Matthew 11:28-30
God’s Solution for A Heavy World
Matt 11:28 Come unto me, all ye that labour and
are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for
I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find
rest unto your souls.
30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
I am not sure where Jesus was when He spoke these words. Most are
agreed that He was somewhere in Galilee, but I am not sure where. In
my mind, I see Him standing up in a large crowd (hundreds, maybe even
thousands) and calling these words to them. In truth, He could have
been a much smaller group, only a handful of people. Why? Because
there are wore out people in every crowd—even inside every church.
I. The World Is Heavy
A. \\#28\\ Jesus used two terms that all speak of our hard,
condition.
1. "labor" - That is work.
2. "heavy laden" - burden, load
B. With these words, Jesus painted a picture: We, the human race,
are all laboring to carry a heavy load.
1. What is our heavy load that is hard to carry?
2. There are many.
a. Life is a heavy load.
(1) That is an all-inclusive term. Most everything
that has to do with life is heavy.
(2) For most, work is heavy.
(a) Actually, God intended that work be a heavy
load. He made it that way in the curse.
Ge 3:19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat
bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out
of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and
unto dust shalt thou return.
(b) For most of the world, working is what
they do just to live.
i. Sadly, most people, even in America,
do not like their work. However,
we should consider just how hard
others have it.
ii. Most people do not know what a
savings account, a 401(k), or even
food for tomorrow is. They just
work for this day and the survival
of their family.
iii. We are blessed not only to be able to
work for out tomorrows, but to be
able to select what kind of work we
do.
aa. My advice has always been, find
something you like to do to
make your living. Doing so
takes so much of the labor out
of work.
bb. But no matter what job we
perform and no matter how much
we might like it, there are
times when work becomes hard to
bear.
(3) However, some have found out that NOT working
is hard too! We are indeed strange creatures.
We live most of our lives wanting to get out
from under the bondage of work only to finally
get out and realize it wasn’t as bad as we
thought!
(a) After reaching retirement, many don’t like
it. For some it’s too boring or too lonely
or even too busy.
becomes empty (or too busy!).
(b) And if the way you reached not working was
by a disability, you find out that is too
painful.
b. Family is heavy.
(1) I love my family and my family loves me but
that doesn’t mean there are never any
problems.
(2) Ask the stay-at-home parent who is caught in the
endless cycle of cooking and cleaning.
(3) Ask the working parent(s) who have to work so
hard to pay the bills.
(4) Ask the parents who have smaller children they
are trying to direct down the paths of
godliness and sound reasoning or the older
parents who have children living in wrong
ways.
(a) As hard as it is to have small children, as
your child grows, you keep getting pushed
further out of the driver’s seat—and that
is hard.
(b) As some point, you must scoot over into the
passenger seat and let your child have the
driver’s seat—or they will never learn.
That’s hard, especially when you know they
are making mistakes.
(c) Then they get married and you are pushed
way back into the back seat.
(d) Then they have children and you get pushed
into the trunk!
(e) It is all hard but it is the way it is
supposed to be!
(5) Ask the grown-up children who have become
their parents’ keepers.
c. Aging is heavy.
(1) Few will spend much time thinking about it
before it comes but getting old is no picnic.
(2) Dimming eyes, failing hearing, aching joints,
sagging flesh, waning muscles, lost memories,
thinning hair—and those are the early stages
of that dreaded disease.
d. Sin is heavy.
(1) No doubt. That is what Jesus was referring to
when He made this statement.
(a) I see Him walking through some crowded
street, filled with people who were
broken, battered, and bruised from sin.
(b) That is not hard to find. You can see
it on every street and road in the world
that has people on it.
i. People problems - There are those who
cannot get along with their boss,
their mate, their parents, their
children, their neighbors, their co-
workers, even strangers.
ii. Addiction problems - Those entangled in
addictions to alcohol, tobacco,
pornography, drugs, sex, and food.
iii. Dream problems - Those whose dreams and
hopes have been beaten down by a
seemingly endless line of rejections,
refusals, denials, and bad
circumstances.
(2) I think it must have been that way on the last
day of the Feast of Tabernacles \\#John 7:2\\,
when Jesus stood up on a crowded street of
Jerusalem and shouted.
John 7:37 In the last day, that great day of the
feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man
thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.
38 He that believeth on me, as the scripture
hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of
living water.
e. Even righteousness is heavy.
(1) Jesus never told us that doing right was going
to be easy. In fact, He told us the opposite.
Matt 5:10 Blessed are they which are persecuted
for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven.
11 Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you,
and persecute you, and shall say all manner of
evil against you falsely, for my sake.
(2) Doing right has never been easy but it gets
much, much harder when society no longer knows
what wrong is.
II. Jesus’ Offer
A. Rest!
1. That is a common word but what does it mean?
2. Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as repose, sleep,
freedom from activity or labor, peace of mind or spirit,
freedom of anxieties.
3. That is a large definition for a four-lettered word.
B. In a nutshell, rest means we don’t have to carry all of our
burdens all of the time.
1. In Christ, there are some burdens we can SHED.
a. We don’t have to carry the burden of guilt
(1) Guilt is what we feel over the wrong things that
we have done.
(2) As we have all done wrong things, we all have
some guilt that we could carry, but rest means
we do not have to carry it any longer.
b. It means we do not have to carry the burden of regret
any longer.
(1) Regret is what we feel over the right things we
failed to do.
(2) Guilt and regret are like Siamese twins.
(3) They follow us around, ever burdening our spirit.
(4) But, in Christ, we can shed both of them.
c. It means we do not have to carry the burden of
discouragement of its big brother, depression.
(1) It is impossible to have an accurate count on the
number of people who are discouraged.
(2) But the CDC says 4.7% of Americans are depressed.
https://www.healthline.com/health/depression/facts-statistics-
infographic#Types-of-depression
(3) I know something about depression, and I’m here
to tell you that Jesus can help you with that,
2. In Christ, there are some burdens we must SHOULDER.
a. Rest does not means we never carry any of our burdens.
(1) It means we do not have to carry all of them all
of the time.
(2) But even with rest, there are loads that we must
bear.
(a) Earthly responsibility and cares do not just
disappear.
i. Christ offers us rest not death.
ii. As long as we ae alive, there will be
burdens we must carry.
iii. What Christ offers is rest, a break,
a place and time to catch your wind.
(b) For example, we will still have to carry the
responsibility for our past.
i. Decisions of the past are like
ripples in the pond.
ii. They reach out in all directions
touching everything and everyone
they come into contact with.
iii. Our past may have limited our future
and hurt others.
iv. We cannot expect those repercussions
to be undone in this life.
(3) What does Jesus offer to help in these burdens?
b. God gives an amazing grace.
(1) Grace means that God steps in to help.
(2) Whatever rest does not relieve us of, grace helps
us to carry.
(3) Grace is a different topic, and I will not go it
tonight; but I will say that with these two
gifts (rest and grace), the human soul is able
to enjoy the heaviest of lives.
3. In Christ, there are some burdens we SHARE.
a. Share? With Whom? With Him.
b. This is what the yoke is all about.
(1) A yoke is a harness that goes around the neck of
a beast of burden.
(2) The kind of yoke Jesus spoke of was a dual yoke,
one made to harness two beasts of burdens at the
same time.
(a) Jesus did not offer us a travoy to lay our
burdens upon so that we could do nothing
(sled or sleigh).
(b) Rather He offers to get in the harness with
us to help carry our burdens and let us rest.
c. You do not have to carry all of our burdens all of the
time because we are not alone in the harness any more.
III. Our Acceptance
A. Jesus offers to trade our heavy burden for rest!
B. How does that work?
1. \\#Matt 11:28\\ The first part of the invitation is to
"COME."
a. That is it.
b. We must want it. We must come and receive it. We
must accept it.
c. There is no one who does not understand the concept
of coming.
d. If there is something we want, when we are called,
we go get it.
(1) When we are called to the table to eat, we go get
it.
(2) When our paychecks are ready, we used to have to
go get them. I doubt that is so any more, but
it was.
e. If you want rest, go to Jesus and get it.
2. \\#Matt 11:29\\ Take my yoke upon you.
a. Jesus is inviting us to get into the harness with Him.
b. The harness is there.
c. He has provided it and invited us to get into it with
Him; but as in most earthly endeavors, the final
choice rests with us.
3. Learn of Me.
a. Jesus was saying that there are some things we must
learn if this is going to work.
b. Such as:
(1) For Jesus to help carry our burdens, we must be
going His direction.
(2) For Jesus to help carry our burdens, we must be
in step with Him.
(a) If you are in the lead all the time, you
are still carrying all of the weight.
(b) If you are behind, then He is having to
carry your load and you.
(3) Unless you want to carry it, you need to dump the
burdens that you were supposed to shed for Jesus
won’t help you carry those.
c. Christians need to learn these things.
I saw a commercial years ago. You probably did too. It showed how a
lumberjack had to train horses how to carry fallen timber. I don’t
remember the purpose of the commercial, but I remember how it worked.
They start training these large horse to carry something light. In
the commercial, it was a tire. They did that because the horses are
often afraid of a load. At one point, the announcer says, "A horse
that can pull 9,000 pounds lacks the confidence to pull a 25 pound
tire." So the trainer must teach the mighty horse how to carry the
burden.
Friend, God never promised us an easy life, but He did promise that
if we would join with Him, He’d help us carry the load.
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