According to tradition, when the Apostle John was leading the Church in Ephesus, in Asia Minor, during the first century, his hobby was raising pigeons. It is said that on one occasion a man passed John’s house as he returned from hunting. When he saw John playing with one of his birds, he gently chided him for spending his time so frivolously. John looked at the man’s bow and remarked that the string was loose.
“Yes,” said the man, “I always loosen the string of my bow when it’s not in use. If it stayed tight, it would lose its rebounding quality and fail me in the hunt.”
“And I,” said John, “am now relaxing the bow of my mind so that I may be better able to shoot the arrows of divine truth.”
Whether it is historically accurate or not, the story makes an important point. Sometimes we just need to hang loose.
Today I want to talk with you about soul stress, and how to find rest for your soul. In Matthew 11:28-30, Jesus says…
Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, 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. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
The first thing I see in this passage is that Jesus invites the exhausted to come to him. Is your soul exhausted today? You may ask, “What is soul exhaustion?” It is the weariness that comes from running. Until we run to Jesus, we are running away from so many things. We run away from deep relationships because we are afraid of being hurt. We run from problems. We run from quietness and solitude into busyness because we are afraid that if we pause for a moment, we may be reminded of how empty our lives really are. Sometimes we run because we forget it is God who sustains our life and not us.
Columnist Herb Caen wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle, “Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle; when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”
What or whom are you running from? What or whom are you running to? Jesus invites the exhausted in soul to run to him and find rest.
He invites those who are exhausted in their search for truth to come to him. The Greeks said, “It is very difficult to find God, and when you have found him, it is impossible to tell others about him.”
Jesus says, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” He claims that the long and lonely search for God, for soul-contentment, ends in himself.
St. Augustine said, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.” Is your heart restless?
Second, Jesus invites the burdened to come to him and find rest.
A man who was overweight had never thought about the strain he was placing on his heart and knees until he developed coronary problems and arthritis. His doctor put him on a strict diet and told him that if he wanted to improve his health, he would have to shed a few pounds. Several months later, in a conversation with his pastor, the man made this interesting observation: “For years I was carrying a heavy burden without realizing it. Now I’ve exchanged it for a new one—this diet! It’s similar to what happened in my spiritual life. The one difference is that the burden Jesus placed on me is easier and lighter than the one I got from the doctor.”
From what kinds of burdens does Jesus relieve us?
Augustine was haunted by the fact that as a young man he had stolen fruit from a neighbor’s tree. In later life he did a number of things worse than that. But that one act nagged at his soul.
Jesus relieves us of guilt.
Jesus also relieves those who are burdened with religion. Jesus said of the Pharisees, “They tie up heavy loads and put them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.” (Matthew 23:4) Jesus was not fond of religion; he was not fond of any humanly manufactured system of do’s and don’ts.
My friend Tim Hansel once described religion as “a pattern of rules and regulations, a system that helps us tidy up our behavior, somewhat like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It allows us a better view as we go down.”
Jesus also invites those who are burdened with hurt. Have you been hurt by others, cruelly treated? Jesus understands because he experienced the same. He will give you the love that no one else has given or can give.
A man who was experiencing trying times in his life came home one day with a package for his wife. As he entered the house, he saw his little daughter sitting in a chair. The girl had been a paraplegic for some time. The man went up to his little girl and kissing her asked, “Where is your mother?”
“Upstairs,” she replied.
“Well, I have something for her.”
“Let me carry it to her,” the little girl pleaded.
The father gently asked, “How can you carry it, sweetheart, when you cannot carry yourself?”
“It will be easy, papa,” the girl said with a smile. “I will carry the package and you will carry me.”
God spoke softly to that man, showing him that he was in the same position as his daughter. He was carrying a burden of difficulty, but was not the Lord carrying him?
A third thing I see in this passage is that Jesus invites us to take on his yoke.
We all probably know that a yoke is a wooden bar or frame by which two oxen are joined together at the neck. It enables them to work together. Jesus invites us to join our lives to his so that he can help us carry our burdens and so we can work together.
Now sometimes, I know, we do not like to be led by others. We either like to do the leading or simply do our own thing.
There was a water pump in the Sudan that was operated by oxen that walked in a circle, slowly turning a giant wheel. One ox was untrained, however, and he constantly tried to break the pattern by going in the wrong direction. He was bucking the yoke because he wanted to avoid toil and strain. But in reality, he only hindered the work and made things harder on himself.
Sometimes we buck the yoke of Jesus because we mistakenly think his way will be more painful than our way. But it really works the other way around.
God created life to work a certain way. Trying to cut life against the grain is hard. But if we follow Jesus’ way, we find peace and productivity.
Jesus says that his yoke is easy. In other words, it is easy to wear, it is well-fitting. When we allow Jesus to lead, we find that his way is best suited to our human flourishing.
Jesus also says that his burden is light. The burden of Jewish religion in Jesus’ day was great because the Pharisees had made it so.
By contrast, Jesus summed up his way of life simply, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22:37, 39) Jesus’ burden is light because it is simple. As William Barclay once said, “The burden which is given and carried in love is always light.”
Barclay tells the story of a man who came upon a little boy carrying a still smaller boy, who was lame, upon his back. “That’s a heavy burden for you to carry,” said the man.
“That’s no’ a burden,” came the answer. “That’s my wee brother.”
Neil Diamond turned the story into a song and titled it, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.”
A fourth thing I see in this passage is that Jesus invites us to find rest in him. This is a great paradox isn’t it, that we find rest through taking on a yoke, that our burdens are eased by taking on his burden? A paradox is an apparent contradiction which in reality may conceal a profound truth. And in this case, we can prove the truth by doing what Jesus invites us to do.
A.W. Tozer once said, “A real Christian is an odd number, anyway. He feels supreme love for One whom he has never seen; talks familiarly every day to Someone he cannot see; expects to go to heaven on the virtue of Another; empties himself in order to be full; admits he is wrong so he can be declared right; goes down in order to get up; is strongest when he is weakest; richest when he is poorest and happiest when he feels the worst. He dies so he can live; forsakes in order to have; gives away so he can keep; sees the invisible; hears the inaudible; and knows that which passeth knowledge.”
Jesus adds to all of those paradoxes this one: we find rest when we take on his yoke.
But what does Jesus promise rest from? He promises rest from all the burdens we talked about at the beginning. And one more thing at least—he promises rest from perfectionism. Instead, he brings us into his “whole-y-ness”.
According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram of June 17, 1988, the Houston school district nominated school bus driver Lillie Baltrip for a safe-driving award. Her colleagues even trusted her to drive a busload of them to an awards ceremony for safe drivers. Unfortunately, on the way to the ceremony, Lillie turned a corner too sharply and flipped the bus over, sending herself and sixteen others to the hospital for minor emergency treatment.
None of us are perfect, are we? And if we try to be perfect in our own strength, it is exhausting!
The good news is that Jesus offers us rest from the pursuit of perfectionism. He offers us his grace. And here is how to spell grace. Grace is:
God’s
Riches
At
Christ’s
Expense
We can receive a full life now and forever because of Jesus’ perfect driving record and because Jesus took the punishment for all of our accidents, all of our sins, upon the cross.
Did Lillie, accident-free for a whole year, get her award in spite of her mishap on the way to the ceremony? No. Award committees rarely operate on the principle of grace. Thankfully, Jesus does operate on grace.
Jesus also invites us to find rest from searching. In Jeremiah 6:16 the Lord says, “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls. But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’” When it comes to seeking God some of us want to be forever seeking and never finding; sometimes we prefer to remain uncommitted. But the Lord says that if we stand by the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it when we find it, then we will find rest for our souls.
Millions of people through the ages have found this peace, this rest in the Lord. And it is good for us to learn from them and copy their example. As Jaroslav Pelican once said, “Tradition is the living faith of people now dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of people now living.”
I want nothing to do with traditionalism. But searching the ancient paths, the ancient traditions of God’s people that lead to a living faith—that’s good stuff!
Those who have found a relationship with God through Jesus Christ can give up endlessly searching for God, because in Jesus they will find the one true God and in so doing they will find rest for their souls.
Finally, Jesus offers rest for eternity. Hebrews 4:9 says, “There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God.” That’s heaven.
I think C. S. Lewis hit the right note when he described heaven at the end of his children’s book, The Last Battle. At the end of the story, Lucy and her two brothers are in a railway accident and then they find themselves in a beautiful world that reminds them of Narnia and England all rolled into one. But the children don’t understand where they are until the great lion Aslan, the Christ-figure of the story, meets them and speaks to them…
Then Aslan turned to them and said:
“You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be.”
Lucy said, “We’re so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often.”
“No fear of that,” said Aslan. “Have you not guessed?”
Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them.
“There was a real railway accident,” said Aslan softly. “Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call in in the Shadow-Lands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.”
Do you remember what it felt like when you were school age and you woke up on the first morning of summer vacation? That was, I believe, but a foretaste of what it will be like when we wake up in heaven. And that is the ultimate rest that Jesus promises to us, if we come to him.
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