Finding Rest in Jesus

The following excerpt comes from the book titled Living Water by the Welsh minister Martyn Lloyd Jones (1899-1981). This book is an in depth examination of the story in John 4 about Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. As it looks at each verse in detail, it consistently points to Jesus as the eternal answer to our overwhelming thirst for true life in Him. In short, this book is pure honey in gospel content and in Lloyd Jones' easy to read writing style. That was actually what I was told by the Crossway books salesman who got me interested, and it indeed is true.

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"On what are we actually living? By what are we living? On what do we really depend?

I wonder, are we kept going by our own activities, by the various things that we have to do? This a question that every one of us should face.

Now this applies, I repeat, to all of us. The very routine of life sustains many people; they go on because they have to. Certain things must be done, and if they are not done, everything will end in chaos. So they are kept going by the demands, the needs, the necessities of life. And very often when, for various reasons such as illness or accident, they have to stop, they suddenly find that they have nothing to rest upon. Others are kept going by things that happen to them, by events and by circumstances, and so, centrally they have nothing on which they can depend and on which they live, nothing that ultimately sustains them.

Or, to put this question in a slightly different form, do you have a central rest in your life, a place of quiet, a place into which you can always retreat? Amid all the multifarious activities of life and of business, is there a place at the center where you can always go, where you know that you will have peace and quiet, where you delight to go because it gives you ultimate rest for your soul?

Or to put it still more directly, what does the Lord Jesus Christ himself really mean to us? This is ultimately the only question that matters...We shall never know him truly, and we shall never know this experience that he himself here describes to the woman of Samaria, until we realize our deepest need, which is this ultimate rest of our soul, the final peace and quiet and confidence and assurance, the ability to stand in the midst of life with all that is happening and all that may happen and know exactly where we are because of our relationship to him."

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Simply, in order to know our need for Jesus, we must realize our deepest need...an ultimate rest for our souls. Through the ups and downs of life...through the daily battle of trying not to fall into a cancerous self-justifying lifestyle...through the constant, idolatrous temptation of success and advancing in the earthly realm of whatever...through the warfare the human race has waged against its creator, we need peace. Rest is not easy to find within ourselves; more so, I believe it is impossible to find apart from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Jesus stabilizes the roller coaster of life by his steadfast promises we have in Him and His Word...Jesus sufficiently justified those in Him through faith on the cross 2000 years ago...and Jesus acts as the mediator between us and His father, to bring us back to Him. May we have rest in these truths for eternity.