Intro:
Have you ever just had one of those days or weeks where everything seems to be falling apart around us or the pace of life seems overwhelming and we’re not sure how much more we can handle?
A while back, I found a newspaper article online from Tacoma, Washington. It was the story of a Bassett Hound named Tattoo. Tattoo was not a big fan of exercise and didn’t intend to go for an evening run, but when his owner shut the dog’s leash in the car door and took off for a drive – with Tattoo still outside the vehicle, he had no choice. A motorcycle officer noticed the passing vehicle with something dragging behind it. He commented that the poor basset hound with it’s short little legs was, “picking them up and putting them down as fast as he could.” He chased the car to a stop, and Tattoo was rescued. The dog had reached a top speed of 25 miles per hour, falling down and rolling over several times but survived and was unharmed.
When we have one of those days, or weeks, or months, or for some of us it’s the only lifestyle we know, we’re a lot like Tattoo, our legs just don’t seem to be long enough and we’re picking them up and putting them down as fast as we can as we try to keep up with life– falling every once in a while and rolling around & feeling as if we’re being dragged along.
Maybe it’s the pressures of your job, early mornings and late nights have become the rule instead of the exception. Your workload is like digging a hole in the sand, no matter how much you take out, there’s always more that pours back in. We probably could handle just that, but on top of job stress and responsibilities, there’s more. We face financial pressures, mortgages, college bills, retirement planning and savings. There are family responsibilities too, you are expected to be a good husband or a good wife. Marriages need to be worked at and that takes time and energy. If you have kids in the house you are expected to parent them to the best of your ability as well to ensure that they have everything that they need and that they turn out alright so that people won’t think that somehow you messed them up! That’s a lot of pressure. We’re expected to involve them in everything that we can so that they are well rounded and to cart them here and there as their busy schedules demand. Sports, school activities, brownies, boy scouts, play dates, all of these are good things but boy can they take a lot out of you as a parent and as a family.
We have a lot going on in our lives, our day planners are jam packed with people to meet, places to go and things to do and to get done.
Time magazine noted that back in the 60’s, that expert testimony was given to a Senate sub-committee on time management. They predicted that advances in technology would radically change how many hours a week people worked. They forecasted that the average American would be working 22 hours a week within 20 years. “The great challenge,” the experts said, “would be figuring out what to do with all the excess time.” Over 40 years later, after major advances in technology – how many of us are wondering what to do with all the excess time on our hands?
Life isn’t always what we thought it would be. It’s hard! It drains us, it depletes the energy that we have. For many of us it’s go, go , go, from the moment we rise until we close our eyes at night. Most of us could use a good long nap and to forget about everything that’s going on for a little while or for our world to slow down long enough for us to catch up and catch our breath. All of us need and desire rest.
As we look at the book of Matthew this morning, rest is exactly what Jesus offers. Listen to verses 28-30 in Chapter 11. Rest for the weary, relief for the burdened, rest for the soul. Sounds nice doesn’t it? Where do I sign up? What do I need to do to get that? Before we look at this beautiful promise of Christ to the people that He loves and came to save, and what it requires of us, I want to get us caught up quickly to what else is going on in this chapter.
The disciples have just been sent out as we looked at last week. Verse one tells us that Jesus also goes out to preach. While He’s out, some men come to him from John the Baptist, who has been arrested and put into prison. Now, this is a very interesting part of the story. Do you remember way back at the beginning of this series when we looked at John the Baptist? He was a man that had been filled with the Holy Spirit from before birth. When Mary, Jesus’ mother visits Elizabeth, John’s mother, John, who is still in the womb, leaps for joy in the presence of Jesus, who is still in the womb. John knew who Jesus was before they were even born. Later, as Jesus comes down to be baptized by John, John witnesses the heavens open and the Spirit descend on Christ and hears the words of God the Father, “This is my Son, in Him I am well pleased.”
But John had expectations of what Jesus would be and what he would accomplish and Jesus was not living up to those expectations. Listen to Chapter 3 verse 11-12. John expects the Messiah to come and to put and end to the way things are. He expects the Messiah to come and to pour out His judgment on the nation of Israel and on the other nations of the world who have turned away from God. That’s not what Jesus is doing. John doesn’t get it and in Chapter 11, verse two it says that when John heard what Jesus was doing, he sent his disciples to Him with a question. He, no doubt, heard of the kind of men that Jesus had called to follow him, he heard what Christ had taught about love and mercy and the law on the side of the mountain. He probably heard that Jesus was making it a habit to eat and fellowship with sinners. He knew that Jesus’ disciples had gone out and were preaching and asking the people to repent, Christ was still giving them a chance to turn away from sin. This wasn’t the Jesus that John expected. And to top it all off, now John is sitting in a prison cell, where is his deliverer.
Most Christians find themselves in this place at some point in their lives. The place where Jesus doesn’t seem to be who you thought He was. He doesn’t seem to be doing .the things in your life and in others lives that you expect of him. Simply put: He is not meeting our expectations, whatever they may be. When we find ourselves in this place, doubt begins to creep in. We wonder if Jesus really is the answer. We wonder if He really is who He claims to be and if He’s capable of keeping the things that He promises.
We’re not alone. Even John the Baptist had his moments. Despite all that he had seen when Jesus didn’t appear to be the instrument of God’s Wrath and Judgment on mankind, like John thought he should be, he sent his disciples to ask Jesus this: Read verse 2-3.
John wasn’t sure anymore! Jesus answers and says to John’s disciples, look at all the things that have been done. Look at all of the that I have displayed my power and my authority. And then he says this in verse 6: Blessed is the one who does not fall away on account of me. Blessed is the one who still believes even when they don’t understand. When Jesus is working in a way that doesn’t meet some of the expectations that we put on Him, blessed is the one who still believes. In our lives, Jesus calls us to that same kind of faith. When we don’t understand and we don’t recognize the way that He is working, when doubt begins to creep in, and it will, that is when Jesus is asking us to trust and to see the things around us that He is accomplishing and broaden our understanding of who He is to include the new ways that He chooses to move.
So, Jesus is not bringing the judgment that John and many others expected. But He goes on to point out in this chapter that the judgment is coming. He denounces those cities that have refused to repent. These cities have seen Jesus perform miracles and heard Him speak and yet their hearts remained hard and Jesus speaks of how awful the Day of Judgment will be for those cities. See, the judgment is coming. The judgment that John and others were waiting for will come, but what John didn’t get was that Christ came to rescue and save as many from that judgment as possible.
This brings us to our main passage this morning, but in order to understand how this passage begins, we needed to have that background, we needed to see the events that have just taken place to understand what Jesus prays and then what He promises. He says that judgment is not what He came to bring even though there were many who were expecting it. The wise and learned people thought that they had the Messiah all figured out. They believed, in their vast knowledge that He would look a certain way and act a certain way and accomplish certain things, and as we’ve looked at already, even John fell into this trap. Listen to what Jesus prays: Read verses 25-27
He basically says, thank you, God, that things are not the way that everyone thought they should be. Thank you that you aren’t bound by what the smart and self assured people think you should do. You have made known your plans through those who are like children, able to be taught, willing to listen, and willing to change the way that they view You and Your kingdom and to trust that You know what’s best, not them.
I listened this last week as a teen and his counselor were deep in discussion. It was obvious that the counselor was not happy with the kid and I heard the teen say repeatedly: You don’t know me. Obviously he felt that the counselor was making claims and judgments based on misinformation and he didn’t really know what was going on with the kid or what the kid was really like.
As Jesus continues to talk, this is what he says next. He says “you don’t know me.” Only the Father truly knows why I have come. Your ideas and opinions are way off base because you don’t know me. And you don’t know my father. Only those who believe in me, who recognize me, will know My Father because I will reveal Him to them. So don’t assume that you know. Don’t assume that I’ve come to judge and to pour out wrath, the Day for that will come, but for now, this is what I offer, not judgment, but rest for those who are weary. Rest for those who are burdened. Not just physical rest, but rest for the soul, rest and peace in the deepest parts of who we are.
What a wonderful promise for those who accept it. Rest from chaos, help with our burdens and cares. But this promise, like so many others in Scripture, requires us to act. There are three aspects of this promise, three commands contained here that are our responsibility if we want experience the supernatural rest that comes from our relationship with Christ.
The First Command is this: In verse 28: Jesus says:
1) Come to Me
Come to me all who are weary and burdened. All who have been beaten and battered by life, come to me and you will find what it is that you need and what it is that you’re looking for. The initial response to this command comes when we accept Christ for the first time. So, the command to come is a call to salvation.
PS 62:1 My soul finds rest in God alone; my salvation comes from him.
It’s for those who are weary and tired of searching for meaning and purpose among the things that the world offers. They have tasted the world and found that it does not satisfy and now they are hearing the call of the Savior to come. And when they do, they find rest. They find peace that no one else can offer because now, they get it. Things begin to make sense, oh, that’s why I’m here, that’s why I was created. No longer is the future filled with uncertainty and fear, when they leave this place they can be assured of a glorious future in heaven with God and that is a promise that leads us all to rest.
The problem we face when we try and share this invitation with others is that there’s a whole lot of people that won’t admit that they’re weary. I can remember when Catherine was around two. She would fight sleep as hard as she possibly could. You could see the concentration on her face, she was not going to give in to the exhaustion and miss out on what was going on around her. She would have her eyes half closed and her thumb in her mouth and you could say, “Cate, are you tired?” Her immediate reply would be to open the eyes, lift her head and emphatically state, “No!” Then she would lay back down and fall asleep.
So many fight the weariness and are so caught up in excitement of everything that’s happening around them that they won’t admit their need for rest, they won’t admit that they’re lives are empty and the call to come goes unanswered in their lives. But for others, we have answered the call, we have placed our trust in the One who calls and we can experience the rest that he promises.
The command to come is also a standing offer to find rest even after the initial salvation experience. Not only are we to come when we are weary but Jesus says when we are burdened as well. When the things we talked about earlier are pressing in on all sides and we feel like we can’t stand up under their weight any longer, Jesus says to come. He wants us to lay our burdens down and to give them to him and when we’ve done that and we trust that He can handle them, you will experience rest.
1 Peter 5:7 Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.
PS 55:22 Cast your cares on the LORD and he will sustain you; he will never let the righteous fall.
What a promise! Then, we can join in praise with the Psalmist when he says:
PS 68:19 Praise be to the Lord, to God our Savior, who daily bears our burdens.
He will take what we give him and He will bear it with us, strengthening us and allowing us to get our legs back under us and to stand. When we come, when we allow Him to deal with our burdens, we will have rest.
The next command that God gives us here in this promise is to:
2) Take My Yoke –
The first command begins with a call to Salvation, to come to Christ. This is a call to surrender. Salvation, the gospel message, that’s the easy part. Accepting God’s free gift of grace and love and eternity is a joy. But it doesn’t end there, the Christian life is one of growth and each of us must come to that point in our growth where we surrender, where we give up trying to do things in our own strength and accept the strength, direction, and instruction that God offers.
In old war movies, when one side sees the hopelessness of their situation, they wave the white flag, they surrender. They give up! We all try to do things in our own strength from time to time but there are those, even in this room, who have never fully surrendered their lives to Him. Jesus says, Give Up, take my yoke upon you. He will not force it on us, but we must willingly get in with Him.
A yoke a carved piece of wood that was fitted to the neck and shoulders of a particular animal that was to wear it to prevent chafing. It was part of the harness used as a means of controlling and guiding the animal, whether it was oxen, donkeys, or mules in useful work. It is always the case that when a pair of animals is yoked together, the workload is reduced and more can be accomplished. To me this is amazing. God, is offering to be yoked with us. To be bound together and to help us in the work that He has for us. And when we obey, when we take that yoke, we will find the rest that he promises.
And he tells us this:, His yoke is easy. It will not choke us, it will not drag us down. It will be well fitting and custom made for us. His yoke is easy and He also says that His burden is light. In Those days, a relationship with God was anything but a light burden. The demands of the law and the rules and regulations that had to be followed were breaking the backs of many Jews who could not shoulder the load.
LK 11:46 Jesus replied, "And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.
Jesus came to lift that burden by fulfilling the law for us and freeing us from it. He carries the load.
My kids love to help me carry things. When we go to Home Depot, if I get a big board or something heavy, as soon as I get it home they want to help unload it. This is a burden that is far too heavy for them. Even if we split the weight 50/50, it would still be too much for them to bear. So, I carry about 98.5% of the load and they hold onto that one corner and the job gets done.
When we’re yoked with Christ, our burden is light, not because problems go away, not because God won’t ever ask anything of us, Jesus doesn’t say that there will be no burden, our burden is light because when we encounter situations in which the burden is too much for us to bear, Jesus is there shouldering the load and the burden is carried together. The weight we bear is something that we can handle and can manage.
There are some here today that are living under the weight of burdens they can’t handle. Maybe it’s the self imposed burdens of the world we live in that says: you gotta earn salvation, you have to be good enough, you have to match up, you have to look like this, act like this, own this and that. It’s an unachievable standard. The burden of Christ is not like that, he reveals that we are saved by faith, not by anything that we can earn. There are some people that if they could just grasp that Truth, a tremendous weight would be lifted off of their shoulders. Maybe it’s a burden of the circumstances that you’re going through. Jesus says, take my yoke. Get in with me, let’s do it together. And then your Father promises to help you carry the weight, to ease your burden so that you can rest. But first, you have to surrender and take the yoke upon yourself.
The third and final command that we have here is Jesus saying:
3) Learn From Me - This is the sanctification aspect of the promise.
Sanctification is the process in all of our lives where we are becoming more and more like Christ. This will happen naturally if we have followed the second command and we have yoked ourselves to Christ. Connecting ourselves with Him, leaning on Him, and following where he leads us. When we are yoked with Christ, we will learn from Him and begin this process of sanctification.
One day a man went by to see a farmer who was plowing his field with a team of oxen. The man noticed that one of the animals was seemingly a little bigger than the other so he asked him about it. The response from the farmer was very interesting. He said that the big animal was an older animal that was well trained and the smaller one was a young animal that was new to the yoke. The man went on to inquire as to why he put them together and this is the answer that He got, “Well you see, it’s like this. That older ox is the best ox that I have ever had; he knows his way around the field. The reason I put the younger one with him is so the older, more knowledgeable ox could teach him how to plow. If I never put them together the younger one would never learn. By himself the younger ox would pull himself to death, but together he learns to cooperate with and rest in the strength of the older ox.”
When we stop pulling by ourselves and take His yoke upon us, we will begin to learn what He wants us to learn as we follow by His side. I had a basketball coach in Jr. High who was a screamer. The way that he taught was to yell and to berate and to tear down. He loved to point out what we were doing wrong and seldom praised the things that we did right. Some people think of God this way, but Jesus says that’s not the case, we can learn from Him for He is gentle and humble in heart, the best kind of teacher. One who is patient and kind as He guides us towards those things that He wants us to learn. Patiently walking us through our shortcomings and cheering us on when we get it right. And he promises again, when we learn from Him we will find rest for our souls. We will have peace and be able to rest in the deepest parts of who we are. Even amidst tragedy, pain, busyness, or any other burden, we will be lead to rest for our weary soul.
We will be lie down in green pastures, we will be led beside quiet waters and we will know the peace of God in our lives that the world cannot understand. That’s the rest that Jesus promises for us. Bur we’ve got to come. Some of you still have not made that initial response to that invitation, have not experienced His salvation in our lives, and you’re tired and weary from searching for what can satisfy you. You’ll find it in Him. Others need to learn to cast our cares on Him, to stop the sin of worry and anxiety over our circumstances and trust that if we come to Him, we will find the rest we so desperately need.
Rest will come when we take His yoke on us. When we surrender, give up trying to do things on our own and let Him shoulder the load with us. His yoke is easy and His burden is light. And if you want rest, rest for our souls, we’ve got to learn from Him. To allow that process of sanctification to begin in our lives and to grow more like Christ each day as we listen to the gentle and humble instruction of a master teacher.
PRAY (heads bowed, eyes closed)
All of us desire rest. Jesus promises that its there for us. His promises never fail, he has not broken one yet and he won’t start with you. What needs to happen in your life to find that rest? Do you need salvation, have you ever truly surrendered, or are you stuck on the sanctification part, your in the yoke but you’re just kind of grazing, really not moving ahead. As we sing this last hymn, I want you to spend a moment with God, he wants to give you rest,
PS 62:5 Find rest, O my soul, in God alone; my hope comes from him.
Ask Him what part you need to work on in your life. If He is speaking to you, the altar is open, come and do business with your God, come and find rest for your weary soul today.
