At that time Jesus said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this is what you were pleased to do.
“All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.
“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. 3For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:25–30
Rest? In this economy?
1. Jesus offers rest because of who he is
2. Jesus delivers rest into who you are
Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. You know what piece of Americana that reminds me of: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Maybe you memorized that poem in the third grade. It’s by Emma Lazarus and it was written about the statue of liberty. The poem talks about a huge part of America’s identity, how we wanted to be a place where people from other countries could come for a fresh start, for a chance to work themselves to better life. For these people, the statue of liberty would be a symbol of that new life.
And in many ways, we’ve succeeded in that vision. Think of how many stories there are of people being born into poverty or near-poverty and being able to work themselves to wealth. Think of how many more stories there are that we never hear about, of people born with very little being able to work themselves to a secure place in the middle class. And as our country has continued, we’ve reduced that poverty rate bit by bit until today, almost 9 out of 10 people in America live above the poverty rate. It turns out that this idea that’s associated with the statue of liberty, that if you come here you are free to work hard to make a life for yourself, it’s infectious. There’s a reason that our country has been a world leader in scientific innovation, in culture, in industry for so many decades: because when you take humans and tell them they’re free to light a fire under themselves and go do something cool, many of us get excited and do just that.
But there’s a cost for all of this pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps that we love to do. If you’ve been paying attention to the World Cup, maybe you’ve noticed it. People from other countries got here a few days before their team’s first pool play match way back in the beginning of June, and then many of them didn’t leave. They stayed for as long as their team stayed in the tournament, some for four or more weeks. When’s the last time you took four, five, six weeks off in a row from your job?
All this to say is that of all the things that makes up America’s DNA, rest isn’t in there. We don’t rest like we should, and we all know it, but there’s not much we can do about it besides pick up and move to a different country. And so there’s this stark difference between what the Statue of Liberty says and what Jesus says. Our country tells us that we are free to work, Jesus tells us he wants to give us rest, free of charge. We don’t rest to the point where, speaking for myself at least, I didn’t really know how to wrap my head around what Jesus says when he says that he’ll offer us rest. When I hear that, I think at first that Jesus is saying, “If you come and spend some time with me, if you read my Word for ten minutes in the morning, I’ll give you the chance to slow down and take a deep breath before you open your email.” But he’s not saying that. Well he is, but let’s not reduce Jesus to the equivalent of starting your morning with a crossword puzzle.
What exactly does Jesus mean by rest? And what exactly does that rest look like in our world, in our breakneck economy? We have some of the most famous words Jesus ever said in front of us this morning to answer those questions, and it’s good that they are famous, because they tell us the core of Christianity. The reason why anyone should want to be a Christian is in these verses. And we’ll see that because Jesus offers this rest because of who he is, and he delivers this rest into who you are.
1. Jesus offers rest because of who he is
To understand what this rest is, we have to know who Jesus is. He tells us right here: he is the communication of God to us. No one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. And we say, ok, well to whom is the Son going to choose to reveal God to? Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened. All who are weary and burdened. This is who Jesus is: he is the one who can reveal God, and he wants to do that for those who are weary and burdened.
To those who work more than 40 hours a week? To those whose schedules are full of family obligations? To those who are stressed about big life decisions coming up? Well yes, to those people. To you, if you feel weary and burdened right now. But please don’t mistake who Jesus is here. Don’t see Jesus only as a temporary fix. Don’t see him only as someone who, if you come across a really challenging time, you can read a little Jesus and he can give you some peace. Don’t see him only as someone who you can pray to when you’re nervous about something. Don’t see him only as a vitamin supplement, you gotta remember to spend a couple minutes with him each morning, and he allows you to be more effective the rest of the day.
No, Jesus is capable of more. And you and I need more. Weary and burdened means more than physically weary and emotionally burdened. This is a weariness and a burdenedness of the soul Jesus is talking about. And we know that because of the words at that time. At what time? If you read the verses before our reading Jesus has just delivered not rest, but unrest in fact. There are these towns in named Bethsaida, Chorazin, and Capernaum, and Jesus pronounces judgment on them. He says, you people heard me preach and saw all the miracles I was doing and yet you did not believe in me. These people rejected Jesus because they preferred the prevailing religious ideas of the day, that if you wanted God to answer your prayers and love you, you had to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. There were so many rules and there was so much pressure for people to perform and behave and win God’s approval that Jesus would later say in Matthew 23: they tie up heavy, cumbersome burdens and placed them on people’s shoulders. The religious leaders were saying that God would not send the Messiah until you shape up. So they carried this massive weight of always wondering if they should be better, do more, achieve higher. Their souls were not at rest.
2. Jesus delivers rest into who you are
Friends, you and I are sometimes burdened in this way too. We don’t have first century religious teachers piling burdens on top of us. But we have that voice don’t we. That voice inside of us that tells us that we’re not enough, that we need to be better, do more, achieve higher. For a lot of us, that voice gets a lot of ammunition from our American culture. Our culture that tells us to work and produce and yield, and even when we do rest, we make our rest serve our work, we only rest so that we can work more. Never enough, higher profits, better performance review. And we start to create our careers with who we are deep down. For some of us, that voice gets ammunition from a religious upbringing where the gospel wasn’t emphasized enough. Where got this view of God as this all-seeing eye, who knows every time we slips up and carefully records it and then pays it back by sending a tragedy into our lives. And we start to equate our behavior with who we are deep down. For others of us, that voice gets ammunition from the pressure to find yourself. Always taking in content, always hearing the message that you have to be an individual, that you won’t be free until you self-actualize, and as a result always wondering who am I? deep down. We are weary and burdened.
In fact, all people are weary and burdened. The sociologist Jonathan Haidt said that this is a core part of how our souls work. He has a book called The Righteous Mind, where he’s very convincing in saying that whatever it is that drives us in life, we have this need deep down to be seen as righteous. We have a need to be able to look at ourselves and think, yes, other people should recognize that what I spend my time doing is the right thing. And this creates a great burden on us, because whether it drives us to spend weekends at work, behave according to religious norms, constantly curate our self-image, we’re always trying to prove something. Whether it’s to ourselves, our boss, our parents, our pastor, our spouse, our souls can never rest until we’ve proven that we are perfectly righteous in all we do, and guess what–that day will never come. I’m not trying to say that the Statue of Liberty is a bad thing, or Emma Lazarus’ poem is misleading. America is a great place where we can celebrate our freedoms to start businesses and go to college and make a great life for ourselves.
But never think you’ll find rest by keeping your nose to the grindstone so you can retire early. Never think you’ll find rest by finally ridding yourself of your tendency to that sin. Never think you’ll find rest by finally finding your true self. These things can only burden your soul and make your soul weary.
Instead, listen to Jesus: Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Jesus silences this constant need to be seen as righteous, this constant voice that’s justifying all your actions. He silences it because achieved righteousness and then gave it to you. Did you notice the amazing contrast here: Jesus is the Son of God, the most important human in history, in fact God in human flesh, and yet he calls himself gentle and humble in heart. Jesus did not come to earth to whip you into shape, to light a fire under you. He came will all his divine power to be perfect in your place so that he can deliver rest into your soul. When that voice inside you starts to murmur that you need to do more, be better, achieve greater things, you can shut it up by showing it Jesus. His perfection that he gives to you. And not in some sort of “I’m perfect just the way I am” kind of way, that’s pretending, that’s dishonest and your inner voice knows better than that. This is actual perfection, not from us, but from Jesus. He delivers this rest, this silencing of the voice, this complete confidence, into your soul. Into who you are.
At some point, we’ll have to have a whole sermon that focuses on what this easy yoke is that Jesus is talking about. There’s not enough time today. Suffice it to say that the rest Jesus offers you is complete, it’s done, you have 100% of it now and forever. But learning to live like it, well like Jesus says we have to learn from him. We have to be trained by Jesus, we have to let him train our actions, our words, our thoughts, our emotions, our desires, and it takes a lifetime.
I’ll tell one story to describe what it looks like to live out our rest in Jesus. I have a friend in Chicago who is a lawyer. Not one of our friends at Crossroads who are lawyers, this is a different lawyer. But I was asking her about the bar exam. And she had all kinds of stories to tell. But one little tidbit in particular stuck out. She talked about how the bar is two days long, with a morning and an afternoon session on both days. And I’ll keep this as decorous as I can, but she said that the bathrooms at the place where they take the bar smell so bad. Because people are so incredibly nervous and anxious when they take this test that it physically wrecks them. But my friend? As calm as could be. Don’t get me wrong, she studied and studied and stressed out and struggled before it, but when it came test time, she was calm. Everyone else in the room? Their whole identity depended on which bubbles they filled in on the exam. Their sense of self-worth, their financial investment in law school, their parents being proud or disappointed in them, their idea of whether they were a good human or not, burdened them to the point of sprinting to the bathroom. But my friend? Whether she passed the bar on the first try or second try or never, that doesn’t affect her identity one bit. Jesus had given her rest for her soul.
Jesus has given you rest for your soul. So to wrap up this worship series, no matter whether your preferred political policies are passed or not, whether the church you’re a part of explodes in attendance or not, no matter what happens in your life or in our life, you have rest. Not just a job with ample paid time off. But rest from the voices that nag and plague you, because Jesus gives his perfection to you. Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Yes, even in this economy.
