Come to Me: Finding Rest from the Burden of the Law

Come to Me: Finding Rest from the Burden of the Law

A sermon on Matthew 11:28–30

Scripture Text

Matthew 11:28–30 (ESV)

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.

Sermon

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Today I'd like to focus on the words that Jesus gives us at the end of our gospel reading, when He says, "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."

Christ Calls Us to Rest, Not Performance

The joy of Jesus Christ is that He calls the weary and heavy laden to find rest in Him. The heart of Christianity is that so much of human life is about performance, about doing something — and even so much of the Bible is about the weight of the law on people. But Christ does not call us to bear a law or to perform or to achieve. He simply calls us to Him to find rest, because He is the one who did the law for us. He is the one who was perfectly obedient to His heavenly Father in our place, and He is the one who went to the cross to die and rise for us, so we can have eternal life.

He did all the work, He did all the achieving, He did all the performance, so that in Christ we can simply rest in Him. All our good works, all our efforts spring from His grace and His mercy. And when we fail, which we always do, it doesn't mean that we are kicked out of the club — but we find forgiveness in Him. Our inability to be perfect doesn't end our relationship with God, because we, who were once weary and heavy laden, we find our rest in Him. What a joy, what peace that we have in Christ.

Why Grace Doesn't Make Sense to Us

This is the hardest thing to understand and fully believe as a Christian, because we human beings just don't get grace. Grace does not make any sense to the natural human person.

One of the greats of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod was C. F. W. Walther, one of the founders of the Missouri Synod. He wrote an amazing book called The Proper Distinction Between Law and Gospel, and in one section he writes — and I paraphrase — that human beings believe religion should be hard. In fact, the more demands and the harder we make any kind of religion, the more obviously true it seems to be. The more you have to achieve, the more you have to work, the better it looks to the normal human being. And I agree with him. This is why Mormonism seems so good to so many people — it is all about working and achieving. Human beings don't understand the grace and mercy of Christ, that God doesn't need anything from us. He desires to give.

When we look out at a world filled with people who don't know this beautiful grace of Christ, very often Christians look out and see a world that seems lawless to us. People are doing all sorts of crazy things, things that God's law says no to, and we think, well, what they need is more law. We need to get the Ten Commandments out into the world and tell all those people that they just got to follow these, and then their lives will be good. But the problem with our world is not that we don't have any law — it's that there's too much law. The people around us are filled with demands that they place on themselves or that people around them place on them, filled with a constant need to perform. They wrap their lives around a kind of law that they can never achieve, because it is always just out of reach. They point their lives toward something that will never provide the security and peace that we have in Christ.

The Burden of "Making a Difference"

For many people, the thing that they want, the thing that they think will give them identity and fulfillment and peace, is making a difference in the world.

It's almost become a truism that if you go to a high school graduation, one of the speakers will say, "You're going to go out there and make a difference. You will change the world." And when you're eighteen, you can almost believe it — you've got the whole world ahead of you, you have all the vim and vigor of someone who doesn't know anything, and you think the world was just waiting for you to bring about a change. That ends pretty quickly, doesn't it? You go out and realize that no matter what you do or how hard you work, nothing ever actually changes. In fact, there are only a handful of people in the whole history of the world who have really made a difference on the big picture. No matter how hard you work, no matter what you do, nothing changes. In politics, you elect the right people, and amazingly enough, they just do the same things as the wrong people. You support the right causes, and nothing ever actually changes. Life just keeps going on.

There's only one person who actually made a real difference in the world, one person who brought about the kind of change that all of us can believe in, and that is someone who went and died on a cross and rose from the dead to make all things new. He defeated the real enemy, sin and death, and when He comes back, He's going to make everything different by creating a new heavens and a new earth. That promise means that we don't have to change the world — God will do it for us. He's already made the difference. We're not burdened by that law.

The Burden of Having Life "All Planned Out"

Similarly, a lot of people think that the way to have life and happiness and fulfillment is to plan out your life in minute detail to make sure you have the success you desire.

I recently was at an event, and an elder gentleman looked out at the crowd and said, "I am so excited about young people these days. I meet so many people who have their whole lives planned out ahead of them." He thought that was a compliment, and I thought that sounded terrifying. How many people do you know whose lives went according to plan — that they left home, went out into the world, and everything fell into place? The job they thought they would get, they got. The money they thought they would make, is what happened. And everything just went smoothly? Having your whole life planned out is kind of a burden — a rigid plan that means the future is set, and anything different is like a train derailment. And it's not just young people. How many people have their retirement all planned out, they know exactly what they're going to do — and oh no, a health problem, a family thing, and it all derails. This burden of planning, of making sure you have everything set, really is just the law weighing on the shoulders of people.

There is only one plan that never changes, one plan that is guaranteed to come to fruition, and that is the plan of our God, Jesus Christ, who died on a cross and rose for you, and knows that everything is working toward the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. When the plan becomes a burden, He says, "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

The Burden of Expressive Individualism

Another way that people find fulfillment, that they find their identity, is through something I've heard called expressive individualism. The idea behind this is that to be truly human, to be truly you, is to find your authentic self. People used to talk about "going out and finding themselves" — that's kind of what this means. To be truly who you are is to find who you are deep down inside and let that out, express it, no matter what the world says — to throw off all restrictions and all boundaries and just be you. And once you release that out into the world, that is how you will find peace. Everything else is oppression. All that is, is the excuse to let out your sinner, isn't it — because I know who I am deep down inside, and he's been drowned in baptism.

Expressive individualism just leads us to being kind of terrible people, making us all alone, and the peace that we want is always just out of reach.

Christ Gives Us a Better Identity

But there's good news for those who labor under that burden. Jesus calls us to rest. He gives us an identity that is so much better than the person we are on the inside — it's the person He has given to us in our baptism. Jesus says, "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

The world is filled with law — more than I could ever list in a sermon — and people don't need more of it. They don't need more demands, more guilt, more shouting, more people pounding on a pulpit. They need the gospel of Jesus Christ, a Savior who's done all the work, who calls them to rest and takes the work upon Himself.

A Warning to the Church: Beware "Or Else" Thinking

But we Christians, we know this — we have to be very careful that once we call people into our fellowship, we don't then call them to a new law. We don't say, "Come here, have this rest that Christ gives," and then, as soon as they sit in the pews, tell them, "You have to behave, or else." And many Christians do that. Yes, we do have to follow Christ. Yes, He does call us to good works. But they flow from the gospel, and they are not a condition of it.

We often don't trust that the Holy Spirit will do that work, will change the hearts of the people who come into this place. And when we speak with the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ to non-Christians, once they come in here, we lay another burden on them. I call it "or else" thinking. We have lots of things we are supposed to do, lots of things we do because they are good for us — and it's our human nature that says, well, we have to give them just a little bit of a threat to get them to do it. Read your Bible, or else. Pray, or else. And usually it comes out in things like: you need to read your Bible because you have to develop your personal relationship with Jesus, and if you don't watch out, you might slip away. You have to do good works because Jesus says, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments," and if you don't keep His commandments, maybe you never were a Christian to begin with.

All that does is show that we just don't trust the Holy Spirit to do His work — we don't trust the Spirit to change the hearts of the people who come and rest in Christ, who find the peace and beauty of the gospel in Jesus, and joyfully decide to do the work that God has given us. We don't need to threaten people to come and receive the sacraments, because they are beautiful and good, and we find rest in them. We don't need to tell you, "Read your Bible, or else," because we know reading the Bible is good for us, and we love to hear God's word. We don't have to place a new law on the Christian, because the gospel causes us to desire to do what God wants us to do.

Conclusion: Rest for Your Souls

And that's what we have as Christians — a Jesus who calls us not to a law but to grace in Him, when He says:

"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."

In Jesus' name, Amen.