Find Jesus, Find Rest
WebMD reports that 43% of all adults suffer adverse health effects from stress. In contrast, Jesus promises peace to weary, burdened, and stressed-out people in Matthew 11:28-30. It is perfect peace you can't find anywhere else: "Find Jesus, Find Rest." July 31, 2011.
There’s an ancient story that explains the concept of rest as pictured in the Old Testament Sabbath Day and, today, fulfilled in true rest, Jesus Christ: One day a curious young king named Ruben asked his advisors, “What is the sweetest melody of all?” His wise men rubbed their chins and searched their books of wisdom, but they couldn’t find the answer.
“Why not have a contest to find the sweetest melody?” they suggested. So the king called all the musicians of his kingdom to come to the palace. Early in the morning, they gathered under the king’s window with flutes, harps, violins, horns, bells, drums, banjos, bugles, chimes, cymbals, gongs, triangles, lutes, lyres, and trumpets. Their tuning and scraping and testing awoke the king. Smiling, King Ruben jumped up, believing that today he would discover the sweetest melody in all the world. By noon, he had listened to all the sounds imaginable that could be made by plucking, dinging, blowing, and banging. By afternoon, the king had heard all the melodies that could be made by whistling, jingling, shaking, sawing, buzzing, and pounding.
King Ruben had listened, but he could not tell which sound was the sweetest. One of his advisors suggested that he should have all the instruments play together, at the same time. He agreed. So all of the instruments rang, blurted, blared, pealed, strummed, and whistled together. King Ruben wrinkled his face and listened with all his might. The noise was so great he could not think. Just at that moment, a woman dressed in her Sabbath clothes pushed to the front of the crowd. It was now late on Friday afternoon. “O King, I have the answer to your question,” she said. The king was surprised because she did not even have an instrument.
The musicians were still puffing, blowing, chiming, and strumming. There was so much noise the king had clasped his hands over his ears. The woman gestured gently to the musicians, and they all stopped playing and put down their instruments. The king took his hands away from his ears. The people in the crowd stood still. The king was whispering, “What? What should I hear?”
“What you hear is the sound of rest,” the woman explained, just as the sun was setting, “and isn’t the peace that the Sabbath brings the sweetest melody of all?”[i]
What kind of noise is disturbing you as you search for the peace that the sweetest melody brings? I’m not talking about the noisy bombardment of messages constantly barraging us in this information age, paralyzing us like dozens of pop-up ads freezing a computer screen. But something similar—searching for what we believe will relieve us of our stress only to find out that what we find, and the journey to find it, stresses us out even more. According to WebMD, 43% of all adults suffer adverse health effects from stress, 75-90% of all doctor’s office visits are for stress-related ailments, and stress in the workplace costs American industry more than $300 billion a year.[ii]
“Weary and burdened”Americans are paying a high price for our stress, and the real reason why we’re so stressed out? Being God. Not God being God, that’s the solution to stress and we’ll get to that later. I’m talking about me being God and you being God. Or, actually, trying to be God. That is the number one cause of stress, because it is the number one sin breaking the number one commandment, “You shall have no other gods.” Here’s how it looks:
· The Israelites decide that they are going to decide which Canaanites to displace from the Promised Land, which idols to destroy, and which foods to eat and days to celebrate—a new and improved human upgrade to God’s revealed plan for conquering the land he gave them.
· The Jewish rabbis in Jesus’ day set up 39 general categories of laws that prohibit all kinds of work on the Sabbath, creating a work-righteous prison of soul impossible to escape.
· You know better than God and insist he doesn’t know what he’s doing when your dream fizzles, when the job doesn’t work out, when Mr. Right becomes Mr. Wrong, when retirement is more demanding than all the years of full-time employment, and when cancer strikes and then kills. “God, you have this all wrong!” you cry with Job’s closed fists of hostile takeover instead of Joshua’s clasped fingers of faith-filled prayer.
Wow! Being God is a big job. So big, so busy, that you can’t handle it. Which was exactly God’s response to Job when he complained that he knew more about his suffering than God did: “Do you send the lightning bolts on their way? Do they report to you, ‘Here we are’?” (Job 38:35). With the weight of the world on our shoulders, we think we can be God better than God can be God. God hates that, and says, “I declared on oath in my anger, ‘They shall never enter my rest’” (Hebrews 4:3). There is only one God, and you are not him. I’m not him.
“Come to me,”Jesus invites people who have played God and now confess that we’ve messed up our lives because of it. Jesus doesn’t invite the people who continue to still play God, who have it all together, the people who have never sinned (or at least they think so), the people who are so successful, well maintained, and good-looking that they don’t need help. Jesus invites you and me, “weary and burdened” people who repent of trying to be God but not being able to be God. When we come as who we really are, Jesus welcomes us with inviting forgiveness and encouraging promise. “I will give you rest.” Come to Jesus as you are with your burdens, and let him have them his way. Come to Jesus as you are with your worries, and let him handle them his way. Come to Jesus with your sins, your guilt, your fears of little faith, and let him forgive. He will give you rest—perfect peace you can’t find anywhere else.
In Jesus’ day the word yoke, a common term for a heavy, wooden bar that tethered a pair of oxen together to perform double the work, also referred to a rabbi’s interpretation of how to keep the hundreds of Old Testament laws. It implied lots of work. When Jesus says, “Take my yoke upon you,” he is purposely comparing himself to the rabbis so good at laying burden after burden on people. Instead of giving you the burden of keeping numerous laws, Jesus burdened himself with the law for you and now gives you rest from its weighty curse. “Anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from their own work” (Hebrews 4:10). Don’t worry about doing enough to make yourself right with God, to get his attention, to earn his ear in prayer, to deserve the favor of his forgiveness. The “It is finished!” of Christ’s crucifixion has already performed enough to be your permission to do absolutely nothing to get right with God, and your invitation to believe in the free gift of eternal life. And the “Alleluia” of Christ’s resurrection means that the law has changed for you from job to joy!
Researchers at the University of Oklahoma taught a 15-year-old female chimpanzee named Washoe to communicate by combining sign language with simple recognition. Over the years, Washoe learned 140 signs. Finally, the project directors decided that the chimpanzee was ready to “conceptualize.” This meant that instead of merely imitating some human words, Washoe would express thoughts of her own. Washoe was a pampered animal, well-fed, physically comfortable, safe from harm. When she finally was able, on her own, to put words together into a single phrase, these were the first three: “Let me out!” And she said them repeatedly. Over and over again. “Let me out!”[iii] When Jesus says, “Learn from me,” he attaches the disclaimer for weak humans worried that he’s going to teach us all kinds of commands that imprison us like caged chimps doing tricks for bananas. “I am gentle and humble in heart…my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Like a wooden bar that connects two oxen, Jesus’ yoke connects us to him. That’s why it is so light. Followers of Jesus don’t beg for him to let us out of our faith, our religion, our church life, but rather to let us stay in, let us keep going, let us be more like him, let us follow, and give, and love, and obey.
Have you noticed that the word stress is a fractured and flipped version of the word rest? Then be careful what you’re searching for, and where you find it. Find Jesus, Find Rest. Come to him. Take him. Learn from him. Let him be the God and Savior in your life. “And you will find rest for your souls.” Amen.
Preached at Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church, Milwaukee, WI (www.gracedowntown.org) on July 31, 2011
[i]John A. Stroman, Thunder From the Mountain (Nashville: The Upper Room, 1990), 53-55, retrieved from
http://www.homileticsonline.com/subscriber/btl_display.asp?installment_id=2651. Adapted.
[iii]As quoted in “Servant Problems,” Sunday Sermons, 20 October 1991, 44, retrieved from http://www.homileticsonline.com/subscriber/btl_display.asp?installment_id=2651
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