A PISMO PEOPLE
I love to spend summer vacation time with my family at Pismo Beach. The climate near the ocean provides a welcome reprieve from the normal days of desert summer. While our friends and loved ones at home in the Antelope Valley swelter under the July sun, you can find the Spencers wearing sweatshirts to keep warm in the central coast fog. That is for real. The hotter it becomes in the Antelope Valley, the colder it seems to become along the ocean. There is doubtless no place closer to the Antelope Valley, where the weather is so distinctly different in July, than Pismo Beach. However, the vast weather differences have long spoken a message about my soul’s need for a Sabbath that portends more than a mere change of venue.
Everyone needs an occasional step back for extended Sabbath. Sabbath, though, implies a spiritual as well as physical rest. You do not need to travel to Pismo to obtain the kind of real rest that your soul needs. The biblical record confirms that the spiritual roots of Calvary’s cross are connected to the Sabbath rest. It was Jesus, after all, who completed His work of purchasing our salvation through the payment of His blood. It is in Him we trust in order to enter salvation’s rest from our soul’s enmity with God through the power of His blood sacrifice.
I can become a true Sabbath believer if I choose to live under the power of Jesus’ completed work at the cross every moment of every day. And if I will not live under the influence of the cross and its message, then no amount of Pismo reprieve will cure the tyranny of my life. There is also a message here about the influence of my life upon others if I am a believer at rest in my soul. People ought to come to believers like you and me and find a manifestation of rest by being around us. I do not mean that we ought to sit around as do-nothing individuals, but that the manner in which we conduct our lives echoes the faith in the One who is the Source of rest for our souls. Are you a believer like that? I hope so. That means that wherever you are is so much different than what everything else is about. You are indeed . . . a Pismo People.
Pastor Jan
