At that time Jesus said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this is what you were pleased to do.

“All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 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. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:25-30)

How are you doing, really? Are you at peace? Are you joyful? Do you live with hope? With margin? With enough emotional bandwidth to love your family well?

Or would you say that you’re stretched thin? That you’re exhausted? Anxious? Doing as much as you can, but it doesn’t seem to be enough? 

If you identify more with the latter than the former, I have good news for you: Jesus offers rest.

In Matthew’s Gospel account, Jesus is portrayed as the fulfillment of all Old Testament covenants. In the opening chapter, Matthew documents a genealogy that proves that Jesus has the necessary bloodlines to support messianic conclusions about him: that he is the True Seed of Abraham through whom all peoples will be blessed, and that He is in the line of David, fit to rule on Israel’s throne. The drumbeat gets louder as Jesus is portrayed as the True Moses, who brings a revelation of God’s character on a mountainside, and declares that He has not come to abolish the Law and Prophets, but rather to fulfill them. Immediately after the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus spends a few chapters healing people, restoring things to be as they should be.

And yet, even after witnessing Jesus perform miracle after miracle, the towns that Jesus frequented doubted His identity, and remained unrepentant. Maybe they were skeptical that Jesus was who He said He was. Maybe they liked what Jesus said, and appreciated the things that Jesus did for them, but resolved that to follow Jesus would require too much.

This is the context for Jesus’s declaration of bringing rest. Culture, by default, has a blindness to the wisdom of God, and God “has hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.” (Matthew 11:25) 

Then Jesus asks the crowd to be honest with themselves. How are you doing, really? Are you weary and burdened? If so — come to me. I will give you rest.

This is a huge claim — one we don’t have the real estate to dive into fully. But there are two implications worth examining here.

The first is that Jesus is a person of rest. As the God-man, the True Israel and the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, Jesus made peace between man and God, and can offer the rest we’ve been looking for since we were expelled from Eden.

The second is that Jesus’s yoke is a yoke of rest. The imagery is one of a beam used to join oxen to pull a load — but what gets lost in translation is that a “yoke” was a first century euphemism for a rabbi’s set of teachings. To become a disciple of a rabbi would be to take their yoke — to live according to your rabbi’s wisdom. As a first century rabbi, Jesus is offering rest to anyone who comes to Him and lives according to His wisdom.

Jesus’s question here is not whether you will wear a yoke — that much is assumed — but whose yoke will you wear? Whose wisdom will you follow? Whose way will you live? And if you feel worn-out, or weary, or burdened, might you try His yoke? If you do — He promises rest for your soul.

If you’re a reader interested in what Jesus is offering, the question that follows is “how do I get rest for my soul?” Matthew answers that question by telling a story about Sabbath, pairing the idea of “rest for your soul” with “Sabbath.” 

In a sense, the narrative thrust of the Bible is entirely about Sabbath rest. The creation account in Genesis 1 and 2 is structured to underscore that on the seventh day, God rested. The one who spoke the world into existence, the one who need not rest, rested. 

Moreover, the days of creation are each concluded with a declaration of evening and morning. Yet, this is not true for the seventh day — Sabbath — the day that God rested. There is no declaration of evening and no declaration of morning, because this is a picture of the seventh day lasting forever. In the story that God is writing, the ending has already been written on the first page: God will dwell with His People in an eternal Sabbath rest.

Of course, it doesn’t take many pages for humans to leave that rest, to defy God and unleash sin into the world. God curses the snake and the ground, and expels Adam and Eve from Eden. But there are clues that the ending of the story still hasn’t changed. The first time Noah is mentioned, his father names him Noah because he would give his people relief from the toil caused by the ground that God had cursed. Noah, by the way, means rest.

Fast-forward to when God leads the Israelites out of Egypt and into the wilderness, and God gives His people the Ten Commandments — the longest of which is the commandment to Sabbath. Twice the Ten Commandments are given — once at the base of Sinai in Exodus, once in Deuteronomy as the Israelites prepare to enter the Promised Land, and two different reasons are given for the Sabbath commandment. In Exodus, Israel is commanded to Sabbath because on the seventh day of creation, God rested. In Deuteronomy, Israel is commanded to Sabbath to remember that they no longer live as slaves in Egypt, but as free people under Yahweh.

Put another way, the Exodus Sabbath command is rooted in getting a taste of eternity, while the Deuteronomy Sabbath command is rooted in resisting the influence that our culture has on us, and instead be formed into people whose lives are marked by the wisdom of God. People of love and joy. Peace and patience. Kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23)

We Sabbath so that we may bear fruit.

Consider John 15:1-8 and Hebrews 4:1-11. Far from legalistically ceasing certain types of work, what does Matthew 11:25-30 and these other passages invite our lives into?