Posted in: Wisdom's Way Providential Academy
We have started back to homeschooling and I’ve begun our 2nd half of the year with a new attitude, new vision, new (or maybe I should say RE-newed) purpose. I am sooooo grateful to our Gracious God for the blessing of REST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We took from the last week in Nov to the 2nd week in Jan. off for vacation/break….and ooohhhhh was it needed and appreciated!!! There is something to be said about taking REGULAR intervals of rest and actually in my own personal studies I’ve come across God’s principle of REST. He knew we would need rest and so He even instituted and incorporated rest into His commandments…”Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy”
Ex. 20:8-11
8Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
9Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work:
10But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:
11For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it
In fact Moses instructed the Israelites to observe the sabbath even before God wrote it on the tablets of the 10 commandments and as we all know God established His cycle of rest in the beginning when He rested on the seventh day in Genesis. Not only did He rest and establish rest but the Word says He made it HOLY!! Our seventh day of rest is HOLY..God considers it HOLY!! How awesome is that! I still don’t fully understand the import of it’s holiness but if God says it is HOLY unto Him then I shall begin to look at it as HOLY and treat it as HOLY…just like the tithe is HOLY unto Him. That is one thing that I’ve been taught not to mess with because the tithe is not ours, it is the Lord’s and it is HOLY unto Him. Therefore, I render it unto Him with respect and sobriety b/c it is HOLY….just like taking my rest when God says to take a rest.
God is just soooooo good…His very name means good(the scripture says God is good—-a little bit of mathematics here, if a=b then b=a….if God is good then the definition of the word good is God and vice versa). Anyway, God has given us daily rest periods(the time where we sleep), the then weekly rests(after we’ve worked for 6 days we are commanded to rest on the seventh…and as far as homeschooling I would encourage every homeschooling mom to schedule regular intervals of rest(and even one prolonged period of rest) in their homeschool schedules b/c it is soooo beneficial. I’ve come to see the answer to burnout, any kind of burnout is rest…but isn’t that what God told us to do in the beginning? I wonder why we’ve not seen it as important and as HOLY as God sees it? Of course it was not stressed in church about how important it is to rest…the 7th day was always spent in church and so was Wednesday night at bible study and so was Friday night prayer and then we go to work and take care of our families and try to spend time and have real relationships the remainder of the week and we are in “rest-deficits”….we don’t have anything to give b/c we violate God’s principle of rest and dont’ take the time to rest and be renewed.
The following is for your consideration:
Isaiah 58:13-14
13 “If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath
and from doing as you please on my holy day,
if you call the Sabbath a delight
and the LORD’s holy day honorable,
and if you honor it by not going your own way
and not doing as you please or speaking idle words,
14 then you will find your joy in the LORD,
and I will cause you to ride on the heights of the land
and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob.”
The mouth of the LORD has spoken.
This scripture says to me that God has promised a blessing in keeping what God has established as HOLY!
The book by Dr. Richard Heidler called The Messianic Church Arising has been such a blessing to me in pointing this principle out.
Something else that has been brewing in my heart is to study the Biblical feasts and not just study but to implement in our lives and homeschool. That is the reason I bought the book by Dr. Heidler. It has turned out to be a wonderful rsource for me (along with Chuck Pierce’s book called Reordering Your Day. This one talks about establishing the prayer watches in your life.) So I’m in prayer about what principles to bring out about each feast as we observe them. I’ll share what we do when we do it. My heart has also been pricked into acquiring more understanding of the Hebraic view of life, God, education, family, etc. Although man has put ‘labels’ on all these topics that I’ve mentioned I don’t see it as becoming Jewish or Hebrew but this quest I’m on is about attaining to the knowledge of The One Who Loved me and Gave His Life for Me…about knowing the Eternal, Ageless One Who Created me and Gave me Life and continues to sustain and commune with me…the One who beckons to me in the night seasons when all is quiet and everyone is sleep…beckoning me to come sit in His Presence JUST because He loves me and wants to spend time with me…the One who speaks Words of comfort to my storm-tossed and weary soul…a soul that is weary from worrying about our homeschool not being up-to-par, storm-tossed with the emotions and physical fatigue of taking care of sick children and rushing my 7yog to the hospital with 103 fever b/c it would go no lower on a Sunday and then my 2 yo coming down with a fever of 102, a soul that allowed itself to be burdened down with the care of finances that are not there in abundance the way I’ve prayed for them to be for so long and yet we still wait, etc, on and on…yet and still I praise Him. It is in these night seasons, at 3am, 4 am sometimes 12 midnight as I respond to His call that He frees me from these cares and concerns and He sets me free to rejoice in Him
I willfully issue forth a praise and I determine to live a life of love and obedience that I pray is a pleasing fragrance unto the Lord even thru the pressure of trial, testing, and warfare.
He continues to show Himself faithful in my life and on my behalf and I shall continue to worship Him for His goodness and to kiss His nail-scarred Hands and Feet…those precious Hands and Feet, I lay tender kisses of my love, of my praise….of my very life.