SPEAKER_00: Good morning, church.
SPEAKER_00: My name's Justin Fawcett.
SPEAKER_00: So I'm the director of family ministries here, and I'm one of the elders.
SPEAKER_00: Being the director of family ministries means I spend a lot of time in the small rooms and not a lot of time in this room.
SPEAKER_00: So this is a little different than my normal teaching environment.
SPEAKER_00: So I teach a lot of middle and high school students, and I teach a lot of three through five-year-olds.
SPEAKER_00: So you guys bear with me if this feels different than a normal sermon.
SPEAKER_00: So today we're going to be in Matthew 11, and we're going to talk about finding rest in Christ, the rest that we find in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: I want to thank you for being here today.
SPEAKER_00: Welcome you if it's your first time visiting.
SPEAKER_00: I'm excited to worship together.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you to the music ministry for leading us in worship.
SPEAKER_00: Thanks to all of the teachers that we can't see right now because they're in the small rooms teaching our children and discipling them well.
SPEAKER_00: Let's read together from Matthew 11.
SPEAKER_00: We're going to read 25 through 30.
SPEAKER_00: So at that time, Jesus declared, I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you've hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.
SPEAKER_00: 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 to anyone the Son chooses to reveal him.
SPEAKER_00: Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
SPEAKER_00: 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.
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray together.
SPEAKER_00: Father God, we thank you for this morning.
SPEAKER_00: We thank you for this morning.
SPEAKER_00: Father, we thank you for the word that you've given us to gather around your scripture.
SPEAKER_00: God, that you've protected through thousands of years to meet us today.
SPEAKER_00: God, we ask that you would help us to understand the truth from your word.
SPEAKER_00: Holy Spirit, that you would give me words to say.
SPEAKER_00: God, that you would give all of us soft hearts that are prepared to hear from you.
SPEAKER_00: And God, that you would help us to understand who you are and who we are and how we should be changed by that.
SPEAKER_00: It's in the name of the Son we pray.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Alright, so we're here in Matthew 11, and you notice we're kind of like there in the student room, I feel like there's things that we repeat over and over and over.
SPEAKER_00: And one of the things we repeat over and over and over is context.
SPEAKER_00: Like context is important.
SPEAKER_00: We're jumping into the middle of this chapter right here in this statement that Jesus is making.
SPEAKER_00: But to understand it, we need to like roll back just a little bit.
SPEAKER_00: So in the beginning, you know something is hidden, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like something, Jesus is saying something has been hidden from the wise.
SPEAKER_00: If you look up at the passage before, uh 20 through 24, Jesus lists all these cities, right?
SPEAKER_00: He lists all these Jewish settlements that he visited, and he performed miracles, and he taught, and he did his thing, and people didn't listen.
SPEAKER_00: People didn't hear him, people didn't have faith in what he said.
SPEAKER_00: And then he lists these other cities that he's comparing them to, and they were all cities that the audience of Jesus' day would have heard as like evil cities.
SPEAKER_00: Not just sinful, I mean like really bad, like the people there do really bad stuff.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus is making this comparison, and he's saying, think of this place that's really bad for these Jewish settlements, for these people that are the children of God, because they saw miracles, they heard Jesus' teaching, and they chose not to believe, it's worse for them.
SPEAKER_00: They've had an opportunity that these evil cities have not, right?
SPEAKER_00: So that's a little bit about the mind of Christ as He's as we're getting into this.
SPEAKER_00: This is what they're talking about as we jump in.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, this, if you've been around church, this may be something that you've heard a lot.
SPEAKER_00: Christ is gentle and lowly, like, take on my yoke.
SPEAKER_00: So the challenge today, as it often is, hear this with fresh ears.
SPEAKER_00: If you think, like, you know what this means, and if you know what this means better than I do, like that's fantastic.
SPEAKER_00: Hear this with fresh ears, though.
SPEAKER_00: Let's hear what Christ has to say.
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
SPEAKER_00: Christ says here that something is hidden.
SPEAKER_00: The knowledge of God, the good news, the gospel, was hidden to these cities.
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't revealed.
SPEAKER_00: But he also says that it's been revealed to someone, right?
SPEAKER_00: In the student room, we do a lot of like call and response.
SPEAKER_00: So y'all are gonna have to forgive me.
SPEAKER_00: That's like my inclination is to say, who does he, who does he reveal it to?
SPEAKER_00: So who do he says that it's been hidden, but it's been revealed to whom?
SPEAKER_00: Y'all.
SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_00: Wait, I heard it?
SPEAKER_00: What did you say?
SPEAKER_00: Little children.
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
SPEAKER_00: So he says, these cities that are trusting in being descendants of Abraham, that's how they think they're made right with God.
SPEAKER_00: They're trusting in that.
SPEAKER_00: They think themselves wise, they think they've got everything under control.
SPEAKER_00: The truth is hidden from them.
SPEAKER_00: They can't see it because of that position of their heart.
SPEAKER_00: But then to little children, it's been revealed, right?
SPEAKER_00: Little children here doesn't mean physically little children, though God does reveal the truth to little children.
SPEAKER_00: But he's saying that we should be like little children.
SPEAKER_00: We should think of ourselves more like little children.
SPEAKER_00: Now, these cities that are trusting in Abraham and trusting, trusting in their uh their being descendants of Abraham, they they're not, okay, the difference is they're not trusting God as little children.
SPEAKER_00: Little children rely on the adults around them, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like toddlers may think that they can go, you know, make macaroni and cheese in the microwave, but after they try, what do they do?
SPEAKER_00: Like they ask mom and dad for help, right?
SPEAKER_00: Christ here is telling us the same.
SPEAKER_00: Like when we uh when we abandon our self-reliance and turn to God, that's when we can see the truth of the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so and then in verse 27, we're all still in context.
SPEAKER_00: We're really talking about 28 and 30 here.
SPEAKER_00: But in verse 27, he says, verse 27, all things have been handed over to me by my father.
SPEAKER_00: No one knows the son except the father, and no one knows the father except the son, and to anyone to whom the son chooses to reveal them.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so no one knows the son except for who?
SPEAKER_00: The father, that's right.
SPEAKER_00: Now, it doesn't mean like I know a person.
SPEAKER_00: Like, if you've ever been to Kroger and like you see someone that you used to work with, you know, and you're like, or you see someone you used to live down the street from, you've had this experience, and you're like, oh, I know that guy.
SPEAKER_00: Like, his name is Chris or something.
SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_00: Like, I'm I know him, kind of, right?
SPEAKER_00: That's not what he's saying here.
SPEAKER_00: He's saying deeply know.
SPEAKER_00: Know the identity of, know who Christ is, know his heart, his heart for God and his heart for people, know his now.
SPEAKER_00: Who truly knows the Father?
SPEAKER_00: The Son.
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
SPEAKER_00: That's y'all, we're gonna do this the whole time.
SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
SPEAKER_00: The only one that truly knows the Father is the Son.
SPEAKER_00: So we've got this closed system.
SPEAKER_00: Who knows the Father?
SPEAKER_00: The Son.
SPEAKER_00: Who knows the Son, the Father?
SPEAKER_00: They know each other.
SPEAKER_00: They know each other perfectly, right?
SPEAKER_00: They're both God and everything.
SPEAKER_00: But then, who else does it say knows the Father?
SPEAKER_00: I heard it somewhere.
SPEAKER_00: I'm patient, y'all.
SPEAKER_00: Who does okay?
SPEAKER_00: The father knows the son, the son knows the father, and who else knows the father?
SPEAKER_00: Those he chooses to reveal the father to.
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so we've got this closed system of the father and the son.
SPEAKER_00: They know each other, but then we are invited into this system.
SPEAKER_00: Think of the absurdity of what we've just read.
SPEAKER_00: That God, the Father and the Son, know each other perfectly, and now we are invited to know the Father through the Son.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: Okay, now we get to verses 28 and 30, which is really where we're gonna spend our time today.
SPEAKER_00: Let me read them for us.
SPEAKER_00: Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
SPEAKER_00: Take my yoke upon you and learn from me.
SPEAKER_00: For I'm gentle and lowly in heart, you will find rest for your souls.
SPEAKER_00: For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, Christ tells us to do three things here.
SPEAKER_00: He invites us, he commands us to do three things.
SPEAKER_00: He tells us to come, he tells us to take, and he tells us to learn.
SPEAKER_00: So, point number one, we're gonna talk about come.
SPEAKER_00: In Matthew 11, 28, Jesus says, Come to me.
SPEAKER_00: The God of the universe, the creator of all things, invites us to come to him.
SPEAKER_00: As people who have maybe been around church, or at least people who have been around the South, this doesn't feel like new news, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like, yeah, Jesus loves us, Jesus says, Come to us.
SPEAKER_00: For a moment, like, imagine that though.
SPEAKER_00: God who made all things.
SPEAKER_00: God who made us, but God who made all of creation, God who made the deepest parts of the solar system, God who is unimaginably powerful, and God who is self-sufficient, who needs nothing from us, invites us to come to Him.
SPEAKER_00: What requirement does Jesus put on us before we can come to Him?
SPEAKER_00: Now, Jesus in the gospel, it's recounting what He said, recounting what He did.
SPEAKER_00: But Christ, as a person who actually lived this and actually said this, He could have said anything, and as God has the authority to say anything He wants, right?
SPEAKER_00: So He could have said, Come to me when you're good enough.
SPEAKER_00: Come to me when your life stops being quite so messy and you're ready, then you can come to me.
SPEAKER_00: Or he could have said, Come to me when you know enough, when you've studied enough, when you feel like you really understand the Bible and what it's saying.
SPEAKER_00: That's something he didn't say, but something he could have said.
SPEAKER_00: He could have said, Come to me when all of your fears and your anxieties are solved.
SPEAKER_00: When the mess inside your heart that nobody else can see, once that's relieved, then come.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't tell us to come to him when we've got things figured out.
SPEAKER_00: He says, Come to me.
SPEAKER_00: And the group that he calls to himself is those who are labor, those who labor and are heavy laden.
SPEAKER_00: So labor and heavy laden, we've got this image of someone who's worked hard and someone who has a heavy weight on their shoulders, someone who's carrying something heavy.
SPEAKER_00: This is the group.
SPEAKER_00: This is the group that Christ calls to himself.
SPEAKER_00: Sorry, Steve talks about allergies.
SPEAKER_00: It's allergy season.
SPEAKER_00: But seriously, though, at no point does he say that we have to be good enough to come to him.
SPEAKER_00: He invites us as we are.
SPEAKER_00: Now, remember, before this, Christ was talking about who knows the Father?
SPEAKER_00: Who knows the Father?
SPEAKER_00: The Son, that's right.
SPEAKER_00: Who knows the Son?
SPEAKER_00: The Father, that's right, and then anybody he invites to know the Father.
SPEAKER_00: So anyone who knows God has been invited by Jesus, invited by the Son to know God, and the next thing he says is, guess who I want to come to me?
SPEAKER_00: Guess who I want to reveal the Father to?
SPEAKER_00: Those who labor and are heavy laden.
SPEAKER_00: He didn't invite, he invited everyone, okay?
SPEAKER_00: Like he invited all to come to himself.
SPEAKER_00: But by name, he didn't say religious leaders who have devoted their entire lives to the church.
SPEAKER_00: That's who gets to come and know the Father.
SPEAKER_00: He didn't say scholars who are experts in the Bible, and he didn't say people who have never made mistakes in life.
SPEAKER_00: Instead, he says, Come to me, those who are tired.
SPEAKER_00: Now, labor here, physical labor to be sure, but we're talking about spiritual labor.
SPEAKER_00: For his original audience, remember, he's talking to Jewish people, right?
SPEAKER_00: He's talking to people who are following the Old Testament and following the laws of the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_00: The spiritual labor that they would be doing, the spiritual labor that they would have been exhausted by, following all of the rules of the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_00: Now remember, Christ, he talked to the people, but he also talked to the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the scribes, the people that were in the temples, right?
SPEAKER_00: Now the Pharisees, they were a group that was had power at the time, but they took the Old Testament, and I believe some probably out of a good heart, and many not out of a good heart, said, if we're going to obey all the rules of the Old Testament, and there are many rules in the Old Testament, the way that we're going to do that is we're going to make extra rules on top of that.
SPEAKER_00: So it says, the Sabbath, okay, take Sundays, keep it holy.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it wasn't Sunday for them, but you got what I'm saying, right?
SPEAKER_00: The Sabbath, take one day a week and keep it holy.
SPEAKER_00: So the Pharisees come alongside and say, Well, how are we going to do that?
SPEAKER_00: Let's make a whole lot of rules about how we're going to keep the Sabbath holy, how we're going to obey the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, uh, if we don't work on the Sabbath, walking, you know, 10 paces, that's not working.
SPEAKER_00: But walking 11 paces, that feels a lot like work.
SPEAKER_00: So there we go.
SPEAKER_00: And you see how they start creating these other rules.
SPEAKER_00: The number of rules that the Jewish people were seeking to follow or attempting to follow was astronomical and impossible.
SPEAKER_00: So this labor, this uh this constant striving to be good enough, this constant effort to make yourself right before God, people were exhausted.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus says to them, you who are exhausted, you who are exhausted of trying to be good enough, a weight that you can't carry on your own, come to me.
SPEAKER_00: For us, so for them, the law, all the rules, the Pharisees, that's how they were spiritually tired.
SPEAKER_00: For us, uh, even if we don't try to follow all the rules of the Old Testament, because I think most of us in here, like by the letter of the law, don't do that, we still try to justify ourselves before each other and before God.
SPEAKER_00: We still try to, we try to live right, and when we don't live right, we say, but you know, you don't understand the circumstances.
SPEAKER_00: I made this decision because of, you know, da da da da da.
SPEAKER_00: That's the law.
SPEAKER_00: Like if you look at the the body of what Jesus said in the whole New Testament, he's not telling us to abandon the law.
SPEAKER_00: He's not saying, you know, free reign, you guys were tired, it was really hard.
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
SPEAKER_00: Free for all, everybody do whatever.
SPEAKER_00: He's not saying that in the slightest.
SPEAKER_00: He's saying as we as we uh as we seek to live lives that honor God, it doesn't have to be in a way that crushes us.
SPEAKER_00: He's offering us something different.
SPEAKER_00: Now Jesus offers us a promise.
SPEAKER_00: He says, Oh, do I have to turn my page?
SPEAKER_00: No.
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
SPEAKER_00: Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and what does he say he's gonna do?
SPEAKER_00: He's gonna give us rest.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so these people that were exhausted, these people that carry the weight of the law, these people that carry the weight of trying to justify themselves before God and before others, he says, Come to me and I'll give you rest.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so the first thing he tells us is to come.
SPEAKER_00: Let's look further.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, point two.
SPEAKER_00: He tells us to take.
SPEAKER_00: He tells us to take on his yoke.
SPEAKER_00: Now, um I'm not a farmer, but I did grow up around farms.
SPEAKER_00: Even still, I didn't grow up around yokes.
SPEAKER_00: Like, has anybody ever yoked an animal before?
SPEAKER_00: No?
SPEAKER_00: Okay, I thought sincerely someone may raise their hand.
SPEAKER_00: Like, that's still a thing, but it's not something we do very much.
SPEAKER_00: So I personally have never yoked an animal, so I read a lot about that this week.
SPEAKER_00: Um, kids, uh, if you didn't know, on the back uh table back there behind the uh behind the camera, there's a bunch of coloring pages.
SPEAKER_00: If you didn't grab one of those, you're free to do that now.
SPEAKER_00: There's clipboards and stuff.
SPEAKER_00: Did anyone grab the one with the picture of the ox on it?
SPEAKER_00: Has anybody got one of this?
SPEAKER_00: Can you hold it up?
SPEAKER_00: anybody?
SPEAKER_00: Really?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I see Rose back there.
SPEAKER_00: Yep, I see Ronald and what he's been working on.
SPEAKER_00: Or excuse me, Landon.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's really good.
SPEAKER_00: So the yoke, if you look at that picture, a yoke was a wooden bar that went across the neck of an animal.
SPEAKER_00: And that that wasn't just to put it there.
SPEAKER_00: The yoke, the purpose of the yoke was that it could do work, okay?
SPEAKER_00: If you had to plow a field and you have this plow, you yoke it to an animal, like an ox, to pull it for you.
SPEAKER_00: Because, I mean, we fickle humans can't pull a plow.
SPEAKER_00: We need a big beast to do that, right?
SPEAKER_00: So that was the purpose of a yoke.
SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' time, uh, they did have a single yoke.
SPEAKER_00: Like if we think in our heads about Old West movies and they're like plowing a field with an ox, you know, and there's a single ox pulling it.
SPEAKER_00: That was a thing in Jesus' time, but more commonly there was a yoke that held two animals, a double yoke.
SPEAKER_00: So that goes across the shoulders of one creature, and then there's another creature that goes across as well.
SPEAKER_00: There's a bar in the center and they're pulling something.
SPEAKER_00: Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_00: Everybody, you gotta nod.
SPEAKER_00: Like does that make sense?
SPEAKER_00: Like you've seen, you you can imagine your mind what I'm talking about, a yoke.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so this original audience, they lived in a farming society.
SPEAKER_00: When he says yoke, take my yoke, the image that probably comes to the mind for these people is that two two yoke, two oxes, and pulling like a plow or pulling a cart, that cart would have had like a single axle, just two wheels on it.
SPEAKER_00: Like if you think of Westerns, they had the the wagons with four wheels with two axles.
SPEAKER_00: You know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm gonna make you nod.
SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry, y'all.
SPEAKER_00: You know what I'm talking about?
SPEAKER_00: Like you think like gunsmoke or something?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they've got a covered wagon.
SPEAKER_00: This is different than that.
SPEAKER_00: This is a cart with a single axle and two wheels, right?
SPEAKER_00: Now, when when we think about this yoke that's sitting on the shoulders of oxen, imagine a cart that has just two wheels, right?
SPEAKER_00: That means that like just with this axle, as the weight shifts, it pivots, right?
SPEAKER_00: Right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't have the four wheels.
SPEAKER_00: Like your car when you're driving down the road, if it's working properly, doesn't pivot back and forth.
SPEAKER_00: Like it might bounce a little bit, but like you've got four wheels on the ground, you're good.
SPEAKER_00: Two wheels, that weight's gonna shift.
SPEAKER_00: What that means is that ox who's in front, who has that bar across his shoulders, he's not just pulling, it's not just like a rope and he's pulling it behind him, he's feeling the weight of that cart.
SPEAKER_00: Like as that weight shifts, like it's literally on the shoulders of the ox.
SPEAKER_00: Now, for us, because we're not farmers, like we have to kind of flesh out this image, for Jesus' original audience, this was their day-to-day life.
SPEAKER_00: Like he says, take on my yoke.
SPEAKER_00: This is what they hear, this is what they see in their mind's eye.
SPEAKER_00: Now, an ox that's pulling a cart or an ox that's pulling a cloud, a crowd, a crowd, a plow, an ox is pulling a plow.
SPEAKER_00: Um, do you why does an ox do that?
SPEAKER_00: Like, does an ox voluntarily just like walk out of the barn and is like, man, I hope I get a heavy weight today?
SPEAKER_00: Like, I hope something crushing is on my shoulders and I just get to drag it through the earth.
SPEAKER_00: You know, that's just satisfaction for a job well done, you know?
SPEAKER_00: Like, no, that's not what an ox is doing.
SPEAKER_00: How does Jesus look at verse 30?
SPEAKER_00: So with that mind of what a yoke is, that mind of the experience of an ox, let's read verse 30.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus says, for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
SPEAKER_00: We're starting here to see what Jesus is talking about.
SPEAKER_00: His original audience, everything we've talked about up to this point, they just know automatically.
SPEAKER_00: We have to kind of work through it, right?
SPEAKER_00: But his original audience is they're thinking about an ox putting on a yoke.
SPEAKER_00: It's a burden, it's heavy, it's something the ox may even fight against as you're trying to put it on.
SPEAKER_00: He says, Take on my yoke, because my yoke is easy and my burdens light.
SPEAKER_00: The weight of self-justification, the weight of being right before God is backbreaking.
SPEAKER_00: Christ here is offering us another way.
SPEAKER_00: All right, point three.
SPEAKER_00: We've talked about coming to Jesus, we've talked about taking on his yoke, and then here, learn from him.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 28 again, come to me all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
SPEAKER_00: 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.
SPEAKER_00: For my yoke is easy, and my burdens light.
SPEAKER_00: So Jesus here says, in taking a taking his yoke, metaphorically speaking, like in taking his yoke, our job is to learn from him.
SPEAKER_00: So one reason that you yoke an animal is to direct them.
SPEAKER_00: Now imagine the absurdity if the farmer has the field to plow and he pulls out the plow and he pulls out the ox and he says, Good luck, you know, Jimothy, the ox, good luck.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, I need to get this plowed, I need this acre plowed, I'll see you this afternoon, like I'm gonna go have a nap.
SPEAKER_00: When he comes back, what is he gonna find?
SPEAKER_00: The ox just standing there, right?
SPEAKER_00: Or more likely the ox has moseied away and doing its ox thing.
SPEAKER_00: If this work needs to be done, the ox needs to be put into the yoke, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like, it's not gonna happen on its own.
SPEAKER_00: So, one reason to yoke an animal is to direct them.
SPEAKER_00: Like, even if he puts the ox in the yoke, he's the ox still needs direction in what to do.
SPEAKER_00: Choosing our own path in life, choosing the way that we choose to live, is something else that can be exhausting.
SPEAKER_00: Using our own moral framework for life, what we decide is right and wrong, is exhausting.
SPEAKER_00: Christ is offering to teach us another way to live.
SPEAKER_00: But remember, verse 30, this way that Christ is teaching us to live is not supposed to be a burden.
SPEAKER_00: The way he's teaching us to live is supposed to be easy.
SPEAKER_00: It's not just supposed to be, it is.
SPEAKER_00: So when we, I say that on the front end, when we hear this and we say, right, but I feel like what Christ is saying feels really heavy, right?
SPEAKER_00: That's not a problem with Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: That's a problem with what we're understanding.
SPEAKER_00: So we have to hang in there.
SPEAKER_00: Now, Jesus here, he calls himself gentle and lowly in heart.
SPEAKER_00: Another way to translate that would be gentle and humble in heart.
SPEAKER_00: Depending on what Bible you have this morning, it may even say that humble in heart instead of lowly.
SPEAKER_00: So what does it mean that Jesus is gentle and lowly in heart?
SPEAKER_00: The women's ministry is like, we're actually going to read a book about that this summer.
SPEAKER_00: They're reading gentle and lowly.
SPEAKER_00: And I saw this morning, I think there's some copies on the back desk.
SPEAKER_00: If you haven't read that book, grab a copy, please.
SPEAKER_00: Like it's it's actually it's actually really, really good.
SPEAKER_00: But when Jesus calls himself gentle and lowly, what does that mean?
SPEAKER_00: So imagine this image that Jesus is using to compare how he wants to lead people, how he wants to teach people, with a farmer, right?
SPEAKER_00: That's the framework that he's been building.
SPEAKER_00: So let's imagine that.
SPEAKER_00: What a farmer who's gentle and lowly, what would that look like?
SPEAKER_00: Like if a farmer invites an ox out of the barn and yokes it and then just is terrible to the ox, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like he's got a stick and he's just like, ah, dude, do the thing, right?
SPEAKER_00: That's not gentle and lowly.
SPEAKER_00: Like a farmer who's cruel to his animals, a farmer who beats an ox into submission, and a farmer who forces him to do this work under pain of death, right?
SPEAKER_00: That's not what Jesus is saying here.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus says that he's humble in heart and he's gentle.
SPEAKER_00: He's not a cruel farmer who beats his animals into submissions, to submission.
SPEAKER_00: So uh Friday night, I think it was Friday night, uh, we let the dogs out.
SPEAKER_00: It was kind of late at night, it's like 9.15.
SPEAKER_00: I didn't ask the dogs for permission to share this story, so don't tell them.
SPEAKER_00: But uh, we let them out in the backyard, it's like 9.15, and they go crazy.
SPEAKER_00: They just start barking their heads off.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm afraid they're gonna wake up the entire neighborhood.
SPEAKER_00: So we look out and there's a snake in the middle of the backyard, and it's caught something.
SPEAKER_00: I see Miss Marsha's face.
SPEAKER_00: Sorry, but like, uh, my face is pretty similar.
SPEAKER_00: But there's this snake that's caught something and it's doing its snake thing, and the dogs are furious that it's here, and it's this, you know, standoff in the backyard at 915, and it's tense, and the neighbors lights.
SPEAKER_00: I'm afraid they're about to come on.
SPEAKER_00: So I'm telling the dogs, hey, it's it's fine.
SPEAKER_00: You gotta come in the house, right?
SPEAKER_00: We have two dogs, and one of them's reluctantly like, All right, I gotcha.
SPEAKER_00: I hear what you're saying, I'm gonna come in the house.
SPEAKER_00: The other dog is not so convinced.
SPEAKER_00: She's about this tall, and she's ferocious, and she's like, right?
SPEAKER_00: In that moment, I was not gentle and lowly in heart with this dog, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like, the first dog comes in and it's all as well, you know, peace, peace be upon you.
SPEAKER_00: And then the second dog, I'm like, I'm gonna have to pick this thing up, kicking and screaming and bring it inside.
SPEAKER_00: Christ here, he's saying that he's not dragging us kicking and screaming.
SPEAKER_00: He's gentle and lowly.
SPEAKER_00: He's not gonna, if if in in this metaphor inside of a metaphor, if Christ is in the backyard with the dogs, like he's not, you know, kicking them and pushing them.
SPEAKER_00: He's being gentle and lowly.
SPEAKER_00: He's a kind of Savior who offers his yoke as a better way.
SPEAKER_00: If we look at the narrative of Scripture from the beginning, the yoke that he's offering is what was originally intended.
SPEAKER_00: He's offering us how to make things right, not to do, not new rules, how to do things the way they were intended to be in the beginning before sin entered the world, before everything went wrong.
SPEAKER_00: Now, there's a bit of absurdity to what Christ is saying.
SPEAKER_00: Now, I don't say that, being disrespectful.
SPEAKER_00: I'd say that the image he's created is a little ridiculous.
SPEAKER_00: He says, if you're tired, come to me.
SPEAKER_00: I have a yoke, right?
SPEAKER_00: What ox goes to the farmer and says, It's been a long week.
SPEAKER_00: We've plowed a lot of fields, you know what I really need?
SPEAKER_00: I need a yoke.
SPEAKER_00: I need you to put something heavy on my shoulders and get to work.
SPEAKER_00: Like, that's how I'm gonna find rest today.
SPEAKER_00: Like, that's it's absurd.
SPEAKER_00: He's saying the way we find rest is this yoke that he wants to put upon us.
SPEAKER_00: In that book, Gentle and Lowly, Dane Ortland, he calls it an unyoke.
SPEAKER_00: The yoke of Christ is an unyoke, and the burden of Christ is an unburden.
SPEAKER_00: Somehow, when we step into the yoke of Christ, it's not that we feel additional pressure on our shoulders from this yoke.
SPEAKER_00: Somehow, when we step into the yoke of Christ, the pressures that we had before feel less.
SPEAKER_00: Acts 15, 10, Peter's talking to the council at Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_00: And he says, So why are you now challenging God by burden by burdening the Gentile believers with a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors were able to bear?
SPEAKER_00: So Peter here in Acts is calling the law a yoke.
SPEAKER_00: And he says that yoke was something that he nor the Jewish people, God's people, it's something that they couldn't bear.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus here, he's telling us something really unique.
SPEAKER_00: Now, he says learn from him is part of the reason we're putting on this yoke.
SPEAKER_00: The farmers of the day, something that they would have understood when he says that, learn from me.
SPEAKER_00: If you're putting an ox in a yoke, uh, you have a young ox, you know, that's not used to this work, a young ox that's not used to that burden on its shoulders, uh, it would often fight against the yoke, right?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00: You put something heavy on my shoulders, I'm probably gonna fight you too.
SPEAKER_00: But you put this burden on their shoulders, the ox would want to fight away from it.
SPEAKER_00: You pair a younger, less experienced ox with an older ox that understands what it's doing.
SPEAKER_00: And it understands when you put the yoke on its shoulders, it understands what it's expected of him.
SPEAKER_00: So the young ox can learn from the old ox, right?
SPEAKER_00: So here when it talks about the yoke of Christ, it is it's Christ's yoke.
SPEAKER_00: Christ is the farmer in this image.
SPEAKER_00: Christ is the one who's putting the yoke on there and directing the work.
SPEAKER_00: But the gospel is that Christ isn't just the farmer, Christ has entered the yoke with us.
SPEAKER_00: Christ is so oxen, I um I can be a little bit of a science nerd.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I read a lot about the physics of oxes pulling carts, and it's actually really complicated.
SPEAKER_00: But the the power of an ox is based on its body weight, like its muscle mass, right?
SPEAKER_00: An ox can carry often at least its body weight, usually more.
SPEAKER_00: So then if you have two oxen, you would assume they can carry body weight plus body weight, right?
SPEAKER_00: And if you have two individual oxen and there's a load and you just kind of tie the oxes to the load, that that's probably about right.
SPEAKER_00: But when you put them together in a yoke, something interesting happens.
SPEAKER_00: It's uh the burden that they can carry becomes multiplicative.
SPEAKER_00: So an oxen can't just carry its body weight plus the other body weight in this yoke, they can actually, because of the the way their muscles are working together, they can actually pull much more.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: This is a mystery of farming, but it's it's interesting to me.
SPEAKER_00: So now if I'm in the yoke, if I'm taking on the yoke of Christ, and the other person in the yoke is Christ Himself.
SPEAKER_00: Like, if a thousand-pound ox can pull a thousand pounds and another one can pull a thousand pounds, and you put them together, maybe they can pull three thousand pounds.
SPEAKER_00: What if that second ox is infinitely powerful?
SPEAKER_00: What if that second ox, there's no limit to what he can pull?
SPEAKER_00: I think we start to understand the way that this yoke is an unyoke and this burden is an unburden.
SPEAKER_00: If we think about Acts 15 and how Peter said that the law itself, the law itself is a burden upon us.
SPEAKER_00: Being able to live a perfect life and be justified before God.
SPEAKER_00: If we uh, if, okay, if someone lived a perfect life and obeyed all the rules, obeyed all the laws, we say that that person is righteous, correct?
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah?
SPEAKER_00: It's been a while since we nodded, I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah?
SPEAKER_00: Okay, a person who follows all the laws, that person is righteous.
SPEAKER_00: They're right before God.
SPEAKER_00: Righteousness, another way to think about that, is a right standing with God, a right relationship with God, and a right relationship with each other.
SPEAKER_00: So if you follow all the rules, that means you have a perfectly correct, a perfectly right relationship with God, perfectly right relationship with each other.
SPEAKER_00: We're not, we're respecting God, we're honoring him, we're not hurting each other, we're loving each other.
SPEAKER_00: That's that's what that means, right?
SPEAKER_00: Now, Jesus, the only person who ever did live a righteous life, the only person who ever did live a perfect life, when he was asked what's the greatest commandment, what did he say?
SPEAKER_00: He said to love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.
SPEAKER_00: The Old Testament says might.
SPEAKER_00: So with everything I have, everything I am as a person, to love God with that, and to love your neighbor as yourself.
SPEAKER_00: So Jesus is explaining to live a righteous life is to live in right relationship with God and right relationship with each other.
SPEAKER_00: Now, in this yoke, Jesus is the person who's done that.
SPEAKER_00: Bearing the law on his shoulders, he was able to.
SPEAKER_00: He lived that perfect life in a way that I could not.
SPEAKER_00: Now he invites me into his yoke, and there's no burden for me to carry because he carried it for me.
SPEAKER_00: There's no burden for me to carry, and all he wants to do is teach.
SPEAKER_00: He tells me that he wants me to learn.
SPEAKER_00: And what he wants me to learn is how to love God well and how to love each other well.
SPEAKER_00: So as we as we close, as we wrap up, everyone in here, the the wherever we are in our problem is the same.
SPEAKER_00: Every single one of us, even whether we trust Jesus or not, our problem is the same.
SPEAKER_00: Our problem is our our illusion of self-dependency, our illusion of um of being able to take care of this by myself, the illusion of thinking that I have this under control, the illusion that leads me to myself and not to God.
SPEAKER_00: Here, Christ is offering us another way.
SPEAKER_00: He says, come to him.
SPEAKER_00: And when we do, he doesn't have an additional burden for us.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, he has a burden to release from us.
SPEAKER_00: Now, uh as as we as we wrap up, I wanted to share the roundabout way that I came to this passage and I came to talking about this week.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, if you asked me last week, we were talking about something completely different, and that's what I had been studying, and that's what I've been preparing.
SPEAKER_00: I thought it was interesting as we uh read through Matthew as a church and in our Sunday schools, we've just gotten into the New Testament as we're going through.
SPEAKER_00: And I thought it was interesting that uh John the Baptist, when he's uh declaring Christ, preparing a way for Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Does anybody remember what he says?
SPEAKER_00: Like what he's calling out to people?
SPEAKER_00: He tells them to repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
SPEAKER_00: Then Jesus, after he's tempted, when he starts his ministry, what does he say to people?
SPEAKER_00: He tells them to repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
SPEAKER_00: Uh when he sends out the 12 later in Matthew, he tells them the message that they're bringing is repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
SPEAKER_00: And then, like Scott read just a little bit ago, when he sends out the 72, he tells them, When you heal the sick, tell them that the kingdom of heaven is close, right?
SPEAKER_00: Similar to at hand.
SPEAKER_00: And I don't know, that's really fascinating to me.
SPEAKER_00: So that's what I had been working on.
SPEAKER_00: And I was reading, uh, I was reading about what would a Jewish person hearing John or hearing Jesus or hearing the 12 or hearing the 72, what would a Jewish person have heard when they heard the kingdom of heaven is at hand?
SPEAKER_00: Because certainly it's different than what we would hear.
SPEAKER_00: They're existing in a completely different culture, a completely different context.
SPEAKER_00: And one thing I was fascinated to find, Jewish writings from around Jesus' day outside the Bible, Jewish writings, they had this idea of the yoke of the kingdom of heaven.
SPEAKER_00: So when a Jewish person from that time and some Jewish people today, when they get up and they say their prayers from Deuteronomy, and they do the same thing they do every morning and they pray, they imagine that as taking on the yoke, the crossbar, the burden of the kingdom of heaven.
SPEAKER_00: So what they're saying to themselves is no matter what happens today, no matter what I encounter, I'm going to seek the kingdom of heaven.
SPEAKER_00: Like I carry the weight of the law, the weight of the kingdom of heaven.
SPEAKER_00: But hear Christ responding to that in these people who would have this idea that every morning when they pray, they're taking on this yoke.
SPEAKER_00: Every day when they pray, and they're taking on a yoke.
SPEAKER_00: He says, I have a better way.
SPEAKER_00: So today, Christ invites us.
SPEAKER_00: He invites us to come down.
SPEAKER_00: He invites us to take on that yoke.
SPEAKER_00: And he invites us to learn.
SPEAKER_00: So friends, as we uh as we move forward in our time, we typically spend three minutes uh considering from scripture.
SPEAKER_00: But this is a good time to read, it's a good time to pray, it's a good time to consider where we are with the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna spend that three minutes, and then the the worship team is gonna come back and we're gonna sing some more.
SPEAKER_00: But before we do that, let's pray.
SPEAKER_00: Father, we thank you.
SPEAKER_00: We thank you this morning.
SPEAKER_00: God, we thank you for being a good God who loves us.
SPEAKER_00: We're thank you, we thank you for being a good God who relieves burdens instead of forgiving burdens.
SPEAKER_00: Father, we pray that you would reveal to us who we are and who you are, and that you would change us with that.
SPEAKER_00: In the name of Christ, we pray.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.