? Is there anything that can so touch our hearts as the power of stillness?

The sweetest blessing that Christ brings us is the Sabbath rest of soul, of which the Sabbath of creation was the type. There is, for the heart that will cease from itself, ‘the peace of God that passeth all understanding’; a quietness and confidence, which is the source of all strength; a sweet peace, ‘which nothing can offend.’ There is, in the deepest center of the believer’s soul a chamber of peace where God dwells, and where, if we will only enter in and hush every other sound, we can hear His ‘still voice’….

We cannot go through life strong and fresh on constant express trains, with ten minutes for lunch; but we must have quiet hours, secret places of the Most High, times of waiting upon the Lord, when we renew our strength, and learn to mount up on wings as eagles, and then come back to run and not be weary, and to walk and not faint.

The best thing about this stillness is that it gives God a chance to work. ‘He that is entered into His rest hath ceased from his own works, even as God did from His.’ When we cease from our works, God works in us; when we cease from our thoughts, God’s thoughts come into us; when we get still from our restless activities, ‘God worketh in us both to will and to do his good pleasure,’ and we have but to work it out.

Beloved! Let us take His stillness; let us dwell in ‘the secret place of the Most High’; let us enter into God and His eternal rest; let us silence the other sounds, and then we can hear ‘the still, small voice.’”

Dr. A. B. Simpson (1844-1919)