Sayings

No rest for the wicked is rendered as no peace for the wicked in a 1425 rendering of the Old Testament’s Book of Isaiah 48:22: “The Lord God said, peace is not to wicked men.” The sentiment is echoed in Isaiah 57:20, which in the King James Version reads: “But the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt.”

It seems strange to me that the phrase is often on the lips of christian workers in reference to their church work.

Have you come across the malady FOMO - fear of miss­ing out that's feeding into the ever-growing pathology, an anxiety prevalent enough to be the subject of study by psychologists. Some are increasingly desperate to be restless in their church work plagued by the fear that unless they do it the church will die.

The bible perspective is quite different. For believers, this brief life on earth is only the entry way into an eternity filled with joy and fulfilment beyond what our hearts can imagine, “what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2:9).

A Wall Street journalist was working on an article in a coffee ship and sent this tweet that went viral. “There’s a guy in this coffee shop and he’s sitting at a table and he’s not on his phone and he’s not on his laptop. He’s just drinking coffee. Psychopath.”  Why does he say that? Because ours is a restless age. It is a listless age. We must always be on something, doing something, on the infinite scroll, looking to the next thing, always and forever. Augustin famously wrote these words – “You have made for us yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

Perhaps it is worth stopping for a moment and resting in the words of John Greenleaf Whittier (1872)

O Sabbath rest by Galilee,

O calm of hills above,

where Jesus knelt to share with thee

the silence of eternity,

interpreted by love!

Drop thy still dews of quietness,

till all our strivings cease;

take from our souls the strain and stress,

and let our ordered lives confess

the beauty of thy peace.

Breathe through the heats of our desire

thy coolness and thy balm;

let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;

speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,

O still, small voice of calm!