Welcome to today's encouragement from our Daily Bread.

I'm Elisa Morgan, and I titled our reading, Permission to Rest.

We sat atop some beach boulders, my friend, Susie and I, watching the foam send up sea spray in arched curls.

Looking at the incoming waves crashing one after another against the rocks, Susie announced,

I love the ocean. It keeps moving so I don't have to.

Isn't it interesting how some of us feel we need permission to pause from our work

to rest? Well, that's just what our good God offers us. For six days, God spun the earth into

existence, creating light, land, vegetation, animals, and humans. Then, on the seventh day, God rested. In the Ten

commandments, God listed his rules for healthy living to honor him, including the command to

remember the Sabbath as a day of rest. In the New Testament, we see Jesus healing all the sick of the town and then early the next morning,

retreating to a solitary place to pray.

Purposefully, our God both worked and rested.

The rhythm of God's provision and work and his invitation to rest reverberates around us,

springs, planting, yields yields growth in the summer,

harvest in autumn, and rest in winter. Morning, noon, afternoon, evening, night. God orders our

lives for both work and rest, offering us permission to do both.

Today's our daily bread devotional scripture reading is from Genesis

1, verse 31 through chapter 2, verse 2. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good, and there was evening

and there was morning, the sixth day. Thus, the heavens and the earth were completed in all

their vast array. By the seventh day, God had finished the work he had been doing, so on the

seventh day, he rested from all his work.

Let's pray. Dear God, thank you that you made us to follow after your heart, to both work and rest for your glory in our good.

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