Come To Jesus For The Rest You Need Most

Children love to play and run around. They are invigorating to watch and they add zest and vigour to life. They love to wake up, run and play.

Our eldest grandson Stevie is full of energy and joy and curiosity and a great willingness to engage in anything his parents, Elia and Stephen, plan to do. Strawberry picking - he’s there.

Swimming, he’s there. Bouncing castles and elaborate kiddie play spaces, he’s there.

Now kids generally find the other end of the day much more of a drag. It can be pretty tough to put a young child to bed.

They don’t want to ‘turn off’. They don’t want to stop. They’ll even keep going and going, like the Energizer Bunny, after they are long-since exhausted..

Adults, on the other hand, generally, love to sleep and find waking up a lot harder. Sleep, rather than being a ‘necessary evil’, as it is for kids, is a welcome relief to long days of living.

Our Scripture passage today comes about a third of the way through the Book of Matthew.

For the first third of the book, more or less, Jesus has mostly been teaching His disciples, the twelve men who were closest to Him, plus the many female disciples who also accompanied Him as they traveled from town to town.

So after talking to His disciples, Jesus goes to talk to people in the small towns of Galilee.

Now, Jesus is an incredible observer of people. His eyes are always wide open to people, to their situations, to their struggles and to their burdens.

We never see Jesus distracted or disinterested. Even at times when He is on His way to important meetings and such, He allows for unscheduled interactions with people.

And He watches. He sees. He knows. He empathizes. And one of the things He observed among the people…

the farmers, the labourers, the common workers, the moms with their kids, the grandparents, the seniors…

one of the things He saw was that there was a common weariness among folks.

And so Jesus speaks these words into the hearts and minds of the people:

Matthew 11: 28 "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."

Now, we might say that Jesus was just an observer of the obvious. But Jesus isn’t just stating a common problem. He is identifying with people, making it clear that He understands how they feel.

He understands the weight they carry. He understands how hard it is, how hard life is; how difficult and disappointing it can be;

how expectations seem like they have to constantly be adjusted downward in order to adapt to ever-declining realities in life.

Jesus understands all of this and more. And so He actually starts with an invitation. It’s not an invitation to think differently, to adopt a new philosophy, to somehow imagine that life is not as hard as it really is.

It’s actually much more simple than that. The invitation Jesus offers is to COME to Him.

It’s most accurately an invitation to come and receive an embrace. Come to a safe place, come to safe person. It’s an invitation to be safe with Him, to place your trust in Him, to let Him be your safest space.

C.S. Lewis, a great Christian writer and thinker, said that there is a God-shaped vacuum in every human being. There’s a built-in thing in us that, try as we might, we can’t fill that space with other stuff. It’s a space only made for God.

Lewis also said: “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”

Sometimes the weariness we feel comes from trying our best to seek fulfillment - even spiritual fulfillment - outside of Him;

Jesus who alone satisfies our deepest spiritual needs and longings, Jesus Who alone has the power and the ability to save us to the uttermost.

As Lewis said, when we locate something - some holy desire - in ourselves that we come to understand has no fulfillment in this world, this is a strong evidence that we are not made firstly for this world, as though this world can meet those needs.

No. We are made for glory, we were made for an eternal relationship with the living God. All those deep yearnings that we find so hard to express are fulfilled in Jesus

There are many paths that we can take to try to fill that void, that blank spot, that deep need, and that a big part of the story of humanity, and for some of us here today, it has been our story to seek spiritual truth in many ways.