Scripture: Matthew 11 Vs 28
1 Corinthians 15 Vs 58
Sermon: Laboring for Christ…
Today, I am still unpacking this verse in Matthew…trying to understand all that it holds in the way of truth…all that it holds for us to learn.
We have already looked at the first part of this verse, “Come unto Me” and found that we are offered an invitation of a lifetime…an invitation from our Creator God to take our souls and make them Eternal with Him. We realized that accepting the Truth was essential and the very first step to gaining our Sanctification and then our Glorification.
Now, let’s look at the second part of this verse…”all those who labor”.
“Labor”. What does Christ mean when He looks at those who labor? What does He consider labor to be?
This little phrase exudes the image of hard work, sweat soaked clothes, the smell of body odor, dirty hands and mud-smeared faces. It gives the impression of toil and hardship…work and exertion.
There’s a little joke…”I love work…I can sit and watch it for hours.”
If you think about it, this little joke has some very deep insights into the nature of man. There are those that just sit and then there are those that do! Scripture says:
“Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find…doing”
There was a man I read about, Mr. Weber. He did odd jobs for people…fixing screens and mowing lawns. And when you would ask him when he would be coming around again, he would say, “If Jesus tarries, I’ll be back next week.” You see, for Mr. Weber, the imminent coming of Jesus was a daily fact. His whole attitude was like that of the Bibles…that of awaiting the return of Jesus.
The New Testament has little to say about the birth of Jesus...only in Gospel of Luke is there any space given over to the very birth of Christ, but it has a great deal to say about the Second Coming. For two thousand years the church has maintained the same emphasis, urging believers to watch with “feet shod and lamps lit”. When Jesus comes, he has said that He wants to find us doing the work He has given us to do…errands of love and caring…being Standing examples of His Way.
Examples like…
Charlotte Elliott, who wrote the words to the hymn “Just As I Am”. Charlotte was born in Clapham, England in 1789. She led a pretty normal life until the age of about 30, when her health began to fail and she became bedridden and sickly. With her failing health she became despondent, aching to die.
In 1822, a popular evangelist, Dr. Ceasar Malan, came to visit Charlotte. During that visit, he told her that even though she was sickly and bedridden, the Lord would take her “Just As She Was”.
This made a very great impression on Charlotte and she considered Dr. Malan’s visit as her spiritual birthday…her conversion. For many years she contemplated that God and Jesus would accept her “Just As She Was”. In fact she contemplated it for fourteen years before she wrote down the words, in 1836, to the hymn, “Just As I Am”.
Though Charlotte lived to be 82 years old, she never regained her health. She once wrote of her afflictions, “He knows and He alone, what it is to fight overpowering weakness and exhaustion…to not give in to slothfulness, depression and instability.”
The text of the hymn, “Just As I Am” was published in a book of other hymns that she wrote, in the hopes of garnering enough money to help her pastor-brother build a school for the children of poor ministers in England. Charlotte had always felt so helpless in her life. This was the one effort that she could contribute…words and music from her own life and relationship with God and Jesus.
Interestingly enough, this one hymn…one of 115 that were published, brought in more funds than any of her brother’s bazaars and projects combined. Her brother praised his sister highly and was amazed at her labor and fruitfulness.
After Charlotte Elliott died, among her effects was found thousands of letters from individual from all over the world expressing testimonials about what this one hymn had meant in their lives.
“Just as I am, Tho tossed about
With many a conflict and many a doubt,
Fighting and fears, within and without,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.”
Charlotte was a “Standing” example for Christ. Charlotte’s story is only one of thousands, though…stories of laboring to become fruitful…to become the fruit on Christ’s vine. You see, that’s what our Sanctification is all about…it‘s about our own efforts to become separated out for use by God…being the wheat, not the chaff. Once we have placed all our bets on God and His Son, Jesus and we truly believe that they are…we must labor to do His work for Him. We are the “Body of Christ” incarnate…His light must shine through us!
In anything and everything we do, we must reflect Jesus and His teachings. We must labor to show faith, hope and love…we must exude the Peace that comes from within us…the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. We must show that we are Christians and that we are not ashamed of it.
It is our job as Christians to move from the profane to the Holy…It is our job to affect those around us with this same spirit…the spirit of moving from bad to good…from sinner to saint…from Man…to a Child of God!
Being a Christian isn’t easy. Standing in the Faith, especially in today’s world, calls us to special challenges. For example, standing against the decay of our nations foundations…holding these truths, that were at one time, self-evident…holding these truths as absolutes and knowing that these truths were sent by God, himself for a nation that believed in God.
Paul labored for Christ…he wasn’t ashamed of his faith. He knew Jesus personally and he knew Jesus came out of God and that God was. His faith was so strong, that he was beaten, stoned, jailed and finally killed for his beliefs. His Christ, was also insulted, spit upon, humiliated, beaten and finally crucified.
Being Christian isn’t easy. Jesus said,”
If the world hates you, keep in mind that they hated me first….no servant is greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will persecute you, also.
So you can see, that the Christian life must be something you love…You must love being Christian. Once you’ve accepted Christ, you must love who He is and what He professes to be. You must love what His life stands for…You must love and believe in it so much that you are willing to be persecuted for it. It must become a “Labor of Love”.
There is a second part of this verse…”those who are heavy laden”.
A lecturer was giving a lecture to his students on stress management. He raised a glass of water and asked the audience. “How heavy do you think this glass of water is?
The students’ answers ranged from 20g to 500g.
The lecturer said, “The weight of this glass of water doesn’t matter. Knowing it’s correct weight isn’t the important concern…what matters is how long I have to hold it up. If I hold it for a minute, I can manage it. If I hold it for an hour, my arm will begin to ache and cramp. If I hold it for a day, I might have some serious problems with my arm.
It isn’t the exact weight that is the issue. The issue is how long do I have to hold it up.”
This lecturer was correct…it isn’t how heavy our burdens are, it’s how long we have to carry them. Do you have burdens that you are carrying?…burdens of guilt, shame…burdens of doubt and regret?
As I was preparing this sermon and came to this point about these ideas of guilt, shame, regret and doubt, I began to realize how these burdens paralyze us…how they slow us down and keep us from doing and living as we should, for Christ.
So I began looked up each of these ideas in my Bible Dictionary. It’s always interesting to me to find out everything I can about ideas like these. Let’s take a moment and look at just some of the burdens people carry with them every day.
Guilt and Shame…this idea of guilt and shame came into this world first through Adam. After eating from the Tree of Knowledge, Adam and Eve became guilty of breaking God’s only law for them and then they felt the shame and tried to hide…”Do not eat of the Tree of Knowledge”, that’s what He had told them. This one act required punishment and so God banned them from Paradise and declared that they would labor for all that they needed from thenceforth. To this day, we still must labor for our needs.
My dictionary defines Guilt as, “the act or state of having done a wrong or committed an offense…a painful feeling of self-reproach over having done something wrong or immoral. This guilty feeling can become shame…knowing that you might have lost the respect of others…knowing that you have done something that would distance you from your God.
I believe that this ‘painful feeling of self-reproach’ is what begins to paralyze you. The feeling that you have done something so wrong that it becomes a big part of what you think about…it interrupts your daily life and if it is carried long enough, it takes over your moment to moment living. It shades everything you do and everything you think about. You begin to realize that you have crossed the line and broken the law.
We know what the Law is. God gave them to us in the 10 Commandments. Jesus told us about them when He was with us here on earth…and then they were written on our hearts with the beginning of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. We know what the Law is. Every man and woman knows what’s right and what’s wrong.
It’s like telling the police officer, “I didn’t know the speed limit had dropped. How can you give me a ticket?” Proclaimed ignorance is not an excuse
God has done so much to seek us out. He has placed us in an amazing creation…He has spoken to us through the prophets…He has given us His laws for living a better life…He has given us the written Gospels…He has given us His Son!!! What else can He do to get us to wake up and live right!
“We are weak, but He is strong”…we cannot keep the laws…we are too weak. We continually stumble and fall. We continually are distracted by the world into our own stupid ways, thinking that we can do it on our own. Throughout the centuries man has devised philosophies about life that lead to nothing but sin and a lonely death.
You see without God, we are nothing. Our limited capacities cannot understand all the Ways of the Creator…the Creator of All Things. Why do we think we can find a better way…why do we think we can become tiny gods of our own?
Guilt and Shame, Regret and Doubt…these are the feelings that paralyze us and distance us from a loving God and his son, Jesus Christ. We let these feelings take us over and instead of going to Him, we try to hide our guilt and shame, just like Adam and Eve. We don’t even give God a chance to help us overcome these thoughts and feelings.
See, this is why we must obey the very first commandment to keep God first in our lives…following the teaching of Jesus…living a life full of His loving grace and mercy, because we are weak and because He is strong. He can give us the strength we need to find our way out of sin. He knows the way… for crying out loud…He created it!
When we finally understand…when we’ve finally heard the Word…we need to start “doing”…doing in the name of the Lord. Taking this Good News that we have found to others…to those who are still trying to be tiny gods of their own. Those who are trying live life by themselves…by their own rules.
There’s a tree that I see every time I come and go down the road to my house. It’s a sad thing to see, but also a glorious one, too. During the ice storm in January of 2002, this tree, like so many others, were weighed down to the point that whole trees broke in half. I could stand in my yard and watch huge limbs snap off from their trunks. It sounded like shotgun fire all around me.
Every branch on this tree broke over and fell to the ground. All the branches pointed downward, instead of up toward the sky. It was so sad to see this tree completely destroyed by the weight of the ice. I wondered how anything would ever survive that ice storm.
But now, 2 years later, new limbs have grown…the green of life is sprouting again, and even though the old large branches still point downward, the tree is beginning to look like a tree again, with its new branches reaching upward toward the sky.
I look at that tree and I think about my own faith…Now that I have declared my faith in God and now that I labor for Christ, will I be able to withstand the persecution that I know will be coming…will my roots sink deeply enough to draw the living water and God’s nourishment. If my life becomes broken and fallen over, like that tree, will I be able to put out new growth…with I be able continue to fight the good fight and finish the race? Will I be able to raise my hands to heaven and praise God again?
What about you? Has your life been broken? Does your faith weaken under the weight of burdens that you have carried for a long time? Can you still trust enough to let Christ help you lift those burdens from you so that instead of looking downward, you can look up again toward heaven and our heavenly Father…so that you too can again labor for your Lord in peace and joy, reflecting His teachings of faith, hope and love to those whom you meet in this life.
“Come unto Me, All those who labor and are heavy laden”…that’s what our Savior said. All we have to do is believe that God and Jesus can do what they said they could do…all we have to do is look around us and see His amazing creation…all we have to do is know His Laws…all we have to do is read His Gospel…
All we have to do is remember that Christ let himself be nailed to a cross…and remember that He took our place!
Pause…
It’s time to start thinking like Mr. Weber…that Christ is coming back and He will see those who are sitting and those who are working. He will see those who are trying to show their Faith. He will see those who are loving and caring. He will see those who have Hope.
The Gospel tells us in 1st Thessalonians 1: verse 3…that before our God and Father, our work is produced by our faith…that our labor is prompted by our love…and that our endurance will be inspired by our hope in our lord, Jesus Christ.
Do you have that ‘faith’, that ‘hope’, that ‘love’ that it takes to be “doing” when Christ comes again? Can we make ourselves a light for the world…can we be the salt of this earth? Can we be ‘fisher’s of men’?
Christ labored for us while He was here. He showed us that we should labor as the servants to this lost world. Do we have what it takes? Have you evaluated yourself lately, in light of what Christ wants you to do?
Are you sitting…or are you doing?
Amen.
Matthew 11: 28
28"Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.
1 Corinthians 15: Vs 58
58Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.
