No matter how much I pray, serve or give, it never feels like enough for God. Is that how it is supposed to feel?

“Wherewith shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before the high God? shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

Micah stages a courtroom scene in which the worshipper escalates desperately: calves, then thousands of rams, then rivers of oil, and finally a firstborn child. It is the logic of somebody trying to satisfy God by sheer volume, followed to its horrifying end. The answer he receives is short and human sized, and its brevity is the whole point. God's requirement was never a quantity you had to reach.

“There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God. For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his.”

Hebrews was written to Jewish believers under pressure to return to a system of continual sacrifice, where the work was by design never finished. The writer holds out rest as the destination and defines it as ceasing from your own works. Rest here is not a holiday. It is the end of trying to establish yourself before God, which for an exhausted believer is the entire issue.