Gently and Lowly

Please if you would open your Bibles with me to today's text. We are going to be in Matthew 11:25-30.

Matthew 11:25–30 ESV

At that time Jesus declared, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

The word of the Lord

Thanks be to God

The Prophet Isaiah reminds in Isaiah 40:8 “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.”

Please pray with me: O heavenly Father, whose law is perfect, converting the soul; a sure testimony, giving wisdom to the unlearned, and enlightening the eyes—we humbly implore you, through your boundless goodness, to enlighten our blind intellect by your Holy Spirit, so that we may truly understand and profess your law and live according to it. Since it has pleased you, most merciful Father, to reveal the mysteries of your will only to the little ones; and since you look to him alone who is of a humble and contrite spirit, who has reverence for your Word, grant us a humble spirit and keep us from all fleshly wisdom, which is enmity against you. Bring to the right way those who stray from the truth, so that we all may unanimously serve you in holiness and righteousness, all the days of our life. We ask this from you, most merciful Father, in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Who Is Jesus

Have you ever wondered who Jesus really is? In the depths of his character and person? Do you feel as if there is this increasing suspicion that God’s patience with you is wearing thin. That deep down God is actually really disappointed with you. You may have told others about the love of Jesus yet you wonder in the back of your mind if he harbors resentment toward you for all the sin in your life? That is what I come to answer today, who is Jesus and what is he offering you. One commentator pointed out to me, as I was preparing for this sermon, says that this is the central message of Christianity, so that is what I want to offer you today, the heart of Christ for sinners. Many of us have heard stories about Jesus and have a conception of who Jesus is but I want to take you to his heart for you. The heart is the animating force of a person in the Bible. It is what gets you out of bed in the morning. Our heart, of our loves, define and direct us and this is what directs Jesus, saving lost sheep. If you love baseball, you are going to be driven to get up early to go play and watch every MLB game this season. Jesus loves to save the lost and He does this be offering them rest in himself, actually deep, rich, satisfying rest in your souls . So I am going to cover three things today as we discuss rest 1) is why you need rest 2) what is rest and 3) how to get rest, again that is 1) why you need rest 2) what is rest and 3) how to get rest.

Why You need Rest

Many of you sitting here today do not need me to tell you why you need rest. You are burned out and exhausted. Life is unbelievably hard and you might be sitting there thinking to yourself that this is really only time of the week you can sit down undistracted and just be present. You might even use this time to be going over your to do list for the week because it’s the first time you’ve had all week to stop. I get it, everyone here is so tired.

Modern Rest Lie

Isn’t that interesting, in the modern world we live in? I thought that there was this big promise to all of that that all of these technological advances in our lives were going to being rest for us? A dishwasher was going to free up our time so we could spend more time with our family, our car makes it so we can live father away from work and get there in a nicely air conditioned box with our favorite playlist playing, I don’t even know if you need me to tell you about what our phones are doing to you brains but we still feel exhausted. Why? it seems like that with all the increases we have with technology we are only becoming more tired and burnt out. We hear messages from us at all times every day saying to be a better parent! Don’t eat that or you hate the planet and your children! You are too fat, you are too old, you don’t have enough stuff so buy this thing that will help you organize your stuff for more stuff! This is exhausting. It seems like we have this unbearable burden our back of trying to even just keep up that we can’t do anything to shake off, no matter how hard we try.

Well, that is exactly why you need rest. You see, when Jesus is saying come and take my yoke upon you and learn from me, he is offering us something counter-cultural to all the other ways you’v learned to get rest. Now I know that when we hear that our modern ears hear take my yoke upon you they instantly perk up and we think, I have to take a yoke upon me i order to be a follower of Jesus, I have to conform to some standard in order to be good enough for him, I am already burdened and you are asking me to take on more? See there you have it, the Bible is oppressive. But I want you to look carefully as what he said, hear his words he says take my yoke upon you. Jesus is saying we are all burdened by a heavy yoke, it doesn’t matter who you are.

Pharisee’s Yoke

Specifically here, Jesus was speaking to the religious leaders of His day, called the Pharisees, who has placed an unbearable yoke on the backs of the people of God. The teachers of the law in Jesus day placed immense weight in following Go with all their heart, soul, and might. They wanted to follow everything God had commanded which is an amazing thing but in trying to do that, that had been adding so many arbitrary additions to God’s law that it has become an unbearable burden to be a Jew. For example Pharisee would say that

1. Drunkenness is a sin. Therefore, one must never drink alcohol.

2. It is best, to avoid temptation, not even to use wine or liquor in cooking.

3. To avoid impurity, one must always check the ingredients of all prepared food. At restaurants, we must also inquire about cooking wine.

4. Just in case a restaurateur would give an erroneous answer to the question above, the faithful should not even dine at a restaurant that has alcohol on the premises.

This isn’t any new kind of phenomena. You could probably think of people in your life who have tried to place these kinds of boundaries around things way beyond what the Bible says. This kind of yoke placed on every aspect of life may have been a delight to the legal experts but for everybody else, it was intolerable to ordinary people. The kind of yoke that Jesus offered was different . This means a life of actually being a disciple of Jesus. As one commentator puts it “A “yoke” implies obedience, indeed often slavery (Gal 5:1; 1 Tim 6:1); what makes the difference is what sort of master one is serving. So the beneficial effect of Jesus’ yoke derives from the character of the one who offers it.” We are ll slaves to some yoke, the question is about the character of who we are slaves of.

Scared

Why do so many us us struggle with taking Jesus yoke on and following him? I’ll tell you, it is because we are scared. Look at what Jesus said in Matt 11.25 . What children intuitively understand that we forget as life makes us hard hearted and we begin to have to figure out how to live in a world that is so broken and messed up, is that children do an amazing job is bing so dependent of their parents for literally everything. They are so needy, aren’t they? “Pick me up, put me down, give me food” They need things from us all the time but we are grown ups, we don’t need things from people, we are supposed to take care of ourselves. Children trust people implicitly and it is only from being hurt that they begin to not trust. That is why we struggle to come to Jesus as a child and we are scared to need things from others and trust them fully, why? because we are afraid us being abused by someone. We are afraid that if we give ourselves totally over to someone they will end up letting us down or hurting us. But look at what Jesus is saying, he is asking you to trust him. he says “I am gentle and lowly in heart” in heart. In the essence of his very being Jesus is gently and lowly. Jesus is saying that he will not hurt you if you come to him, he will not abuse you or abandon you or take the most precious things of your heart and stomp all over them but he will love you and be gentle with you.

What is Rest?

Now what even is rest? You live in small town America, the place where big city folks like to come to to find rest, but none of you feel rest. So what even is rest if you live in the place where rest is supposed to be found? How do you usually try to find rest? Like many of us, we rest by going on vacation over the summer with the family to get away from all hustle that comes with our day to day life. Maybe rest for you is sitting down to watch the cardinals game after work and dinner with a beer in hand and just tuning out everything else, or maybe rest is having long talks for hours to process your life and all of the problems you are experiencing, but is that actually rest? Tomorrow you are going to wake up and start again, after your vacation you come home, and the Cardinals only play certain times of the year.

Well, Jesus says that true rest comes from knowing him and following him. Jesus is saying that when he is offering rest, it is not just rest from the daily grind but rest for your souls. Now that sounds really spiritual and lofty, what does that mean? That word rest in the original greek is anapausis is only used 5 times in the New Testament and carries the fuller meaning of “a cessation from wearisome activity for the sake of rest” cessation from wearisome activity of the sake of rest. Jesus is saying if you take my yoke on you, you will find rest for your soul, deep abiding rest. Jesus had been speaking to a great crowd which we see up in verse 7, and he is telling this crowd that the rest they are seeking will not come from all of the burdens placed on them by the Jewish people or by the Roman who were occupying their cities or by their own righteousness. No rest is something deeper than freedom from the chaos, it is also the presence of flourishing.

Eschatological Rest

What Jesus is picturing here is the kind of rest that was intended for Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, the rest they fortified for themselves and all of the rest of mankind, but the rest that we find promised in Revelation 21: 3-4 In describing all of creation being made new we hear:

Revelation 21:3–4 ESV

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

This is rest, no more mourning or crying or pain any more and every tear wiped away from your eye. This is the answer to your hearts deepest longing to be fulling known and fully loved, to experience the world as it always was meant to be experienced.

How to Get Rest

So how do you get that? How do you get that kind of deep, abiding rest. You yoke yourself to Jesus. What is this yoke like well here in verse 29 we get an unbelievable statement. This is the only time in the entire New Testament where we see Jesus explaining his character. Is many other places we see Jesus making claims about himself but there are roles or relationships. He calls himself the Shepherd, the Son of Man, the Son of the Father, the Vine, the Light of the World, God himself. Only here in all of the stories of Jesus life do we get his self disclosed character. Jesus calls himself Gentle and Lowly

Now what would you put there? If you were going to describe Jesus to someone at work tomorrow who asked you, what is Jesus like, what would you tell them? I have a friend back at my church back in Columbia who was meditating on this passage about a year ago and she remarked to me that “this is what I always wished Jesus was like but never believed he was” This seems too good to be true! What about all of this angry crazy god who is just hoping to send someone to hell? Well that is not what we find in the Scriptures. Yes, Jesus is coming one say to execute all of his full wrath on all ungodliness and sin but look here with me at who those are.

Election

Jesus says that it is only those whom the Son choose to reveal that will know the Father. So it is only to those whom the Son chooses that will come to Him. That sounds very exclusive, are you saying that only certain people will get into heaven? Well, look at the next verse.

With all the power and authority of God Jesus declares “Come to me, all...” All, wait all can come but Jesus is saying he is going to choose who comes? how does that work? Here we have one of the most profound doctrines in all of the Bible laid out before us, God’s election of humanity. Now look, God says he will choose and then he offers a free invitation to all.

There is a paradox here in how to get rest. The only people who get rest from the Father are those whom God has chosen by his gracious will. and at the same time it is those who choose to come to God who are offered rest. The invitation is offered to all, everyone who would accept it. Here we step into one of the great divine mysteries of the Christian faith, of divine election and I won’t touch on everything here but look at the text and wrestle with it with me for a moment. The only ones who know God are those who he choose and then those who know the father are those who choose him. Which is yet. it is both. here we have what is called Divine Sovereignty, or rulership, and Human responsibility in full action. There is not getting away from this mystery only living into it. To get true rest you come to the Son and take his yoke upon you and then once you come to the son you realize that he choose you before all the foundations of the earth.

Charles Spurgeon, a preacher in the 18th century who is know as the Prince of Preachers gave this analogy for those who were about to enter in the gates of heaven as they are about to enter rest. He said that “It has been worded like this, "Before salvation we see a sign on the outside, 'WHOSOEVER WILL MAY COME'; we go inside; we turn back and look over the door and see a sign, 'CHOSEN IN Christ BEFORE THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORLD. So come and rest in that salvation.

Application

So I want to give you three points of application to help you find rest. Those are 1) what should you do? 2) Who should you become? and 3) how do you discern truth from error here?

Okay what should you do. Well from the text we see plainly and obviously that you should take on Jesus yoke. This means that you should do all that Jesus commanded you. We learn from the sermon on the mount that We are called to do all that Jesus commanded us so what should we do, obey Jesus. That one is pretty simple and I think a lot of us know those things, read your Bible, pray, come to church, give your money and possessions away, all of these things are taking the yoke of Jesus on us.

But the Bible is concerned with more than just what would should do, who should you become? Well we learn from the text here that you should be gentle and lowly as our savior is. When your kids don’t listen to you as you get them ready for school, Jesus is calling you to be gentle and lowly with them. Serve them and be the kind of parent who love them deeply. When your spouse and you don’t agree and you just can’t believe that did that thing you knew they would do because, of course they would! You know, you are called to be gentle and lowly with them, to remember your marriage vows and become the kind of person who turns away a wrathful word with meekness.

Finally and I am wrapping up quickly here, how do you discern truth from error in following Jesus? The Jews in the time of Jesus day couldn’t discern truth from error when trying to follow the law, the listened to all of the extra rules and regulations placed on them by religious leaders. So how do you discern this, you spend time with God and in his word, understanding his gracious will to know truth from error. So when you hear one of your friends saying something you know isn’t right, you are able to discern the lie they are saying, or when a family member is struggling with sickness, you can give them a gentle word. Discernment here is reserved not for those who are wise and understanding in their own eyes, but those who approach God like little children, willing to be taught at the feet of our great Lord and master.

The invitation is open to you right now, if you come to find rest if Christ he will give it to all. Please pray with me.

Be Thou My Vision: A Liturgy for Daily Worship Day 4

As a reconciled Father, take me to be your child; and give me your renewing Spirit, to be in me a principle of holy life, and light, and love, and your seal and witness that I am yours. Let him quicken my dead and hardened heart. Let him enlighten my dark unbelieving mind, by clearer knowledge and firm belief. Let him turn my will to the ready obedience of your holy will. Let him reveal to my soul the wonders of your love in Christ, and fill it with love to you and my Redeemer, and to all your holy Word and works. Amen.