The revelation of entering into God’s rest is flowing strongly in the Body of Christ today and things are happening because of it.
God is saying, No more toil—rest in the blessing.
We are seeing people all over the world get hold of God’s rest. As they rest, ceasing from their own toil, they hear the Word of the Lord more clearly, take hold of it by faith and receive His promises in abundance in all areas of life.
Every revelation of God’s master plan is connected to His original purpose for earth and for His man. Looking back to the beginning, we can see what He’s always had in His heart for mankind. When God began time, He did His work in six days and “rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made” (Genesis 2:2).
God called every kind of fish out of the sea and all kinds of plants and animals out of the earth. But when He got to Adam, the first man—the first one of you and me—He called Adam out of Himself. Adam was the exact duplicate of God, made in His image.
God and Adam functioned in this earth not as two but as one. And God blessed Adam and said to him, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion…” (Genesis 1:28).
With that blessing, God’s work was complete. He was finished and He rested.
God took a spot on earth He called Eden and created a garden. His plan was that as Adam lived forever in the blessing God had commanded, the garden would take over the whole earth. All He asked Adam to do was to plant heaven in the earth and flourish in the blessing.
God’s blessing was powerful enough to do it. All Adam had to do was rest in the blessing.
The grace to live in the blessing was in God’s union with Adam. The supply of all Adam’s needs and desires was in that union but Adam let himself be talked right out of the blessing.
Adam chose to satisfy his needs his way and suddenly he and Eve were out there “going it alone.” They put themselves in a position to operate in the earth apart from God’s plan—apart from the blessing of God. In Genesis 3:17, God declared to Adam that “…the ground is under a curse because of you; in sorrow and toil shall you eat [of the fruits] of it all the days of your life” (The Amplified Bible). The word “toil” means “to work; to exert strength with pain or fatigue in body or mind.”
Our ancestors lost a lot with that decision but God did not give up.
God may have rested on the seventh day of creation but His plan continued. Man may have quit on God but God was determined from before the foundation of the earth that this would be the place where His blessing would rest and His man would be both the deliverer and recipient of His plan.
For hundreds of years after Adam, God was continually on the lookout for a man who would receive all He had to give him, including rest in the earth. God revealed His plan to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses and David and they all lived in the plan for a season. Then, either they or their descendants would get off course and God’s people would end up back in a wilderness of one form or another.
Generations later, God spoke through the prophet Isaiah about what He had envisioned for the earth and its people, in Isaiah 51:2-3, “… and He will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord…”
Through the faith of Abraham, a portion of the earth actually was delivered and turned into a garden of the Lord for his descendants. Abraham received that land and fulfilled God’s planned relationship between man and earth in his land.
As Abraham’s family history unfolded, his descendants abandoned their land and their blessing and took generations of their family into bondage. But God never gave up. He never stopped talking to His people about His plan to bring them to their place of rest and no more toil.
The prophet Ezekiel spoke of looking forward to the day of His unfolding plan in Ezekiel 36:33-36. Well, we are in that day. We are in the greatest day of His plan. By the precious blood of His Son, Jesus, God has cleansed us of our iniquities. He has delivered to the Body of Christ the blessing Jesus regained for us.
And now we are getting in on all that means to us, His children. He is causing us to dwell in our cities and build the wastelands in them. Our desolate lands and desolate people are being replanted and are flourishing again as He intended for the Garden of Eden.
As His people get onboard with Him, walking in His plan, taking hold of His Word and allowing Him to do what He says, we are at rest—no more toil.
“So, does that mean we just sit around and do nothing?” someone may ask.
No, but what the Lord calls us to do we can do without toil. We do the good work of God that He created us for in Christ Jesus, resting in Him and apart from the kind of toil that brings pain to body and mind.
We get out there in our communities and in the world, resting in the blessing, declaring His Word and completing His plan to reveal His garden wherever we are.
Jesus demonstrated time and again the kind of work God intends for us to do. Peter had “toiled all night” to catch fish but when he heard the Word of Jesus, he just threw out the net and took what may have been the biggest haul of his life (Luke 5:1-7). That’s how our work for the Lord should be.
And we’re seeing it happen.
We’re getting out there in our communities and in the world, resting in the blessing as we go. We are being planted in the world as visible signs of the Garden, recouping and recovering all that was lost.
And here’s the best part: People are becoming curious as they watch us receive such great results without toil, seeing what the Lord is doing.
The time has come for the Church to be the Church. People all over the world are waiting to see something in our lives they can’t see in their own. They want rest.
As we progress in the rest of God and work without toil alongside Him, people will be lined up to get into our churches. The healing in our churches—the prosperity, the joy, the peace, the rest—will draw them. They will come through the doors of our churches, our homes, our businesses, our schools… wherever God’s people are at rest in Him. They will step through the doors in wonder and amazement to be part of heaven on earth, to receive the life of God with no more toil.
The Rev. Dr. Bill Winston is pastor of the 19,000-member Living Word Christian Center in Forest Park, Ill., and founder and president of the Joseph Business School, which recently opened a branch in Miami.
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