A Place of Rest

About a month after 9/11, as you remember, we were in a period of great turmoil and fear. I started working on an idea I had for a painting. I didn’t know what to call it but I kept hearing in my spirit, “A Place of Rest”…”A Place of Rest”…”A Place of Rest”… I began to suspect that God was telling me this. It sounded to me like a scripture but I didn’t know where it was. In 2001 I did not yet know how to google. But then one evening, right before closing a couple walked in my gallery and the wife says to her husband, “hey look honey, he’s a Christian, he puts scriptures on some of his paintings.” Well that was my que to walk over. We introduced ourselves and as it turned out he was a Baptist minister. So I asked him if he ever heard of the phrase “a place of rest” in scripture. He said he would look it up when he got home. Later that night he called me freaking out. He said, “I found it! This is amazing! It’s in Isaiah 66:1, “Who will build a house for me and where will I find a place of rest?” He said, “you’re painting a house, it’s perfect!”

Well obviously, the house is a metaphor for a habitation of God. Our bodies are the habitation and he wants to find a place of rest in us.

In Hebrews 4 the writer explains that Jesus is our sabbath rest and we are to labor to enter into that rest.

If you have been busy doing other things, it only takes a little bit of house preparations to have Jesus come over.

As soon as he enters the house, your house becomes a place of rest.