Faith Rest
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Divine Good Works

To see a whole local congregation promoting the eternal values that are associated with divine good production is a rare but a marvelous sight. For this reason, the Lord Jesus, who saw that in the Thyatira church, highly commended them. The resources that are available to each believer for serving the Lord Jesus should never be squandered on human good production.

Love

The Christians in Thyatira were characterized by mental attitude love, and for this reason, they were a great joy to the Lord Jesus. The standards of divine righteousness are fulfilled by those who exercise mental attitude love toward God and toward man. For this reason, the Lord Jesus says, "All the law is summed up in this word: 'agape.'" All of your relationships to other people are summed up in one word: "agape" – loving your neighbor as yourself, loving God with all your heart, with all your soul, and so on.

Faith

Inerrancy

In Thyatira, the people believed that they must obey what was written in Scripture, because they believed that it accurately conveyed to them the mind of God. For this reason, because this is such an important matter, we have urged you that you should not fellowship or support any groups or any individual who reject the inerrancy of the Scriptures. That is an expression of arrogant intellectualism, and it is condemned by the Word of God. It is not justified by the Word of God. And you violate the Word of God by associating yourself in any kind of sympathetic way with someone who holds such a very dangerous error.

It is out of this very church at Thyatira that the horrible expression of religion known as the Roman Catholic Church today was born – this conglomeration and this amalgamation of New Testament Christianity with the paganism of the ancient Babylonian mystery cults. And it happened because people began compromising the Word of God as being absolutely without error, and therefore the final authority in spiritual things. Once you permitted a bishop; once you permitted a religious leader; once you permitted a church council; or, once you permitted a pope to speak as the final authority for God, then all divine viewpoint was undermined and gone. Only the Word of God has preserved what God thinks and what God says. That's why, a little later, we'll be referring to one of these churches, and in the next letter that represents the glorious return to the Scriptures as the sole guide for faith and practice. That was the marvels of the Reformation which brought humanity out of the Dark Ages and back to the enlightenment of the Word of God.

So inerrancy is a very serious matter. Do not take it lightly. Do not treat lightly people who reject it. They are serious heretics and should be treated accordingly. I don't care how they smile. I don't care how sweet they are. I don't care how kind they are or how nice they treat you. They are dangerous people. You are not to lack mental attitude love toward them, but you are not to engage in compatible Christian fellowship with them.

So now we go on a little further with looking at the faith which the Christians at Thyatira were characterized by. It expressed itself, first of all, in the confidence and a firm conviction that God had given us an inerrant revelation. Faith in the Word of God also expresses itself in a second way. That is that it expresses itself in conduct which is based upon the directives of the Word of God. If you have genuine functioning faith, as a believer, you will conduct yourselves as per the directives of God that He has given us for human relationships and for human conduct. In 2 Corinthians 5:4-7, Paul says, "For we walk by faith, not by sight." We walk by faith in what? We walk by faith in what God has said. We do not walk by sight, which is the way our society walks today in our country. They walk according to the site of what other people do. The terrible moral condition of this country is the direct result of the fact that people are walking by the sight of what they see other people do. They are not walking as per the absolute authority of what God has directed as moral and human conduct.

So if you have faith, you will discover that it will produce holiness in your daily walk – experiential sanctification. Your walk will not be based upon human viewpoint reasoning which is characteristic of the unbeliever. Faith in God's directives results in living according to the will of God. If you want to know how to live according to the will of God, you can take a giant step forward in that direction by simply studying what the Word of God has directed us to do – what the Word of God has given us as guidelines for living. If you believe that, and that's what having faith in that means, then you will live according to the will of God, simply because you are obeying the directives of God. If you reject God's guidelines, it results in living according to the central flesh, and you will then be self-centered and pursue an animal sensual gratification.

Unbelief causes one to waver from divine viewpoint conduct to human viewpoint conduct. All human viewpoint conduct is simply justified by the fact that you're just not sure that this is what God requires. When the Lord has spoken, and He has given us in an inerrant Scripture, if God says you don't do this, then you don't do it. I don't care what our society says, and what the intellectuals of our society say, you don't do it. By the same token, when God says, "This is what you do as pertaining to Christian conduct," then that's what you do. You don't bring into question whether this now applies to you or does not apply to you.

Of course, we could stop here and explore this tremendously, but I'm going to have to leave that for you to apply to your case and to your own knowledge of Scripture. But the Word of God is very clear with directives for guidelines for living. If you have faith (genuine Holy Spirit-produced faith), then you will obey those directives.

Faith Rest

You and I are going to go out and we are going to run into a lot of problems this week. Some of you are going to stand aside from that problem, and you're going to deal with it. You're going to solve it. Other people's problems will come to you. You will stand aside. You'll deal with it. You'll help solve it, perhaps. But the one thing you'll not do is become part of the problem. This is the curse upon local Christianity: that people become part of the problem. This is what causes believers to take sides within a local congregation. Anytime you hear about a church has had a big argument within itself, and some of the members have split off and gone someplace else, you can be sure that the problem was lack of faith rest. Somebody in the operation became part of a problem that maybe was a genuine problem. But instead of solving the problem, they became part of the problem. Had they functioned under faith rest, they would have known that God is there to solve problems, and that God is going to solve problems within His ministry. He is the head of every local church. When a congregation permits Him to function as the head, I'll guarantee you that He will solve the problems without you and me becoming part of those problems.

Faith rest is a tremendous quality. For that reason, we ought to review it to be sure that you understand where the idea came from, and that it's not just a cute invention. These are two very critical biblical words: faith; and, rest. They are combined for us in Hebrews 4:1-11 in a very significant way. These verses explain to us the principle of faith rest. I'm not going to go into this in great detail – just sufficient to illuminate what the Lord was commending in the Thyatira believers. If you want the full doctrine and the full explanation, then get the series on the techniques of the Christian life that deal with the faith rest technique. This is one of the techniques of the Christian life. It is one of the procedures that you and I as Christians must daily practice.

Hebrews 4:1 begins: "Let us therefore fear, lest the promise of being left us of entering into His rest (there's is the word rest), any of you should seem to come short of it." Verse 1 tells us that God has a condition of rest for the believer. God never intended a believer to be in turmoil. God has only one condition for your soul, and that's peace. That is rest. That's the only condition that God ever intended and ever provided for the individual believer.

Here in this context, the writer uses the Exodus generation of Jews as a classic example of believers who do not trust God, and consequently, failed to enter the rest that God had for them. In the case of the Exodus generation, you'll remember that the rest that God had provided for them was in the prosperity and happiness of the Promised Land. They were being led to that prosperous place. They would have come through it in very short order, and they indeed did within a year's time. But when they arrived at the port of entry to the Promised Land, because they lacked faith to rest in God, they could not enter into the rest that God had provided for them. They did not believe God when He said, "Go in. These people are very strong. Your spies have correctly reported to you that they are a fantastic people. They are strong militarily. But I'm going to tell you something. You're going to gobble them up. You're going to put them in a meat grinder, and I'm going to give you a hold of the handle, and you're just going to grind up these Canaanite pagans to smithereens. You will walk in and you will possess the land. I have given it to you. Nothing will stop you."

You would have thought that having been slaves for so long, and having come with a heritage of over four centuries of slavery in Egypt, that they would have said, "Thank God. Hallelujah. Praise the Lord. It's at an end. We're ready to go in. Let's go in and let's wipe them out." But no. The rest was there, but the faith was lacking. You know the sad story. Consequently, everyone 20 years old and up had to go back out into the wilderness and die there. Only those 19 years old and under were permitted to enter this rest 40 years later.

Spiritually mature Christians have this condition of repose in their souls. They, for that reason, are not always in turmoil about things. They're not always hot under the collar. They're not always up in arms to set things straight. This is a sign of spiritual weakness. When you're hot-tempered; when you're hot under the collar; and, when you're forever storming around to set things straight, you're telling us that you lack the faith rest principle. Things do need to be put in perspective, but you don't have to become part of the problem to do that. It can be done in an orderly, effective manner that waits upon the Lord to resolve the problem. You don't have to go get your baseball bat and start slugging away in a wild melee in order to move the Lord's work forward. Violence, the Scripture tells us, does not produce righteousness.

So spiritually mature Christians are characterized by this quality of faith rest in believing God. Instead of Sabbath-like rest, for most Christians, there is fear; there is mental disorientation from reality; there is emotional turmoil; there are human viewpoint solutions; and there is deep-seated unhappiness. That is not a condition of peace. That is not a condition of rest.

So what verse one is telling us here is that God has a place of rest. God has the purpose of rest as being the quality of your soul. But some people fall short of it. Verse 2 says, "For unto us was the gospel preached as well as unto them. But the Word preached did not profit them, not being mixed (the next key word) with (and here's the third key word) faith in them that heard it." There's the factor: mixing faith with the promises of God so that the product is rest: the spirit of ease. The Exodus generation failed to mix faith with God's promises – the promises which would have brought them into the rest of the Promised Land. Christians today who do not believe what God says in the Bible cannot enjoy rest in their souls. They have no stability in the decisions they make. People who are believers make decisions that cause you to shake your head and say, "What on earth is that person thinking in making a move like that?" You can just be absolutely sure that they have forgotten the technique of faith rest and that that quality is not functioning in their lives. People who are functioning on faith rest do not make wild, asinine, stupid decisions that close doors of blessing and of opportunity of service to them.

So indeed, we are talking about something very important. When the Lord Jesus says, "I'm so pleased with the Thyatira church because of the faith I see there," He was talking about this quality of faith rest stability that characterized these people.

Verse 3: "For we who have believed do enter into rest, as He said, as I've sworn in My wrath, if they shall enter into My rest, although the works were finished from the foundation of the world." Thus, those who enjoy moment-by-moment peace in life have mixed faith with God's Word, and the result is a faith rest condition. There is a repose in the soul in the face of crises; a repose in the face of your failures; a repose in the face of pressures; a repose in the face of your losses; a repose in the face of your disappointments; and, a repose in the face of the unexpected that arises. That takes something. I can guarantee you that the ordinary person of the world does not have this kind of stability and repose in his soul in the face of this kind of turmoil and crisis that he may face. The faith rest principal expects God to be true to His Word and to His character so that all is well with our souls. That's what it amounts to. You know the Word of God; you know what His character is; you know what He has promised; and, you know that He will be faithful to it, so all is well with your soul. That is faith in what God has said with the product in your soul of rest. Faith rest expects God to come through for you in every instance of need. Faith rest is trusting in the divine viewpoint wisdom that God provides, rather than a human viewpoint reasoning that Satan provides.

All of you have had experiences where you say, "Boy, nothing is going right. Everything's coming apart. Here I'm trying to reach this goal, and I can't reach it. Things aren't falling together." If you are a believer who is functioning on faith rest, you won't come all apart; you won't become all nervous and upset; and, you won't get up in a frap. You'll realize, "I'm having these problems, and these things aren't coordinating, but the God who has promised to bless; the God who has promised to care for me; and, the God who has promised to provide beyond my fondest dreams and imaginations: He's out there working for me. If this stuff isn't clicking, there's a reason for it."

Again, we could spend the rest of this session with your testimonies and the experiences that I've observed and have had where I thought something was not going well, and where I was somewhat disappointed because what I thought was a great door to open closed, or something didn't gel that I thought would have been a wonderful thing, only to discover that indeed, farther down the line, the perspective that time gave showed that that would have been a terrible thing to happen. Our God, who is taking care of things, closed doors and changed direction of things because He has promised that He would take care of us.

When we see that things aren't falling together, faith rest keeps you stable, and keeps you from running around in some wild way to shove through what you think would be a wonderful thing to happen, but that God says, "Not at this time." Faith rest demands of us that we recognize that the Lord was showing us; the Lord was directing us; and, the Lord was closing doors. And sometimes, He does so even through people who are doing it out of ill motivation. Remember what we learned earlier in Romans? Paul is in prison, and these characters are out there giving him trouble – serving the Lord in competition with him, and trying to undermine what he's doing. But Paul, the man of faith rest said, "Oh, those yo-yos; those ding-a-lings. They think they're giving me trouble, and they think they're putting burdens on me, but I'm glad that the gospel is being preached: in the spirit of cooperation; or, in the spirit of competition, it makes no difference to me. The word is getting out." They were not disturbing the apostle Paul.

So here's the technique of faith rest. It knows what God stands for, and it acts accordingly. It doesn't pretend to act otherwise.

Someone told me today that one of the problems we have politically is not to be blamed on the party which has been in majority control of this nation for almost five decades now, and which has promoted the economic principles; the social policies; the complete reversal of the treatment of the local authority of states; and, the complete reversal of the interpretation of our Constitution. They should not be blamed. But those were just poor politicians who were doing what the people demanded. The problem was that the people weren't educated to what they should have wanted. The politicians were only giving the people what they wanted. The solution for it was to have a man who was a strong politician who would arise and would explain to the people, and teach them, and show them that what they wanted was bad, and that this was not the right thing to do. Well, we've been waiting for 50 years to find a politician like that. It seems to me that once you're in office, you're that man. Once you got elected, now you can start teaching them. I'd like to be president of the United States for a while. Boy, could I have some fireside chats on television to do some teaching. Why haven't the people who've been there been doing things like that? Most of them know just about everything I know, and they could teach the people.

Well, if you have faith rest, then you are exercising faith in what you know God has said and what God is. Therefore, you take a stand for what is right. An American patriot said, "I'd rather be right than be president." That's the principle. That is the thing that faith rest amounts to. It's acting according to what is right, as you know what God has said, and you have the full confidence that God is going to prosper and bless that.

So this compromising with error in order to stay in power or to create some kind of influence is bad business. This is the reason that I look askance at preachers into relating themselves in various fellowships and organizations. This is why I've avoided the fellowship of the Saturday morning preachers' breakfast clubs, because sooner or later you are in a position where you are seeking favor. You are seeking to have some benefit. Unless you are willing to stand as a man of God alone without the approval of established organizations; without the blessing of established organizations; without the approval of other preachers; and, without the blessings of other preachers, only that way can you be God's man, and no other way. That sin nature within us is going to compromise sooner or later in order that some organization that has influence will look well upon you, or that some group of preachers who have some potential favors that they could throw in your direction will feel kindly disposed toward you, and you'll compromise your voice as God's man.

Faith rest knows what God stands for. Then you act accordingly. You trust Him to solve the problems, and you trust Him to handle your stand. If you do not have faith rest, you are, as a believer, in a dangerous position when you don't get what you think you'd like to have, and what you think you really should have. This often results in bitterness and resentment toward God, because you have some ambition that isn't fulfilled, and you want to say, "Why did God do this to me?" Or you have some desires and they're not met, and you say, "Why did God deny this to me? I've served Him so long. I've broken my neck for Him. And here, this is the way He treats me." If you do not have the quality of faith rest, that's exactly the kind of bitterness you're going to have, and then you are in a tailspin.

The faith rest technique is not designed for emergency measures. It is not designed by God as something that you fall back upon when you're in a crisis situation – when you can do nothing else. It is designed to be the normal pattern of your Christian experience. Faith rest is not designed for when you're in trouble. It's designed for before you're in trouble as your normal relationship and expectation from our God.

I'll tell you that the world will hold such faith in God in considerable contempt. The world's principle is that God helps those who help themselves. But the Lord Jesus Christ highly commended the Thyatira Christians because they believed in God and trusted Him to do the helping. Consequently, there was rest in their souls.

Let's read rapidly through the rest of these in Hebrew 4:4 to complete the picture: "For he spoke in a certain place in the seventh day in this way. And God did rest the seventh day from all His works." The seventh day (the Sabbath day), which was a rest day, was a symbolic expression of this principle of faith rest. God has an eternal sabbatical rest for his people to enter.

Verse 5: "And in this place again, they shall enter into My rest, seeing therefore it remains that some must enter into it, and they to whom it was first preached entered not in because of unbelief (the Exodus generation). Again, he limited a certain day saying, in David, 'Today, after so long a time, as it is said, today, if you will hear His voice harden, not your hearts.' For if Joshua had given them rest, they would not afterward have spoken of another day." And, of course, had they listened to Joshua (one of the spies), they would have had rest, because Joshua said, "Those people are formidable, but God says we're going to whip them. Let's go in. We can take the land."

Verse 9: "There remains, therefore, a risk to the people of God." That generation of Jews did not find rest. But God has rest for His people. "For he that has entered into His rest, he has also ceased from his own works, as God did from His." And there you've got that human doing effort in order to find rest. God says, "When you're resting, you're not working." "Let us labor, therefore, to enter into that rest, lest any man fall after the same example of unbelief" (the unbelief of this Exodus generation). So faith rests here is symbolized by God's seventh-day Sabbath during the creation week. The Exodus generation missed the blessing of faith rest. They are an example which we should not imitate. Today, some Christians enter faith rest while others depend on their own capacities. Faith rest means enjoying the provisions of God's grace in abandoning all your trust in your own self works.

The faith rest technique is dependent, however, upon knowing Bible doctrine. I can guarantee you that the less you know of the promises of God; the less you know of the prophecies of God; and, the less you know of the doctrines of Scripture, the less faith rest you will have. You do not enter faith rest merely through some inspirational talk that you heard. You will not enter faith rest because you have been here today, and you say, "Yeah, I can see that this is the only way to live. That is great. I want it. That's how I'm going to be." No, you won't be. Until you have taken into your human spirit a great residue of divine viewpoint doctrine; promises; and, prophecies, you will not be capable of resting upon God, because you'll have nothing in which to have faith. You will be on an emotional jag. God's moment-by-moment rest in the angelic warfare is entered through the written Scriptures. That's what we call the grace system of perception – developing a knowledge of God's viewpoint through the Word of God.

Thus, this section on faith rest, that we have just read, ends with that famous verse, Hebrews 4:12, which says, "For the Word of God is living (or alive) and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intent of the heart." Without the knowledge of the Word of God, you cannot experience the faith rest that He has just described for us in the verses preceding, to which He has commended us.

The believers in the Thyatira church must have been some congregation, for the Lord Jesus to be able to look at them and say, "You people are characterized as a whole by the quality of faith rest." Lack of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ prevented Him, on one occasion, from doing mighty works for the people that He was dealing with. In Mark 6:1-6, we read about this. This shows what God can do with people who have faith, so that they rest to Him, and what He is restricted from doing with people who do not have faith and are not resting in Him: "And He went out from there and came into His own country, and His disciples followed Him. When the Sabbath day was come, He began to teach in the synagogue, and many hearing Him were astonished, saying, 'From where has this man these things, and what wisdom is this which is given to Him, that even such mighty works are wrought by His hands? Isn't this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James and Joseph, and of Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?' And they were offended at Him."

Incidentally, by the way, that's a tough verse for the Roman Catholic Church, which gives us this nonsense that Mary had no further children after Jesus, and that she was a perpetual virgin. You see very much right there the other children that she had, and that were the half-brothers and half-sisters of Jesus Christ.

Verse 4: "But Jesus said unto them, 'A prophet is not without honor but in his own country and among his own kin and in his own house." And he could there do no mighty work, except that he laid His hands upon a few sick folks and healed them. And He marveled because of their lack of faith (their unbelief). And He went round about the villages teaching."

What God would do for you and me if we would function on the technique of faith rest is absolutely marvelous. Faith rest provides the believer with unlimited possibilities. That's where it's all at – unlimited possibilities through the faith rest technique.

I will warn you about something if you are a Christian who develops this kind of stability. And that's what we're talking about – a very kind of stable person where you don't become part of other people's problems, but you become a helper to solve the problems. You will have this virtue degraded and belittled by other Christians. If you are a stable, solid, hardcore, faith rest type of believer, they will call you simplistic because you think that everything is easily solved. They will call you insensitive because you're not getting all up in a frap over their problem. They will call you an elephant hide because they can't cave you in to become part of their problem. They will call you oblivious and suggest that you just don't know what's going on. Or you wouldn't be so calm. They will accuse you of not having any self-respect, and they will call you harsh. All of these terms are applied by simply weak believers who lack faith rest who are trying to belittle the believer who has this kind of stability. Faith rest will provide you with mental, emotional, and physical good health. The people who have faith rest, and who function on faith rest, are the people who are mentally stable. They are the people who are emotionally under control, and they are the people who have good physical health. You are not destroying yourself physically by emotional tirades and the agonies that you cannot deal with, and that you cannot solve.

Jesus Christ was telling His disciples, "You can't change the color of your hair; you can't increase your stature; and, can't make yourself taller. You can't change some things. You'd be foolish not to accept them, and not to stop worrying about them." What He was talking about was faith rest that was later enunciated here in Hebrews.

So if you want good emotional, mental, and physical health, faith rest is the avenue to it. Faith rest makes us dependent upon Almighty God who is a God of holiness. It does not keep you and me dependent upon our sinful human puniness. When you do not have faith rest in your soul, it will be evidenced by certain outward factors, and it might help identify for you where you stand – whether you are in the tradition of the Thyatira Christians.

Believers who lack faith rest are in the habit of doing a lot of yelling. When they come into a problem and conflict, there's a lot of yelling. If you were able to hide in their home invisibly and listen to the normal routines, that would be very interesting. One thing that you would find with people who lack faith is there's a lot of yelling and screaming going on. You would also find that there's a lot of scheming and a lot of conniving. People who do not have faith rest are people who are constantly scheming.

This is one characteristic of a woman who's on the prowl for a man, and she lacks faith rest to wait to find the Lord to bring her together with her right man. She becomes a schemer. I've sort of made a study of facial expressions that women have when they become schemers. It startles me once in a while when I see it around here. It's generally so very cute. It's very hard for me to imitate the facial expressions, but boy, I can spot them. I know when I come into the presence of a female who's on the prowl, and she's being really coy and really cute. She is scheming. Sometimes it's for other reasons than the fact she's trying to find a man. It's because she's trying to get something out of you, and she's trying to con you in some way. She resorts to being cute in order to be able to get what she's out to connive and to con you into. She's a schemer. A person who does that is not depending on the Lord. That is not faith rest. That is not saying, "Father, I think that this is how you should move him. This is how he should go. This is how he should act. I wish he would just kind of get with it and see that he does it."

That is faith rest and depending upon the Lord to bring it about. That is quality womanhood. And men, in their ways, do the same thing. If you do not have faith rest, you're characterized by an awful lot of whining. It is terrible whining. It is usually very high-pitched whining too, which makes it very grating upon the souls of those who do have faith rest. You're constantly whining about your state; whining about what God is doing with you; whining about what your kids are doing; whining about what your husband or wife is doing; and, whining about what the other church members want to do. It is just whining because, again, you're not trusting the Lord to be our leader to solve your problems and our problems.

Self-Pity

So this was no small thing that the Lord was able to commend the Thyatira Christians for when he said, "I'm pleased with your faith: your faith in the Word of God as being an authoritative revelation for Me; your faith in what I have told you in that revelation for conducting your life; and, your faith in Me as your God, that I will care for you, so that you function on a spirit of rest in your soul, and of peace within your soul, because you are looking to Me and trusting Me to be the one who provides you." Our Lord has said, "I'll never leave you. I'll never forsake you." What have we to fear from those without? Indeed, what have we to fear? These are the marvels of the faith rest technique.

In the next session, we come to the next quality, which is Christian service. I want to mention that to you. Don't miss that one. This is going to open up worlds. For some of you, it will be refreshing your pure minds by way of remembrance. But the business of Christian service; the business of Christian soldiering; and, the AWOL and the deserters that we have within the Christian community make an interesting study. Be sure you're here.

Dr. John E. Danish, 1977

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