Here's Pastor Alan Wright with today's blessing—a biblical, faith-filled vision for your life. As Jesus, the firstborn of all creation, slowly suffocated on a Roman cross, the Father did the unimaginable. He took His strong right hand of blessing from the firstborn's bleeding head and moved it toward the head of the undeserving younger siblings. That's you. That's me.
God crossed His arms in grace. It means that you can walk in the favor of God, a blessing that should have rested on the sinless Savior alone. With such a gift in mind, there is no limit to the favor of God on your life. Pastor, author, and Bible teacher Allen Wright. If Jesus is going to use an image.
To talk about resting in Him, why does He use the image of labor, a yoke, a heavy beam put across the beasts of burden like oxen? Why does He use that image? That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new light. I'm Daniel Britt.
Excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series "Gateways to Grace" as presented at Renolda Church in North Carolina. If you are not able to stay with us throughout the entire program, I want to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now, which can be yours for your donation this month to Allen Wright Ministries. As you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. Contact us at pastorallen dot org. That's pastorallen dot org, or call eight seven seven five four four forty eight sixty.
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We're honored to stand with you in prayer. More on all of this later in the program, but right now, let's get started with today's teaching. Here is Allen Wright. Are you ready for some good news? If you are weary, if you are overtaxed, if you are stressed, if you're just Tired?
Jesus has an invitation: Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Rest for your souls. We are talking about the gateways of grace. We're talking about spiritual disciplines, and they are like gateways. They are they are not the thing.
they they aren't the They aren't the blessing. They are the gateway to it. They are not the fruit. They are the opening to it. And as we are starting to get more specific into how the practices of our lives can make space and openness and find new rhythm.
For the grace of God to flow in us, I want to start here with resting in Christ in this busy, busy world, and it's really kind of part one of two.
So next week we'll pick back up in some more practical ways with this. In 2011, a postal worker in Durham, North Carolina, was caught on video dumping seven bags of mail into the woods. Poor, poor guy. You know, I mean, he just got he got he got behind, and he just I guess he just thought I'll never catch up. And somehow there was a video camera around there, and he just went out into the forest and just dumped all these bags of mail out into the woods.
Like, okay, that's the way I'm gonna catch up. And what was funniest about it was I was reading this article, I laughed out loud, and it said, "And postal authorities have noted that only two or three customers have complained of not." Receiving mail, nobody's gonna receive them. Not getting, nobody wants to get any more bills or any more junk mail. We don't even have time to look at what we do.
So when the mail didn't come, everybody's like, "Well, this is great. That is great." If anything could happen that would slow down life a little bit, it's just busy wherever you go. You never talk to someone and says, "How are you?" and they go, "Well, really well rested and content." That's not what people say. I had a dear friend had gallbladder surgery last week. I love him a lot.
We pray for each other a lot. And I was out of town. I was checking in with him as soon as he got done with the surgery and he could get his phone. I said, "Well, how did it go?" And he said, "It went well." I said, "Good. I'm praying for you." And next day I texted him again.
I said, "How you feeling?" He said, "I'm feeling pretty good." I said, "How's the pain?" He said, "It's not that bad." He said, "Doing really well." And I said, "We want to send you some food." He said, "Yeah." He said, "My wife's taking good care of me." And he said, "How are you doing?" I said, "I don't know. I've had a very stressful week." He said, "Well, maybe you need a little gallbladder surgery." And just for a second. I thought, yeah, a little minor surgery where people take care. What is wrong with us? If a little minor surgery might sound kind of appealing, and into the midst of such a really stressed out world, where we have maybe an epidemic of anxiety in our young generation, Jesus says, "Come to me, all who labor and heavy laden." And I'll give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you. Learn from me, for I'm gentle and lowly in heart, and you'll find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. Come to me. That's the invitation.
Come to me. That's really, in the sense, what I want to talk to you about. All fall is how we come to Jesus. How do we make the kind of space and rhythm of life? Wherein we can better accept His invitation to come to Him.
I love the message version of this text from Jean Peterson, Matthew eleven twenty eight, and his version goes, "Are you tired, worn out, burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me, and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest." Walk with me and work with me. Watch how I do it.
Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me, and you'll learn to live freely and lightly. Boy, how much do you want that? I want that.
So to dig into this absolutely sweet morsel of a text. We're first going to talk about the problem that it is highlighting—the problem of the great restlessness of our souls—and then a puzzle. And the puzzle I'd like to say up front is: if Jesus is going to use an image to talk about resting in Him, why does He use the image? Of labor, a yoke, a heavy beam put across the beasts of burden like oxen. Why does he use that image?
And then there's a privilege that he's invited us into here, because he's inviting us to connect to his heart. And this is the only New Testament passage where Jesus explicitly describes the nature of his heart. I'm gentle and lowly. And heart.
So a problem, a puzzle, and a privilege. They can give us great rest, change everything in our lives. Most American psychologists and sociologists before the technology boom in the 1950s thought we were going to have a problem on our hands that, with all the new inventions, that people would have too much leisure and wouldn't know what to do with themselves. They wrote articles about this. They wrote books about this.
You could understand how they got there and their thinking. They thought that, well, if washing dishes takes an hour by hand, and now we got a dishwasher, it only takes fifteen minutes to load it. You just found forty-five minutes, and if doing the laundry by hand. Takes an hour and a half, and you scrub it, and you do, and you're hanging, you know. And now all you got to do is throw it in the washing machine.
You just gained another hour there. And they started just going through all the things and said, "We're going to have so much time on our hands." No, some of the smartest people in the world said the problem is going to be that we're only going to be working three hours a day, and we're not going to know what to do with ourselves the rest of the time. That wasn't right, was it? Because in fact, the matter what happens is technology. It makes us more efficient, but it actually makes us more busy.
That's kind of crazy. But you know, here's an example of how I've seen that in my life.
So I like to do a thorough job of whatever I'm doing. And when I was in college, I wrote lots of papers. I was studying English and religion, and we wrote papers and research documents. And so here's how I knew that I was thorough, and how I could stop researching something. It was when I'd look through all the resources we had in our library, and sometimes that was a lot.
At the Wilson Library, I'd go digging through the dusty stacks back there of books, and I'd find stuff relevant to my thing. And when I found everything I could find, and I read it, my research was done.
Now it was pretty time-consuming to go find a dusty old book, get it, find the right reference, read it, make notes on it.
Now, all of that is available with a click of a button. But not just that. But everything that's ever been said or written on this subject is available with a click of a button. In other words, there is no boundary or end point as to when the research is over. You could just keep going as long as you want to go.
So, on the one hand, researching something now is way more time efficient than it was. But because it's unlimited and the availability, it actually makes us busier. And also, something happened in our country, and this is, I think, in some ways, not unique just to America, but in contrast to a lot of other cultures, it's unique, that we move towards this. Appreciation of hard work becoming a celebration of drivenness. There was a scholar in 1899 who wrote a book about the leisure life of the wealthy, and in that book he was highlighting how the mark of prosperity is you had plenty of leisure time, and that's the way it used to be.
Like, if you saw someone who wasn't too busy, you assumed they're well-to-do. But now it's completely changed, and the assumption is, and it's accurate, that the more prosperous people are actually the ones that are busier, and those that are poorer than them are usually less working hard. There was a study not too long ago that they took. Italian people and American people, and gave them the same images, the same depiction. And what they were showing is they first showed them a man who had a life that had a lot of leisure and extra time in it, and then a man who was working, working, working.
And it was so interesting the responses. The Italians, a culture where it's mandated that every employee gets at least four weeks vacation paid, and all their holidays, and half the people just take off the whole month of July, versus America, driven, driven, driven. And in Italy, the respondents they all said, "What do you think of these two men?" They said, "Well, this first man who has this leisure, he must have been very successful." And has a lot of money because he's got some time, and this poor person over here is probably behind and trying to catch up. And Americans said exactly the opposite. We were wrong about the technology thing, and something happened in our culture that put us off balance, and we have become a nation that applauds ambition and applauds.
Drivenness, and sometimes it's like we feel like the postal worker is like, I don't know what to do with it. I'm just going to dump the mail in the woods. And all the stress—it's killing us literally. All the studies are showing it. It's making us sick and isolated.
And most scholars agree it is an epidemic of anxiety and depression in our young generation.
So what we're doing is not working, y'all. That's the problem. There's no rest. Instead, you could say the characterization of our nation is restlessness.
Now, here's the puzzle: If Jesus is going to describe what it is to rest in Him, why this image? If He's going to talk about rest, why not use an image of a hammock? Or a blanket on the hillsides of the Sea of Galilee, where you're having a picnic, or just some image of leisure. But instead, to describe resting in Him, He uses this image of the yoke. The yoke was a big wooden beam, and it had kind of these hooks that go beneath it that go around the animal's neck.
And at least two, sometimes more, animals would be yoked together, oxen, in a field for the purpose of plowing the field.
So, the yoke is about being linked. It's about two or more being connected in an inseparable way.
So, the yoke means you can't be going in different directions. And the yoke, therefore, is about moving forward in a common direction, and it is about more than that. It's about sharing in some very unique way. It's not just coexisting beside one another. It's sharing something, and ultimately, it's about fruitfulness.
It's about the farm becoming more fruitful.
Well, you can begin to see the importance of the image to Jesus that. To take up my yoke, he's saying, is to be inseparably connected with me and moving in the direction that I'm moving. To be yoked with Jesus means you can't be moving this way and he's moving that way. It's his yoke, and you're wearing it also. But it means that there is, in some way, and some marvelous, uncanny way, that he's saying that there's a sharing that's going on between the two of us.
And that this is ultimately for a more fruitful life, and so that begins to get us to the image of the yoke. But still, why why an image of such hard work?
Well, part of the answer is that if Jesus had committed to his disciples and given them an image that said, "Come, follow me, and you'll have a life of leisure," it just wouldn't be true. I mean, it's amazing. It just wouldn't be truth, and Jesus is the truth, and He cannot lie, and He never said that. He said, "In this world, you'll have trouble." In fact, He said, "Follow Me; you'll probably be persecuted." So He's using an image here that doesn't falsely convey that the life of the Christian is simply a life of leisure. And have you ever noticed that work is kind of an unusual thing, and In the Bible, there was work before sin came into the world.
Work's not the enemy, so this image of work, the yoke, is not a negative one to Jesus. God put Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. This good garden, Genesis two fifteen. The Lord took man, put him in the garden. Even what to work it and keep it.
It's not arbitrary or meaningless work. It's purposeful. It's a vocation to care for, to do some hard work, to farm, to prune trees, harvest fruit. All of that. It's an act of God, trusting His human creature made in His image to take care of paradise.
So there was work when there was no sin. There is work in paradise, and you can very well expect. Therefore, there's work in heaven. Thank God. Because work's a gift from God, purpose.
We are we are designed for purpose. We're created for good works before we are even born. The Bible says, and if you don't ever find what your good works are that you're to be doing, then your life feels real empty.
So, work is a gift, but something happened when sin came. Genesis three seventeen, to Adam after sin came in, God said, "Cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life." Pain entered in with the work, thorns and thistles. It's like now it's like it's a pain. The work feels like that, and He says, "By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread." So. Other words, work that was pure delight before the fall.
Now, for some reason, the same work seems like a heavy burden. This is what turned it into dreading Monday and looking forward to Friday. What happened here? It's it's a fall from innocence that caused us to feel like we work by the sweat of our brow. You ever notice little kids?
Long and begged to do the chores that we hate to do. Many years ago, Ann and I, when our kids were little, we babysit for Catherine and Kevin, Ann's sister, Catherine, Kevin, and they babysit for us. And one time, little Jake, he was three, and Ann and Catherine were coming over to our house. We were going to babysit. It was July.
And we had a fun afternoon planned and evening, and and they were going out for a date, and you know we had Winnie the Pooh videos ready and games to play inside and popsicles, and we were going to do all this stuff.
Somewhere in the middle of it, I realized that a storm was going to be coming the next day, and the grass was so high, and I hadn't mowed it, and it needed to be mowed. I said, "Hun." If you can just play with them a little bit, I'm gonna go out here and mow the grass. Pastor Alan Wright, our good news message, resting in grace from the series, the gateways of grace. Stay with us. Pastor Alan is back here in the studio sharing a parting good news thought for you and me in just a moment.
What if growing closer to God isn't about trying harder?
So often we approach spiritual growth with a list of things we need to do. Pray more, read more, be better, but what if the secret to spiritual transformation isn't found in greater effort, but in experiencing more of God's grace? In his book *The Gateways of Grace*, Pastor Alan Wright invites you to discover a fresh perspective on spiritual growth through timeless practices like Scripture, prayer, meditation, wonder, and rest. You'll discover how to create space for the Holy Spirit to work in your life. These spiritual disciplines aren't obligations that earn God's favor; they're gateways that open our hearts to experience more of God's goodness, peace, and transforming grace.
When you give to Allenwright Ministries, you help share the gospel with listeners around the world. And when you give today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's book, The Gateways of Grace, as our thanks. To discover these aren't just disciplines; they're gateways. Step through them and discover the grace that's been waiting for you. The gospel is shared when you give to Allen Wright Ministries.
This broadcast is only possible because of listener financial support. When you give today, we will send you today's special offer. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks from Allen Wright Ministries. Call us at eight seven seven five four four forty eight sixty. That's eight seven seven five four four forty eight sixty, or come to our website.
PastorAllen.org. Back here now in the studio to share Pastor Alan's parting good news thought for the day, and well, I like the term resting. I'm I'm one that likes to take that very literally. The older I get, especially. If there was a word to describe our society, though, is probably restless.
You know, we're we are in such an overburdened, stressed out culture now that the words, the ancient words of Jesus, come to me: "All who labor and are heavy laden, I'll give you rest." The discovery of what he means by taking my yoke upon you, and what that Really means, in terms of taking on the whole way of life of this rabbi, is revelatory, and I look forward to learning more about that. Thanks for listening today. Visit us online at PastorAllen.org or call eight seven seven five four four forty eight sixty. That's eight seven seven five four four forty eight sixty. If you only caught part of today's teaching, not only can you listen again online, but also get a daily email devotional that matches today's teaching, delivered right to your email inbox, free.
Find out more about these and other resources at pastorallen dot org. That's pastorallen dot o r g. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.
