The Hard Work of Resting
Matthew 11.25-30
Today we’re finishing up a three-week series on work. The first week, we looked at a biblical view of work—that work is a good gift from God; but that because of sin, work is hard. Last week, Joe talked about how the gospel should influence our approach to our work, which should be seen and lived out for Jesus Christ: that we can serve Christ in our jobs no matter what job we have, and that the gospel’s call should impact every aspect of our lives—including our professional lives, and sometimes in a radical way.
There’s obviously a lot more that we could say on this subject or the interaction between the gospel and work, but we decided that this final message in the series should address the topic of rest, which of course an integral part of the whole thing.
I want to explain my dilemma before I start, because otherwise it might be a bit confusing.
There’s a problem inherent in this subject, and that is that for most of us, when we think “rest”, we think “vacation.” We think rest is time when I’m not working. And that kind of rest is important, for sure. It’s important for our bodies and it’s important for our minds.
But we’ve all experienced how it often works in practice. You make big plans for vacation, you leave, and you come back even more exhausted than you were before. Vacation can be rest-ful, but it’s not really true rest. It’s not rest that will carry over into our lives once vacation’s over.
Now, it could be—but only if we understand what true rest is. And by the same token, if we understand what true rest is, we won’t need vacation to get it. We’ll have access to that true rest it every day of every week.
So I’m sorry, I’m not going to give you five tips to recharge your batteries at the end of a stressful period at work—we’re going to need to talk about true rest. But in order to get to that rest, we need to understand its context—in what conditions this rest is found. And that’s the dilemma: explaining the context before getting to the meat of the subject.
So we’re going to dig into this context which, at first glance, seems to have nothing at all to do with our jobs, in order to get an idea of what true rest looks like. And then we’ll try to bring it back to the ground and see what it means in the context of our day-to-day work.
For this, I’ll invite you to go to the gospel of Mathew, chapter 11. We’ll be reading v. 25-30.
Keep last week’s sermon in mind as we read, because it’s exactly what we see Jesus do here. All of our work, all of our lives, should be seen through the lens of the gospel; the goal of our work is to advance the proclamation of the gospel. (And there are a million ways to do it, that I won’t touch on today; go back and listen to last week’s sermon if you want to know more on that, because Joe nailed it—it was really excellent.)
In this passage, Jesus talks about the nature of the gospel, and how the gospel is revealed to those whom he saves.
A Selective Revelation (v. 25-26)
We see three things here that characterize this revelation of the gospel. So we’ll take them one by one. First, it is a selective revelation.
Jesus is talking to the crowds, as usual. And we read starting in Matthew 11.25:
25 At that time Jesus declared, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things [“these things” = his identity as the Messiah, his call to the people of Israel to repent] from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; 26 yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.
I don’t think it’s a secret for you that not everyone who listens to the gospel will really hear the gospel.
The stereotypical Parisian, as you know, is well-educated, independent, and fairly cultured. It’s not an easy sell to convince someone who is intelligent and cultured and capable that they actually don’t have everything they need, or that they can’t get it on their own.
Jesus said it wouldn’t be easy: he rejoices that the Father has hidden these things from the wise and understanding—the religious elite of the time, those people who are educated and respectable—and revealed them to little children. Now he’s not saying that God has hidden the gospel from educated people, and revealed them to uneducated people. God is not anti-education or anti-wisdom.
The problem is that very often a diploma brings pride along with it. Those who think they are wise and understanding often believe they can basically take care of themselves.
Little children, on the other hand, know they need help. They’ll pretend they don’t until they fall down and hurt themselves—and then they’ll tell the truth: they’ll start crying and ask for Mom or Dad to come pick them up.
Those who know they don’t have it all together are naturally more inclined to listen to someone tell them they need help.
So the revelation of the gospel is selective: it goes out to those “little children” who recognize they need help, who recognize they need a rescuer, and it is “hidden” from those “wise and understanding” who think they can do it all on their own.
An Exclusive Revelation (v. 27)
The thing is that we all need a rescuer—we all need a Savior—no matter how wise and understanding we might actually be. So what allows someone to realize they need help?
V. 27:
27 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.
This is a troubling text for some of us, because here Jesus says two things people don’t like to hear: firstly, he says that we can only know God if we know him through Jesus. Any other attempt to get to God will fail, because Jesus is our only way in.
The second thing he says is almost more troubling still: he says that we can only know God if Jesus chooses to reveal him to us. Without his help, we can hear the gospel, and it’s like we’re looking at one of those optical illusions where you have to squint your eyes in just the right way in order to see the real picture. If we want to see God, and believe in him, and know him, Jesus must give us eyes to see.
I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this, because debating the fine points of the subject is not the main message of this text. What we need to see is that Jesus is showing us our own inability to save ourselves.
The gospel message is revealed to “little children”—to those who know they need help. We know we need help once we see the Father, because seeing the Father shows you how little you can do on your own: when you see everything he is, you realize all that you are not.
In order to be saved, we need help. That’s the point.
And that’s the hard truth we need to know before we can appreciate what he says next. There’s something in all of us, no matter how good our theology is, that makes us want to try and work as hard as we can to do what we need to do, to get in Jesus’s good graces.
We work hard to try to be humble enough for God to consider us “little children.” We do our best to be “good Christians,” to get Jesus’s attention, so that he might just reveal the Father to us.
This is our natural mode of thought: when we discover that God has hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children, when we discover that we can’t know the Father unless Jesus chooses to reveal him to us, we think, What do I have to convince Jesus to reveal the Father to ME? What do I have to do to be one of these “little children,” so I can know the Father?
A Restful Revelation (v. 28-30)
Jesus’s answer is absolutely earth-shattering, if we take the time to hear it. He says, Stop working. You have nothing to prove, you have nothing to earn. Stop trying to earn it—just come to me, and REST. V. 28:
28 Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Before we talk about the rest Jesus is speaking of, let’s address the elephant in the room, which is everything that came just before.
We saw that the revelation Christ gives is both selective and exclusive—he clearly that “these things” (the reality of judgment and the salvation he offers) are not revealed to everyone.
But then in v. 28, he gives an invitation which seems like the exact opposite. It is a very open invitation. He says, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden.”
Do you see what he’s doing? He’s throwing out this invitation indiscriminately—there are people in the crowds who will accept him, and there are people in the crowds who won’t. But when he says “all who labor and are heavy laden,” he’s giving every person in that crowd something to grab on to, because there is not a person in the world who, at some point or another, doesn’t feel tired. Doesn’t feel beaten down by the circumstances of life. Unless we’re completely selfish and irresponsible, we all labor; we are all heavy laden.
Imagine for a minute that you’ve never read this passage, that you’re just listening to Jesus talk, you get through v. 27, and you don’t know what’s coming next.
First Jesus gives us this unsettling news: “You can do nothing on your own. You can’t know the Father, or come near the Father, or humble yourself before the Father, unless I choose to reveal him to you. This is out of your hands. You can work as hard as you’d like, you will never be able to work hard enough to get in good with God.”
And then he says something that—if we didn’t know it was coming—would be just about the most shocking thing he could say. “You can’t do any of this without me…and you don’t have to. I’m not calling you to come and do anything—I’m calling you to come and rest: to know that you can’t do anything, and to stop trying.”
Several years ago I was visiting one of our supporting churches in the U.S. I was sharing with them that that year had been a difficult year for me personally; there had been some pastoral cases that had weighed on me, plus the usual fatigue that comes with having a new baby at home. (Zadie was about two months old at the time.)
One of those elders modeled this restful gospel perfectly in that conversation we had.
At one point as I was sharing this, he thanked me for being honest, and he said, “I just want you to know that you don’t ever have to try and give us the impression that you’ve got it all together. You don’t have to be doing well. We are here, and we’ll support you even if you’re totally falling apart. We’re not going anywhere.”
Brothers and sisters, that is the gospel.
The gospel is rest.
The gospel is not for those who work; it is for those who are tired of working.
It is not for the strong; it is for those who have no more strength.
It is not for the moral or the righteous; it is those who need righteousness but can’t be righteous on their own.
Few things could be more difficult for modern, educated, cultured, self-sufficient Parisians to accept—they don’t know what to do when someone tells them that they have nothing to do, because Jesus did it all for them.
And part of it is the very real fact that it shouldn’t work this way: if God really is holy, and we really are accountable to him, then we shouldn’t be able to just come rest.
That’s why, when people finally hear the gospel for the first time, even if they have a hard time believing it, they actually do see why we’d call it good news.
The gospel tells us Jesus already did everything for us. He lived our life, and he died our death, and he gives us life through his resurrection.
So when we come to Christ, there truly is nothing left we can do to get in good with him. He reveals the Father to us because we already are in good with him. There’s nothing we could add to what he has already done.
The question is, once we have done this—once we come to him—what happens then?
Jesus’s answer is surprising: he says, “Come rest, and keep resting. But be aware that your rest with me will be really different from the rest you’re used to.”
Our rest in Christ will not be the absence of work, but a different kind of work. V. 29:
29 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. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
A “yoke” is that big, heavy, wooden frame they put over oxen’s necks to attach them to a plow: it’s hardly an image that suggests rest. In fact, it suggests quite the opposite: not just work, but hard work.
And if we read the Bible, we see that that’s true: there are a lot of commandments in the Bible, commandments that don’t seem easy.
The apostle Paul said at one point, “I worked harder than any of you!” If you’re a Christian you know that we don’t stop working when we become Christians—we work even harder than before!
But here’s where a lot of people get stuck: we work hard as Christians…but it’s a really different kind of work, and that’s what Jesus is getting at.
The work Jesus calls us to is different because, firstly, he is gentle and lowly in heart.
The fact that Jesus is gentle and lowly of heart means he won’t beat us when we fail. He sympathizes with our weaknesses, because he knows what we’re made of, and he knows it’s hard to live for him. He will correct us, but he will correct us with a soft hand.
When Jack was little he liked to climb on stuff, and he was pretty agile. (That’s actually still true.) One of his favorite things—for a while—was to put one hand on the radiator in our hallway, another hand on the doorjamb across from the radiator, and his feet on the wall behind him—kind of a Spider-Man thing.
And I’d tell him, “Don’t do that; you’re going to fall.”
But he was six—of course, he’d ignore me, and keep doing it.
Then one day, his hand slipped and he did a bellyflop right on the hard tile in our hallway. Knocked the wind out of him.
When that happened, I did not yell at him and tell him how stupid he was for ignoring me. The kid couldn’t breathe; he was freaked out. So I ran to him, and pulled him into my arms, and once he’d gotten his breath back I held his face in my hands and said, “I’m so sorry you fell, I know that hurt. What can we do different next time?”
Jesus is gentle and lowly in heart, so when we work for him, we don’t have to be afraid of failing. Gentle correction is not frightening; it’s love. We will fail…and he will correct us with a soft hand.
Secondly, the work Jesus calls us to is different because his yoke is easy, and his burden is light.
His burden is light because, when Christ saves us, he calls us to learn from him (v. 29). Learn what, exactly?
He calls us to learn what God has always taught his people, and that is how to live. He says if we come and learn from him, this gentle and lowly Master, he tells us the result: and you will find rest for your souls.
When he says that, he’s quoting Jeremiah 6.16, in which God laments over the invitation he’s given to his people, which they have refused to accept:
16 Thus says the Lord:
“Stand by the roads, and look,
and ask for the ancient paths,
where the good way is; and walk in it,
and find rest for your souls.
But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’
What are the “ancient paths”? What is “the good way” God invites his people to walk in? It’s his law; it’s his commandments; it’s his will for the people he has created and chosen for himself.
When Jesus invites us to learn from him, he’s inviting us to learn what he is like; what he loves; what he hates; what he desires. That’s what his commandments are. The Bible is filled with commandments, and they’re hard. The Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7 contains the most difficult commandments in all of Scripture. But at the same time, we love that sermon—even unbelievers tend to be drawn to that sermon—because we all recognize that this is the kind of person we want to be.
And that’s why his burden is light: quite simply, it’s not hard to do what you want to do.
You see, true rest is not the opposite of work. True rest is the right kind of work.
When we understand the grace of Christ, and we begin to love what he loves—because what he loves is actually worth loving—the work of obedience isn’t just light; it’s refreshing. Nothing is more restful than wanting the right thing, and then doing exactly what you want.
With Christ in the School of Rest
Here’s the paradox of this passage: the invitation to rest is an invitation to work. Not the work of a laborer trying to earn his wages, but rather the work of a student learning from a master. Christ’s invitation to rest is an invitation into his school—to work hard learning from him.
What do we learn in Christ’s school?
In Christ’s school, we learn who he is. He is gentle and lowly in heart. He is a gentle Savior, a humble Master.
In Christ’s school, we learn what is important to him. We learn from his commandments what kind of Master he is, and we find ourselves wanting to become that kind of person ourselves. So we work at it, and we learn from our successes and from our failures. Under the care of our gentle and lowly Master, we learn to desire what we should desire.
In Christ’s school, we learn who we are in him. In regards to what is truly important, we are not grownups; we are not wise and understanding. We are little children, saved by a gracious Father, learning to become adults.
And that’s sort of the key to this whole passage: the becoming. In our community group this week someone was questioning the relationship between the true rest Christ provides here, and the ordinary rest we need from our jobs and our other occupations. Finding true rest in Christ is good, but it doesn’t really change the fact that we still need ordinary rest, right?
That’s true—we do still need ordinary rest. We do need breaks, we need to not work the weekend (which is why God instituted the Sabbath), we need vacation. But that doesn’t mean that there is no relationship between these two types of rest.
Here’s an example of what I mean.
One of the biggest surprises I found when I first moved to France was the relationship that the French have with vacation. If I wanted to caricature, I’d say that the French work 10 months (with the occasional small break), breaking their backs to get to summertime, so that they can finally rest.
I found it odd because I grew up in the U.S., and at least in my family, in my entire life before getting married, we took three real vacations as a family. Three. And each of them lasted less than a week.
The thing is, none of us—even my parents, I asked them about this—felt a particular lack of rest. Why is that?
I don’t have a definitive answer, but at least one reason is that multiple times during the week, in the evenings (since we ate very early), we left our house, and we did things together. We went to the movies or we played mini-golf or we went to the park and played baseball, or we ate out for dinner. We did this sort of thing at least three or four times a week.
My dad only had two weeks off work a year—he couldn’t take a long vacation. But we didn’t feel the need for one, because we had several “mini-vacations” every week.
Now we can debate this way of doing things later (I’ve been in France for twenty years now, and I admit I’ve gotten used to the French way of doing vacation). But the principle is a good one. Small moments of rest on a regular basis, throughout the week and throughout the year, provide better rest than big moments of rest a couple times a year.
We do need to rest—we need to rest our bodies and our minds. But we can’t content ourselves with ordinary rest, because there’s a difference between resting when we need to, and being at rest.
Ordinary rest is necessary, and we need to rest. But more than that, God gives us what we need to be at rest. All the time.
Look at how Jesus says it:
“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.”
You see, he’s not commanding us to rest. He’s inviting us to receive a gift. He’s inviting us to find rest in him. True rest—the rest Christ gives—is not an action we perform; it’s a state we’re invited into.
There’s a big difference between resting, and being at rest. There’s a big difference between resting, and being restful people. You can rest without being at rest. If you do, then yes, you’ll rest your body and your mind, but that will be all.
But if you are already at rest in Christ when you clock out of work on Friday and start your weekend, imagine what that would change about your ordinary rest.
When we do ordinary rest, what do we do? We do things we enjoy; we have fun. If we know Christ, then we do things that feed our souls; we come to church and we encourage our brothers and sisters and we worship God together. All of that is good—that what ordinary rest looks like.
But if we’re already at rest when we start this time, then the ordinary, fun things we do won’t only be fun. Playing with our kids will become a moment of thankfulness to God for giving them to us. Eating a good meal will be a moment of joy and gratitude to our good God for providing us with good things. Looking at works of art will be a moment of wonder as we see our Creator God reflected in the work.
So how do we do it? How do we find rest rather than just deciding to rest?
Christ tells us: Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me.
In other words, learn to obey my commandments. It’s the basics of Christian discipleship. It’s what he told the disciples to teach others later on, when he said (Matthew 28.19-20)
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.
True rest, the kind of rest that bleeds into every area of our lives, no matter what the circumstances of our work or our lives actually are, is found in simple obedience to Jesus Christ. We learn to rest—we take Christ’s yoke on ourselves—when we are tempted to disobey him, and we resist that temptation. We learn to rest when we discipline ourselves to read his Word and pray, to learn to know him more. We learn to rest when we get together with our brothers and sisters to encourage one another in the gospel. We learn to rest when we share the gospel with someone else.
If we have found our rest in him, every other rest we might find benefits us double—because we can have the ordinary rest these moments provide, but we don’t have to depend on them. Our vacations can go badly—and we’ll be okay. Our days off can be stressful—and we’ll be okay. Our good weekends are made even better, because we’re able to see the ordinary rest we find for what it is: a good gift from a gracious God.
So the call of this text is very, very simple. If you’re tired, come to him. Learn from him. Learn to obey him, learn to be like him.
And if you do, Jesus promises, you’ll find rest for your souls. True rest—rest that isn’t something we do, but something we are.
That is what Christ is offering to us. “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.”
