Matthew 11:28-30 Work + Life Balance: The Search for Rest
A Day in the Life
At the beginning of his book, Making Room for Life, Randy Frazee describes the average day of a typical middle-class family in America:
The family rises at 6:00am. Everyone fends for himself or herself for breakfast. Dad heads out at 6:45 to beat the 7:00 traffic. His normal commute without excessive traffic is forty-five minutes. Mom and the two children are out the door by 7:15 (usually someone is a little cranky.) Mom drops her elementary-age sons off at school by 7:40. Twenty minutes later she arrives at her workplace.
At 3:30pm the children are done with school and enter an afterschool program. Mom skips lunch so she can rush out of the office to pick the kids up by 5:00. She arrives home at 5:30. Fifteen minutes later one son has baseball practice. She gets both kids in the car and rushes to make it to the practice field on time. The other son has a game at 8:00. She calls her husband on the cell phone while taking her son to make sure he can grab the second child at the field and get him to his game by 7:30.
Dad leaves the office at 6:00pm, unsuccessful in his efforts to make it through his to-do list. Traffic is now an issue. The forty-five-minute commute stretches now into an hour and fifteen minutes. He arrives at the practice field at 7:15 with all the signs of road stress. He kisses his wife, waves to his son in center-field, whooshes the second son into his SUV (a mere $700 a month), and heads to the game field about fifteen minutes away. Son #1 finishes practice at 7:30, and he and Mom head for home. On the way they stop at Taco Bell for dinner. They arrive at 8:00. The boy turns to video games while Mom checks the e-mail.
Meantime, the baseball game gets started a little late and doesn’t end until 9:45pm. Dad is still in his business casual clothes, but he does appreciate the forced break to watch his son play ball. On their way home they make a quick stop at the McDonald’s drive-in window. They arrive home at 10:30. Once in the house, son #2 reveals that he hasn’t finished studying for the history test he’s supposed to take tomorrow.
After forty-five minutes of shoving facts into her son’s short-term memory while he inhales a McDonald’s “Happy” Meal, Mom sends him to bed. It is now 11:15pm. Time for bed. Mom and Dad flop into bed dead tired. They watch a little television; exchange a few words—mostly action items for the next day—and then lights go out. Mom falls asleep as soon as the lights are out. Dad, on the other hand, doesn’t. He lies there thinking about all the things that must be done. He knows he needs to sleep, so he gets up and swallows a sleeping pill. It seems to be the only way he can get a good night’s sleep lately. It bothers him a little, but he doesn’t see any alternative. Tomorrow promises more of the same. (p. 16-17)
I know that scenario describes more of a large city/suburban setting than we live in; but aside from the traffic issues it does not sound all that different from the pace-of-life for many families around here.
If there is one word to describe what it is like to live in our world today, I think the word most of us would choose first is: busy. We are busy people. We have busy families. Kevin DeYoung, in a book called Crazy Busy, says:
We have more opportunity than ever before. The ability to cheaply go anywhere is a recent development. The ability to get information from anywhere is, too. Even the ability to easily stay up past sundown is relatively new. The result, then, is simple but true: because we can do so much, we do do so much. Our lives have no limits. We eat (most of) what we want, buy (most of) what we want, and say yes to (too much of) what we want. In all of our lifetimes we’ve seen an exponential expansion in the numbers of opportunities for children, opportunities for seniors, opportunities for leisure, opportunities for travel, opportunities for education, opportunities at church (and for different churches), opportunities in our local communities, and opportunities to make a difference around the world. No wonder we are so busy. (p. 24-25)
I think that paragraph is a good summary of our current reality. We have more opportunities than ever before; and so we are busier than ever before. As DeYoung puts it: because we CAN do so much, we DO do so much. We live in a culture of busy-ness. We are a part of a culture that is designed to keep us busy.
Work + Life
We are starting a new 4-part sermon series today. I’m calling it Work + Life: Balance. The new school year is about to begin. We are just a month or so from the harvest cranking up. In a couple of weeks we have a national holiday known as Labor Day. We are very busy. So it seems like a good time to talk about work and rest. A good time to think about the balance between the need to get things done, and Jesus’ invitation to find rest in Him.
I think our chronic busyness may be symptomatic of a larger spiritual problem I call “the performance standard.” There is something about the human condition that drives us to perform. We have a need to prove ourselves. To make our own way. And so we are constantly comparing our achievements to others. We are constantly trying to demonstrate that we are capable. In a sense, I believe, we are trying to earn God’s approval. We think that the more we do, the more we get done, the busier we are, the more we deserve God’s love.
But, of course, that’s not the way it works. Jesus came not so that we would work harder, but so that we could rest. Jesus came to free us from the performance standard.
Listen to these words of Jesus, from Matthew 11:28-30:
28Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
An Invitation for the Weary
I want to outline this passage with three main points. Then, at the end, I’ll have three points of application.
First, notice who Jesus is talking to. This is an offer to the busy. Verse 28:
28Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
This is an invitation to those who are busy. For those who feel they are going a hundred miles an hour in a thousand different directions.
Let’s face it, when someone asks us how we are doing, one of our favorite responses is to say: “I’m busy.” Kevin DeYoung includes an anecdote in his book about a woman from another culture who came to the United States and began to introduce herself as “Busy.” She heard it so often whenever she met someone new—"Hello, I’m busy”—that she figured it was a part of an American greeting ritual. So she told everyone she met that that’s who she was. (Crazy Busy, p. 16)
I’ve heard it called “busy-bragging.” It’s a version of humble bragging, when we complain about how hectic our lives are but really we’re just trying to convey to people how important we are, how committed we are, how many things we have going on.
Busyness is one of our calling cards.
But busyness can be exhausting. That’s what Jesus seems to be getting at in verse 28: “all you who labor and are heavy laden.” The word “labor” means toil, self-effort, and weariness to the point of exhaustion. The word translated here as “heavy laden” means loaded up and over-burdened. It’s the kind of word you would use for a pack animal that has been given too much weight to carry.
What’s the danger? Where does all this busyness lead? In the book Crazy Busy, Kevin DeYoung suggests three dangers to our spiritual lives that come from chronic busyness.
1) It ruins our joy. When we feel busy, we feel harried and stressed and overwhelmed. It makes us “frantic and frenzied, we are more prone to anxiety, resentment, impatience, and irritability.” (DeYoung, p. 26) In a word, it makes us crabby. Busyness sucks the fun out of life. And that’s bad not just for us, but for those around us as well. As DeYoung says: “When busyness goes after joy, it goes after everyone’s joy.” (p. 28)
2) It robs our hearts. In the parable of the soils, Jesus describes some of the conditions that make it difficult for faith to grow up in a heart. For the third type of heart, He describes thorny soil. Essentially, He says that what prevents us from believing in Jesus is busyness. “The worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful.” (Mark 4:19)
DeYoung writes:
For most of us, it isn’t heresy or rank apostasy that will derail our profession of faith. It’s all the worries of life. You’ve got car repairs. Then your water heater goes out. The kids need to see a doctor. You haven’t done your taxes yet. Your checkbook isn’t balanced. You’re behind on thank you notes. You promised your mother you’d come over and fix a faucet.You’re behind on wedding planning. Your boards are coming up. You have more applications to send out. Your dissertation is due. Your refrigerator is empty. Your lawn needs mowing. Your curtains don’t look right. Your washing machine keeps rattling. This is life for most of us, and it’s choking out spiritual life. (Crazy Busy, 29)
3) It covers the rot in our souls. Perhaps the most dangerous part of busyness is that we may be making ourselves busy so that we don’t have to take stock of the actual condition of our souls. All the things we stuff into our calendar may be an attempt to fill a void that only Jesus can fill.
Tim Kreider, not a Christian, wrote an article for the New York Times in 2012 called “The ‘Busy’ Trap”. He wrote:
Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness. Obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. (quoted by DeYoung, p. 31)
We have to ask ourselves if we are keeping ourselves busy just so that we won’t have to slow down to consider the things that we are really missing in our lives.
That’s the first thing to see from this passage. Jesus knows that we are busy. Jesus knows that it is wearing us out and weighing us down. He knows that it robs us of joy and distracts us from Him and covers over the real needs in our heart. So the offer in this passage is to those who are busy and weary of it.
The Gentle One
Second, I want you to notice who is talking. I want you to pay attention to the heart of the one who is making the offer. Look at how Jesus describes Himself in verse 29:
29Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.
In a book called Gentle and Lowly, Dane Ortlund points out that this verse is the only place in the Bible where Jesus tells us about His own heart. He writes:
“Gentle and lowly.” This, according to his own testimony, is Christ’s very heart. This is who he is. Tender. Open. Welcoming. Accommodating. Understanding. Willing. If we are asked to say only one thing about who Jesus is, we would be honoring Jesus’s own teaching if our answer is, gentle and lowly.
If Jesus hosted his own personal website, the most prominent line of the “About Me” dropdown would read: GENTLE AND LOWLY IN HEART. (p. 21)
The word translated “gentle” in the verse occurs just three other times in the New Testament. One is in the Beatitudes when Jesus says the “meek shall inherit the earth.” (Matt. 5:5). The word for “meek” there and “gentle” here are one and the same. A second occurrence is in the story of Palm Sunday when it says that Jesus the king is “coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey” (Matt. 21:5) “Humble” and “Gentle” are the same word. The third place this same word is used is in 1 Peter when wives are encouraged to have a “gentle and quiet spirit” (1 Peter 3:4). Ortlund writes:
Meek. Humble. Gentle. Jesus is not trigger-happy. Not harsh, reactionary, easily exasperated. He is the most understanding person in the universe. The posture most natural to him is not a pointed finger but open arms. (p. 19)
The word “lowly” overlaps the word “gentle” in many respects. However, this is a word that refers not to humility as a virtue but humility as a condition of those who are socially unimpressive. In other words, this is a word which could be used to describe the lowly circumstances of Jesus’ birth in a stable as well as the humiliating nature of the way He died. Ortlund writes:
The point in saying that Jesus is lowly is that he is accessible. For all his resplendent glory and dazzling holiness, his supreme uniqueness and otherness, no one in human history has ever been more approachable than Jesus Christ. No prerequisites. No hoops to jump through…The minimum bar to be enfolded into the embrace of Jesus is simply: open yourself to him. It is all he needs. Indeed, it is the only thing he works with. (p. 20)
Think about the stories of Jesus and who He interacted with. When His disciples tried to turn away the little children as unworthy of His time, He insisted that they be allowed to come. When lepers called out to Him from a distance, Jesus’ reached out His hand and touched them. When the Jewish Religious Authorities snickered behind their hands about the woman washing His feet, Jesus praised her for giving Him the greatest of gifts.
Jesus is gentle and lowly. Jesus moves through life at an unhurried pace. Open and welcoming to all who come to Him.
And it is this gentle and lowly heart who is inviting us in. This gentle and lowly heart who is inviting us to lay down our busyness and our heavy loads. This gentle and lowly heart who offers an alternative.
The Yoke
So what does Jesus offer? In a word: Rest. Jesus offers to exchange the busyness of always striving to prove ourselves for the rest of walking alongside of Him. Let’s read the whole passage again:
28Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
When we labor under a performance standard, we have a hard taskmaster. If our worthiness is determined by our performance, then we’re always only as good as the next thing we do. Accomplishing one task only means we have to move on to the next.
That’s why the Pharisees have become so notorious. They typified the performance standard of Jesus’ day. They were the self-appointed experts in the law and the rule-setters of the day, and Jesus has nothing but harsh words for them. Jesus calls them hypocrites, blind guides, white washed tombs, and more.
And if there was one thing the Pharisees were good at, it was adding to the burdens that people carried. Later in Matthew, Jesus says of them: “They tie up heavy loads and put them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.” (Matt. 23:4).
Under the Pharisaical worldview people always had to be striving to do more. Everyone was judged by their performance. There was no rest. Because human effort could never measure up to the perfection God requires, the Pharisees said everyone just had to keep trying.
But Jesus is different. Jesus offers rest. He says it in verse 28 and He repeats it in verse 29. “Rest for your souls.” With Jesus, our worth is never based on our performance. When we come to Him, we are freed from the need to constantly prove ourselves. Our place in His kingdom is not dependent on how full or schedule is or how much we cram into a day. Our place with Him is based on what He has done and who He is. Our busyness doesn’t earn us any extra-credit.
I think Jesus is being deliberately evocative when He mentions a yoke. If there is anything that symbolized labor and burdens in the 1st century it would have been a yoke.
As people from an agrarian community, you are probably familiar with what a yoke is, even though we really don’t use them anymore. A yoke is a device which fits around the shoulders of animals or men and makes it easier to carry burdens. For humans, it would be most likely used to help carry water buckets. For animals, it was most likely to be used on a draft animal like an ox or a donkey to pull a wagon or a plow.
So Jesus is inviting us to trade in our labor and burdens for a yoke. His yoke.
In other words, Jesus wants to be our master. A yoke would be used to direct and guide the steps of the oxen. Jesus clearly wants to set the direction for our lives and have us follow Him. In that culture the image of a yoke would often be used to describe a student who committed himself to a certain rabbi. As Jesus says, He wants us to learn from Him. He wants us to submit ourselves to Him.
This might look like a case of trading one heavy load in for another one. A case of exchanging the rat race of modern life for the busyness of following Jesus. The yoke of the Pharisees for the yoke of Jesus.
Except, the one who is making the offer is gentle and lowly. And the burden that He gives us is light.
The other thing to know about a yoke is that it conveys the idea of a shared burden. Typically, two oxen would be paired together in one yoke. Jesus talks about “my yoke.” There is a sense in which He is inviting us to step into harness alongside of Him. To cooperate with Him in doing what we need to do.
I read this story this week: One day a man went by to see a farmer who was plowing his field with a team of oxen. The man noticed that one of the animals was a little bigger than the other so he asked about it. The farmer replied that the big animal was an older animal that was well trained and the smaller one was a young animal that was new to the yoke. When the visitor asked why they had been paired together, this is the answer that He got,
“Well you see, it’s like this: that older ox is the best ox that I have ever had; he knows his way around the field. The reason I put the younger one with him is so the older, more knowledgeable ox could teach him how to plow. If I never put them together the younger one would never learn. By himself the younger ox would pull himself to death, but together he learns to cooperate with and rest in the strength of the older ox.”
Left to ourselves, many of us would pull ourselves to death. But Jesus invites us to come to Him and rest in His strength. Jesus came, not so that we would work harder, but so that we could rest.
3 Challenges
So what should we do? If we find ourselves caught up in the caught up in the rush of everyday life, what can we do to hop off the treadmill of the performance standard? How do we confront our busyness? I have three suggestions:
First, we need to admit that we have a problem.
One of the reasons we find ourselves stuck in a cycle of busyness is because we kind of want it that way. We wear our busyness like a badge of honor. In some cases we act like martyrs to our schedules.
And yet, Jesus calls us to rest.
In this brief series on Work + Life: Balance I am not going to do a sermon on honoring the Sabbath. I talked about that a couple years ago when we did a series on the 10 Commandments. But it is worth noting that from the very first week of creation God built rest into our schedules. God has designed us with a need for rest, and He commands us to regularly pause for rest.
The word Sabbath is sort of lost in our age, but it is all over the Bible. Time of rest. Time to put down what we are doing and just be.
We need to learn the lost art of Sabbath keeping. Not just taking off a day of work once a week, but the bigger principle of pausing, resting, breathing.
Second, we need to learn to spend some time for others.
One of the reasons we get so busy is that we view time as a limited commodity, and thus try to pack as much into it as possible.
In 2020, when the coronavirus was first making itself known, there were rumors that our supply chains would be all fouled up. For many of us, our first indication that the pandemic was not going to be a normal year was when the paper goods aisles of our grocery stores were empty. People heard there was going to be a shortage of toilet paper, so they went out and bought as much as they could.
That’s how we operate when there seems to be a shortage of something: we hoard. So if time is short, we better pack as much into it as possible.
But there is an alternative, and it is counterintuitive. Rather than trying to get so much done for ourselves, perhaps we should try giving our time away for the sake of others. Eugene Peterson translates Proverbs 11:24 like this:
The world of the generous gets larger and larger;
the world of the stingy gets smaller and smaller.
Applied to our schedules, this verse means this: generous people have more time. Jesus moved through life with a seemingly unlimited amount of time for interruptions. Gentle and lowly at heart, He was always generous with His time.
In God’s economy, to redeem time you might just have to waste some. Seek to spend time for others. Be generous with your time.
And then, finally, we need to focus on the one thing.
Any discussion of busyness related to the Bible tends to bring to mind the story of Mary and Martha. It’s a story told in Luke 10:
38As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. 39 She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet listening to what he said. 40But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”
Martha is the consummate host. The classic example of something I read about this week called the “Martha Stewart syndrome.” Everything has to be perfect for Jesus. So she throws herself headlong into the work. Rooms have to be readied, fresh water has to be drawn, food has to be prepared, dishes have to be washed and so on and so on.
Martha received Jesus by doing. She set out to serve. She wanted to make sure He was absolutely comfortable for as long as He was in her home. So she got busy.
Not so Mary. Mary chooses to receive Jesus by being with Him. While Martha is busy fluttering about and making things just so, Mary chooses to stay close to Jesus and "listen" to Him. She chooses the position of a student—at the teacher’s feet--and makes a point of taking in all that Jesus had to say.
Mary received Jesus by sitting at His feet. She set out to learn from Him. She wanted to make sure she did not miss a single word of truth for as long as He was in her home.
It raises a good question for us. If Jesus were to visit your house, how would you receive Him? Would you want to cook a fancy meal and make sure all the kids' toys were picked up and put away and everything was in its place? Or would you just invite Him in and sit with Him? The way a lot of us approach our calendars, it’s clear most of us would choose the busy route. But you know which one Jesus prefers?
“Martha, Martha," the Lord answered, "You are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her."
Only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better. It will not be taken away from her.
In the busyness of life Jesus offers us an alternative. Rather than always running on the treadmill of performance, Jesus invites us to come and meet with Him. He wants you to take His yoke upon you and learn from Him. He wants you to rest in Him. He didn’t come so that we would work harder, He came to free us from the performance standard.
Don’t be so busy that you miss out on Him.
