SPEAKER_00: Matthew 11, 28.
SPEAKER_00: Come to me, all you 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.
SPEAKER_00: For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
SPEAKER_00: This is the word of God.
SPEAKER_00: It was sometime in the summer of 1726 when Jonathan Edwards began preparing a sermon on Romans 12, verse 1, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice to God.
SPEAKER_00: This is your acceptable act of worship.
SPEAKER_00: And if you're familiar with Romans, you know that's the first list of imperatives in the book of Romans, comes in chapter 12.
SPEAKER_00: It's all the commands about how to lead the Christian life after all the rich theology of Romans 1 through 11.
SPEAKER_00: So Jonathan Edwards began preparing a sermon on that verse, Romans 12, verse 1, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice and all of the commands attendant with that description there, and begins to fill out a sermon about the obligations of the Christian life.
SPEAKER_00: He filled up 10 pages of notes.
SPEAKER_00: As far as we know, he never preached the sermon.
SPEAKER_00: He put it away for almost a year, came back to it much later, and crossed out every page and wrote along the column Matthew 11, 28.
SPEAKER_00: Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, I will give you rest.
SPEAKER_00: I hope you can sympathize with the battle in Edward's mind right there as you have an imperative to present your body as a sacrifice, to do the commands of Scripture, and for you to feel burdens by that and to start to flesh out all of the things that you're supposed to do in the Christian life and just to have this sense of weight on your shoulders, that you can't lead a life that is that good and that holy.
SPEAKER_00: You feel even studying the commands of the Lord almost overcome with weight.
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure you've all been there.
SPEAKER_00: You can sympathize with Jonathan Edwards, who just wants to cross the whole list out and write, just come to Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Come to him and he'll receive you.
SPEAKER_00: We live in a weary world, don't we?
SPEAKER_00: We live in a world where people are weary, where dads are exhausted.
SPEAKER_00: They work so long and then they come home and they feel like they can never spend enough time at home with their kids.
SPEAKER_00: They feel like no matter what they do, their wife always expects more from them and they just feel drained.
SPEAKER_00: We live in a world with exhausted moms that feel like just at the end of their rope, that they are pouring it all out at home with their kids, and their husband doesn't, you know, love them or show them attention anymore, and their kids don't respect them, and they just feel like they can't keep doing this.
SPEAKER_00: We live in a world with exhausted kids that feel like no matter how hard I work, no matter how hard I study, it's never good enough for mom and dad.
SPEAKER_00: We live in a world with exhausted people.
SPEAKER_00: Emotionally exhausted people that just feel like they're at the end of their rope, physically exhausted, spiritually exhausted, who feel like there are just so there's so much to do.
SPEAKER_00: You look around church and you see all these other happy families that seem to have everything together, and you just think, that's not us.
SPEAKER_00: You find yourself almost rooting for other families' trials.
SPEAKER_00: You know, you see the family that has everything together, and one day they show up at church and the wife is crying and the kids are yelling, and you're like, Yes, I knew it.
SPEAKER_00: That is not a healthy place to be spiritually, by the way.
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure you can relate.
SPEAKER_00: We live in a world where politics are exhausting.
SPEAKER_00: Amen?
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's maybe you haven't noticed, but it's presidential election time.
SPEAKER_00: People can get so wrapped up in this and think that the you know their own sense of psychological and emotional well-being hinges on the outcome of an election, and they start like sending Facebook messages to all of their friends they suspect might be Democrats.
unknown: Rrr.
SPEAKER_00: It's exhausting.
SPEAKER_00: And do you think that it will work?
SPEAKER_00: In four years, you're gonna be right back here again, doing the same thing again.
SPEAKER_00: It's a cycle you can never break yourself out of.
SPEAKER_00: You are exhausted by it.
SPEAKER_00: It is frankly amazing.
SPEAKER_00: George Whitfield wrote, a contemporary of Jonathan Edwards in the mid-1700s, he wrote, quote, It is frankly amazing how many Christians feel burdened by life, weary of marriage, weary of family, weary of church, but who have not yet turned to Jesus for rest.
SPEAKER_00: Such is the crowd on this day in Matthew chapter 11.
SPEAKER_00: What a phenomenal chapter Matthew 11 has been for us in our study over the last few months.
SPEAKER_00: It began on a bright and sunny day, emotionally, a bright and sunny day.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus was there out on the Mount Arbel, the Galilean hillside.
SPEAKER_00: The disciples of John the Baptist came asking him if he was truly the Messiah.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus began doing miracles and teaching for an hour to answer that question.
SPEAKER_00: As he did miracles and as he taught, the crowd only grew.
SPEAKER_00: People flooded from nearby chorus and out there.
SPEAKER_00: The crowd swelled to thousands of people seeing miracles and listening to Jesus teach all day long.
SPEAKER_00: As the disciples of John the Baptist left, Jesus turned his attention to the newly arrived crowd and asked them what they came out in the wilderness to see.
SPEAKER_00: Did they want a man in fine clothing?
SPEAKER_00: Did they come to see a reed shaken by the winds?
SPEAKER_00: What exactly were they after?
SPEAKER_00: And he tells them, Oh, you came for someone, you came for a prophet.
SPEAKER_00: And I tell you, you have more than a prophet.
SPEAKER_00: You get Jesus, the Savior Himself, out there to whom John pointed.
SPEAKER_00: And then he talks about the crowd's unbelief.
SPEAKER_00: He says, in a lot of ways, you guys are like little brats in the marketplace.
SPEAKER_00: You know, your friends ask you to play a happy song and you don't because you want to be sad, and so they ask you to play funeral and you don't want to do that because you want to be happy.
SPEAKER_00: And we deduce that you just all need Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: That's your problem.
SPEAKER_00: Your problem isn't the tone of the music.
SPEAKER_00: Your problem is that you don't love the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: And then Jesus zeroes in on the religious leaders and says that it is going to be easier for those in Sodom and Gomorrah in hell than it will be for those people who flooded out to the hillside to listen to Jesus teach and see all his miracles and yet don't give him their life.
SPEAKER_00: So what started out as a sunny day ends with Jesus condemning the whole hillside to hell.
SPEAKER_00: Then he gives what we looked at last week, just this very small but profound teaching on election.
SPEAKER_00: You can see where this would be comforting to Jesus, looking after all he taught and all the miracles he did to see so many people not believing, and Jesus says, ultimately, God is going to save whom he's going to save.
SPEAKER_00: He chooses, he's going to save some, so don't worry.
SPEAKER_00: And you almost expect the sermon to end there.
SPEAKER_00: But instead, Jesus follows the teaching on election with one of the clearest and most bold gospel invitations in all of the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: We tend to pit election against evangelism, don't we?
SPEAKER_00: We say, if election is true, why evangelize?
SPEAKER_00: If election is true, why pray?
SPEAKER_00: If election is true, why hope?
SPEAKER_00: Jesus teaches on election and follows it with an invitation for the thousands of people who are there to come and find salvation in him.
SPEAKER_00: Come to him, he says.
SPEAKER_00: If you try hard and do gooder and do better, you can make your own happiness in life and with your family and at work.
SPEAKER_00: And there's just this burden on the shoulders of people who want a happy family, they want a successful life, and they want to work hard enough to get it.
SPEAKER_00: And there's the reality that you cannot work hard enough to do it.
SPEAKER_00: You can't hold it all together.
SPEAKER_00: You just can't.
SPEAKER_00: And so you feel stretched and you feel burdened.
SPEAKER_00: It's to those kind of people that Jesus gives this invitation.
SPEAKER_00: There's three imperatives in this passage, three commands to come, take, and learn.
SPEAKER_00: Come to me, Jesus says in verse 28.
SPEAKER_00: Take my yoke, Jesus says in verse 29.
SPEAKER_00: Learn from me, Jesus says.
SPEAKER_00: It's an invitation to come and take and learn.
SPEAKER_00: It's a call to respond to Jesus' day of teaching and day of miracles, to respond to him in faith.
SPEAKER_00: And listen, if you are here today and you, this is describing you, you feel stretched in life.
SPEAKER_00: You feel like no matter how much you do as a husband, you can never be, you can never, you can never make your family happy.
SPEAKER_00: No matter how much you do as a wife, your kids don't love you or respect you, and you just feel like stretched to the breaking point in your own home.
SPEAKER_00: If you're here as a kid and you feel like, I just can't do enough to please my parents, if that's you, Jesus' invitation is for you this morning.
SPEAKER_00: He's telling you to come to him, to take from him, to learn from him.
SPEAKER_00: The first of these imperatives, come.
SPEAKER_00: This is the most classic gospel invitation in the scripture.
SPEAKER_00: Come to Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: This is Isaiah saying, come, eat, drink, live, eat bread without cost, drink wine and milk without payment, live in eternal life through faith in the Savior.
SPEAKER_00: This is the Samaritan woman at the well who is rescued from her sins by Jesus and sent back to the town, and she surrounds herself with the townspeople and she tells them, Come, come and see this man.
SPEAKER_00: I just met him, he knows everything about me.
SPEAKER_00: I think he might be the Savior.
SPEAKER_00: Come and see.
SPEAKER_00: This is Jesus to Zacchaeus up in the tree.
SPEAKER_00: Zacchaeus, come on down, man.
SPEAKER_00: Come with me.
SPEAKER_00: This is Jesus to the disciples on the Galilean shore.
SPEAKER_00: Come and follow me, he tells them.
SPEAKER_00: And these this is Jesus talking to you today.
SPEAKER_00: If you are weak, if you are burdened, if you feel stretched, if you feel exasperated, if you feel drowning in your own sin, you too can come to Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And this command, it is not come to him with your feet, come to him with your bodies.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is giving it to thousands of people that physically came out into the hillside, into the wilderness to see him.
SPEAKER_00: They are already there.
SPEAKER_00: No, he means come to him in faith.
SPEAKER_00: Find the meaning of your life in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Place your faith in him.
SPEAKER_00: It's come to him in faith, come to him by faith, come to him through faith, come to him and put your faith in him.
SPEAKER_00: This is a personal and compelling invitation to go out to Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Perhaps you know what it's like to be waiting for an invitation.
SPEAKER_00: I think back to when my kids were in elementary school and we're coming home from church on a Sunday and they'll be talking in the back of the van and say, Oh, it's so-and-so's birthday party next weekend.
SPEAKER_00: Can we go?
SPEAKER_00: And what's the parent's first response always to that line?
SPEAKER_00: Were you invited?
SPEAKER_00: Like, well, no, but most of the other kids in class were invited.
SPEAKER_00: Sure, certainly I'm invited too.
SPEAKER_00: All my friends are invited.
SPEAKER_00: Doesn't mean that I can go too, and you have to explain it as a parent.
SPEAKER_00: Like, no, that's not what it means.
SPEAKER_00: Your friends getting invited to a birthday party is not the same thing as you getting invited to a birthday party.
SPEAKER_00: Like, oh, are you sure, Dad?
SPEAKER_00: Yes, that's the way the world works.
SPEAKER_00: Think of an athlete who's waiting to get invited to All-Star Camp or waited, waiting to get invited to the travel team or whatever.
SPEAKER_00: Coaching high school soccer right now, and sometimes we'll play at practice starters against non-starters, but I also like to play where I have the players pick teams.
SPEAKER_00: I'll choose two players and have them pick out their teams.
SPEAKER_00: And of course, you see the faces, it's the same kids who are often chosen last, and so you see on their faces like, oh.
SPEAKER_00: And I say, you know, I don't care, I'm not your dad.
SPEAKER_00: You don't want to get picked less pick last to play better.
SPEAKER_00: That's your lesson.
SPEAKER_00: Like I said, I'm not their dad.
SPEAKER_00: And you can see like a look of relief when they do get chosen.
SPEAKER_00: Think of the person who's working and they're waiting to get invited to go on the the board retreat or go to the off-site planning day or whatever, and the call never comes.
SPEAKER_00: Here's a greater invitation for you here.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is talking to people who feel lost and isolated in the world, and he invites them to come and have fellowship with him.
SPEAKER_00: They want to be accepted by God, they want to be in this situation, accepted by the religious leaders.
SPEAKER_00: They could never do enough to be accepted by the Pharisees.
SPEAKER_00: They want to be accepted in their homes, they want to be accepted in the world, and they can't ever find it.
SPEAKER_00: And this is the irony, as long as you're looking for acceptance on the horizontal level, you will not find it in any meaningful way.
SPEAKER_00: And it's to those people that Jesus says, come, come to me instead.
SPEAKER_00: Second imperative is take.
SPEAKER_00: Take my yoke, Jesus says, take my burden.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 29, take my yoke upon upon you.
SPEAKER_00: You take off the burden of works, righteousness you have, and put on his burden.
SPEAKER_00: If come is an invitation to faith, take is an invitation to lordship, to submit your life to the commands of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Put your life under his burden.
SPEAKER_00: The gospel call is not a call to a libertine lifestyle.
SPEAKER_00: It's not come to Jesus to live however you want.
SPEAKER_00: It's a call to come to Jesus and put your life under his authority.
SPEAKER_00: It's a call to put on his yoke.
SPEAKER_00: It goes beneath the animal's neck and above the animal's neck.
SPEAKER_00: It usually has bolts on the side connected to poles that go back.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they're harnessed to animals together.
SPEAKER_00: They can't separate.
SPEAKER_00: You're under the direction of whoever's controlling the yoke.
SPEAKER_00: The yoke breaks the oxen.
SPEAKER_00: It makes them do what the one who is controlling it commands them to do.
SPEAKER_00: So Jesus' command is to the whole world.
SPEAKER_00: You're yoked by somebody, Jesus is saying.
SPEAKER_00: You're yoked by your idols of success.
SPEAKER_00: You're yoked by works righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: You're yoked by trying to find success and happiness in the home or in the family or wherever.
SPEAKER_00: You're yoked by trying to live to get enough money or happiness in your life.
SPEAKER_00: That's your yoke.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus says, set that yoke aside, put on my yoke and say it's better for you.
SPEAKER_00: It's actually made for you.
SPEAKER_00: It fits you.
SPEAKER_00: You put yourself under the submission of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: That's the yoke.
SPEAKER_00: If you are overburdened or weary or heavy or tired or feeling lost and worn out, Jesus doesn't offer you freedom from all external forces.
SPEAKER_00: He offers you submission to himself, which is better than submitting to the idols of your world.
SPEAKER_00: He has a better life for you.
SPEAKER_00: He just says, Come, take my yoke.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't relitigate how you got into your situation.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't rehash what you were thinking when you decided to start trying to do good enough to go to heaven.
SPEAKER_00: Like, are you out of your mind?
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't critique you for looking for happiness in your marriage or happiness in your work or happiness in your home.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't go over all that and drag you through it.
SPEAKER_00: He just says, look, you now are burdens, you're heavy laden, I have something better for you.
SPEAKER_00: We're going to find out elsewhere in Matthew how these people got that way.
SPEAKER_00: Matthew 23, verse 4, Jesus says the religious leaders heap burdens on top of people.
SPEAKER_00: The same word, they heap burdens on top of people.
SPEAKER_00: They can't bear them.
SPEAKER_00: Job describes all of life as burdensome.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, if you remember in the book of Job, he longs for death to escape the burdens of this life.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus says, you don't have to die to escape the burdens of this life.
SPEAKER_00: You can come to me in faith.
SPEAKER_00: Here's a yoke.
SPEAKER_00: He opens his arms to you.
SPEAKER_00: The third command is to learn.
SPEAKER_00: To come to him in faith, to take his yoke, his restrictions, live under submission to him, and then learn from him.
SPEAKER_00: That's the third imperative here.
SPEAKER_00: You spent the call to become a Christian is a call to spend your life learning about Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: If the call to come is conversion and the call to take is lordship, the call to learn is discipleship.
SPEAKER_00: The invitation to follow Jesus is a life of learning.
SPEAKER_00: It's a life of learning about Christ.
SPEAKER_00: It's a lifelong process of study.
SPEAKER_00: You become a student in the school of Christ, you study Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: You don't just put yourself under his word, you then become a student of his word.
SPEAKER_00: And that puts everything in focus.
SPEAKER_00: You spend your life reading the Bible, praying, fellowshipping with the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: It's an invitation to come to Him, submit yourself to Him, and now learn from Him.
SPEAKER_00: You can't learn from Him without submitting yourself to Him.
SPEAKER_00: You can't learn from a teacher unless you enroll in the class.
SPEAKER_00: So this is an invitation to come, enroll, and study.
SPEAKER_00: It puts yourself under the authority of Jesus Christ where you start learning what the Bible says, and so you learn more about Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And that puts everything else in focus.
SPEAKER_00: You can see how that starts to transform your burdens.
SPEAKER_00: You're in a marriage that you seem as it seems to you as hopeless.
SPEAKER_00: You know, you think, when I got married, I signed up for happiness.
SPEAKER_00: This marriage is not happy, and I can't take it anymore.
SPEAKER_00: I'm at the end.
SPEAKER_00: Alright, so Jesus says, step back, come to him, submit yourself to him, do what his word says, and learn about Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: So get your eyes off of this world onto the next world.
SPEAKER_00: Start focusing in heaven because you understand this is not your only life.
SPEAKER_00: You have this life, and this life is important, but this life pales in comparison.
SPEAKER_00: It's not even worth comparing the trials of this life to the eternal glories you have in the next life.
SPEAKER_00: It's not even worth comparing the two.
SPEAKER_00: And so you get your eyes off of this life.
SPEAKER_00: You're so fixated that you're not happy in marriage, you're not happy in this life.
SPEAKER_00: Get your eyes off of this life, put them in heaven, focus on Christ in the next life, and you will see how the burdens of this life get reframed and reshaped.
SPEAKER_00: When you're not seeking happiness in this life, but in the next, suddenly the trials in this life become a means of sanctification, preparing you for the next.
SPEAKER_00: They're way less burdensome that way.
SPEAKER_00: A husband who thinks, man, I just cannot do enough to make my wife happy.
SPEAKER_00: You're looking for acceptance on a horizontal plane.
SPEAKER_00: You will not ultimately find it.
SPEAKER_00: Get your lives off of the horizontal, get your eyes into the next life, focus on Jesus in the next life.
SPEAKER_00: Suddenly you realize you're accepted by the Lord in the next life.
SPEAKER_00: Acceptance in this life means so much less.
SPEAKER_00: It just gets reframed differently.
SPEAKER_00: The kid who thinks I can never make my parents happy.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus invites you to him.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus puts his arms around you.
SPEAKER_00: You realize you're accepted by Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Your parents are now changed in your eyes from a people that you're trying to please to people the Lord has given to you to raise you and to care for you and to teach you to fear him.
SPEAKER_00: And that just shapes the way you start to view them in a different light.
SPEAKER_00: Your problems don't go away.
SPEAKER_00: They just don't burden you as much anymore.
SPEAKER_00: You come to learn from Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: I've never met somebody as a pastor who's told me, man, my marriage stinks.
SPEAKER_00: I'm at the end of my life.
SPEAKER_00: I want out, I can't do it anymore.
SPEAKER_00: But you know what's crazy?
SPEAKER_00: My quiet time is better than it's ever been.
SPEAKER_00: My prayer life is off the charts.
SPEAKER_00: My husband's a loser villain, but Psalm 119 is awesome.
SPEAKER_00: Once people get despondent and weighed down by this life, they turn away from the word.
SPEAKER_00: Their prayer time becomes a memory, their Bible time becomes a memory.
SPEAKER_00: The burdens get heavier and heavier and heavier as the Bible gets dustier and dustier and dustier.
SPEAKER_00: Get back in the word.
SPEAKER_00: Now, a quick observation before we keep going here, come take, learn, three imperatives.
SPEAKER_00: All of these are the same invitation.
SPEAKER_00: There has been so much damage done to the Christian church by people prying these three apart and even saying, you can come to Jesus as a Christian without submitting yourself to his word.
SPEAKER_00: Or you can come to Jesus and submit yourself to him without becoming a disciple.
SPEAKER_00: That's something that happens later in your spiritual life.
SPEAKER_00: They want to separate these and they develop these whole, like a whole rubric of like, here's a carnal Christian.
SPEAKER_00: This person's going to heaven, but they haven't given their life to Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: This person's given their life to Jesus and is going to heaven, but is not yet a disciple.
SPEAKER_00: They're not ready for that kind of thing.
SPEAKER_00: And that's just noxious.
SPEAKER_00: Because that poisons people.
SPEAKER_00: You want to see somebody trapped under despair, tell somebody they're a Christian without, and they don't have to submit their lives to the Lord and check in on them in two years.
SPEAKER_00: They're going to be drowning up to their neck in sin and yet think I'm a believer because of, you know, I accepted Jesus into my life and I go to church.
SPEAKER_00: They've never turned from their sin.
SPEAKER_00: They're dying under the weights, and you're just putting lead in their pockets and saying, you know, good thing you're a Christian.
SPEAKER_00: This is the same invitation.
SPEAKER_00: Come to Jesus, put yourself under his word, and learn from him.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, conceptually, the call to faith and the call to conversion and the call to discipleship, conceptually they're different.
SPEAKER_00: You can't separate them and have a functioning Christian.
SPEAKER_00: You understand this with a car.
SPEAKER_00: The engine and the transmission and the steering wheel are conceptually distinct, right?
SPEAKER_00: But you can't have a functioning car with only one of the three.
SPEAKER_00: You buy the car, you're buying all three.
SPEAKER_00: It's a package deal.
SPEAKER_00: The invitation of Jesus to come to him, it's a package deal.
SPEAKER_00: Well, he follows us with three reasons why you should take him up on his invitation.
SPEAKER_00: There's self-descriptions.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus says, Come to him because he's gentle and lowly, because his burden or his yoke is easy, and his burden is light.
SPEAKER_00: These are self-descriptions of Jesus in this passage.
SPEAKER_00: The first, gentle and lowly.
SPEAKER_00: This is the only place in the New Testament where Jesus self-describes his own heart, his own disposition.
SPEAKER_00: He describes himself as gentle and lowly.
SPEAKER_00: This is Jesus' self-image, so to speak.
SPEAKER_00: And I don't want to do too much anachronism here, taking like a modern psychological term and applying it to Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: But if you could grant that Jesus has some image of himself or some kind of concept of who he truly is, his own words about his heart, this is it right here.
SPEAKER_00: He describes himself as gentle and lowly.
SPEAKER_00: The words gentle and lowly, that's not the normal way they're translated.
SPEAKER_00: The word gentle is the concept of meek, strength under control, somebody who is controlled by their own power.
SPEAKER_00: Meekness is another way it's rendered in the Sermon on the Mount.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus describes himself as meek.
SPEAKER_00: He has his strength and it is controlled.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't squash you.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't rain down lightning from heaven on you or fire from heaven on you, although that's been requested by his disciples at various points.
SPEAKER_00: His strength is in check and is under control.
SPEAKER_00: He's the omnipotent God of the universe.
SPEAKER_00: He has all power is his.
SPEAKER_00: It's his by nature.
SPEAKER_00: And yet he is robed in human flesh.
SPEAKER_00: He has come down to us.
SPEAKER_00: His strength is under control.
SPEAKER_00: And he is lowly.
SPEAKER_00: That's the word for humble.
SPEAKER_00: He's humble.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't lord his authority over us.
SPEAKER_00: He's humble.
SPEAKER_00: He comes from heaven to earth.
SPEAKER_00: He, although he had the very form of God, he didn't consider a quality with God, something to be grasped, but he emptied himself, taking on the form of a slave, becoming obedient to the commands of God, obedient all the way to the point of death, and even death on the cross, the most ignominious, humiliating death you can imagine.
SPEAKER_00: So he went from the throne room of heaven to the cross at Golgotha.
SPEAKER_00: That's humility.
SPEAKER_00: When he came to earth, this is the language of Hebrews 1 and 2.
SPEAKER_00: When he came to earth, he didn't come as an angel.
SPEAKER_00: If he wanted to humble himself and condescend to us and enter creation, why didn't he do it as an angel?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, they can fly, they have power.
SPEAKER_00: Angels were made for the throne room of heaven.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus could have come as an angel, he represents all the majesty and power and glory of God, yet in a physical manifestation of it.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't do that.
SPEAKER_00: He comes under angels, he comes lower than angels, he says.
SPEAKER_00: So that he can call you and me brothers.
SPEAKER_00: He's not ashamed to call us brothers.
SPEAKER_00: You think that he would, if he's seen hanging around with the likeness of us, hang his head in the hallway of heaven.
SPEAKER_00: But no, he's not ashamed to call us brothers.
SPEAKER_00: Even to the angels, he owns us.
SPEAKER_00: He says, Yeah, they're with me.
SPEAKER_00: That's the lowliness of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: In the next chapter, it's going to say he fulfills Isaiah's prophecy.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't quench a smoldering candle, like the flame is flickering.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't extinguish it.
SPEAKER_00: You know, the flame starts to flicker.
SPEAKER_00: Some of you might feel that way, like you're just running out of oil in life.
SPEAKER_00: You're running out of power in life.
SPEAKER_00: Your flame is starting to flicker.
SPEAKER_00: You would expect somebody to just come and put it out.
SPEAKER_00: What do you do if you see a candle that is flickering?
SPEAKER_00: You just put it out and light a different one.
SPEAKER_00: Some of you feel that way.
SPEAKER_00: Like I'm at the end, my oil is running out, I'm just flickering.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus comes along and he gives you more oil.
SPEAKER_00: And my don't judge me for this.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, the confession time.
SPEAKER_00: In my house, we have an electric cat water thing that cycles the cat water through.
SPEAKER_00: It's embarrassing.
SPEAKER_00: I never thought I would be that person, but there it is.
SPEAKER_00: As the water runs out through time, it starts to gurgle and make a weird sound.
SPEAKER_00: That happens normally at one in the morning, is my experience.
SPEAKER_00: And the easiest thing to do is just unplug it.
SPEAKER_00: There.
SPEAKER_00: That solves.
SPEAKER_00: The cat's not gonna die.
SPEAKER_00: Unplugged.
SPEAKER_00: But then my kids are like, why is the cat water unplugged?
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, maybe the cat unplugged it.
SPEAKER_00: We'll never know, I guess.
SPEAKER_00: You're supposed to put more water in it.
SPEAKER_00: Some of you feel at the end of your line, you feel gurgling, you feel like I'm running out of power.
SPEAKER_00: And again, you would expect a stronger person whom you're disrupting to simply unplug it and deal with it later.
SPEAKER_00: But Jesus comes and refills you, powers you up.
SPEAKER_00: That's the gentleness and the humility of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And he does this by giving you a burden, a yoke that's designed for you.
SPEAKER_00: Look at verse 20 or verse 30.
SPEAKER_00: My yoke is easy.
SPEAKER_00: The easiness of the yoke is contrasted with the labor in verse 28.
SPEAKER_00: That word labor is the word for weary, some translations give it.
SPEAKER_00: It's an internal word.
SPEAKER_00: It's like dehydration.
SPEAKER_00: The sun is beating down on you, and inside of you, your strength is gone.
SPEAKER_00: You don't have the strength to keep going on.
SPEAKER_00: That's what living on the horizontal does for you.
SPEAKER_00: Living for success in family or in life or with other people or in sports or in finances or even works righteousness, trying to do good enough to be accepted by God that drains you from the inside.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus comes along and gives you an easy yoke.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't deplete you.
SPEAKER_00: It's to nobody's benefit if the yoke is too heavy for the oxen.
SPEAKER_00: It's not for the farmer's benefit, not for the oxen's benefit.
SPEAKER_00: The yoke has to be strong enough to direct them, and that's it.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus says, My yoke is fitted perfectly for you.
SPEAKER_00: Why?
SPEAKER_00: Because Jesus gives you the strength to do what he commands.
SPEAKER_00: He empowers your obedience from the inside out.
SPEAKER_00: It's like he's pushing against the walls of your heart to hold it open.
SPEAKER_00: You feel inside like your heart is withering up.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus pushes it open.
SPEAKER_00: He gives you commands to obey, and he gives you the strength to obey it.
SPEAKER_00: This is why he's different than the religious leaders who lay burdens on you, but they can't change the heart.
SPEAKER_00: You live for the here and now in this world.
SPEAKER_00: It's burdens, and you run out of energy.
SPEAKER_00: You can't do this anymore.
SPEAKER_00: But Jesus can give you strength by changing your heart from the inside out through faith.
SPEAKER_00: He gives you a new heart, he gives you new strength.
SPEAKER_00: You can now live from the inside out.
SPEAKER_00: I took my family to Mount Vernon recently, and we saw the oxen demonstration there, these two big oxen.
SPEAKER_00: One of them is named Knox.
SPEAKER_00: I love that.
SPEAKER_00: Scottish Presbyterian oxen.
SPEAKER_00: And he's plowing the field, and we learned that you don't put two oxen of similar strength next to each other.
SPEAKER_00: You have to have one strong and one weak.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know which they look the same to me, but I'm assuming Knox was the strong one.
SPEAKER_00: And the lady tells us, hey, these oxen are trained.
SPEAKER_00: They can do commands.
SPEAKER_00: Do you want to see one?
SPEAKER_00: Like, oh, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00: I want to see a trained oxen.
SPEAKER_00: And she says, What commands?
SPEAKER_00: And I say, What can they do?
SPEAKER_00: Well, they can go forward, backwards, left, or right.
SPEAKER_00: And I say, backwards for sure.
SPEAKER_00: Of course.
SPEAKER_00: Is there another answer?
SPEAKER_00: She's like, all right.
SPEAKER_00: And so she shouts at the oxen, reverse, and then whips them.
SPEAKER_00: And they go back, like, ah, that's not a trained oxen.
SPEAKER_00: That's a whip in the face.
SPEAKER_00: That is the picture of the yokes that looking for success in the world places on you.
SPEAKER_00: It just breaks you and brings you down.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus' yoke on you gives you the strength to do what he commands.
SPEAKER_00: The second description here is light.
SPEAKER_00: The burden of Jesus is light.
SPEAKER_00: It's not heavy.
SPEAKER_00: Now, this is in contrast with the heavy laden.
SPEAKER_00: Back up in verse 28, that phrase heavy laden, that's an external weight on you.
SPEAKER_00: That's a word that's used of ships that have so much cargo their hole hits the ground.
SPEAKER_00: You can't get it out to sea because it's got so much weight on it.
SPEAKER_00: It can't get off the shore.
SPEAKER_00: Again, sometimes people feel that way.
SPEAKER_00: They've put so much expectations on themselves.
SPEAKER_00: There's so many external pressures on them, they feel like they can't move anymore.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus says, Well, come to me.
SPEAKER_00: My burden is light.
SPEAKER_00: It lets you move.
SPEAKER_00: And this is intentionally an oxymoron here.
SPEAKER_00: Like, how can you have a light burden?
SPEAKER_00: That's not what the word burden means.
SPEAKER_00: A burden cannot be light.
SPEAKER_00: If it's light, it's not a burden.
SPEAKER_00: But that's what Jesus says.
SPEAKER_00: His burden is light.
SPEAKER_00: And that's because he doesn't give you unreasonable expectations.
SPEAKER_00: You have to get this to have a free Christian life.
SPEAKER_00: The standard of holiness is perfection and we fail.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus forgives us of our sins, gives us a new nature, and then shows us how to live.
SPEAKER_00: The standard is still perfection, but the expectation is progressive sanctification.
SPEAKER_00: The expectation is you're going to grow in godliness throughout your life that you will fail.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus knows that.
SPEAKER_00: He knows you're going to stumble into sin.
SPEAKER_00: He knows you're going to, you know, go two steps forward, one step back.
SPEAKER_00: He understands that about you.
SPEAKER_00: And he still loves you.
SPEAKER_00: He still receives you.
SPEAKER_00: He still accepts you and he still empowers you.
SPEAKER_00: That's why his burden is light.
SPEAKER_00: Because he knows what you can bear.
SPEAKER_00: He's the strong mule in this scenario.
SPEAKER_00: You're the weak one.
SPEAKER_00: And you yoke to him and he directs you.
SPEAKER_00: His yoke fixes you.
SPEAKER_00: It brings you under his arm.
SPEAKER_00: And ultimately, all these revolve around the word rest.
SPEAKER_00: The invitation is to come find your rest in Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: That's in verse 28.
SPEAKER_00: Come to him, I'll give you rest.
SPEAKER_00: His invitation is that you would find verse 29, rest for your souls.
SPEAKER_00: Your soul's work and your souls' labor, and Jesus offers them rest.
SPEAKER_00: There is no rest in this world.
SPEAKER_00: There is no rest in trying to keep God's law.
SPEAKER_00: There is no rest in success.
SPEAKER_00: There is no rest in money or family.
SPEAKER_00: There's certainly no rest in politics.
SPEAKER_00: Again, you do the same thing every four years.
SPEAKER_00: There is no rest in your work.
SPEAKER_00: The word work is literally the opposite of rest.
SPEAKER_00: The only place you can have rest is by coming to Christ.
SPEAKER_00: You can live your life stressing and straining and struggling to be as perfect as you think everybody else is.
SPEAKER_00: But ultimately, your kids are not going to be perfect.
SPEAKER_00: Your job is not going to be perfect.
SPEAKER_00: Your spouse is not going to love you like you thought they would.
SPEAKER_00: Your kids are not going to respect you like you thought they would.
SPEAKER_00: That's not going to happen.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus then gives you rest anyway.
SPEAKER_00: He frees you from wearing that burden in the world, and he gives you rest to make you back like you were created.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus created you to glorify him through obeying him.
SPEAKER_00: So he frees you from the burdens of this world, not to set you free into the world, but to set you free in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: That's not freeing him.
SPEAKER_00: That's a death sentence for my cat.
SPEAKER_00: Coyote snack.
SPEAKER_00: You wouldn't say I'm freeing him by letting it run away.
SPEAKER_00: You want to free a tree from the slavery of the ground?
SPEAKER_00: Do you pluck it up?
SPEAKER_00: You want to free a fish from the weight of the water?
SPEAKER_00: Do you hook it in his mouth and get it out of the water?
SPEAKER_00: That's not freeing any of those things.
SPEAKER_00: No, if you want to free the tree, you plant it because it was made to live in the ground.
SPEAKER_00: You want to free the fish, you throw it back in the water.
SPEAKER_00: That's where it's supposed to live.
SPEAKER_00: You want to do what's best for the pet, you put it back in the house.
SPEAKER_00: What is freedom for you?
SPEAKER_00: It's coming back to Christ.
SPEAKER_00: It's coming and finding your rest in him.
SPEAKER_00: He designed you to be found in him.
SPEAKER_00: Earlier this year I hiked Mount Doom Mordor in uh New Zealand, the volcano from Lord of the Rings, and it's had it was a long, long hike and lots of steps.
SPEAKER_00: And my littlest, Geneva, has legs that are roughly this tall.
SPEAKER_00: And each step for her was like mountain climbing.
SPEAKER_00: And you know, we're like halfway up, and she's like, I'm out.
SPEAKER_00: I cannot do this anymore.
SPEAKER_00: These little I now have total sympathy for Frodo.
SPEAKER_00: You see the theme through Lord of the Rings books.
SPEAKER_00: He's always complaining about how many steps there are.
SPEAKER_00: Like I get it now, his little legs.
SPEAKER_00: So I can tell Geneva, listen, I can carry you, but I can't carry you and my backpack.
SPEAKER_00: Like, I'm not Alex Hergrove.
SPEAKER_00: He could do both of those things.
SPEAKER_00: I could not.
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna take off my backpack, give my backpack to Geneva.
SPEAKER_00: She'll wear that and I'll carry her.
SPEAKER_00: It's way lighter than having to walk.
SPEAKER_00: Do you think she complains about the backpack?
SPEAKER_00: Oh no.
SPEAKER_00: No way.
SPEAKER_00: That backpack seems so light to her.
SPEAKER_00: Because she's being carried up the way.
SPEAKER_00: This is our life.
SPEAKER_00: We are on an impossible mission, an impossible journey, up an impossible mountain with an impossible weight, impossible expectations.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus comes and says, Let me carry you.
SPEAKER_00: Let me carry you the rest of the way.
SPEAKER_00: God, we're grateful that you invite us to come to faith in you.
SPEAKER_00: Pray for everyone here this morning.
SPEAKER_00: If there's anyone here who's never given their life to you, I pray that today they would turn to you and find their rest in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: That you'd give them the courage and the strength to stop living for themselves, but to live for you.
SPEAKER_00: We ask this in Jesus' name.
unknown: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: And now for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for joining us.
SPEAKER_00: If you're in the Washington, D.C.
SPEAKER_00: area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.
SPEAKER_00: For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.
SPEAKER_00: For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.
SPEAKER_00: location, go to TMS.edu.
SPEAKER_00: I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.