How the Bible Transforms How I Manage Myself and Rest Well
Last fall I had the chance to visit my alma mater to give a talk to our local student group on the topic of self management and resting well. I missed being on campus and it was so fun to be back. Even though I work in vocational ministry focused on university/college students, I’m so rarely actually ON campus.
Drowning and floundering
When I was a student 15 years ago, this was a topic I desperately needed help with. I’m still learning how to manage myself and rest well. As seasons of life change and develop, there are always new things to learn. But back when I was floundering and completely overwhelmed with my life, I didn’t realize that it was something I needed to learn. Didn’t everyone else have their life figured out?
→ Why did it feel so impossible to sort out how and when to do laundry, or study for my exams, or find enough time to write my papers, or still see my friends on a Friday night, and somehow buy groceries and carry them home on the bus while also wanting to stay up late and watch the latest episode of whatever tv show everyone else seemed to be watching?
I was drowning while everyone else around me seemed to be thriving, or at least, doing better than me. They didn’t seem to have weekly anxiety attacks or emotional breakdowns over dropping my pizza or whenever my friends asked me, “Erin how you?” I thought I was doing everything I was “supposed to do” to have THE GOOD life, and yet I couldn’t keep my head above water long enough to breathe.
I needed help learning how to manage my time, my whole life really. I needed help with knowing how to rest well. I also needed help to understand why all of it mattered to God. And what the spiritual significance of rest was. As a student, I was following Jesus, but my heart was often far from God. My priorities, and choices, and emotions were not centered on Jesus and the Bible, but on what I thought was right and good.
This was the secret that no one told me at the time: no one is born knowing how to manage their time well. And we aren’t born automatically knowing how to rest well either. They are both skills that we all learn, and need to re-learn as we grow and our priorities change.
But who was going to teach me? Or help me?
After I graduated and over the first few years of ministry I did learn a few things about how to manage my time and my self. I also had a lot of knowledge and experience to pull from: my mom is an excellent administrator and structured person. She taught me a lot growing up that I needed to pull from and apply.
But all of my time management and self care strategies needed to be grounded in something eternal and stable. A firm foundation that wouldn’t change, even if all of my plans and intentions constantly did. As I dug into God’s word I found it had a lot to say on the ideas of rest and managing ourselves well.
As I read my Bible overtime I kept noticing three elements of rest that stood out to me:
abiding with God in his presence
trusting God’s promises
waiting for and receiving God’s provision
I find that when I pray and ask the Holy Spirit’s help in doing each of these three things, it helps lay a foundation for me to make small, faithful choices to manage my days well, helping me thrive and be a blessing to others. My days (then and now) are imperfect and full of unexpected challenges and pivots. But when I start with rest, from what God teaches me in his word, it helps me manage myself a lot more smoothly.
Abiding with God in His Presence
In the Beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. – Genesis 1:1
I discovered a lot of clues in Genesis chapter 1 revealing a Biblical principle of rest, work, and what it means to abide with God in his presence. Here are six that stood out to me:
1. Each day starts with rest.
Each of the days is phrased “there was evening and there was morning” (v.5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31).
The believed author of Genesis–Moses–was a Hebrew, and the Hebrew practice was the start the “day” with rest. They would eat a meal together with their family at night, a built in time for social, spiritual, and physical rest.
2. God creates time itself.
In v.14-19 God creates the lights in the heavens which are for signs, seasons, days, and years.
God orders and sets the boundaries of our time within creation itself. Our time is not something we create. We lack control on manipulating and changing time. It’s in God’s hands and God’s control.
3. God creates and defines what is “work”.
In v. 22 God tells the living creatures and birds to be fruitful and multiply. He also tells this to mankind in v.28 but they are also to subdue it and have dominion.
Work was less about control over creation and more about stewardship and care. This is Adam and Eve’s work–their purpose for being created–to partner with God in the stewardship of his created order.
4. Everything God creates is good.
God creates time and work before the fall of sin. There is inherent goodness in it, though both are marred by sin later on in Genesis 3.
5. God finishes his work of creation.
In Genesis 2:1-3 we see God’s good work as finished. When it’s finished he rests. He blesses the seventh day (the only day he blesses) and creates it holy.
6. Adam and Eve start with rest in God’s presence.
Adam was created on the 6th day, along with Eve, and given their creation mandate for good work. The 7th day, Adam’s first full day, was a day of rest. Before Adam and Even really get into the work God created them to do, they rested with God. How beautiful is that??
→ To truly rest is to abide with God in his presence. We see this in Genesis 1, built into the creation order itself.
But: What is the relationship between our work and what we produce, and God’s presence?
Jesus offers this invitation in John 15:4-5,
“Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine and you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.”
Jesus deeply cares about what we do, what we produce, and what we can accomplish for his kingdom purposes. But none if it can take place without first abiding in his presence.
When we are resting with God, we are able to do the good work God calls us to do.
When we are in God’s presence we can listen to God and speak to him. He gives us wisdom, insight, and counsel from his Word and other people on what to do and how to best live out our days.
Trusting God’s promises
Trusting in the promises of God helps ground us to do the good work he called us to do and rest with him. One promise that helped ground me during my chaotic years of university was Hebrews 13:5,
“Keep your life free from the love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”
When money is our god, we never have enough. We are always constantly striving for more, more, more.
When anything else but God is at the centre of our lives we catch ourselves on this hamster wheel of always running after the next thing. The writer of Hebrews offers us a contrast: Don't do this, and do this. We are to be content with what we have.
Be content with what God has given you, in this day, what he placed before you. When God is at the centre of my day and my time, I can say to God, “Thank you God for this 1 hour to work on ______. In my perspective it doesn’t seem like enough time. But in faith I’m going to trust that you can multiply what little I have and I trust you with the end result.”
The promise of God that frees us to be content with whatever circumstances God has ordained, and keep God at the centre of our lives–not money, not time, not production, not results–is found here in v.5.
God’s promise says: “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”
God is with us in each moment. God will never abandon us–even when we are unfaithful to him and turn to other sources of comfort or try to do things our own way. God is waiting for us to return and waiting to offer an abundance of peace and joy and even contentment. What a promise from God!
But even though God promises to always be with us, if we’re honest, it often doesn’t feel like it. Anxiety, depression, fear, uncertainty, the scramble of our days, and chaos of our hearts can make it seem like God is far away, and that he has left us.
In Psalm 22 v.1-2, David is crying out to God. He says,
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest.”
To David it feels like God has abandoned him. He is calling out to him constantly but hears no answer, and he is restless. But has God REALLY abandoned David? It feels that way, but in reality God was there. God answered him. God saved him. God redeemed him.
And we know that because when Jesus is hanging on the cross, he points back to this moment of David, and inserts himself, as the Messiah, into this scene.
In Mark 15:34 Jesus proclaims in a loud voice, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
This word, forsaken is the same word in Hebrew and Greek used by David in Psalm 22. In fact, Jesus is directly quoting David. And it’s the same word used in the promise of Hebrews 13:5.
This is why we can look to the cross of Christ, and trust in God’s promises. David felt like God had abandoned him. We can feel like God has abandoned us. But the only one whom God actually abandoned was Jesus on the cross. God turned his face away as Jesus hung to die, so that we can be fully reconciled to the Father through faith, and forever have access to God’s presence no matter our feelings or felt reality.
Jesus died and was abandoned by God so that God could forever keep his promises to us.
God is with us, he will never abandon us. And we have full access to his presence, and all of this leads to deep rest. When we live from the rest of God’s promises we are way more fully equipped to manage our time and days well.
waiting for and receiving God’s provision
God has something to offer us: he invites us to draw near and receive his rest.
In Matthew 11:28-29 Jesus offers this beautiful invitation,
“Come to me all who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls.”
Mark Vroegop–pastor and author–says this about rest: “Rest is spiritual and emotional and internal peace.”
Isn’t that exactly what we need?
In the chaos of our schedules?
The demands of our classes?
The pressures we face from our friends?
The drain from being so dialed into social media?
The anxiety around an unknown future?
We desperately need spiritual and emotional and internal peace. And this is what Jesus offers. Not only offers, but invites us to come to him, so that he could provide this for us.
As we try to manage our time, manage ourselves and manage our lives, often what we most deeply need is peace. What we are most burdened with is this internal restlessness. That’s why I love Mark’s definition of rest.
“Come to me” Jesus says, “all who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest”. Do we trust that Jesus has rest to offer us? Or are we trying to find rest in all the wrong places?
The tricky thing about Jesus’ invitation is that there isn’t a timeline. And it says nothing about our circumstances. He doesn’t promise that we can snap our fingers, pray a prayer and miraculously feel all better. He doesn’t say that our stressful or overwhelming circumstances will go away. God’s provision of rest is something we need to WAIT for, and TRUST in FAITH that we will RECEIVE no matter what we are facing.
Often it does takes time. We need to pay attention and notice how God is working in our lives. When we come into God’s presence regularly and we are grounded in the promises of God, we can start to see how God provides rest for us in all sorts of different places.
When I was a student on campus, deep in the middle of a busy semester, with so many papers to write and it didn’t seem like there were enough hours in the day, God had rest for me. I still had my work and assignments. But he had something to offer me in the middle of it all.
As I drew close to him in prayer, worship, and in reading his word, he offered me the peace of his presence. Refreshment through listening to worship music on the bus. He offered a perspective shift, and a hopeful outlook on spending a long day in the library writing thousands of words. Jesus had joy to give me, if only I was willing and ready to receive it in faith. He helped me come to a place of full surrender over my work and time. He helped me find meaning and my true identity in him alone. God offered rest in so many different places.
But what does it look like to come to Jesus? How does he take our weary and heavy laden souls and trade them with his rest? How does this actually work?
Let’s look at the second half of what Jesus says here in Matthew 11,
“Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls.”
Jesus tells us to take his yoke upon us–his yoke is something we are to receive. A yoke is the piece of wood that connects two oxen who are pulling a cart. It helps bear the load of the cart, shared equally between the two animals.
But look closely at what Jesus says. He doesn’t say to come to him so that he can equally share our burdens like two oxen. Jesus says “take my yoke upon you”. It’s an offer to trade yokes. Jesus is inviting us to come to him, and offering to take our heavy burdens, and instead gives us his yoke, his burdens which aren’t burdens at all.
In the book Gentle and Lowly, Dane Ortlund says this about Jesus’ yoke,
“Jesus is using a kind of irony, saying the yoke laid on his disciples is a non yoke. For it is a yoke of kindness. Who could resist this?... His yoke is kind and his burden is light… He does not simply meet us at our place of need; he lives in our place of need. He never tires of sweeping us into his tender embrace. It is his very heart.”
Jesus offers to take our weary and heavy burdens and trade them with his kindness. His deep spiritual, emotional and internal peace. His oneness with the Father.
Jesus also invites us to learn from him. This is really a picture of discipleship with Jesus, being in relationship with him, learning from him, and receiving the rest that he so readily offers us when we come to him.
There’s another aspect of rest that I think Jesus is talking about here, one that goes so much deeper than rest from our circumstances. It points to finding salvation in him alone. This is what the ESV Study Bible says about the phrase “rest for your souls”,
“this rest is ETERNAL rest for all who seek forgiveness of their sins and freedom from the crushing legalistic burden and guilt of trying to earn salvation from good works.”
God has given us good work to do. He’s given us passions and desires and dreams about how we can create and heal and restore and care for others in our world. But when we are so focused on our work and are blinded to the God who gave us that work, we are tempted to believe that if we work just a little bit harder, or do just a little bit more, God will be more pleased with us.
There’s nothing I can do to make God more pleased with me. I cannot earn his acceptance. I cannot earn his approval. I cannot earn a place in God’s Kingdom. The world we live in, it functions like this. But don’t be fooled and think this is how God works too. This is often what lies underneath all those time management approaches and strategies, this LIE that in order to be GOOD, I must do MORE.
This is not the invitation Jesus offers each one of us. The rest for our souls that he is so ready to provide us, is an eternal rest from the striving and burden of trying to be good from the work we do. He offers us full reconciliation to God. He offers us salvation. He offers us a place in his kingdom. Not because of our work, but in spite of it. And this is grace. That this rest he offers is not what we earn, but what he freely gives us because he loves us. Because Jesus’ saving work was dying on the cross, so that we don’t have to work to earn God’s love but just embrace it through faith in Christ alone.
This is the good news of the gospel.
God has something to offer us: he invites us to draw near and receive his rest.
These Biblical ideas about rest and work–that we are to abide with God in his presence, trust in his promises, and wait for and receive his provision of deep eternal soul rest–they change me.
They help me engage with my work and life and relationships differently. I can come to God and receive his rest and refreshment. I can work out a freedom of not needing to earn God’s approval (or the approval of others), but a heart of service and care and compassion.
Sometimes the drowning and floundering Erin resurfaces. I still experience overwhelm, emotional disregulation, anxiety, and bone-deep exhaustion. So I need to re-remind myself of these Biblical truths about rest to return to my grounding. To return to God’s presence, promises, and provision.
This foundation help me make small, faithful choices to manage my days well, helping me thrive and be a blessing to others.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash.