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.
But there is only one way. That is Jesus, the Way, the truth and the life. Amen?
And Jesus here is giving us the gentlest invitation imaginable to come to Him so that He can fill that God-shaped vacuum. Again, this is not an invitation to religion. It’s not an advertisement for some philosophy or denomination. It’s a great huge welcome into the freedom of a life of God.
We are wearied and burdened by different things at different points in life.
I know that the pace of work and family life for me can sometimes spin out of control and can leave me quite fatigued physically.
That’s one kind of weariness. But there’s another kind of tiredness and burden we can carry.
When life slows down on the outside, things can quicken on the inside. We can be burdened by regrets, deep regrets about things done long ago that have no chance or choice of changing.
Those regrets can cycle over and over again in our minds and, you know, they can leave us tired and frustrated, they can rob us of enjoying life right now.
They can make us stuck in the past with an unbearable burden of regret and waste.
To us who are reliving these regrets Jesus speaks a word: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest”.
Sometimes we carry the weight of the world on our shoulders. We worry about this and we worry about that, we fret about things we have little or no control over.
Sometimes even mourning the loss of dearly loved ones, as necessary and natural as it is to mourn…sometimes our grief weighs on our shoulders.
In the early stages of grief, every new day’s awakening is a new breaking of the heart.
To us who fret and who mourn and who carry such a weight on our shoulders, Jesus says: “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."
So we have an invitation to come to God, to come to Jesus, God made flesh, to receive that divine comfort, that holy rest that we need so much. And then we have an invitation to offload our burdens on God, and to take His yoke upon us…His yoke or burden that is easy and light.
We’re not being asked to take on additional burdens. That’s not the sense of the Scripture at all.
We’re being asked to trade, or exchange, our burden for His. And the impact will be, the IMPACT WILL BE that we will find rest. We will find solace. We will find comfort. Our souls will be at peace.
It is only in Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, that we can truly find that peace that passes all understanding. And so we have in these few verses 3 important challenges that require some kind of response from us.
First we have the plea of Jesus Christ, in the form of an invitation: “Come to me”, Jesus says. He wants us to come to Him. He’s not setting up a list of rules we have to follow.
He’s not saying we have to be perfect, or anything other than what we really are right now. So please hear Jesus now as He speaks through His Word. And what He says is “Come”.
Don’t worry about changing your life so that God will accept you.
No one can do that anyway. Just respond with a humble yes or an enthusiastic yes, and see what God does in your life.
Secondly we see the type of people that Jesus welcomes. He welcomes the weary. He welcomes the burdened. He welcomes the heavy laden. If that in any way sounds like you, then please hear that you are among those who Jesus calls to be His people.
Thirdly we have a promise, and that promise is not a theory about something, it’s not an idea, it’s not a proposition.
The promise of Jesus is that He is a safe place for you. He is gentle. He is not going to hurt you, he is not going to be insensitive to your needs.
He is not going to yell or bark at you. Of course not…He is gentle. He is humble in heart. People who are arrogant and full of themselves are not good care-givers to the rest of us.
People who do things for us firstly for their own benefit can’t be trusted to have our well-being in mind.
But Jesus…Jesus is humble in heart. So humble in fact that the gospel of John records that He washed His disciples’ feet…He was willing to take on the lowliest of chores because He is not proud.
Think of it - the Creator of the universe, God Incarnate, stooped to wash the feet of his people. The Highest did the lowest of chores, but he did it to show His love, He did it to show us how we should live humbly and with a gentleness and welcome toward others.
So humble was Jesus that He willingly went to the cross so that He could take upon Himself the burdens of our lives, the burden of our sin.
So humble was Jesus that He gave His life as a willing sacrifice for you; and you only need to believe that this act of love was for you in order to receive the eternal benefits of His sacrifice.
And the final promise is something we all need. We need it now and we need the promise of it for eternity…Jesus says that when we come to Him we find rest for our souls.
Reminds me of the great Shepherd’s psalm:
The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he restores my soul. He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.
So may we come to Jesus, may we bring Him our weariness and our burdens.
May we trade our sorrows, may we trade our shame, may we trade our pain…every burden we carry, may we exchange it for the easy burden of Jesus.
May we embrace the One who extends His loving arms to each one here. May we say “Yes Lord” to Jesus invitation into the life of God. Let’s pray.
Lord God we thank you that Jesus spoke these words to the weary and the burdened.
Thank you that Jesus is interested in being close to us. He wants our lives to be entwined in His life, and all this for our benefit now and for our benefit in eternity.
God somewhere deep inside us we know this is what we need, We know this is what we want. Will you grant us faith to believe, and to receive Jesus Christ as the One who is Saviour and Lord?
And God will you grant each of us your peace. For it is in Jesus name we ask. Amen.
