28 “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give
you rest.”
- Matthew 11:28, The New International Version, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan
Publishing House) 1984.
We receive all kinds of invitations. Some, we might classify as unwelcome: the IRS invites you to come down and defend some deductions on your tax return; you receive a summons for jury duty at a very inopportune time; a telephone solicitor interrupts your meal and invites you to accept a fabulous, once-in-a-lifetime offer. But not all invitations are unwelcome. Some are very welcome, aren’t they? A girl gets invited out on a date by that guy she’s liked for quite a while; you’re invited to a wedding or graduation or some other special event in the life of someone you love; somebody’s managed to obtain a few hard-to-get tickets for a sporting or musical event you’ve really want to go to and invites you to come along.
One of the best invitations I ever received came almost 40 years ago, during the year I was vicaring in southwestern Minnesota. I was a long ways, close to 1000 miles, from home. I lived by myself and didn’t know how to cook. One of the families in the congregation took pity on me and issued an open, ongoing invitation to eat Sunday dinner at their place any time I didn’t have an invitation elsewhere; so at least once a week, I had a good, home-cooked meal.
But, as welcome as that invitation was, obviously it pales in importance to the one Jesus issues in our text. It, too, is an ongoing, open invitation. Listen again to it: "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."
JESUS INVITATION IS THE MOST WELCOME OF ALL
We are going to look at this invitation of Jesus phrase by phrase this morning. As we do so, we are confident that the Holy Spirit will impress upon us how welcome this invitation is. And, I’m sure, he will also move us to accept Jesus’ invitation again and again.
"Come"
"Come." You can say that word in two different way, can’t you? It can be a stern command, like a parent saying to a naughty child, "You come here this minute" or it can be a gentle, loving invitation. It is not difficult to figure out the tone in which Jesus says "Come," is it? He says it in the same way he often did in his ministry. Like the occasion when, noting how weary his disciples were, Jesus said to them, "Come to a lonely place and rest"; or the time after his resurrection when, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus said to the disciples who had been hard at work fishing all night, "Come, and have breakfast"; or, the welcome words you will hear from Jesus when he comes again and say to you, "Come, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world." That’s the way Jesus speaks in our text when he says, "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened." It is not a summons, but a gracious invitation. The tone is not harsh and demanding, but warm and inviting—like the invitation I received for Sunday dinners 39 years ago.
"Come,…All You Who Are Weary and Burdened"
To whom is the invitation extended? "Come,…all who are weary and burdened." The invitation is extended to those who are "weary." The same Greek word is used to describe how Jesus felt when he arrived at Jacob’s Well after a difficult journey in the heat of the day. We are told that he was "weary"—worn out and fatigued, exhausted.
Jesus invitation is extended to those who are "weary" because they are "burdened," he says. The word translated as "burdened" was used by the Greeks for a ship’s cargo, which "burdens," weighs down, a ship. When I was a boy growing up in Detroit, MI, my Dad and I used to go fishing for walleyed pike in the Detroit River (a part of the waterway that connects Lake Huron with Lake Erie). We would troll in the deep shipping channels of the river, close to the big freighters that sailed from the iron range of Northern Minnesota to the steel mills of Ohio and Pennsylvania. The ships moving in the direction of Ohio and Pennsylvania would ride low in the water because of their heavy cargo of iron ore; but the ships heading back to Minnesota would ride high because their heavy weight had been removed.
So it is with us. Sometimes we ride high in life, but sometimes we ride low. There can come times when we are so weighted down, heavily laden, we feel like we’re about to sink. We need to have the cargo we’re carrying, the burden that’s weighing us down, removed.
Those weighty, encumbering burdens can take a number of different forms. I will mention two of them. One is the burden of your sin. I think you would agree with me that we can hardly carry a heavier weight than that of a guilty conscience. David in Psalm 32 talks about how his conscience burdened him after his sin of adultery with Bathsheba followed by his cover-up murder of her husband Uriah. He says, "When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer."
The story of every religion devised by mankind is the story of man’s attempt to remove the dreadful burden of sin. We all know what it means to carry that burden, don’t we? We are born with it, for we came into this world burdened with the weight of sin, and we add to that burden every time our thoughts are not God’s thoughts, our words are not God’s words, or our actions are not God’s actions. If we committed only one sin each day and live to age 80, we would have committed almost 30,000 sins in the course of our life. That’s pretty incredible, especially when we remember that the wages of sin—one sin—is death.
The second burden is that of the sorrows and troubles of life. I am thinking especially of the kinds of things we feel ourselves powerless to change. Like family and marital problems, where we’ve done all we can to resolve them, but they still stubbornly remain; or a lingering illness—our own or that of a loved one; or the death of a loved one; or the loss of a job and the financial difficulties that go with it; or troubles in school—with your grades, your teachers, or your classmates. These kinds of things—the thorns that come along with the roses of life—can be heavy weights around our necks, sapping our strength and robbing us of peace and joy.
None of us are totally free from these wearying burdens of life—caused either by our sin or by the fact that we are living in a sinful world. That is why it’s good to see the little word "all" in Jesus’ invitation.
"Come,…all who are weary and burdened." "All" means no one is excluded. Judas, you will recall, thought he was too sinful to come to Jesus after he betrayed him, and as a result he suffered eternal loss. The truth is, no sinner is too sinful, no burden-bearer is too heavily burdened. Jesus’ invitation goes out to all. He graciously invited the adulterous woman at Jacob’s Well to drink of his living water. He graciously invited himself into the home of Zacchaeus, a cheat and swindler, to offer him salvation. So to each of us here today he says, "Come, all, each and every one of you, you who have sinned, you who are troubled and sorrowing. Come, all you who are weary and burdened."
"Come to Me"
Come to whom? "Come to me," says Jesus. "What a Friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear." Why does Jesus make sure to add the words, "Come to me"? It’s because sometimes people go to the wrong place to get their burdens removed. Think of Martin Luther as a young man. He was weary and heavy-laden with sin. Where did he go? He went to a monastery, the Augustinian cloister, thinking that by doing the good work of surrendering his all to become a monk his burdens would go away. They didn’t, for he had gone to the wrong place.
We can go to wrong places also. Don’t try to still an accusing conscience with self-help resolutions to do better next time. Don’t try to cover up your trials and troubles with drink or drugs. Don’t try to shut off the cares and worries of life with endless rounds of activities, constantly forcing yourself to be on the go, because you’re afraid to be alone with yourself and your thoughts. At most, such self-help solutions will provide temporary relief for the burden.
Jesus says, "Come to me." "Oh, what peace we often forfeit, oh, what needless pain we bear, all because we do not carry everything to God in prayer." I think it was devotional writer Herman Gockel who tells the story about a young man spending his first day on a new job in a large factory. Everything was going well until the machine with which he was working began to make strange noises. Eager to demonstrate his mechanical ability, the young man began to tinker with the machine. The whole machine cam to a complete stop and he couldn’t get it going again. When foreman arrived on the scene, the young man tried to defend his actions. "I was only trying to help," he said, "I did my best." The foreman responded, "Young man, around here, doing your best is to send for me."
Doing our best is to send for, or better yet go to, Jesus. "Come to me," he invites. Simple isn’t it, but yet hard to do with troubles right before our eyes. It’s something like driving in a beautiful, scenic area with a bug splattered right in the middle of your windshield. You find yourself looking at that splatter on the windshield rather than at the beautiful scenery all around you. We need to turn our eyes away from the bugs to Jesus, from our sins to our Savior, from our burdens to our burden-bearer, from our problems to our problem-solver. The Scriptures state: "Fix your eyes on Jesus, the Author and Finisher of your faith." When we look to Jesus, we are looking beyond the problems to the solution, as we see in the promise Jesus makes in this most welcome invitation of all.
"Come,…and I Will Give You Rest"
"Come to me…and I will give you rest." St. Augustine said it well years ago: "Our hearts are meant for Thee, O God, and cannot find their rest until they find their rest in Thee." Jesus’ first promise is that he will give us rest for our souls. That is most important, isn’t it? Jesus alone can provide rest for the soul since he alone is our sin-bearer. John the Baptist said it well, didn’t he? When seeing Jesus approach, he exclaimed, "Look, the Lamb of God who takes away [literally, "lifts up"] the sin of the world." Jesus lifted up the sin of the world. He lifted it up off of our shoulders onto himself, onto the cross.
Every time you repent of your sins you are assured of the forgiveness won at Calvary. Every time you receive the body and blood of Jesus you receive the individualized, personalized assurance that Christ has removed your burden. Jesus invites, "Come…and I will give you rest." We respond, "I come, O Savior, to Thy Table." "Weary am I, and heavy-laden, With sin my soul is sore oppressed. Receive me graciously and gladden, My heart, for I am now Thy guest. Lord, may Thy body and Thy blood, Be for my soul the highest good." It will be!
Jesus also promises rest from the burdens of life. Perhaps you know the old spiritual, "Gonna lay down my burdens, down by the riverside." The river the spiritual refers to is the River Jordan and the other side of the river is the Promised Lane of heaven. This spiritual is thus a reminder that this side of Jordan, of heaven, we will still have burdens. But Jesus invites us to lay the weight of those burdens upon him. Have you ever ridden on one of those moving walkways in an airport? It’s interesting how from time to time you see people standing on the walkway, but still carrying their heavy pieces of luggage. The idea, of course, is to let the conveyor do the carrying for you as you’re being transported.
As we are being transported in the course of our life to our final destination of heaven, all sorts of burdensome baggage will accompany us. But we don’t have to carry it. David writes, "Cast your burdens upon the Lord and he will sustain you." That, my friends, is the most welcome invitation of all! So, come. Come, all you who are weary and burdened. Come to Jesus. Come, and he will give you rest.
Amen.