When our bodies and hearts are weary escape and optimize are our go to renewal strategies. Some of us think that an escape to the beach or the mountains will provide the R-and-R we need. “After a trip to our favorite get away we will be good as new,” we tell ourselves. A number of us hope that optimizing our to-do lists, calendars, and paycheck routines will finally give rest to our restless hearts. Unfortunately, like so many of us have discovered, we have escaped and optimized but our bodies and hearts are still so tired. Here, we need the words of Augustine of Hippo who said, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

Eternal life is a key theme throughout John’s gospel. The kind of life John is presenting is the kind that begins in the present and will continue forever. It is life from God (1:13; 3:3, 5). Life that never ends sounds cool and all, but only if there is a certain quality to it. Eternal life according to John is marked by the love of God (3:16; 13:34-35; 1 John 4:8-12). So then we should say that eternal life is to know and enjoy God’s life and love. This should be incredibly appealing to us.

Proverbs is about living wisely in this world, and at first glance, it might seem that wisdom is about the right action. Do this. Don’t do that. Instead, this book teaches that true wisdom begins with the heart. It’s not first and and foremost about knowing the right thing or doing the right thing. True wisdom begins with enjoying the right things: enjoying God, creation, and neighbor. Sin exchanges enjoyment for exploitation. Yet, for the joy set before him, Christ Jesus—who is the Wisdom of God—endured the exploitation of the cross so that we might come to enjoy life with God. As we behold the Jesus of the cross and empty tomb we will become like him. Welcomed into his joy, his joy will be poured into our hearts, and his joy will overflow in our lives. As we become like Wisdom himself only then can we enjoy God for his own beauty and the creation and neighbors he gave to us. This is true wisdom.

In Psalm 18, David is sharing with us, his fellow sufferers, the comforting mercy he received from God. He was as good as dead, but, in his suffering David called out to the Lord, the Lord heard him, and delivered him. David looks back, “In my distress I called upon the LORD; to my God I cried for help. From his temple he heard my voice, and my cry to him reached his ears” (v. 6).  David comforts today’s sufferers by reminding us that God hears and answers our prayers. Like David, we should call upon the Lord for help in our distress. Some of us share experiences somewhat similar to David. We were on the verge of death or crisis, we prayed, and God delivered. We got to go home with a discharge note instead of a death certificate. These moments are truly of God’s mercy and a great comfort to us and others, but these moments of deliverance only delay the inevitable: death. So, we must remember to look beyond David to the comfort of King Jesus, the true and better David.

Jesus is the true King whose kingdom will have no end. His peaceful reign has no expiration date. His enemies, sin and death, have suffered a crippling blow. Jesus took to the cross. He was beaten, pierced, and forsaken on a cursed tree in the place of cursed sinners. On the third day he emerged from the grave taunting death: “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” Death has no answer. Death is dead. The eternal age of peace has begun and is coming still.