Are you standing on the firm and dry ground, the rock of salvation Jesus Christ? Jesus rescues us from disobedience and death, to obedience and life—abundant life! When he made vintage wedding wine he made a lot of it! (John 2:6). When he fed the five thousand with loaves and fishes, there were twelve baskets of leftovers (John 6:13).  “He satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things!” (Ps. 107:9). And look at the home that Jesus is preparing for us. The New Heaven and Earth, a place of unceasing abundance and life.

Have you ever noticed how sad people look in cafés? There we are with our hot coffee and a table heaving with Eggs Benedict, warm croissants, and smashed avocado on toast. And though we feast on foods that most will only ever see in a picture, we seem unhappy. Why so?
We are unhappy because though our stomachs are full of delicacies, our hearts are empty and our spirits are parched. We don’t know our Creator. We don’t know why we exist. God pours out love-gifts of sun and breath, food and family, and we don’t see him. We are dying, and we don’t want our lives to end. We don’t know where we are going, nor how to get there.
This must have been how the first readers of Genesis felt: Israel was enslaved and dying in Egypt at the hand of cruel and genocidal Pharaoh. The six days of Genesis 1 showed them God, who he is, and what he is about to do for them—and for all his people in the millennia ahead.
Creation began as a lightless, lifeless, formless, and watery chaos (Gen. 1:1-2). Then we see God laboring on this raw material over six days to make it habitable for humankind. Humanity needs light, and so on Day One God floodlit the blackness. Humanity needs air, and so on Day Two he created the sky—a “vault” where humanity could breathe and live.
But human beings cannot live on water alone.
Even to travel across it, or to build above or on it, we need the hard materials that only dry land can provide. And when you read about the sailors of centuries past, after six months at sea even the most hardened sea dogs crave to see vegetation and to feel the coarse sand between their toes. We need the land and all that it produces for us. Our feet crave terra firma. And this is what God does on Day Three:

And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.

And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day. (Gen. 1:9-13)

Note again the sheer power of God. God speaks, the waters gather, dry ground appears. By naming the ground and gathered waters he proves ownership and determines purpose.
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When we feel weak and frustrated by how limited we are, we can turn to him and find rest, knowing he has taken care of all we need for salvation in the gospel. We don’t need to work without ceasing to prove our worth to our Father because Christ has already accomplished all we need for salvation. We can now serve God out of a place of rest and gratitude.

I collapsed into the wingback chair. A long walk on the trail pushing the stroller over bumps and ruts in the summer heat and humidity had exhausted my body. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth and begged for water. I propped my feet up and gulped down a glass of water and chewed into an energy bar to restore my body.
My eyes flitted over all the unfinished work surrounding me. The laundry still needed to be folded, the office still needed to be organized from cleaning out the desk, the kitchen floor still needed sweeping from supper, and the bathroom still needed renovating.
On days like this, I long for eternal strength. I wish I never became weak or faint. I wish I could stay up into the late hours of the night finishing all these projects without taking a break. Sometimes I even try to push through, knowing I’ll pay for it that night as I try to fall asleep with a racing mind and throbbing feet.
I not only do this in physical exhaustion but mental and emotional exhaustion. When I feel as if my mind is going to break from helping one more person, comforting one more screaming child, or volunteering for one more activity, I put my head down and plow forward anyway, taking on even more tasks.
Yet as humans, we will never know what it’s like to run without tiring, to exercise without sore muscles, to work at a desk all day and not have our minds turn to mush, or to care for every single hurting person we encounter. Though we may resist and pump more caffeine into our veins, eventually our bodies will give out. As mothers, we know how lack of sleep crumples us in every way and what happens when we spend an entire meal running from child to child serving food without ever sitting down to eat ourselves.
Can you relate to this constant drive toward exhaustion? This regular imaginary play that we can be eternal like God? Are you tired of it—but likewise feel as if you can’t stop? We must relinquish such travail and toil and rest in God’s eternality—though first, we should understand where this drive stems from.
The Culture of Efficiency
What leads to this constant striving to be eternal? Perhaps our modern culture plays a part.
Our current North American culture upholds and honors that which is efficient and produces the most content or product. If we have nothing to show for our work at the end of the day, was it truly worth it? If we didn’t maximize production and speed on every task, did we truly do our best? As AI continues to thrive, we may begin to wonder: if I can’t be eternal like God, I might get replaced by a machine.
Meanwhile, much of our meaningful work is anything but efficient. Relationships, parenthood, marriage, art, education, and pastoral care (to name just a few) are utterly inefficient when done well. It’s not productive to spend eighteen years producing a well-equipped, godly human being. Am I truly maximizing my time by spending several hours working on a painting only my husband and children will see? Perhaps you could have written a month’s worth of sermons this week if that family didn’t have an unexpected crisis.
Often we have less to show for ourselves at the end of the day, and to our world that is humiliating. But God calls us to a much humbler way of life: rest and trust in his eternality, accepting the good limits he placed on us.
God Is Eternal and We are Not
God is eternal. Dwell on that for a moment.
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When the fool is struck by the Word, those with understanding will understand and beware (Pro. 19:25). The lost have seen plenty of capitulation and flip-flopping all around them. What often sets them back, awakening them to grace, is seeing men and women of God stand with conviction for the whole counsel of God without getting red in the face for those portions of Leviticus about shell-fish. The world has seen plenty of cowardice, perhaps it is waiting for Christians who are actually courageous to believe, live, and declare the Word with boldness.

In the years that I’ve been writing publicly, a common contention is that pointing out and knocking down certain worldly viewpoints might be hurtful to people. The frequent rebuff I’ve seen is that Christians are supposed to be loving, not judgy and all that. Or some keyboard warrior will ask, “Why did you pick a fight on this or that issue, shouldn’t Christians be Gospel centered?”
Confronting some cultural nonsense, whether in the church or outside it, will often earn you the chiding of other Christians implying that you need to be more gracious, sweet, and kind. I’d like to address some of these objections, showing why we need twice the courage and half the niceness.
Impotent Gospel-Centeredness
First of all, too often claiming to be “Gospel-centered” has become an excuse to confine the Gospel to the size and scope of a linen closet. You’re not gospel-centered if you’re embarrassed by the Gospel as it is found in Leviticus, or in the hard sayings of Christ, or in the biting rhetoric of the Prophets, or in the salty stories of Judges. To be Gospel-centered actually requires us to be Bible-centered. We must read and receive the whole book.
You can think that John 3:16 is the only verse you need to hop up and down on, but even there, in that famous verse, Jesus clearly lays out the consequences of not believing in the only begotten Son: you will perish. Jesus seems to be implying, trigger warning, that outside of faith in Him there is no meaningful life.
It does no good to be Gospel-centered with an impotent Gospel. The Gospel of Christ is that He demands the whole of your life, your neighbor’s life, and Saudi Arabia’s life. He is Lord of all the earth. It all belongs to Christ. He has commanded us to disciple the nations, not coax them to join our religious LARPing club. Our Gospel is to the whole world, for the whole world.
The Godly Virtue of Picking Fights
Others object that picking a fight, by writing on a controversial topic (which I have been known to do), doesn’t seem very grace-filled. This all depends on if you define grace Biblically, or if you have had it defined for you by the sort of books with the author’s face taking up 90% of the front cover. Grace is proclaiming that God looks upon those in Christ with favor, having forgiven them all their sins. Grace is not molly-coddling folly or sin. Numerous examples of Prophets & Apostles, let alone our Lord Jesus, show that picking a fight can be the most godly course of action. Through these instances of godly fights, we see God’s grace displayed to sinners.
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