Rest

“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” — MATTHEW xi. 28.

I CANNOT begin to preach to you from these rich and familiar words without stopping a moment to remind you and myself what a sermon from this text ought to be. The words do not suggest or tempt any merely curious observations upon the ordinary course of human life. Nor do they seem even to allow the general discussion of abstract themes, the elucidation of great topics of impersonal theology — if there be such a thing. Let other verses from the Bible lead the preacher and the hearer in those directions — no doubt there are times when it is good that we should follow them. But this, which is beyond question one of the best-known and best-loved of all the words of Christ, has quite a different suggestion. He who would preach from it must at least try to make sound in his people’s ears the sacred, solemn invitation which the words contain. There is a sermon possible (would God that I could preach it!) which should cause everything else to be forgotten, and set the Saviour in the abundance of His power, in the completeness of His love, before the faces of men weary and troubled and distressed, finding it hard to live, often overcome by what seems the impossibility of living truly and bravely; and make them hear Him say to them, “Come unto me!” — a sermon which should feel the infinite sympathy of the words and of the soul from which they came, — a sermon which should reveal to somebody that there is a heart which pities him and which can satisfy him, — a ser mon which should leave the hearer, when it closed, in full communion with the soul of Christ, and with the new divine life joyously begun. Who would not give anything to preach that sermon!

Jerusalem was only a picture of the universal life of man. What goes on everywhere and always, was going on there. The streets were full of anxious faces. The houses were restless with uneasy hearts. Men were making plans and seeing them come to disappointment, and making them over again only to be still disappointed, till the heart was weary through and through, and only hoped on with the dead and brutish force of habit. Men were finding that the dearest affections, the most sacred relationships, carried misgivings and the power of untold misery at their hearts. Men were racing each other down for wealth, suspecting each other’s character and motives, wondering whether the whole blind struggle were at all worth while. How familiar it all sounds! It is just what is going on to-day. And then, with perfect calmness, coming so quietly that He was there in the midst of them before they saw Him, came One who declared: “I can give you the escape from all this. I know it all, but I tell you that it need not be. Come unto me, all of you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Much is it when a child comes into a household or a world of weary and distracted men, and with his fresh and unsuspicious happiness rebukes it all, and, opening some simple and elemental vision of life, bears his bright testimony that this weariness and distraction need not be. It is easy to smile in our superiority and say: “He does not know. His disbelief in our misery comes from his childish ignorance.” Even while we say that, we still feel the power of his protest, and come to him with some sense that we have escaped. But this is no child who speaks in Jerusalem. This is evidently a man who has not merely flitted above, but has pierced down below, the misery of human life. He will have these men, these brother-men of His, escape not merely by forgetting, but by understanding their weariness. As He looks them in the face, and the power of His being tells on theirs, we can see certain great changes taking place within them. Behold! things which used to matter very much to them begin to show their insignificance. And there are other things which they thought that they were missing altogether of which they suddenly or slowly come to see that they are getting the essence, though they are failing of the form. And there are other things, of which they become aware that they would find more joy in having their brethren possess them than in possessing them themselves; that in some deep, subtle, and true sense they themselves had what those whom they loved possessed. among other knowledges, passed over as it w«re from Jesus into them, almost as light passes over from the sun into the diamond and becomes its light, when they felt the invitation of His presence and came unto Him. So His Rest of Soul became their rest and His promise was fulfilled even before He uttered it, as are all God’s promises.

Words deepen their meaning, throb back their force to us out of a profounder and profounder heart, as we grasp them with a more and more intense experience. No doubt to “come to Christ” came to mean more and more to these men of Jerusalem, and therefore the harmony of the effect with the cause, the sufficiency of the cause for its effect, in the promise of Jesus must have become more and more apparent. First, physical approach, the finding themselves where they could touch His hands and look into His face; and then obedience, the doing of what He wanted them to do and what would give Him pleasure; and then communion, the confidential interchange of thought, so that their thinking enlarged and refined itself with His; and so, at last, likeness, the showing of His character, the coming themselves to be what Jesus was. Nearness, obedience, communion, likeness, — these were the stages of approach, these were the opening chambers, room beyond room, by which men “came to Jesus.” Only when all the rooms had been entered and occupied was the coming to Him complete, but at each stage it was just so much nearer to its completion. The invitation, as each man accepted it, throbbed with a deeper meaning. At the same moment, in every mingled group which fronted Him, there were souls which each depth of the invitation reached. It was the completeness of them all together that made the fulness of the power which drew the multitude after Him as He went up and down the land.

This, then, is the old story out of which the words first came to us. Peace fell from the presence of Jesus upon the wearied and overburdened hearts of men who came to Him, who saw Him and obeyed Him, and confided in Him, and grew to be like Him. And now we want to remind ourselves of how it is that we come to have a right to transfer all that across the centuries and hear the same voice speaking in our ears. Remember we mean that in the most literal sense. I wish that I could state how literally I mean it. The summons of Christ to anxious humanity is not a memory of something which happened years ago; it is something which is actually happening now, to-day. That involves and rests upon the facts that man is the same being that he was in the Gospel days and that Christ still lives.

What then shall we say is the relation between that invitation to which eager souls listened in the streets of Jerusalem and the perpetual invitation which is always coming from the heart of Jesus to the soul of man? Shall we not say that it is the same relation which always exists between a special event of the Incarnate Life and the continuous influence of Jesus, — indeed, the same which exists between the whole Life of the Incarnation and the perpetual presence of the Life of God under the life of man? It was a particular manifestation of that which is universally true; and therefore the universal truth may be studied in and by that particular manifestation of it, while yet it does not lose itself and cease to be. It is the great fire which burns at the heart of all the earth breaking out at one volcano point. It is the sea on which the whole world floats, bursting through once in a fountain which strikes the stars. Let us not be the slaves of our senses, we who ought to be their masters and take the messages which they bring us into the keeping and interpretation of our souls. The words which the bodily lips of Jesus spoke, one day in Syria, do their full duty only when they quicken and interpret the utterance which His actually living, unseen heart is always making to our lives and souls to-day. With this in our mind, we see how absolutely reasonable, how perfectly true, is the conviction which has possessed millions of men and women, which is possessing countless numbers of men and women to-day, that they too may come to Jesus, to a present and living Jesus, just as literally and truly and blessedly as any man or woman came to Him in the old Syrian town. The whole sky opens, and what was then is everywhere and always, — Jesus is here! We say it to each other here and now precisely as men said it to each other there and then — Jesus is here! And men in sorrow look at a present Christ and are comforted. Glad men look up and are perfectly sure that He rejoices in their gladness. Perplexed men get light from Him upon their problems. Wicked men get first rebuke, and then forgiveness, and then the power of a new life from a Christ as truly visible to their souls as the Christ of Jerusalem was visible to the eyes of the men of Jerusalem. I would that I could put in clearer, stronger words how literally and absolutely this is true. Do not be slaves of your senses, — Christ is Here! Men are coming to Him every day. He says to you, “Come unto me.”

If we become sure of that, then all the text is ours, and He who speaks it is speaking it to us. Let us read it again and try to hear it so, with ears which know that it was meant for them, — “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

The first element of power in these words is their intense and intelligent sympathy with life. He who speaks them knows what it is for men to live. Tell me, could He have known it better if He had gone down the business streets of our city, if He had sat in our anxious counting-rooms and offices, if He had stood in the tempest of noise which fills the chambers of the roaring mill, if He had gone into the squalor of the tenement house, or climbed to the garret or pierced to the cellar of the pauper? He had been in them all. He is in them all, and knows them all to-day. And the truth of His knowledge is testified by this — that it is to weariness and the sense of heavy burden that He appeals.

Ah, my friends, if there were ever days when those words of Jesus ought to be heard, and to bear witness for themselves that He who speaks them is divine, they certainly are these days in which we live. They speak to the tumult of living. And was there ever a time when the tumult of living was so intense and universal as it is to-day? It matters not what region of life you choose for your own: you live in the city or the country; you are in the heart of poverty or in the heart of wealth; you are in one business or another, — it makes no difference. Everywhere there is tumult. The street is full of furious emulation. The study is full of tireless discussion. The capitol is wild with political debate. The household is torn with social ambition and unrest. Was there ever a time when He who lifts up His voice and speaks to those who are wearied and heavy laden could so claim the hearts and consciousnesses of those who heard His voice?

We all know what it is to “take life hard.” The really practical problem is: How can the vitality of the world be maintained, and the fearful wear and tear of the world be mitigated? The world rejoices in its exuberant vitality. It does not want to secure calmness and peace by death; but it is conscious of perpetual exhaustion which it believes is not a necessary part of its vital action, but a false and terrible attachment to it. The world dreams of a complete life which shall at the same time be free from friction and full of rest.

Here is a poor ship struggling through the sea. She is conquering the waves, but she is conquering them with terrible struggle. Every twist of the great water has her in its power. She creaks and groans in every strained and tortured plank. She is weary and heavy laden. And then there comes grandly and calmly sailing past this bruised and beaten vessel the great, sufficient steamer, fully competent for her task, conquering the sea instead of being conquered, going faster and not slower than her groaning sister, by and by leaving her out of sight and coming into the port which they both are seeking whole weeks before her wrenched and battered sister ship creeps in and lays herself beside the wharf. So man’s dream of how he ought to live towers and shines beside and sails away past his consciousness of the way in which He is living. Whoever will speak to him and be heard must speak with the power of that dream, and tell him in some way how, without losing the energy of life, he shall still escape the weariness of life. That is the promise which he hears from the lips of Christ.

To this man Christ says, “Come to me.” It is the offer, the claim of a personal presence, and the acceptance must be in the spirit of that offer. Where shall we find the illustration of that method? Let us look for it in the simplest of all places: A child is wounded in body or in mind, hurt by some of the rough things which strike our human life almost as soon as it is started on the earthly journey. He is standing with his bleeding breast, or bleeding soul, helpless and confused; and then his mother calls to him and says, “Come to me, my child”; and the poor little creature runs into her open arms and throws himself upon her pitying bosom. Does he find comfort there? Indeed he does. And how? By and by she staunches his blood and heals his wounds; or, by and by, she reasons with his exasperated spirit and sets it right; but first of all it is more personal and elemental than that. She gives herself to him. It is to her that he comes. A doctor might dress his wounds. A teacher might correct his blunders. Only a mother could take his heart to her heart, and, pouring nature into nature, give him strength. Why is it that you go to the friend whom you trust and love, when you are in trouble, for something which the wisest doctor or the shrewdest lawyer cannot give you? It is that not merely his, but he may take possession of you and be your healing. You sit beside him and he says no word; but the peace of his presence and the healthy soundness of his heart and the richness of his love envelop you. All that he afterwards gives you of distinct rebuke, or counsel, or suggestion, gets its character and value from this first bestowal of himself, from this possession of your nature by his nature. Alas for any man who does not have some great sacred room of a brother’s life into which he many go for rest and blessing!

Now, any idea of the relation of a man to Christ is fundamentally imperfect and untrue to the New Testament, which has not, behind everything special and particular, a large and general conception of what it is to come to Him, which corresponds to that which I have thus described. We sometimes ask ourselves how Jesus would have received such or such a man whom we know, if, in the same condition and state of mind in which we know him, he had come to Jesus in Jerusalem. The real question is not that. It is how Jesus does receive that man when that man comes to Him to-day. I know the man and I know Jesus now. I see the man come into the spiritual presence of Jesus just as literally as my friend comes into my physical presence when he crosses the threshold of my room. And then, this great thing happens. All that is in Jesus, all that Jesus is, welcomes him and takes him in. Jesus beholding him loves him. That is not merely an emotion in the Saviour’s heart; it is an enfoldment of the Saviour’s whole being around the man, as the mother enfolds herself about the child, as the friend enfolds himself about the friend. That is the welcome of Christ. To believe that that may happen is to believe in Christianity. To experience that is to be a Christian.

Within this great conception all that the welcome and embrace of Christ may do for a man is enfolded and contained. They are the elements and constituents and methods of this rest of the soul whose essence consists in the surrounding and possession of the soul by Christ. When the great conception is thoroughly fixed and present with us, then we may look for those elements and give them their names and values. I have already enumerated in passing what they are. Let me remind you of them, and ask you to consider if you may not claim them in yourself. They are principally these four:

I. He who is the friend of Christ sees some things to be insignificant which he once thought to be most important. What a power of restfulness is there!

Some men seek it ignominiously. They say of the great and sacred things, of the things without which a man cannot be a real man: “I will not value this, because, if I value it, I shall seek it, and if I seek it I shall be in perpetual unrest.” That is base. But to see, as you keep company with Christ, that He perfectly does without that which you have lived as if you could not live without, — wealth or fame or luxury, — and so to see that you can live without it and be as much, nay, be much more, a man — is there not a great rest which comes to the soul with that? There is hardly any restfulness so great as that which comes with the liberation from a false and unnatural and unnecessary desire.

2. And then, he who comes to Christ enters into Christ’s eternity and so into Christ’s patience. There are other things which the soul desires not less, but vastly more, when it is given up to Him. Before, it wished for them languidly and with no stir of effort; now, that those things should come to pass becomes the one passionate desire of its life. Only now, with the deeper knowledge of how great they are, the man not merely endures, but demands the necessity that they should come gradually, and is satisfied that their perfect attainment should be very far away. Christ gives him time enough. He does not relax his work for them; he works all the harder. But he works calmly. The hurry fades out of his face. The rest of Time-Enough has come to him from Christ.

3. And then, again, Christ spiritualizes and so enlarges my notion of the thing which I am seeking, and sometimes lets me see that I may freely have, perhaps that I have already, the soul of a desired attainment, and so sets me free from the feverish pursuit of a particular form of it which very possibly I never could attain. Here am I, saying, “I must and will have happiness,” — meaning by happiness some special form of happy circumstances; and Christ, as I stand close to Him, says quietly: “Poor child, do you not see that you are happy now, or may be any moment that it is purely happiness you seek?” And in an instant all is changed for me, and I am happy; and the fever cools and dies. Is there no rest in such a revelation?

4. And then, once more, if I am really one with Christ, the whole humanity which is in Him rises around me and blends my personal life with it, so that what happens to it, in any of its least or farthest members, truly and genuinely happens to me. All that humanity has, in some true sense, is mine. I pity you if you have never caught some glimpse of what that means. I need not know everything, for my race knows. I can be unhappy, if man is happy. Nay, not that, but, I am happy if man is happy. Let all that man has be mine, and lo! I possess much which I feverishly sought; and the search ceases, and there is a great calm. The peace of Him, who because He is the Son of Man carries the whole world in His heart, is mine.

We count these elements in the rest which Jesus promises, and as we count them we are continually coming back to that which I have said at length already, — that they are only elements within the great personal bestowal of Himself which is the true and final rest which Christ bestows.

But there is more than this, which I must lead you to before I close. To the great multitude who hear the words of invitation, and to whom they be come very precious, there always sounds through them one word which is not written there, which I have not spoken yet, but which really sums up and expresses all their value. That word is “forgiveness.” The great burden and weariness of life, when any man has once become conscious of it, is sin. “I could bear anything if I had not done wrong,” the true man says. And then begins the turmoil of self-reproach and self-contempt, and longing for lost innocence, and fear of consequences, which beats and drives the poor, bewildered soul about as the sea beats about the wrecked ship, abandoned to its power. This is the great woe of the human soul, so great that all others while it lasts seem insignificant. It is almost a mockery to talk of everything else which Christ can do for man, until we tell first what He can do for man’s sin. If He cannot save the ship from wreck, it is a mockery to say that He can keep the cabins from disorder and hold the masts in place.

Therefore it is not strange that they who hear Christ’s promise most of all rejoice in it because it offers them forgiveness of their sin. “He has fulfilled His word, He has given me rest,” sings the released and happy soul. And what most glows in his heart, and trembles on his lips in the glad utterance, is this: “He has pardoned my sins. He has freed me from their guilt and power.” Can any thing satisfy you short of this? Can anything be anything to you if you have not this above, beyond, around all other gifts? Cry for forgiveness first of all, — “O God, be merciful to me a sinner.”

And yet, in all the intensity of the desire for forgiveness, we must not let forgiveness come to seem too special, separate, and narrow. Forgiveness is the total giving of the Divine to the human. There is no part of that complete bestowal which is not included in it. The great salvation is not divisible sharply into periods. There is no moment when the pardoned soul stands pure and colorless, with every penalty removed, with all God’s anger disappeared, but with no holiness enveloping and filling it, — naked, with all its rags torn off, but with none of the new glorious raiment yet folded on its limbs. That would be a strange, awful moment in a spiritual history. Justified but not sanctified, as the old theologies would have said. No, it is by the pressure of His gifts of grace that God drives out the usurpations of the devil. It is by claiming the soul for His own that He sets it free from every false dominion.

And so the rest which the forgiven sinner knows is one and the same with the rest which the reclaimed nature finds in its replacement in the obedience of God. The saving of the wrecked ship is one and the same act with the commission which sends it forth on its appointed voyage. Sometimes the craving for forgiveness, intense as it is, has sounded almost soft and sentimental. It has seemed to be negative. The rest which it craved has seemed to be only a release from old bondage and a luxurious repose upon the assurance that “there remaineth now no condemnation.” Does not its salvation from such weakness lie in its vigorous identification with the soul’s possession by the will of God? The full freedom of the slave has not come with the mere breaking off his fetters; it comes only when he has become part and parcel of the nation which has set him free. The drop of water rests in the stream only when the stream’s life fills it and it moves with the great current of the stream towards the ocean.

Wrestle, O sinner, with your sin! Pray for forgiveness. Fix your eyes on the heights of sinlessness and see their beauty. Hear in your deepest soul the voice of Him who has the power to forgive calling you to come and be forgiven. But always in the depths of that sweet summons hear the call to all obedience, and to the attainment by obedience of the entire life of God. O sinner in your sin, O mourner in your sorrow, there is rest for you! The everlasting promise is for you. It is your Christ who says, “Come unto me!” You are the weary and heavy-laden one to whom He speaks. But it is all of Him that calls to all of you, and only when all of you — your obedience and grateful service resulting in gradual likeness to Him you serve — has come to all of Him, — His authority and great designs and ardent inspirations, — only when all of you has come to all of Him can He complete the fulfilment of His promise, and give you perfect rest.

This is the rest which remaineth for His people! This is the rest into which the brave young hearts and the brave old hearts who have gone forth out of our sight into His eternal world have entered. It is a rest full of vigor and activity, a rest which is the same that Christ’s own soul enjoyed. It is His Peace. Behold! He offers it to every one of you. Behold! He stands before you, your Friend, your Lord, your Christ, and says to you, “Come unto me, O weary and heavy-laden man, and I will give you rest.” May His voice so prevail with you that you shall come to Him!