The Bible says, "...In repentance and rest you will be saved, in quietness and trust is your strength..." (Isa. 30:15). It also says, "Cease striving and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth" (Psa. 46:10).

That we should "cease striving" and "rest" does not mean that you should stop trying. It only means that we must reapply our effort to resting and not to working.

Repentance and growth—as the Bible describes it—happens because you rest into believing and trust toward God. Real growth does not happen because you work yourself up to achieving it.

Rather than working to achieve reasons for faith in ourselves, coming to the place of trust and believing is much more like resting than work. Even so, the Bible says we should work at resting.

For the one who has entered His rest has himself also rested from his works, as God did from His. Therefore let us be diligent to enter that rest, so that no one will fall, through following the same example of disobedience (Heb. 4:10,11).

Work at getting your heart to rest into a place of believing and trust toward God (Heb. 3:19-4:1). But don’t think of faith as state of being. You will never be able to say about your faith that, "I have arrived." Greater faith is always possible. The goal is to continually be improving your faith toward God. The goal is to continually be involved in the process.

It is work to wake ourselves up from our unthinking tendency to trust ourselves! Resting into faith is something that takes diligent effort. Work at resting, but don’t think of it as needing to pressure yourself into a higher state of believing. Faith is not something we can achieve. Don’t think of faith as something you can earn.

Faith is something we have to "rest" into similar to when we finally admit that we are tired and then we rest down into an over-stuffed chair after a hard day at work. At some point you say, "I’m tired. I give up. I have to rest." Faith works the same way.

So don’t try to pressure yourself into faith. Submit into believing the truth; "I give up. I have to rest." Adopt the attitude that "I can rest because it is the truth." by this, you can "rest" from the internal pressures of having to earn the right to experience God’s presence.

Work at resting from any sense of pressure that you have to perform or achieve in order to earn or deserve God’s presence. Learn to be aware of feelings inside of internal pressure to perform and achieve spiritually—and train your heart away from those things. React with thanks and praise about how you don’t have to live.

Take every opportunity that arises to train yourself to stop putting your faith in what you deserve or don’t deserve. Thrill your heart with great thanks and praise that God’s grace is grace. You just have to calm your heart with the truth—enough to receive it! Rest into believing.

Entering God’s rest, involves diligent work applied to believing that what God offers freely is far greater than anything we could earn by human effort. Applying your effort toward resting in the Lord will help you to more freely fill your thirsty desires with God.

The pressure you let yourself feel—without heart-training against it—will kill your ability to receive. Work at resting.

When you are drinking by earthly means there is an inner striving to achieve—something the Bible calls "works." Depending on earthly sources forces us to have to work at doing something that justifies our value. If feels like an inner pressure to perform—a threat to either perform better, or suffer the pain of being slapped with the truth that your humanity just isn’t enough.

You are living according to "works" when the pressure is on you to find earthly reasons to believe that you have a basis for pride. When you are depending on your earthly ways, you are also working to protect yourself from getting hurt by the earthly sources that you are trying to drink from. You work to keep from losing the approval of people. You work to align the circumstances with your goals. You work to keep people laughing. You work to avoid being wrong. Many of these things aren’t wrong in themselves—it is just that you can’t afford to be "drinking" in these ways.

Inside, it feels like you are reaching, stretching, pushing, extending, pressuring yourself—forever trying to find evidence that supports believing that the glory of your human "flesh" measures up to God’s standard. That is why earthly sources always leave us feeling empty and if they fill us, it is only pride.

When we depend on God, we don’t work at believing the glory of our humanity. We rest into believing His glory and our being able to trade our weaknesses for His strength—our inadequacies for the closeness of His adequacy. Your can rest because of grace—not because you achieve glory somehow.

Whether from earthly sources or God, delight is central to the entire process of "drinking." Even the possibility of being rewarded with delight drives us to pursue what ever we believe will supply. Whether it is friends, a doctrinal idea, or your job, you feel delight the moment you believe you have found the refuge of safety that you need. If it is your personality that you trust, you feel delight the moment you find evidence that other people are impressed. You feel a sense of delight when you feed yourself with your human strength, your speed. The same is true if you are depending on how kind you are to someone.

Drinking from the fountain of God should be our greatest thrill—our first love. The Bible says we should delight ourselves in abundance,

Ho! Every one who thirsts, come to the waters; And you who have no money come, buy and eat. Come, buy wine and milk Without money and without cost. Why do you spend money for what is not bread, And your wages for what does not satisfy? Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good, And delight yourself in abundance (Isa. 55:1,2).

Turn to God by thanking Him with great delight that, "The pleasure I long for is not the twisted glory there is in sin—there is far more glory in standing before God. Lord, I love the abundance of what I can drink by drawing near to You." Get your heart to hear that, "The pleasure I need most is not to change my earthly circumstances—I need God. Lord, I love Your grace to draw near to me and soothe me when things aren’t going well." Listening with an intent to hear and believe will help you to turn to God and find freedom to draw near.

The Heart-training promise...

Directing your heart to God is a process that must be assertive and repetitious. The Bible says,

"You shall therefore impress these words of mine on your heart and on your soul; and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontals on your forehead. You shall teach them to your sons, talking of them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road and when you lie down and when you rise up." (Deut. 11:18,19)

Talking about the truth when you sit and when you walk, when you lie down and when you rise up means that your heart-training must be repetitious. "Impressing" God’s words on your heart means that your heart-training must be assertive.

Elsewhere it says, "Bind them continually on your heart..." (Pro. 6:21). "Impressing" and "binding" the truth on your heart is a highly assertive process. A passive approach won’t work. Moving what you know from your head down to your heart requires that you repetitiously assert what your head knows down into your heart. If your attitude isn’t to strongly impress and bind the truth on your heart—repeatedly—you won’t be able to soften your heart as required.

The assertiveness you use to help your heart to hear needs to be strong. But to balance your assertiveness you also have to include a kindness that is just as extreme. Remember that you are helping yourself to be able to repent by quieting your fears with the truth.

You can’t let up, but working with your fears means you have to keep on nursing your heart along. So don’t just demand that your heart believe. Your dominant and demanding attitude will only cause your fears to become greater. Be assertive, repetitious, patient, and kind all at the same time.

Press ahead. Reassure your heart assertively, but rest into believing. Receive the truth with joy—but give delight and joy enough time to do their work. Don’t be discouraged with yourself. Expect to need to "impress" the truth on your heart over and over again. Your heart will hear.

When Israel was ready to go in and posses their promised land, God told the people to remove the idols from the land. He told them to go to war.

"...you are to tear down their altars and smash their sacred pillars and cut down their Asherim for you shall not worship any other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God" (Exo. 34:13,14).

We have to do the same. We have to make a declaration of war on the "other gods" in our lives. Effectiveness at turning our heart to God requires an attitude to be ruthlessly thorough.

Follow Jesus’ example, "And He made a scourge of cords, and drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen; and He poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables" (John 2:15). He was zealous about keeping the temple clean. He still is today. We need to have the same attitude toward ourselves because, "...we are the temple of the living God; just as God said, "I will dwell in them and walk among them; And I will be their God, and they shall be My people" (2 Cor. 6:16).

We need to be zealous about repentance (Rev. 3:19). The Bible also says, "Circumcise yourselves to the Lord And remove the foreskins of your heart..." (Jer 4:4). Be zealous and ruthless about cutting off all the ways you fill our desire for God apart from Him—even the little, subtle, and hidden ways.

Directing our heart toward God is like selling everything to buy the field in the parable below. Jesus said, "The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid again and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field" (Matthew 13:44). Be ruthless toward the believes and loves of your heart that keep you in bondage. Leave no rock unturned. Every discovery you make about how you are depending on earthly sources is a springboard for turning to God and greater dependence on Him. Buy the farm—delight to "die" to receiving from earthly sources.

We dare not allow our repentance to be surface. Otherwise, we will be "intermarrying" with little gods.

"So take diligent heed to yourselves to love the Lord your God. For if you ever go back and cling to the rest of these nations, these which remain among you, and intermarry with them, so that you associate with them and they with you, know with certainty that the Lord your God will not continue to drive these nations out from before you; but they will be a snare and a trap to you, and a whip on your sides and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from off this good land which the Lord your God has given you." Jos. 23:11-13 (See also Jeremiah 7:2-11 and Psalm 27:4)

But please note that the proper approach to being "ruthless and through" is that you get your heart to hear by using thanks and praise with delight—not by self-condemnation. Don’t miss this point! It is being ruthless—without condemnation—that will help your heart to hear. Condemnation will only make you harder.

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