Life is often filled with pressure, stress, and anxiety, and trying to carry them all on your own can be exhausting. Have you tried giving those burdens to Jesus? Today on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah returns to Matthew chapter 11 to share the unmatched rest and relief offered by Christ. From the battle for your soul, here's David to introduce the conclusion of his message.
Rest for your soul, in the words of Jesus. If we come to Him from our labored and burdened souls, He will give us rest. We're talking about that here on Turning Point as we explore our way through the brand new book, The Battle for Your Soul. And let me just say up front, The Battle for Your Soul is a 240-page hardback book, a major book just released from Turning Point into the marketplace. It's available in all of the big bookstores, wherever good books are sold, you will find it.
But you can find it more easily by simply asking for it when you send a gift to Turning Point during the month of August. October. Just say, please send me the book about the soul, and it'll be on its way. I believe this book will have an impact on you. I wrote the book, and it's had an impact on me.
How easy it is for us to marginalize the important truth of our soul. I've asked our people on occasion, when was the last time you went up to somebody and said, "How's your soul today?" We don't do that. We don't think in those terms. And yet, I remember when we began this discussion a few days ago. I told you, you are not a body with a soul.
You are a soul with a body. And today we're going to talk once more about how to find rest for your soul. We'll get to that in a minute, but just let me remind you: we have a Caribbean cruise coming up in December. We're sailing on the Holland America Zuiderdam, December the 26th through the 2nd of January, and we're going to go to Grand Turk, San Juan, Saint Thomas, and Half Moon Cay. Michael Sanchez, Yuriel Vega, other musicians will be with us.
We'll have a great time together. You're invited to come. Go to David. Jeremiah dot org, and you will find information that you need to register and come on this cruise.
Now, here's part two of rest for your soul. In John Bunyan's classic allegory, Pilgrim's Progress, he pictures Christian beginning a journey, carrying a heavy burden on his back, a symbol of the guilt and weight of sin. He travels through dangers and struggles and doubts, searching for peace with God. At one point in the journey, Christian comes to a hill where a cross stands above an open tomb. The moment he reaches the cross, the burden suddenly slips from his shoulders, and tumbles down the hill and falls into the tomb and disappears forever.
For the first time, Christian feels completely free, overcome with joy and gratitude. He stands there amazed that the cross could remove a burden he had carried for so long. Tears fill his eyes as he realizes he has found rest through Christ's sacrifice. Bunyan's description is unforgettable. Jesus invites the weary and burdened people to come to Him.
Not to earn salvation, but to receive it as a free and undeserved gift. Notice, Jesus does not say, "Try harder." That's what most of us do. Jesus says, "Come to me, the burdened." And then He adds to His description of those for whom this invitation is intended, the burned out. And then Jesus said. All you who are heavy laden.
Here, Jesus was describing people carrying burdens placed upon them by others. The religious leaders of his day had turned God's law into a crushing system of rules and expectations.
Some experts say there were more than five or six hundred of them, beyond the law, beyond the Ten Commandments. People were exhausted trying to keep all those rules and all those measurements, and here is how Jesus described what was going on. In Matthew twenty-three, he says, "The scribes and the Pharisees bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men's shoulders, but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers." Jesus was addressing people who were experiencing what we call burnout.
Now, I've heard that term all of my pastoral life. Probably have even said something like, "I fear that I might be headed toward burnout." But, ladies and gentlemen, burnout is not working too hard. Burnout is working too hard at something you can't do. It's working too hard at something that won't work. Burnout is not just working hard; it's working towards something that cannot be achieved.
It is fatigue and frustration from efforts that don't bring any fulfillment. In Jesus' day, people tried desperately to meet the overwhelming demands, yet they knew inwardly they could never do it, and the result was exhaustion of soul, burnout. Things haven't changed much, have they? I mean, burnout has been called the malady of the overcommitted, and it is more prevalent now than ever, because those who truly want their lives to matter often feel the strain. But let me tell you something: burnout will come when you keep trying to do what you can't do, and as unbelievers.
Trying to go to heaven in your own strength is an undoable task.
So many people feel like if they just do enough good things, they will be all right for heaven. But heaven isn't about people who do good things. It's about God who did the one thing, which was necessary. He gave us His Son to be our substitute.
So when we put our trust in Him, we can go to heaven. Listen to what Jesus says. He says, "Come to Me, and I." Will give you rest. It's just that simple. All you have to do is accept Jesus' invitation, and give your heart to Him, and He's promised you a different kind of life.
Years ago, there was a famous scholar named John Duncan who taught at the Edinburgh University. He was famous for his knowledge of Hebrew and the ancient languages. It was so extraordinary that students jokingly said he probably prayed in Hebrew as well. But one evening, two students quietly stood outside his bedroom door, expecting to hear deep theological prayers filled with impressive language and scholarship. Instead, through the keyhole, they heard a simple, childlike prayer.
This great intellectual giant prayed, "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, look upon this little child, pity my simplicity, let me come to you." That is the heart of this invitation. You don't have to impress Jesus. You don't have to come to Him polished and all cleaned up. You simply have to respond to Him as you are. He invites you to come.
Come to me, all you who are heavy laden and burdened. But then, after the invitation in this passage of scripture, we have some instruction in verses twenty-nine and thirty. We are told how to find rest. Very interesting passage of scripture. Matthew eleven twenty-nine.
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. In Bible times, a yoke was made to fit around an animal, and skilled carpenters would smooth the rough places and shape the yoke carefully so that it would rest on the shoulders of an ox. A bad yoke rubbed and wounded; a good yoke fit well.
When Jesus removes our burdens, He gives us another one. This one is entirely different from the one we carried before. Dr. Paul Brand explained it this way: Jesus offers us each a well-fitted yoke. He does not call us to the kind of rest that means inactivity or laziness.
That would lead to spiritual atrophy. Instead, he promises a burden designed to fit my frame, my individual needs, my strengths, and my capabilities. I come to him weary and heavy laden. He removes those crushing burdens that would destroy any human being, and replaces them with the yoke of appropriate stress designed specifically for me. I've read this passage as you have all my life, and I remember when I first read it, I had this picture of a yoke of oxen with Jesus on one side and me on the other side, and together, me and Jesus, we were pulling the load.
But when I studied the passage more carefully, I discovered that is not what Jesus meant at all. You see, in Jesus' day, taking someone's yoke Was a common rabbinical expression for becoming that person's disciple. To take a teacher's yoke meant to place yourself under his instruction, under his leadership, under his authority.
So when Jesus says, "Take my yoke upon you and learn from me," he is really saying, "Become my disciple. Bring your life under my direction. Let me shape the way you think and live." If you study the life and teaching of Jesus, you discover something very clear. Jesus asks for everything. He doesn't say, "Give me ninety percent of your life.
You can keep ten percent. Do what you want." No, he says, "Give me everything. Every area, every corner of your heart. Bring that under my authority." That's difficult because we naturally want to hold something back. I'm that way.
You're that way. We want Christ to guide part of our lives, and we continue controlling the rest. But the truth is this: no Christian can ever truly experience peace while fighting against the lordship of Christ. Let me tell you where stress often comes from in my life. Over here is one circle representing what I believe God wants for my life and my ministry, my vision, my goals.
Over here is another circle, which represents my own ambitions, my preferences, and my plans, and the exhaustion comes from when those two circles do not line up. God is leading in one direction; in this circle, I'm going over here in my circle, and until you can get those circles to come together, there's this tension that pulls apart. What he wants, what you want. As a Christian, you know better. You know that what you're doing is not necessarily the Lord's will, but you pull against it, and then we wonder why we have stress.
Jesus is teaching something very simple here. If you want rest, bring those two circles together. Let His will become your will. Let your will become His will. Stop trying to live for two different agendas at the same time.
And that is exactly how Jesus lived. You know, one of the things I always have thought was strange about Jesus, and you can disprove this for me if you're a New Testament reader. But Jesus never seemed to be in a hurry. Have you ever noticed that? I never noticed Jesus running from this place and running from that place in a frenzy like we normally do.
He was always at peace, and he walked. You remember when Lazarus died? Jesus took a day off before he went to take care of it. He was always at peace, and one of the reasons he had peace in his life is described in words that come from his own mouth. Very seldom do you see this in the New Testament, where Jesus describes his inner feelings.
But in John 8:29, he said, "This I always do; those things that please Him." Jesus was at peace because he lived under one agenda. He didn't have to worry about what anybody else wanted him to do. He always did those things that pleased the Father. One reason many of us live with so much stress is because we're trying to manage too many agendas. We're trying to please ourselves, our friends, our families, our employers, our culture, our teachers, and somewhere in the middle of that, we try to please God too.
When I came here back in 1981, this church was one church in three locations. I try not to think about it too much. It was a very stressful time. Every church had their own ideas of what I should do, who I should take care of. If I was here, I should have been downtown.
If I was downtown, I should have been up north. It all came to grips one night when I was downtown after church on a Sunday night. One of the ladies of the church—I don't remember who she is—and I'm kind of glad because I'd probably still be mad at her. But she came up to me. And she said, she stuck her finger in my face.
She said, "I just want you to understand something, young man." She said, "You work for me. You work for us. You get your check from us. You do what we tell you to do. You work for us." And you know, the thought of working for that woman really was stressful to me.
First of all, it wasn't true. But if it were true, that would have been an awful experience. And I remember thinking, you know what? I don't work for you. I work for Almighty God.
Now that doesn't mean I'm not concerned about what others say. But if you're a pastor of a church of eight thousand people or whatever we have, and you think you're going to be able to please everybody in that church, you're in for a rude awakening. I have never been able to prove any way possible for anyone to make everybody in this church happy. Most of you are happy, and for that, I'm glad. But somebody's always got an issue, and they always think you're the one who's supposed to fix it.
Early in my time here, I came to grips with the fact that I must live out my life before an audience of one. The most important thing for me to do, and the best thing I could do for this church, was to walk every day as best I knew how in the will of God. And when you walk in the will of God, guess what? You please the right people who are also walking in the will of God. You can't please everybody, but if you're a Christian, you need to please one.
And when you decide that your life is built around the direction and motivation from one person, everything gets easier. If you're not sitting around thinking, "Oh, what if I do this? What will they think?" You know what? Get over that. Because no one can ever live such a multifaceted life and have any sense of peace in their heart.
Do what God wants you to do first, foremost, and every time, and you will discover that stress starts to ease out of your life. I know that some of you are thinking, "How can Jesus say His yoke is easy?" Seems to me like it's pretty hard.
Well, let me tell you what's really hard. It's hard to please everybody else. It's impossible to satisfy every expectation people place on you, and it's exhausting to try to live for the approval of others, also trying to satisfy yourself. I see people doing that all the time. They run from one expectation to another, trying to keep everyone happy.
It's stressful just watching it happen. And one day, I told a friend of mine who was living that way, "You know, the problem is, everywhere you go, you take yourself with you." Isn't that true? Douglas Webster sums it all up for us in this paragraph. He says, "Apart from the grace of Christ and the saving work of the cross." It would be impossible to convince people that the easy yoke is even doable, let alone easy. But for those who live under the yoke, there is absolutely no other way to live.
Who, in their right mind, would go back to the gods of self, money, lust, and power? Who would return on bended knee to the shrines of pious performance and judgmentalism? Is not love better than hate? Is not purity better than lust? Is not reconciliation better than retaliation?
Such is the rest that comes with Jesus' easy yoke of discipleship. What a statement! The invitation, the instruction, finally the incentive. At the end of this passage, Jesus tells us something about himself. It's very revealing.
He not only tells us what he will give us, but he tells us what kind of person he is. If you're going to put yourself under the total submission to the Lord Jesus, what kind of a person is he? Matthew eleven twenty nine says, "For I am gentle and lowly of heart, and you will find rest for your souls." Think about that. The greatest man who ever lived, the Son of God Himself, describes His heart as gentle and lowly.
Now, gentle doesn't mean weak; it means strength under control. Jesus is not harsh with weary people. He does not shame us when we struggle. He is strong enough to help us and tender enough to heal us. That's what this means.
The Bible says. He will not crush the weakest reed or put out a flickering candle. First of all, I want to ask you a question: Have you ever felt like a flickering candle? Yeah, the light's about to go out. If something doesn't happen, this is not going to be pretty.
And the Bible says, when you're in that situation, Jesus does not put out a flickering candle. He doesn't come along and see you're wavering in your faith and you're done. No, the Bible doesn't present Jesus like that. It says He does not crush the weakest. Read, lowly means He is humble and approachable.
He's the kind of Savior who kneels to wash dirty feet, and welcomes broken people instead of pushing them away. When you read the Gospels, you see this gentle and lowly heart of Jesus everywhere. Jesus forgave the paralyzed man in Mark two. He calmed fearful disciples in Mark four. He gave peace to the sinful woman in Luke seven, and he gently corrected overwhelmed Martha in Luke ten, and he offered living water to the lonely Samaritan woman in John four.
That's Jesus. Everywhere he went, worried people found rest in him. Guilty people, grieving people, fearful people, exhausted people, and struggling people, when they got next to Jesus, they found what they were looking for. I want to end on a personal note and tell you what these verses have meant in my own life. Like all of you.
I know what it's like to carry pressure and responsibility that can become overwhelming at times. I don't want to go through all the things that go on around here that I end up having to take care of in some way or another. The challenge in ministry is the temptation to measure yourself by the expectation of others, and I've learned that if I try to carry all that on my own, eventually it will wear me out. Over the years, the Lord has had to remind me of something very simple: that the best thing I can do for this church is to stay close to Jesus and walk in His will every day. When I come back to Him and say, "Lord, help me do Your will," the pressure begins to lift because I remember that this life was never meant to be carried on in my own strength.
My responsibility is to be faithful and leave the rest in His hands. In New York City, there's a huge statue called Atlas at Rockefeller Center. It shows a man straining to hold a giant sphere on his shoulders, as though he is carrying the weight of the world. Right across the street stands St. Patrick's Cathedral, with its towering spires pointing toward heaven.
It's a picture of two ways to live. You can spend your life like Atlas, bent beneath the burdens you were never meant to carry, or you can lift your eyes to heaven and trust Jesus with the things that are too heavy for you. You have to make the choice. As I was growing up, we used to sing a hymn whose words were written by Horatius Bonar. It captures the heart of Jesus' invitation.
Listen to these special words. I heard the voice of Jesus say, "Come unto me and rest. Lay down, O weary one. Lay down thy head upon my breast." I came to Jesus as I was weary, worn, and sad. I found in Him a resting place, and He has made me glad.
Folks, that really is the answer. Life will always bring pressure and stress and anxiety. No earthly solution can give rest to a soul that is far from God. Rest comes when you come to Jesus as you are, and ask Him to forgive your sin and bring your life into step with His will. May I go back to the two circles?
The two circles. Here is God's will in this circle, and here is my ideas in my circle. Until those circles come together. Stress will be a major issue. Don't fight the will of God.
Let me tell you why you shouldn't fight the will of God. Here's what I've discovered: His will for your life is so much better than your will for your life that you're foolish if you trade the one for the other. God's plan for your life is way better than your plan for your life. I can testify to that from the experience of the life I have lived. God's plan for my life was so much better than my plan for my life.
I had enough sense back in the beginning to say, "Lord, I'll do what you want me to do," even when at the time it didn't make any sense to me. But it made sense to God because He sees the end from the beginning, and He knew everything that would happen. And the same is true for all of you. You don't have to mistrust God.
Some say, "Well, I don't trust God. I'm going to do my thing. I don't trust God." Well, you're going to be disappointed. You're going to look back someday and maybe get a vision of what God would have done in your life if you would have just said, "Lord." I'm going to put you first, and I'm going to bring my circles together. If you do that, you will discover not only will you find rest, but you'll find fulfillment in life.
You will find the thing you always been looking for, and the thing you really were equipped to do, and always really down deep in your heart wanted to do. That's who God is. If you commit your way into His life, He will give you the desires of your heart, and you will find rest in Him. Amen. Amen.
Say, friend, I hope you are listening carefully, taking notes, following along in the Scripture. Tomorrow we will continue our discussion of the war zone, which is your soul, and we'll turn to a very familiar passage, Psalm 23, verse three, which says, "He restores my soul." What does a soul look like when it gets restored? Maybe you feel like your soul needs a little restoration. If so, I hope you'll be sure and listen tomorrow as we continue our discussion of the battle for your soul. Hey friends, we are so grateful for your support.
And every year during these days, when we get back into the groove of the routine, we start to travel, and we'll meet you somewhere along the way in one of our events. And we thank you so much for your support. I can't tell you how much that means to me personally that you stand with us as we share the gospel around the country. God bless you. Have a great day, and be sure to join us tomorrow for the next edition of Turning Point.
Today's message originated from Shadow Mountain Community Church and Senior Pastor Dr. David Jeremiah. Drop us a note to let us know how God is using this ministry in your life. Write to Turning Point, P.O. Box 3838, San Diego, California 92163.
Visit our website at davidjeremiah.org/radio, or call 800-947-1993. Ask for your copy of David's new book, *The Battle for Your Soul*, and learn to be victorious in spiritual warfare. It's yours for a gift of any amount. You can also download the free Turning Point mobile app for your smartphone or tablet, or search in your app store for Turning Point Ministries to access our content. Visit davidjeremiah.org/radio for details.
This is David Michael Jeremiah. Join us tomorrow as we continue the battle for your soul on Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah.
