Here's Pastor Alan Wright with today's blessing—a biblical, faith-filled vision for your life. Blessings on your ability to focus, undistracted, undeterred, undaunted, regardless of the petty, pesky diversions and staticky white noise of daily life. Regardless of the purposeful schemes of hell to pull you from God's plan, you can Nehemiah-like live with focus. When opponents Sambult and Geshem said, "Let's meet in the plain of Ono," Nehemiah said, "Oh no! May you take his actual words to heart.
I'm doing a great work, so I cannot come down." Nehemiah six two. Whatever your great work might be, may you be filled with the grace to say, "Oh no." To everything that is a distraction from your true calling, Pastor, author, and Bible teacher Allen Wright of our life and all wisdom, it comes from Him. What Jesus is offering, beloved, is not a guidebook, not a set of principles, not even a religion. What He is offering is Himself. Prince of Preachers Charles Spurgeon says of this: "Remember, it is not thy hold of Christ that saves thee; it is Christ." Oh, I want everybody to know that it is not your grip of Christ that saves you; it's Christ Himself.
The invitation to apprentice with Jesus is not about a skill set like a plumber learning teaching an apprentice. It is. More about a heart. 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're 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. That's eight seven seven five four four forty eight sixty. While at our website, please let us know how we may pray for you. Submit your prayer request to our prayer wall and be uplifted and encouraged as the community around this ministry starts praying for you and receive notifications as your. Request is prayed for.
That's the prayer wall at Pastor Alan dot org. 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. In Jewish families, the kids started school around age six in what was called Bet Sefer.
And the goal of this was to mainly learn the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, and when successful, the children would memorize the entire first five books of the Bible. And so, this phase of learning was just about taking lots of knowledge and putting it in. But then, around age two, the Hebrew student would enter into what's called Bet Talmud. And they would be from about age ten to age fourteen.
Now, not just taking in knowledge, but learning how to think, not just memorizing, but learning how to ask questions and answer them. And they'd study the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures. And if a child showed special promise. And was a very gifted academic student. Then they might be invited into what was called bet midrash, and this is basically an apprenticeship with a rabbi.
And some rabbis are so highly regarded that you could imagine it was just a a wonderful thought if you could ever get a chance to go study with a rabbi. You could think of this period of study like an internship or an apprenticeship, like like a young man learning from an expert plumber who gets to go and work with that plumber and learn how he does things, and learn his ways, and learn what to look out for, and learn what. Or maybe you could think of a fellow. You know, someone who's finished residency and they're going to do a fellowship, and they get to work with the surgeon they wanted to work with. Maybe they're going into orthopedic surgery, and they love the way that this orthopedist does the posterior approach to hip replacement surgery, and wants to learn the nuances of that because he's been very successful.
You see, this is a real privilege when you get to go learn that closely with someone. For a period of time, the bet midrash, and if you were able to have the privilege of entering into bet midrash as a young man, the rabbi would welcome you into learning, essentially saying, "Come, learn from me," and that was called taking on the rabbi's yoke.
So this is a figure of speech. And ancient Judaism, to take on a yoke was to enter bet midrash and become an apprentice of a rabbi, because every rabbi had his own sort of school of thought, his way of interpreting scripture, his way of looking at life, his philosophy and ideology, and his biblical worldview. His way of teaching, his way of thinking, his way of living, his rhythm—all of that was the yoke of a rabbi.
So when Jesus says, "Take my yoke upon you," everyone knew what he was talking about. He's talking about an apprenticeship, bet midrash, with the greatest rabbi ever. Once you understand this, it goes far to explain why those early disciples were so quick to drop their nets and follow Jesus. Most of those disciples were not the ones who had excelled academically and had the privilege of going into Bet Midrash and following a rabbi. And now, the most popular and amazing rabbi anyone had ever known in their time came and said, "Would you like to come and apprentice with me?" They were like, "Yeah." It'd be like when Bennett was little and playing junior golf.
If Tiger Woods had come to him and said, "Would you like to have a year's worth of free lessons just from me every day?" Ah, yeah. Take my yoke means come and learn everything that I have to teach you and show you, and you learn it by being with me. You are yoked. You see what it means. Come, apprentice.
Come be a resident. Come be a intern. Come and learn. Get this same yoke that I'm wearing, and take all that I know about life, and just walk it with me until you've got it. Take my yoke upon you.
Get so attached to me. That you can learn the unforced rhythms of grace that I practice. It means that the yoke of Jesus is a gift. Come to me, verse twenty-eight. All who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
The yoke means that Jesus has chosen. And wanted to link himself with you forever, and that therefore all of our life, and all wisdom, it comes from him. What Jesus is offering, beloved, is not a guidebook, not a set of principles, not even a religion. What he is offering is himself. Prince of Preachers Charles Spurgeon says of this: "Remember, it is not thy hold of Christ that saves thee; it is Christ." Oh, I want everybody to know that it is not your grip of Christ that saves you; it's Christ Himself.
It is not thy joy in Christ that saves thee; it is Christ. It's not even faith in Christ. Though that be the instrument, it is Christ's blood and merits. Therefore, Spurgeon preaches: Look not so much to thy hand with which thou art grasping Christ as to Christ. Look not to thy hope but to Jesus, the source of thy hope.
Look not to thy faith but to Jesus, the author and finisher of thy faith. We shall never find happiness by looking at our prayers, our doings, or our feelings. It is what Jesus is, not what we are, that gives rest to the soul. And this is the privilege. You have been offered the greatest privilege imaginable.
You can take up the yoke of Rabbi Jesus. Who wouldn't want that? Who in this stressed-out world couldn't look at the life of Jesus? And the power of Jesus, and the goodness of Jesus, and the serenity of His heart, and not want that to live like that. Oh, who wouldn't want it?
Here's the privilege: you are invited to learn from Him. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me. The offer is coming from the genius who brought order out of primordial chaos. The offer is coming from the creator of two hundred billion trillion stars. The offer is coming from the mastermind of the human genome.
The offer is coming from the source of all wisdom, from the One who is and was and is to come. The One who is perfect light and infinite love is inviting us to learn from Him. Take up My yoke. This is powerful and freeing and wondrous at every level. And Jesus is making it clear here that His way, His yoke, is so different from what they imagined the yoke of a rabbi to be, because the various rabbis had really hard yokes.
Meaning, here's the way I live it. Here's the way I follow all the laws of God. Here's the way I do it, and now you come do it this way. But Jesus says of His yoke that it does something different than that. It doesn't make your life harder; it makes it, in a sense, easier.
It doesn't make you rest less; it gives you rest. John Mark Comer, an overly busy pastor, was preaching six times on a Sunday. Decided to slow down, and he's been writing about it in his book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. I like the way he puts it. Can you imagine a stressed out Jesus snapping at Mary Magdalene after a long day?
I can't believe you dropped the hummus. Can you imagine Jesus at the end of a long day sighing and saying to himself, "I seriously need a glass of wine." Can you picture? Can you picture him half talking to you, half texting on his phone? Yeah, was that? You know, can you hear him saying, "I'm sorry, I'd love to heal your leg, but I got to catch a plane." It's comical because you can't envision Jesus like that, and he was the perfect human being.
He was oddly. Living out an overly full schedule, and yet lighthearted, he was. Comer says, showing us a whole new way to be human. And what is that way? This is where we go deeper in this beautiful text.
Take my yoke upon you. Learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart. The invitation to apprentice with Jesus is not about a skill set, like a plumber learning, teaching an apprentice. It is more about a heart. He's saying, "Come and learn to have a heart like mine." Come connect to my heart.
The only place Jesus tells us what his heart is like is in this verse. Gentle, the Greek word occurs only three other times in the New Testament, most notably in Matthew five and the Beatitudes, where we're told by Jesus the meek will inherit the earth. That's the word here. It means essentially humble, like in Matthew twenty one that Jesus would come to you humble and mounted on a donkey. And the word "lowly" it overlaps with this word.
It can also be translated humble, like in James four six, God gives God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. The point of all of this is in saying that Jesus is lowly in heart, humble in heart, is to say that he is utterly accessible. He is not pridefully looking down on the student. He's available. He won't use his divinity to turn away your humanity.
He won't take his righteousness to lord over you because you're unrighteous. All of this helps explain why he says, "My yoke is easy, and my burden is light." The word for easy can just as just the same word could be translated pleasant or kind. His yoke is kind. Really pleasant, and it's light; it's easy to bear. Beautiful words from Dane Ortland.
His yoke is kind, his burden is light. That is, his yoke is a non-yoke, and his burden is a non-burden. What helium does to a balloon, Jesus's yoke does to his followers. We're buoyed along in life by his endless gentleness and supremely accessible lowliness. Because this is Jesus's heart, meaning the deepest motivational force of his life, his whole way of being.
It means that he always delights in taking your burden. He always delights in you being yoked with him. We tend to assume in our flesh, in this world, that if we share a burden with someone, now we've. Taxed them. We've weighed them down.
You know, we say things like, "I don't want to burden you with this," because in in our way of thinking, somehow we do wind up heavier. From, but Jesus says something the opposite. He's saying that He delights in being the one to give you rest. He isn't diminished when you bring Him a burden. He is increased.
He is, Ortlund says, like a missionary doctor who's gone into the jungle, and is met by a primitive tribe who is superstitious and suspicious of modern medicine, and so no one will receive his medical care until one day a local tribal leader comes and has a son with a fever and is willing to risk trying this strange doctor's new medicines and takes the antibiotic. What does that missionary doctor feel on that day? Burdened? No, joy. Joy that the gift I have to to give has now been received.
This is the way of Jesus. Jesus doesn't get burdened by your burdens because he has already finished the great and grievous work that needed to be done on the cross. He's like a lifeguard who is trained to save, and then one day there's a drowning cry for help, and swims to the perishing soul and circles her with a life-preserving device, and brings her safely to the shore. The lifeguard does not feel disgusted for having. Had to help the drowning one, but instead is delighted to have done what he is trained to do.
Jesus's heart and his life is about lifting burdened. It's the nature of Jesus. It is the heart of Jesus, and so Jesus gives the invitation: "Come to me, if you labor, if you're working." By the sweat of your brow, for fear of messing up. If you feel heavily laden, like you're just carrying around the weight of the world on your shoulders. If your thoughts keep spinning in a negative cycle, telling you that you're not enough.
If you're heavy in heart. Come to me. Come to me. Not some other system. Not some other rule.
Not some substance. Not some practice. Come to me, and I'll give you rest. His yoke is his whole way of being, and it's kind, and it's light, and it will bring rest for your soul. And that's the gospel.
Pastor Alan Wright, our good news message, "Resting in Grace" from the series "The Gateways of Grace." Stick 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 Allen Wright 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 with Pastor Alan in the studio, and on resting in Christ today's teaching. I think you mentioned here Eugene Peterson and the phrase that is in the Message Bible: "The Unforced Rhythms of Grace" goes with the the thought of resting in Christ, right?
I love that unforced rhythms. If you're a Christian, then you are an apprentice of Jesus, a student of the Rabbi Jesus, yeah, and Yoke was an ancient term for the whole way of life and teaching that a rabbi lived and passed on to his students.
So that's really what you're taking on: is you're taking on Jesus's whole way of being, not just some individual teachings, but Jesus's whole way of life. And so, here's my blessing to you: may you draw near. To this Rabbi Jesus, and be so close to him that the unforced rhythms of his own life become yours. Thanks for listening today. Visit us online at pastorallen dot 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.org. That's PastorAllen.org. Today's good news message is a listener-supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.
