Sermon Tone Analysis

Please if you would open your Bibles with me to today's text.

We are going to be in Matthew 11:25-30.

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:

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