Relinquishing Control to Find Rest

Rest certainly is about taking a day off, but it’s also about living a life of rest. Where much of the world may offer you riches and glory, only God can offer you true rest.

Relinquishing Control to Find Rest

04/29/2022

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 gentile and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

When I was 16, I reluctantly went on my first missions trip. After declining to go the previous year, I felt obliged to go this time because there was suddenly a vacant spot and the loss of those unused funds seemed gave me a sense of duty to go. So with an organized team under Feed the Hungry and we departed for Nicaragua. To much of my surprise, I loved the trip! So much so, I decided to go back to Nicaragua as a translator the next month with another group of people.

For those wondering how I learned to speak Nicaraguan, I never did. But thankfully I spoke Spanish which is the actual national language and not it's ficticious counterpart.

As soon as we landed, one of the women on the trip wanted all of us to stop for an hour long prayer break. This of course ruffled some of our leader's feathers who were on a tight time crunch, but nevertheless we stopped and prayed.

I can’t remember this lady’s name, so I’ll call her Jenny. Jenny was going from person to person praying over them and I was impressed by the things she was saying; they sounded so prophetic and authoritative. She knew things about people that they hadn’t disclosed to her. So, when she got to me, I was excited for what she had to say.

At this point, I had a couple amazing experiences with God and an elementary knowledge of the truth...but I did everything in my power to avoid the church routine. It was mundane, boring, and everybody at the church seemed kind of off. So understand the devestation in my heart when Jenny came over to me in all my anticipation and said, “are you called to be a pastor?”

My bones were shaken and my stomach flipped. Oh Lord, I had hoped she was wrong. In my 16 year old mind, I had all the options in the world. I could be a pilot, a doctor, a business owner. Why would anyone want the hair-pulling, slow moving, static role of being a pastor? Alas, I now chuckle, seeing that I am an ordained minister that has served as both a missionary and a pastor, and I hardly can express the honor it has been to be used by God in such a way.

Our Path, or His?

Growing up in America, I, like many of you are probably familiar with the narrative of the ideal life.

We study hard, get into a good school, find a great job or start our own business, we grind and we work our way up the ladder, and eventually we make enough money to live a peaceful retirement, and then we die. Or we seek the new form pyramid slavery called "passive income". Everything goes smooth and it’s all fulfilling.

How many of you know this just isn’t real? At least not the assurance of peace we are seeking in this standard life trajectory. I mean, not even achieved in the movies. The whole premise of any hallmark movie is that somewhere along the way, something in this formula goes wrong. You drop out of school having to work to pay for a loved one’s medical bills or you never find the right partner and that doesn’t satisfy you, or your family farm catches on fire and you have to rediscover yourself in the big city.

Life rarely goes as planned and if it does, it will never be everything you thought it would be.

As Americans, we like to believe that people are where they are in life because of the choices they’ve made. If they’d worked harder and saved better, they’d have a nice home. If they’d studied harder and sacrificed more, they’d be in a better position.

I used to believe this in part too, but then in 2015 I found myself working with Middle Eastern refugees on the Greek-Macedonian border. Millions of people were fleeing their home in search for safety. I saw all kinds of people cross the border: healthy families, businessmen, even doctors, leaving their homes because of a crisis they had no control over.

I imagine people in Ukraine are going through the same exact thing right now. Unprecedented and unpredictable circumstances are drastically disrupting their expected trajectory of life. They lost their retirement, their bank accounts, their home investments, some lost families and many lost their lives. All that was left was their raw existence.

Or how about 2020? How many of us had interupted business plans, travel plans, even the expectation of a normal year? Dina and I were supposed to go to Israel with our school, but instead we got a virtual tour. Not the same!

Whatever your theory is on why it happened, the fact is you had no faint idea of what would take place and no control over when things would go back to the way they were before. And pandemics are nothing new to the Earth’s history; they’ve happened before and they will happen again. War has abrupted lives before, it is doing so now, and it will in the future.

I think it’s human nature to start to think we have things under control.

Definitely, we need psychologically need to be able to feel secure and gain a sense of grounding in order to function well. If we always lived under the anxiety of a war breaking out or another pandemic coming, we wouldn’t operate healthily as people in a moving society.

Yet, our grounding should not be in delusion that we have it all put together and our plans will keep us safe. Our grounding should be in God’s sovereignty over it all, come what may.

James says this 4:13-16:

“13Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business, and make a profit.” 14You do not even know what will happen tomorrow! What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.

15Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord is willing, we will live and do this or that.” 16As it is, you boast in your proud intentions. All such boasting is evil.”

The reality is, we have no control of our future beyond what God allows for us. As James says it, we don’t know what will happen tomorrow. The Lord could come back or God forbid, something could happen to us. We aren’t guaranteed any number of days in this life. Believing anything else is giving us way too much credit and ultimately drives us away from rest.

What drives us away from rest?

We were taught many values growing up, yet some of them pull us away from true rest. In the American culture, we value perseverance, grit, independence, the self-made man.

Those self-made men are the people that started with nothing, rented out a garage and began dreaming and getting to work. They overcame obstacles, and sacrificed whatever it took to get to the next breakthrough. Eventually, they reached their self-perpetuating peak of success and the glory is all theirs.

Or, to hit it closer to home. Sometimes as pastors, we can try and replicate the models of other pastors that have quantifiable "success." We quickly open our ears to the ministers that humbly began leading a small home group, that eventually grew into a mega church.

We view their success as honorable and admirable and desirable. And we follow the pattern - Work hard, keep going, don’t quit, those who strive will reach their goals.

Many of us have bought into the lie of materialism, selfish ambition, judgement towards the weak, and the illusion of control. Things will only spark joy for a moment, but it quickly fades. Ambition will fuel a restless craving for approval and power and recognition, but at the cost of compromising your values and the needs of others.

None of these things will ever bring you true rest. It puts the entire load of your success on your own shoulders and that’s a weight too big for any mortal to handle.

The problem is not a healthy drive or strong leadership, it is in the belief that this life is ours to tame according to our own design and our results are solely our responsibility.

How will you handle calamity?

What if the story of Job happens to you? A man who had it all, suddenly has it all taken from him. His trial was a test to see if his heart was for God or for his wealth, or his family, or his health. Just as easily as God gave, God took away. But God blessed Job, because he proved to love God when he had everything and was righteous because he also loved God when he had nothing. Job was well grounded in the theology of God’s sovereignty.

Would you curse God if he took away what he has given you?

When we start believing our success, our path, our destiny is in our own hands and in our control, we start to take on a burden that was never meant to be ours. It’s almost like being a deist. God set the world in motion and has stepped aside to allow us to figure things out. But we weren’t meant to have it all figured out. And God certainly did not intend for us to do this life without him. He wants us to walk with him, to let him lead. He wants us to learn from him. There is a way of life that brings contentment, peace, and rest. It relieves us of our fears and our anxieties. It places the right amount of responsibility on us and gives the rest of it to God.

The Hebrew word that comes to my mind is "Shalom". It’s a sense of wholeness, the parts that were missing are now found and have been put together in us. It’s a word that describes peace and perfect rest. Shalom is best described to me in Psalm 1:3:

“[The Righteous Man] is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.”

The image here is that of rest. We see there is growth, progression, and prosperity, but the way of getting there is not by striving, but by patience and abiding. And even in winter, the tree does not wither, or as we like to say, it does not burn out, but is strong year round.

How do we get to this place of shalom/of rest?

Let’s look back at our opening verse, because I know there’s more there that Jesus has to say.

What did Jesus mean by rest?

Matthew 11:28 “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 gentile and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Which for those of you that may be wondering why we’re talking about eggs, the yoke is a wooden bar placed on an animal to secure the load or burden on them. This was both a farming technique to attach a plow to an ox and a form of attaching a cart with a load.

Now when I read this the other night, I said “Jesus, what do you mean your yoke is easy and your burden is light??”

He was God who set aside his throne in heaven to be with mankind (mankind before deodorant and food safety ratings at restaurants).

He had no home

No predictable steady income

His friends betrayed and deserted him and he knew they would

He was constantly marginalized by leadership

And his life was threatened all the time

His destiny was death by crucifixion.

"What then, do you mean Jesus, when you say that your yoke is easy and your burden is light?"

From my fleshly perspective, what Jesus is saying can’t be true. But seeing as I’m not the one that created the Earth, then there must be something wrong with my interpretation of a light yoke and easy burden.

Jesus is saying watch me, look at me, learn from me.

When we learn from him, we will learn the rhythms of rest.

Jesus isn’t telling us that his light yoke is free of suffering; he was known as a man of sorrows.

Jesus also isn’t saying his burden is free of work; he was a craftsman by trade and then became a traveling teacher and now is seated at the right hand of the father in heaven interceding for us.

He isn’t saying we should become apathetic and should stop caring about things we think are important, for he commanded us to love and be passionate.

So what is the “rest” Jesus is promising?

If we keep reading the text, we’ll find the point Matthew is making.

Directly following chapter 11, is all of chapter 12. Which, often, if you stopped reading chapter 11 one day and picked up your Bible the next day to read chapter 12, you may actually miss the continuing thought Matthew is making without chapter breaks.

Post Jesus telling his disciples to come to him, to learn from him, and that his burden was light and his yoke was easy, Matthew tells us of three power encounters with the pharisees which all happened to be on the sabbath; the day of rest.

Whenever you see a progression of 3, take note! The writer is wanting you to see something important.

3 Sabbath encounters

The first one is 12:1-8 Jesus walking with the disciples and they get hungry so they start plucking some grain to eat. The Pharisees say it is unlawful to pick grain on the sabbath. Jesus tells them stories of David breaking some rules, that something greater than the temple is here, and that he desires mercy not sacrifice. That he is Lord of the Sabbath.

The second one is 12:9-14 Jesus heals a man later that day and the Pharisees try to accuse him by saying he is breaking “rest” by healing a man on the sabbath. Jesus says, wouldn’t you rescue a sheep that falls in a pit, even on the sabbath?

The third one is 12:22-45 the climax of the encounter is when Jesus casts out a demon and the Pharisees tell Jesus he can only cast out demons by the prince of demons, and Jesus rebukes them for their blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. He goes on to say something greater than Jonah is here and that something greater than Solomon is here.

Jesus had just finished telling us to learn from him and we will find rest. Then, Matthew, in panoramic view, compares what it’s like to learn from the pharisees and the “rest” that they offer.

The Pharisees weren’t intentionally evil, they were people like us. What we learn in scripture is that they began to love their authority, power,  and the recognition of man more than what was true - more than the God who stood in their midst.

Matthew shows us the load and the burdens they were putting on people that God had nothing to do with.

The Pharisees couldn’t see why it was okay for a hungry person to pick grain if it was the sabbath…or to heal a man if it was the day of rest…or to relieve a tormented soul because it was a holy day. They completely misunderstood what God’s rest was all about.

They truly believed salvation and their righteousness was all in their control. Success and piety was a formula. If you followed it to perfection, you’d achieve great status with God.

But Jesus is the one who has borne our burdens and he says to learn from his ways, not the ways of the world. The Pharisees failed in understanding it wasn’t about what they could do for God, it’s about what only God can do for us.

Jesus, looked at his followers with love and compassion and said to them, “my way is a way of rest. Even when you go through trials, even when you’re persecuted, you can be at rest because I am with you and I am in control.”

Aren't you tired yet?

I have learned first hand that ultimately, the sense of needing to control the destiny of your life is exhausting.

Often, I’ve had unexpected turns in my life. I thought everything was going in one direction in my career or in my family and suddenly, the image I had for my future shifted.

I was constantly trying to predict what God would do next and how he would make it happen.

I remember coming back from the mission field at the end of 2018 not having a clue who I was going to be in America or what I would do. I had been gone for 7 years. My future could have been anything and all the options were so daunting. The pressure to make the right decisions was too much with each decision leading down a path of unknown risk.

But I started to learn to trust in his hand. I started learning to wait, to dig my roots into the ground of Jesus. I started seeking him and receiving his living water. As seasons passed I grew and I believe I have been and am now, exactly where he wants me to be.

It’s been a journey and will continue to be a journey of learning that Jesus is truly with us everyday. I’m experiencing the steady faithfulness of God in his provision and his plan for our growth and our steps in life.

It’s so much less about what we need to do for God and much more about just being still and learning from him. Releasing our sense of self-dependancy is like breathing pure air, the kind you find on a forested mountain.

Keep reading over Matthew 11 and 12 and see the contrast between the rest Jesus offers and the “rest” the pharisees kept striving for and never reached.

God will give you finances, people, and responsibilities. Take careful and patient care over everything he has given you. Stop striving for more than what you’ve been entrusted with. Remember it’s not yours anyways and it’s not your foundation, Christ is. Whatever has been given can be taken and whatever is given will be more than enough.

I believe Jesus wants to take each of us on a journey to rest. To be like a tree planted by steams of living water, that can withstand the trials and turns in life, that doesn’t fret, doesn’t strive, but receives the life of God and in it’s due season we bear much fruit and in all that we do, we prosper.