Come To Me Series

It feels like we really never got to celebrate summer. There are a few students here today. The students who had to start school a few weeks ago are probably already starting to begin to feel a little bit of stress and strain from the heavy curriculum that they took on or the heavy course load they took on. Maybe thinking initially I can handle those 18 credits and AP classes and all of a sudden you are feeling stress and tired about that. The parents are usually glad the kids get back to school, but at the same time they are probably feeling a little bit of anxiety and stress because they are beginning to see the homework their kids are going to have and the projects and they realize they are the ones that have to do most of the work. I used to hate those projects. Plus the running around of the kids to all the different sporting activities and extracurricular activities and that sort of thing. So they might be feeling already a little bit of tiredness and worriedness. Then you have the people that just constantly are always feeling tired or weary just because they are overloaded with the burdens of life. Constantly living in a state of being tired. Going from one season to the next and not even having the time to celebrate something like summer or something like Labor Day.

If you fit into one of those categories, then today’s passage would apply to many of you. This is Jesus saying “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 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. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” This passage is probably one of the most liberating and freeing passages in the entire New Testament if not the entire Bible. In this passage, Jesus is making this phenomenal invitation. He is saying if you are tired, burned out, worn down, tired of running the rat race of life, just come to me and I will give you complete rest. I will give you rest not just for the body, mind, and spirit but rest for the entire being. Rest for your soul. I don’t have time to get into the idea of what a soul is. I will spend some time with it hopefully in the next few months and I will be talking about the soul. Today, I just want to think about this definition of the soul that is given by a theologian and philosopher named Dallas Willard. Dallas Willard writes “The soul is that aspect of your whole being that correlates, integrates, and enlivens everything going on in the various dimensions of the self. It is the life center of a human being.” The soul can be thought of as the thing that holds everything together; body, mind, and spirit. It is what makes you uniquely you. If you have a body, mind, spirit, and soul, and if your body is worn down, your spirit is worn down, and your mind is worn down and tired, you are pretty much going to have a tired soul. That is what we are talking about today. I wanted to address first these various dimensions, body, mind, and spirit, and how they do weigh upon the soul. Many people, including many people here today, are probably feeling a little bit of tiredness in your body. You are just feeling worn down maybe because you are overworked or maybe simply because you do not get enough sleep. I was reading a recent study that said the average American gets 6.8 hours of sleep per night. Back in the 40s, people were getting 8 hours. They are saying we need between 7 and 9 hours of sleep. If that is true, then we know that there are a lot of people walking around just tired, including people here today. Including myself. I am a little tired because I got about 4 hours of sleep last night. The body can be tired. I don’t know what they use nowadays. When I was in college, we would pump ourselves with caffeine and the drug of choice was No Doz. It was basically a caffeine pill. Nowadays they have all these things like Red Bull and 10-hour energy and energy bars. Those are things to help us get through our day especially when our bodies are tired. We know a tired body can hurt your health. It contributes to things like heart disease. It contributes to things like obesity and depression and diabetes and all these types of things. An unhealthy body or a tired body contributes to a tired soul. So a lot of people have tired bodies.