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Rest For Your Souls
By daniel | March 7, 2004
Beloved brothers and sisters,
I find myself physically tired most of the time. With a little one in the house, decent sleep is fast becoming a disappearing natural resource. Joy is in rougher shape than I. If left alone on the couch for more than two minutes –you can bet on it –she's unconscious. Fatigue is a part of life, and like all organisms we adapt.
But soul fatigue is a different matter entirely. One does not adapt to the restless, relentless demands of a soul out of balance. I am reminded of a song by Caedmon's Call that says, “I am looking for the well that won't run dry; the rest the weary thoughts can not deny” Life happens, and it can happen in a way that wears you out. Once your soul is tired, any rest you get is plagued by the weary thoughts, by the implacable feelings of despair, self-pity, ambition, dissatisfaction, loneliness and the like, and by a will that seems to want to take you in three different directions at the same time. We usually answer soul fatigue by medicating it. Drugs, drink, and sex are the more famous anesthetics — only because they are so strong and so obvious. But home remedies for internal exhaustion are more subtle and far more common. We work more, watch more soaps, talk more so as not to be trapped in revealing silences. We entertain ourselves, and arrange our lives around seeing to it we have adequate entertainment to quell the great yawning void inside … for a while at least. The radio is always on. The phone, the TV. We become skilled at blaming others –our spouses, our kids, the government and the “liberal media” — for the emptiness that drives us to greater emptiness. And in all this we remember that Jesus came so His joy could be in us and our joy could be full. We have life, but “abundant life” seems like a very bad religious joke. So we answer our lack of joy one of two ways: either something is wrong with us (guilt) or something is not genuine in the faith we have embraced (doubt). And of course, either of these simply wears us out more.
We respond, “That's fine, and something about it sounds strangely appealing. But my life is a mess right now, I'm really busy, work is so demanding, my family has apparently turned against me, and (frankly) I'm too wiped out to even think about your 'kingdom' stuff.”
To this our mouths say, 'Amen, Lord Jesus' and our day timers and checkbooks and hearts say, 'Yeah, right
'Right about here is a good place to stop and clarify something. Soul fatigue is not a circumstances-problem. It is a kingship-problem. Your soul is not tired because of how your life is happening to you. Your soul is tired because you serve a merciless taskmaster –yourself. When Jesus says to seek rather His kingdom, He is not offering to trade agendas; that is, He is not saying, “I'll take care of your stuff if you'll take care of mine.” Rather, He is offering loyalty to Him and His agenda as the only cure for your soul fatigue.
A passage we looked at this week in Matthew illustrates this brilliantly. Matthew 11:28-30 reads like this
(28) Come to me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.
(29) Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.
(30) For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
The invitation extended here is to those who are “weary and heavy-laden.” The word 'weary' means 'having worked yourself to exhaustion.' Sound familiar? The promise offered is rest. Verse 29 makes clear that it is rest that goes all the way through the soul. It is a rest that the weary thoughts really can't deny. And you get this soul-rest by coming to Jesus.
But how you come to Jesus determines whether or not you put yourself in a position to receive and experience the rest He offers. He says, 'Take my yoke upon you.' In the ancient Near East (the time and place in which Jesus is speaking here) the yoke was a symbol of kingship, of the authority of a ruling regime. Just leaf through your Old Testament and you will find countless mentions of it. 'My yoke will be lighter than that of my father,' one king promises as he lowers taxes. Elsewhere, God promises Israel that He will 'break the yoke of the oppressor off of you.' So, Jesus'; invitation to voluntarily, by a conscious act of choice, take His yoke upon you is simply an invitation to engage Him as King – as your King. King of your years and king of your minutes. King of your heart – and therefore king of your agenda and your checkbook and your family and your everything. He is inviting you to abandon your self-serving way of life, and to become an agent of His kingdom, His revolution of love and transformation. To 'seek rather the kingdom.'
And this glad submission to a king who is much better and smarter than you is, of course, the foundation for any meaningful experience of Him. 'Take my yoke upon you and learn of me.' You only really get to know Jesus when you are agreeing with Him that He is king and you are not. You learn the King by serving the Kingdom. And this is also how you find His rest. You see, His yoke is easy and His burden is light, specifically because He is 'gentle and humble in heart' – in other words, He does not abuse His subjects or push us around. That is why only the willing slave of Jesus is truly free. Your yoke is not easy (you said so yourself) and your burden is not light (that is why you are so tired, remember?), so why hang on to them? Soul-fatigue is a kingship problem. You are a bad king for you to serve, and your agenda can do nothing except wear you out and crush those you love under the wheels of your selfishness, ambition, pride, and love of pleasure. Come to Jesus. Abandon your meaningless pursuits. Take up His easy yoke, take up His amazing agenda, build His beloved church, see to His kingdom coming, recruit all your resources for that endeavor, and you will find rest for your weary souls. You can count on it. I love you all.
For King and kingdom,
Brother Virgil
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