Our North Star and Anchor

In his preface to The Saints Everlasting Rest, Richard Baxter writes:

“What more welcome to men under personal afflictions, tiring duties, disappointments, or sufferings, than rest?” [The “rest” that Baxter writes about is our seeing the face of Christ; a “rest” that I believe the Bible teaches begins now and continually unfolds in Jesus Christ.]

“It is not our comfort only, but our stability. Our liveliness in all duties, our enduring of tribulation, our honoring of God, the vigor of our love, thankfulness, and all our graces; yea, the very being of our religion and Christianity depend on the believing, serious thoughts of our rest.” (italics mine).

While I have heard the saying, “People can be so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good,” I have seldom, if ever, seen a person like this. My experience has been quite the contrary. The people I have known who have a deep and abiding sense of Christ, of things above (Colossians 3:1-2), of the eternals, are those who tend to have more compassion and mercy on those around them; they are those who tend to use their time and resources to help others.

Note that Baxter is looking at life as it really is; we will have afflictions, we will have disappointments, we will have sufferings; Baxter’s Christianity is not “health and wealth” or “name it and claim it” or “maintain the status quo” or one of personal peace and affluence.

Baxter knows that when we are seeking Christ and the “rest” we have in Christ (Hebrews Chapter 4) that Christ becomes our North Star and our Anchor. (Consider that the men and women of faith in Hebrews 11 were “looking for a city that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.”) When we look to Jesus Christ we have stability, and when we have stability in Jesus Christ we have one response to suffering, one response to pain, one response to uncertainty, one response to mountains and valleys – Jesus Christ and the rest that we are on pilgrimage to reach, the rest that is already unfolding in our lives – for it is Jesus Himself who is our rest, our heart’s desire, our hope.

The professing-church today, at least in the West, is unstable; it runs here and there looking for a new teaching, a new experience, a new solution that will appeal to church attendees and prospective attendees and will solve our immediate problems – making us feel good. We are like puppies chasing their tails. We sow seed in soil with no depth or nutrients. We grow dis-eased crops. We plant annuals and do not cultivate perennials.

When Baxter writes “our liveliness in all duties” I take that to mean that the rest of Christ, and the life of Christ within us, animates all of life (John 15:1ff). We not only have a North Star and an Anchor, we have a constant source of Life, Divine Life, the very Life of Jesus Christ, the life of the Trinity, living and abiding with us.

What a blessing to enjoy stability in Jesus Christ in an unstable world!