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| Archives: Rest is a concept that is foreign to so many of us today. We live in a hustle-bustle world, trying to do everything, fix everything ourselves. We’ve swallowed the ‘me’ pill so completely that many of us live our lives in the self-indulgent, self-satisfying and self-centered fashion, and when it comes to rest, the rest must be me-centered. Others of us are in a merit-based or work-based religious system, whereby we exhaust ourselves with a continual onslaught of self-effort to appease the rules of the system. We’ve been taught that if we are in need of rest, it must come from our own making, with a set of prescribed rules and regulations that must be met before any true peace can come to us. Other of us desire rest so badly that we’ll compromise in other areas that require our attention. Others are seeking the truth in fact they crave it because their lives are a mess and want to find the meaning of it all. Sadly, many are finding the truth in all the wrong places We aren’t under Roman rule but there are so many other tyrants in our lives trying to occupy and take first place, and we keep putting them there or allow others to stack them high on our backs. They manipulate us, they inundate us with guilt, monopolize our time, our thoughts and our actions as well as our choices. In the center of it is a culture promoting “me-ism” to the maximum. Me, myself and I – for many of us is the center of the universe. I can do it on my own, with my own work and my own strength. In fact, there if there are solutions to life’s questions then I must find them. If there are problems to be solved, then I will work to find or create a resolution. If I’m looking for peace, rest and truth/meaning in my life, then I must look to my core inner self and pull out the solutions from within me! Right? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do? Jesus is saying, “No”. First notice the invitation. He is saying “come to me all of you who are weary and burdened”. This is an invitation, with no gimmicks or hoops to jump through. ‘Come to Me’, this is an action to be taken our part. It suggests that one will not come, that one would rather stay in their hole of self-centeredness, their hole of legalism and religiosity, their hole of sinfulness and especially their hole of trying to fix things on their own power. It is a command demanding an action; an action of repentance or a full turn around from carrying your own burden. Jesus isn’t to be one more thing to be stacked upon you. He is to be the primary thing. He should occupy your mind, your heart and actions in all things that you do. Yes, one still has their responsibilities and challenges in life, but stop trying to do it all by yourself, or fix it all yourself, or follow endless rules of a merit/work centered religion, stop carrying the guilt of sin, just stop carrying all that stuff…turn and come to Jesus. “I will give you rest”, notice the word ‘give’. It makes sense that Jesus would say that, after all His whole life on earth was all about giving, so here again He says He will give you rest. What kind of rest? Let’s look first at what Jesus says in the previous statement. “All things have been committed to Me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him’ Jesus said earlier in the topic that one must be like a child to receive the truth of God. A child is not wise. A small child is utterly dependent upon its parent(s). A baby is not self reliant. A baby can’t do anything productive on its own. A baby comes into the world not knowing anything, not able to survive on its own, completely and totally helpless, and it will stay that way all throughout their early years. This is the child likeness that Jesus is describing here; someone who is utterly dependent upon God in their humility, open and ready to receive the gift. There is also a very important aspect of humility here. The realization of the fact that your sinfulness is so egregious and heart breaking to God. It is so offensive to God to live in the “me”, after the fact that He gave His Son to us. And that Son lived and died a horrible death to pay that price of sin and so we wouldn’t have to live in the “me”, but rather in the “He” with a capital “H”. We needed saving from our sin, and so a Savior was given. Our hearts should be broken because of that sin, and we should be running toward our Savior. Why is humility in the equation here? Pride and self-centeredness, me-focused people, or people who desire to fix things themselves, are generally not humble. With this inward focus a barrier is created, many times not by choice, but rather as a by-product of their exhaustion of carrying the load themselves. The realization that they truly need the Savior is somehow covered under the stack upon stack of encumbrances on their back. These stacks are making them weary and overburdened. Jesus is saying, humble yourself; let me remove that weight. Notice that Jesus said, “….learn from Me for I am humble and gentle”. Jesus is saying should you also be. This is also the first step to the next phrase in which Jesus said, ‘Take my yoke upon you and learn from me”. I’ve never been around oxen or any large farm animal-for that matter. But it would appear that a yoke – like the one used on oxen –is a heavy and bulky piece of wood used to get two oxen to work and act as one. One ox can’t do his own thing when bound by a yoke to another ox, they work together and the yoke keeps them in place. Again, we hear Jesus’ command to take the His yoke. It again implies that one is content in carrying their own heavy yoke, full of earning-your-own-salvation methods and rules or running an exhausting circle of self-reform and going nowhere fast. This yoke is heavy with guilt, with anxiety and full of the crushing weight of more people adding to your already high stack...stacking and stacking until you can’t carry any more! All you want is rest! ‘Take my yoke and learn from me’. Remember the broken heart and the true realization that we should be running a sprint towards our Savior Jesus, with repentance on our hearts. Here again is another invitation to do just that. Break down that wall separating you and God, and “learn from me”. The invitation is there. It appears that not just the elect are invited to take this gift, but that Christians would be more open to take it. The Doctrine of Election and Jesus’ free gift to all in this passage are not up to me to reconcile, consider nor contemplate. He is God and that’s good enough for me. Again, the yoke is wonderful symbolism that reflects two working as one. Taking His yoke and learning from Him would encompass living Christ-like. That’s the hard part –isn’t it? I don’t know about you, but that is sometimes quite difficult for me. Now hear the good part of that phrase. Jesus says, “...and learn from Me”. Whew!! I am so glad that He added that!! Because I have so much to learn. Spurgeon called it ‘Jesus School”, and this school has but one book. You guessed it. This one book contains all that one needs to know about our God- our Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. One God in three persons. (we are so blessed in the United States where Bibles are so plentiful, where in other parts of the world people would give anything they had just to have one). The Holy Bible is the one true book, full of everything the Holy Spirit desired for us to know about our God, our Savior and our Helper. It is sufficient, it is right, it is the truth, and it’s alive, germane and relevant to our lives today. Why would God’s Word be anything but that? Those that are humble and child-like, those that are broken-hearted and repentant, they are those who Jesus has chosen to reveal Himself to. These will be the best students at ‘Jesus School”, because they’ll want to be. They’ll have a burning desire to be good learners-emulating the attributes of gentleness and humility with repentance. The yoke is a binding instrument, it binds one to another. His yoke will bind you to Him. But take heart, His yoke is easy, and His burden is light, but you must learn first. Notice that there are two rests in this passage. One that is given and one that is found. The given rest is the first step, the rest of repentance and of faithful trust and surrendering your burdens to Christ and letting Him work out the details, the rest from oppression of a works-oriented religious system. The first rest is a rest from having an unbearable weight of sin and the anxiety of that sinfulness plus the weight of self-effort that produces only exhaustion. That’s’ the first rest. The second rest is a rest for our souls. The eternal rest of heaven. Rest beyond description because it will be a rest found in eternal worship, service, eternal praise and glorifying God… a rest I know nothing about –but can only imagine. Tired? Overburdened by life’s stuff? Anxious? Feel sin’s crushing weight? Tired of what you think is a saving religion –only to find it full of ritual, empty creeds and ceremonies, devoid of any relationship with our Savior? Tired of the circle of self-effort? Tired of guilt? Tired of not knowing what to do about your sin caused guilt? Are you weary?…. Then:
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