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Christ Community Chapel is a church in Hudson, OH, that invites people to reimagine life because of Jesus. Learn more about us at ccchapel.com.
Matthew 11:28–30
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 gentle and lowly in heart,
and you will find rest for your souls.
For my yoke is easy,
and my burden is light.
Well
hey, everybody.
Welcome to the weekend
gathering at Christ Community Chapel.
I'm so glad that you've joined us.
Welcome to those of you here in the gym.
If you're seeing this on video, it's
because I'm out in the tent
preaching out there,
and the weather is much better than than
it is right now
because it's pouring down rain.
My name is Jimmy Kozy.
I'm one of the pastors here at CCC,
and I'm really glad
to have the opportunity to be with you
for a little bit this evening.
Before I get into the message.
You know,
this was mentioned
in the pre-service video,
but we have something to celebrate
as a church this weekend.
I'm wearing a shirt for The Park Church
in Chagrin Falls Park up
in the northern part of Ohio,
and we set a goal when we started Orchard
NEO seven years ago that we would plant
60 churches in communities all around
Northeast Ohio by the year 2050,
and the Park church launches this weekend.
On Sunday, there are first service
there, opening services Sunday at 6:15
at the Sugar and Falls
Park Community Center.
The Park Church is the 12th church
planted out of Christ Community Chapel,
which is an amazing thing
for Pastor Brandon and for that church.
Really excited for that.
And we are in between sermon
series here at CCC.
So we just finished
the More Than Religion series
last week, and in the fall,
we're going to be launching into a series
where we're going to be going
through the book of acts together.
It's going to be a blast.
Really looking forward to all that
God has for us in that series.
But the topic today is rest,
and you heard the verses from Matthew
chapter 11, verses 28 to 30, read prior
to the sermon, prior to the sermon.
And maybe when you listen to those,
the idea that Jesus can give your soul
rest.
I don't know about you, but
when I hear that, I lean in a little bit.
That sounds appealing to me.
That's something that I would want.
It's important for us to understand
what that would actually look like.
And so in order for us to understand that,
I have three points for us.
This will serve as my outline today
and also give us a little bit of structure
for our time.
They are as follows.
First is needing rest.
Second is understanding rest
and then third is getting rest,
needing rest, understanding rest
and getting rest.
So we'll start with that first point
which is needing rest.
So I had an encounter
with a wild animal recently.
And I'd like to tell you
a little bit about it.
So something you ought to know about me is
that I'm a very routine oriented person.
I my day, when I look at the day,
I like to know what's going to happen
every minute of the day.
I have a pretty tight schedule, and
my schedule is what organizes me and it.
Part of it comes from the fact that,
you know, I have a job, I have four kids.
They have to get to school.
Our household
just needs to run on a routine
and in order for everything to work.
But part of my routine
is that every morning
I work out pretty early in the morning.
And so in order to be as efficient
as possible a few years back,
I ended up buying a treadmill
and putting it in our basement
so that have to drive to a gym.
I didn't have to worry about the weather
if I was going to run outside.
It was perfect.
It makes everything efficient
and so it's in a room.
In our base of our basement
is a walkout basement onto our patio.
And so one morning recently,
I was downstairs.
It was super early in the morning,
so it's dark outside.
The house was warmer than it was outside.
So I decided that while I was running
on the treadmill, I would pop
open the door to the walkout basement so
there's some cool fresh air would come in.
Make it just a better overall experience
running on the treadmill.
As good as it can be running in the dark
like Batman, that's what I was doing.
So I did my run and I finished up
and I went outside and,
you know, every morning
after I finished my workout, I have about
what I would call ten minutes of peace
before the day
tips over the top of the roller coaster,
and then there's no getting it back.
And so I was in that ten minutes of peace,
sitting outside on a chair,
playing with my phone outside our walkout
basement, and I looked up from my phone,
and about six feet away
from me, there was a skunk.
And so the skunks backside was toward me.
Which I don't know
if you're familiar with skunk anatomy,
but that's the wrong end of the skunk.
That's not the end you want to be.
I don't think you want any end of the
skunk to be facing towards you. But.
So I didn't know what to do.
I froze
and I started to panic a little bit,
so I tried to stand up and move away
and luckily the skunk did not spray me,
but he did notice me
and so he kind of wandered off.
And then I watched in horror
as he wandered
down the side wall of my house,
and then slipped right in the open
basement door that I had left open
when I came in to sit outside.
So in
this moment, I had no idea what to do.
I'm going to be honest with you.
So I ran over to our other basement door,
and I'm happy
to say that for the first time
in their entire lives,
my kids had locked the basement door
after they were playing outside,
so I couldn't get in there.
I thought maybe I could head off the skunk
at the past, scare them back out.
And so I realized there's a skunk.
It's pitch black outside.
There's a skunk on the loose in my house.
I'm the only person in the family
whose awake, and there is only one entry.
It is a dark doorway
in which a skunk has just entered.
And so I realized, with great courage
and great bravery,
that I was going to need to find a weapon
and go in and defend my family.
And so I did.
So I found what I could find,
which ended up being a pool noodle.
And so if you can imagine me
shirtless, sweaty,
barefoot, tentatively walking in a pitch
black basement with an iPhone flashlight,
poking things with a pool noodle,
trying to see if I could find this skunk.
So I searched my basement
for about 10 or 15 minutes.
No sign of the skunk,
and so nothing's going on.
I stopped, I couldn't hear anything,
no rustling, no odd smells.
And so I did what anybody would do.
I pulled out my phone and I asked ChatGPT,
what should I do next?
And Chad told me, what you need to do is
you need to go upstairs,
leave the basement door open,
close the door and go about your day
and hope that the skunk will
leave your basement on its own own terms.
So that's what I did.
So I went upstairs
after about ten minutes of searching
and I decided I'm done
searching for the skunk.
This skunk is on its own.
Hopefully it leaves on its own.
And then I went to work.
So you can imagine what
that goodbye conversation with my wife
was like when I said to her, hey,
I'm leaving for work for the day.
I'll be back sometime after five.
I'll see you then. One small thing
I can't say that
there is isn't a skunk in the basement,
or is a skunk in the basement.
There may be a skunk in the basement.
Okay, to make a long story short, well,
at this point it's been over a week.
There is no evidence that the skunk
is in my basement, so I think he's gone.
But neither have I actually seen him leave
my basement so he could be down there.
I don't know, but I think he's gone.
But the reason I tell you that is because,
like many of you.
My life has organizing principles.
I have a career, I have children,
I have things that need to happen in a day
that dictate for me what my priorities
are, that help me to make decisions.
And all of us have organizing principles
and all, and our organizing principles
are good things.
There are things like our career,
our family, our relationships, our money.
There are things that we should have
and that we should care about,
and that should inform our priorities.
But the reason we're tired
and we need rest
is because we have a tendency
to take organizing principles
that are a part of our lives
and make them way more important.
And the way that we do that
is that we turn them into scoreboards
by which we assign
meaning in value to ourselves.
And because of that, we're tired.
And the problem with scoreboards
is scoreboards always create pressure.
Here's what I mean by that.
If you look at the scoreboard
and you're ahead,
that immediately creates pressure
because the next thought you will have
is, well, I need to do
whatever it takes to stay ahead.
If you look at the scoreboard
and you realize you're behind,
then of course that creates pressure,
because what you think is,
I need to do
whatever it takes to get back ahead.
And so your kids, for example,
are a great organizing.
They should be an organizing principle
for your life.
But if your kids become a scoreboard
by which you determine
your meaning, that's going to change
everything it's going to make.
Every time
something goes wrong with your kids, it's
going to feel like a devastating failure
on your part.
As a parent, if your career, a great
and important organizing principle,
becomes your scoreboard
by which you determine your meaning
and worth,
a negative performance review or a missed
promotion becomes an existential crisis.
If you if your money,
which is an organizing principle
for all of us, becomes your scoreboard,
then you'll measure your worth
and let it rise and fall with your salary
and your bank account balance.
Because when we do that,
we're taking things
that were never meant to serve
as our source of meaning and worth,
and we're putting them in a position
that they were not meant to be.
And that's what makes us tired.
And that's why
when we read what Jesus says
in Matthew chapter 11 verse 28, it's
so compelling to us.
Listen to what it says.
Come to me, all who labor and are heavy
laden, and I will give you rest.
Jesus calls this laboring
and being heavy laden.
The idea that we need rest.
But what he says
next is somewhat unexpected.
And that leads me to my second point,
which is understanding rest.
So we need rest.
Now let's understand it.
Let me read for you
from that same passage, verses 28 and 29.
Here's what it says.
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 gentle and lowly in heart,
and you will find rest for your souls.
So in this, in these verses,
Jesus says two things that are unexpected.
The first thing that he said,
well, let me let me say this.
If I were talking to somebody
who was struggling with feeling burdened,
feeling like they're laboring
and being heavy laden,
this is not how I would talk to them.
I wouldn't say I would say something
like, oh,
you're feeling I can take your burden,
I'll carry it for you.
I'm strong, I'm mighty.
But that's not what Jesus says. Here's
what he says.
The first thing he says, this unexpected.
He says, take my yoke upon you.
And he's using farming terminology.
But what he's really saying
is, I have a burden for you.
Take this burden of mine.
So he's he's talking to people
who he's saying you are a laboring
and are heavy laden
and he's giving them work to you.
Why does he say that?
Then the second thing that he says is, for
I am gentle and lowly in heart.
And again, what I might expect Jesus
to say in this instance, to speaking to
somebody who's tired is to say,
I'm strong, I'm mighty, I'm powerful.
I can carry it for you.
But that's not what he says.
He says, you take my yoke, for
I am gentle and I am lowly in heart.
And I think what Jesus
is getting at here
is that we need to understand
what rest actually is,
because what rest is
is not connected to activity or inactivity
or the things we do,
but it's rather connected to what
our lives are organized around.
Rest is connected to who Jesus is
and the role that he plays in our life.
This is why he describes himself.
This is interesting
that this is one of the very,
very few times in the Bible that Jesus
actually describes his character.
He talks about his role
and what he came to do plenty of times,
but this is one of the few times
where he actually
describes himself in his character.
He says, I am gentle and I'm lowly,
and that's interesting.
This is intuitive to us in the workplace.
You know, the experience of carrying
a burden is directly
the quality of the experience of carrying
a burden is directly
connected to the person
giving you the burden.
It's like if you have if you've
if you've worked in any job, you know
that the experience of work
can be vastly different
depending on your relationship
with your direct supervisor or your boss.
So you can have the same role, same title,
same office, same responsibilities,
same workload.
And if you have a great boss, it can be
a joyful and wonderful experience.
Very meaningful, impactful and great.
If you have a bad boss,
it can be terrible.
It can be miserable
because the quality of that experience
is not dependent on the work
you're doing itself, but
rather on the person you're doing it for.
And Jesus is saying, when it comes to
rest, the same thing is true in our lives
that we were meant
to organize our lives around him.
But that's actually good news for us
because of who he is
and the kind of person that he is for us.
He is gentle, he's lowly, he's caring.
You know, it's interesting
the people that Jesus is talking to here,
they would have been contrasting him
with the other religious leaders
of the time,
who were known as the Pharisees
and the Pharisees.
The way that they approached
the relationship with God
was kind of like a ladder.
They would say, you know, you got to do
as many good things as you can.
And by doing those things, you climb
the ladder and the higher you want
are on the ladder, the more likely it is
that God will accept you and love you.
And Jesus says, no, no, no,
that's not how it works.
It's not about being high and mighty.
I am gentle and lowly.
That's the kind of leader
that I'm going to be for your life.
And so what Jesus is saying
is that what it means for us to rest
is to find a new organizing
principle in him,
to allow him to reorganize our lives
and in so doing,
separate our sense of meaning, value,
and worth from what we accomplish
and what we achieve
in different areas of our life and attach
to what he says is true about us.
So then the next question we would ask
is naturally, okay,
how do we actually get this rest?
And that leads me to my third point,
which is getting rest in.
In order to understand this,
we have to look a little bit further back
in the passage, the three verses that
precede the verses we read already today.
Let me read these for you
Matthew chapter 11, verses 25 through 27.
They say this.
At that time
Jesus declared, I thank you, father,
Lord of heaven and earth,
that you have hidden these things
from the wise and understanding,
and revealed them to little children.
Yes, father, for such
was your gracious will.
All things have been handed over to me
by my father, and no one knows the son
except the father,
and no one knows the father
except the son, and anyone
to whom the son chooses to reveal him.
So in those verses, Jesus says
two interesting things that help us
understand what it actually looks like
to get the rest that he's talking about.
The first thing he says
is that the son reveals the father,
and the father reveals the son.
And what he means by this,
what he's saying is,
if you want to know what God is, he's
making an enormous claim about himself.
He's saying, if you want to know
what God is like, you look at me.
If you want to know
what kind of relationship
he wants with you, if you want to know
his character, his actions, how he wants
to interact with you, you look at me.
That's why later he's saying, for I am
gentle and lowly in heart, and you can.
And my my yoke is easy
and my burden is light.
He's saying, look, if you want to know
what God is like, look at me.
But then the other thing
he says that's interesting is
that God has revealed these things.
The way to rest, the way to to peace.
He's revealed these things
to little children.
And I think it's important
for us to understand what that actually
what does he mean?
What does he mean by that?
Maybe another way of saying that is,
what do you little children know
that adults don't know?
Because it can't be that Jesus is saying
only little children can understand God.
What he must be saying
is something about
how we approach our relationship with God.
So the question is, what do little kids
understand that it else don't?
Well, speaking
as a father of four little kids
between the ages of six and 11,
I may not be an expert,
but I do spend a lot of time around
little children, and so maybe I can figure
out some things here.
So I have a six year old daughter.
Her name is Elena.
She's a twin with her brother James.
He's also six.
That's how twins work.
So she's six years old.
I so over the last couple of months,
we have fallen into a little bit
of an unfortunate pattern in our house
where every night,
sometime between the hours of 12 a.m.
and 2 a.m.,
we will hear
Elena's feet thump on the ground,
and then she'll come running down the hall
and wake us up and climb into orbit,
and she'll say, I can't fall asleep.
I'm totally unable to fall asleep.
I can't do it.
I need somebody to snuggle me
until I fall asleep.
So my question is, why does she think
that it's okay to do that?
Like, let me put it this way,
if I showed up at your house tonight
2 a.m., walked into your room, climbed
into your bed and said, I can't sleep.
I need somebody to snuggle me
until I fall asleep.
Totally different conversation.
So what does Elena.
No. Well, she knows a couple of things.
The first thing she knows is
she can't do it on her own.
She knows she's helpless.
She's aware of her helplessness.
She can't do it.
But then the second thing she knows
is that we love her.
And so because of that,
she trusts that we will accept her
and that we will help her.
It's not as if Elena stands in the hallway
outside our room
and says, wait a minute,
was I a good enough six year old today?
Did I eat enough Cheerios?
Did I play enough?
Did I do all the right things?
Maybe she doesn't think that at all.
She just knows.
She knows she's helpless.
She knows we love her.
She knows we accept her.
So she just comes.
She comes believing that she will be loved
and that she'll receive the help
that she needs.
And I think that's so important for
for us to understand that when it comes
to how we approach our relationship
with God, the way to find rest in
Jesus is to come just like that.
I think that's what Jesus means
when he says that God has revealed
these things to little children.
He's revealed to these things to those
who approach God with an understanding
of their helplessness
and expectation of his love,
leading to his acceptance of us.
Another way.
Another way of saying this is that Jesus
has reversed the order of performance.
What I mean by that is our other
organizing principles are other burdens.
They ask us to pour ourselves out for them
if we make them our scoreboard.
So if you make your career,
your scoreboard
and define your meaning
and worth by your career,
it will ask you to pour your life out.
Everything will be on the table
for your career.
Same with your kids.
If they become your scoreboard,
everything in your life will be poured out
in order that your kids will be
where you want them to be.
If it's your money,
the same thing is true.
But what Jesus has done
is he reverses the order of that.
Jesus poured himself out for us
when he went to the cross,
that we might have relationship with God.
And so what that means
is that our rest comes from the knowledge
that we don't have to achieve anything
in order to have meaning and value
and worth, and that everything
that we ever needed to do to receive
God's love and his acceptance
has already been done for us by Jesus
and credited to us through his life,
death, and resurrection.
Second Corinthians 521 says this.
It says,
for our sake he made him talking about
Jesus to be sin who knew no sin,
so that in him
we might become the righteousness of God.
What that's saying
is what I just said, that
Jesus, when he went to the cross,
he became sin.
And his righteousness,
which was perfect, was credited to us
so that we might have relationship
with God.
And what that means for us
is that we no longer
have to attach our value
to our achievement, to our accomplishment,
to the scoreboards
all around our lives that we look to
to tell us how good we are,
whether we're good enough,
whether we've made it,
whether we've done it.
Instead, our meaning and value
have been defined for us already,
through the fact that Jesus perfect life
has been credited to us through his death
and his resurrection.
And because of that, we can rest.
We can come knowing that
the one who is gentle and lowly
has already paved the way for us
to be accepted by God, to be loved by God.
And we can rest
knowing that our worth and our meeting
are not attached to our accomplishment,
to the things that we do.
If we never accomplished one more thing,
God would love us just as we are.
If we come to him knowing we're helpless,
but presuming on his love
and affection toward us in Christ Jesus,
that's what it means to rest,
to be free of achievement, knowing that
Jesus has already achieved for me.
Let's pray together.
Father in heaven, we
thank you for your goodness
toward us in Jesus.
We thank you that through him,
everything we ever needed to do,
you've already done for us
and given to us through his life,
death, and resurrection.
We pray that we would believe that.
We pray that we would fight to believe
that when everything around us
tells us we need to achieve more, do more,
be more, create more.
Lord, we pray that we would see
the goodness of Jesus
and know that no matter what we achieve
or don't achieve,
his love has already achieved everything
for us.
That we need to be known and loved by you,
and we thank you for that.
We thank you for your goodness
toward us in Jesus, in whose name we pray.
Amen.