Saturday, August 25, 2012

Entering into the Lord's Rest (Hebrews 3-4)

There is an interesting phrase used in the scriptures about "the Lord's rest" so I decided to find out what is meant by that and how we can obtain that. In Hebrews 3-4 Paul talks about the children of Israel that Moses brought out of Egypt, many of them were disobedient and Paul says that they were not able to enter into the Lord's rest. In chapter 3, verse 19 he states that it was because of their unbelief and throughout chapter 3 he states other reasons like being hard hearted.
Source
In Doctrine & Covenants 84:24 it defines the Lord's rest as "the fulness of His glory" so the children of Israel were denying themselves the glory of God. In order to avoid making the same mistake ourselves we have to learn from the past and Paul helps us do that by repeating things we should avoid. The main one is not being hard hearted, we have to make sure we are doing what has been commanded of us and we have to encourage each other to do the same. We have to be obedient and follow the counsel of our leaders to lead us down the right path. In Hebrews 4, Paul gives counsel on things we should do to enter into the Lord's rest. He says that we need to do the opposite of what the children of Israel did and he also talks about how we need to rely on Christ in order to receive that rest. We can't make it on our own because we make mistakes but with Christ all things are possible. We can't just say we believe, we have to actually act on that belief like Christ says in Matthew 7:21, "Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven." We have to be obedient in order to receive the reward, it isn't enough to just say that we believe something and not do anything about it.

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