Lectionary: I Will Give You Rest - Matthew 11:25-30 - July 5, 2026

Well, good morning.

Everyone's awake this morning after the 4th of July.

I'm very very proud of everyone here for um waking up this morning, making their way to church for the day after the 4th.

I guess everyone else is getting much needed rest, which is deeply ironic based on the chapter verses we're about to read together.

But um if you haven't met me yet before, my name is Matt.

I'm one of the pastors on staff here.

Um it would be great this morning if you have the scripture open in front of you.

If you brought a Bible with you, awesome.

If you don't have a Bible with you, I welcome you to go grab one from the table back there.

If you're on your phone this morning, I will just assume that you're looking at the Bible app and nothing else.

Um, with all that in mind, would you pray with me this morning as we open up?

God, I pray that we may have open ears to hear, open minds to understand, and open hearts to receive what you have for us in your word this morning.

And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all your people's hearts be pleasing and acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock, and our redeemer.

Amen.

Now, uh, for those of you who know me well, you know that my uh all of my previous ministry roles have been in youth ministry.

Um I absolutely loved my previous jobs doing youth ministry.

It's a ton of fun.

But um let me tell you, youth ministry can be exhausting at times.

Imagine hopping on a 54-person charter bus packed with middle and high school kids bound for the mountains of western North Carolina for a ski retreat, and then all of a sudden one of the eighth grade boys yells, My friends and I just downed Red Bull energy drinks.

And you think to yourself, who in the right mind would do this kind of thing and stay sane?

Well, it's me.

I'm that guy.

I did this.

Um my immediate thought was, man, how much caffeine can I personally drink without having a heart attack?

This was me.

This was this was my life for a long time, but it was at least better for my mental health than when I worked at Truro and we did overnight lock-ins at the church, which if there are any youth here, I'm sorry to disappoint.

Mike and I will never lead a lock-in again.

I can't pull it off anymore.

But um, you know, I thought that given my years in youth ministry and in high school I was a swimmer, so all these early mornings, I knew, I thought I knew what exhaustion and tiredness really was.

Well, I was I was very wrong.

In this last year, Liz and I moved up to um Northern Virginia from Raleigh, North Carolina, actually almost exactly a year ago today.

Um we moved back up here.

We welcomed the birth of our son Jack, who's four and a half months old now.

We moved to a new house about also four months ago because our previous landlord was not the best, and the house was not great.

Um I also ended up in the hospital in December for eight days with a really significant flare of Crohn's disease.

God has been with us every single step of the way, and you as a church have supported us so well, but this was a whole new level of exhaustion and tiredness that I had never experienced before.

And it wasn't just, it wasn't just physical tiredness and physical exhaustion.

It was this deeper rooted sense of exhaustion, of sickness, of anxiety, of self-doubt, all mixed with the incredible, life-changing birth of our son Jack.

And I wonder, I wonder this morning, especially after a potentially late night watching fireworks, if this is something that you can relate to.

A level of exhaustion that goes much deeper than the simple, oh, I'm feeling a little tired this morning.

One where you drive to church and you try to get out of the car, but you're just sitting there and the door just feels so heavy to open because you're so tired.

Or even a level of exhaustion where the very idea of getting up and going to church or getting up and doing anything just sounds like more than you can handle.

Now, if you're anything like me, you brush off this exhaustion and this tiredness with this phrase.

This is just a season of tiredness because fill in the blank and everything will get better within X amount of time.

I did this just yesterday.

I thought to myself, I am so tired.

But this is just a season of life.

Jack will get older, he'll start sleeping better, then I'll finally be able to get more rest.

But I've been told by parents with older kids that that may not be the case.

But there are some times in our lives when we hit a breaking point where exhaustion and tiredness is truly just too much for us to handle.

Sometimes it feels like the season of life, of tiredness that we find ourselves in, it just feels like it's never gonna end.

And we ask ourselves, what are we to do?

What are we to do then?

What are we to do when it's just too much?

Now the good news is that our passage today contains one of the most well-known verses in Scripture.

In fact, it's one of the verses that we say every single week when we say the comfortable words.

Now, if you know it, feel free to say it with me.

It's Matthew 11, 28.

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

So Jesus invites us to rest in him.

Now, however, this invitation in our passage this morning, it's preceded by two super important truths that we need to understand if we are to fully receive this rest that Jesus offers us.

Now, first, the first truth that Jesus tells us about is that Jesus reveals the posture of those who can truly know God.

He reveals the posture of those who can truly come to God.

Look at Matthew verses 11, 25 to 26 with me.

At that time Jesus declared, I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children.

Yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.

Now, how does this passage begin?

And it begins in a really cool way.

It begins in prayer.

Verses 25 and 26 are prayer of thanksgiving that Jesus is praying directly to his Father in heaven.

And I love the language that Jesus uses here because it's so paradoxical.

He begins with this simple, familial language of thank you, Father.

But then he follows it up with this incredible statement of who his father is, the Lord of heaven and earth.

Now, this is this is just a quick aside, but how amazing is it?

How incredible is it that our God, the Lord of heaven and earth, the creator of the universe, the Alpha and the Omega, reveals himself to us as a loving father.

How every time I think about that, it just blows my mind.

But then moving on.

So, what is Jesus thanking his father for in this passage?

He's thanking his father for hiding these things from the wise and the clever, but revealing them to little children.

Now, as I was studying this passage this week, coming up with this sermon, one immediate question that I had as I was reading through it is what is Jesus referring to when he says these things?

Right?

When you read it, it seems a little ambiguous, but what does Jesus mean when he says these things?

Now to answer this, we have to look back a little bit in Matthew's gospel to the verses right before the ones we read today in Matthew 11, 20 to 24.

Now, in these verses, Jesus is denouncing Chorazan, which I'm like fairly confident I'm saying right.

Bathsettah and Capernaum.

And these were the cities that Jesus spent a lot of time in, where he witnessed the gospel and he did these mighty works or miracles.

Yet what he's saying here is these cities they failed to repent.

So in verse 25, these things that Jesus is referring to is the true significance of the mighty works that the wise and the learned in these cities didn't grasp.

The revelation of who Jesus is and what God is doing through him.

And the towns that Jesus was just in and did all these mighty works, they just couldn't grasp it.

They couldn't understand it for all the knowledge that they had.

Now the truth of the gospel is hidden from the learned and wise.

And what does this mean?

Does this mean that wisdom and knowledge are bad?

No, that's not what Jesus is saying.

What he's saying is the truth of the gospel is hidden from self-confident adults who think they can rationalize their way to God.

Now, instead, the truth of the gospel is revealed to little children.

Now, God's revelation of his son, it isn't earned by intellect, by status, or by self-sufficiency.

Instead, it's received with childlike humility and dependence.

Now, the barrier to knowing God, the barrier of coming to God, it's rarely a lack of knowledge.

More often than not, it's pride.

It's self-reliance that blinds us from the truth, but humility is the thing that opens our eyes.

Now, this was the Father's gracious will that he talks about in verse 26, reminding us that grace, not merit, is what governs how we come to God and how we know God.

Now, this is summed up so well.

I'm in I'm very much an Anglican nerd, you know, given my profession.

So this, I love the prayer book, and one of my favorite prayers in the prayer book is the prayer of humble access.

And this idea of humbling ourselves to come to Jesus, it's summed up so well in this prayer that reads, We do not presume to come to this your table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in your abundant and great mercies.

We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs from under your table, but you are the same Lord whose character is always to have mercy.

Now, before inviting us to rest in Him, Jesus first tells us that we must approach Him with a childlike posture of dependence and open-handedness, and that we must humble be humble enough to recognize that even though we are not worthy enough, so to gather the crumbs from under his table, Jesus still offers us grace.

So Jesus' invitation to rest, it's also preceded by a second incredible truth, that Jesus is the only one who reveals the Father to those humble enough to receive it.

Now look at verse 27.

Jesus says, All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

Now, this is one of the most Christologically rich verses in all of Scripture.

It reveals so much about the very character and nature of who Jesus is.

Now, first, Jesus tells us that all of his father's authority and power has been handed over to him.

Salvation, judgment, the power to heal, the power to forgive, all of it.

All of the power that the Father has has been handed over to the Son.

Now, Jesus, he was fully human, right?

He felt true emotion.

He felt the full range of emotions that we feel.

Jesus wept when he saw Lazarus die.

He felt pain on the cross.

But Jesus is also fully divine, and that's what we learn here.

He has the same power and the same authority that his father has.

And this is what this passage tells us.

It tells us that Jesus, though he was fully human, he also has the full power and the full authority of his father.

And it also says that Jesus is the only one who truly knows the Father.

Now, no other prophet in all of Scripture, as great as they were, and as amazing as the works that they did, no one else can make this claim.

There is no, there's this unique mutual knowing between the Father and the Son.

And it also tells us in this one verse that Jesus is the only one who can reveal the Father to us.

Jesus is the doorway to the Father.

There is none else.

And this is so reminiscent of what is written in John 10, verses 1 through 10, when Jesus said, Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep.

John 10:1–10

All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them.

I am the door.

If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture.

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.

I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

I am the good shepherd.

The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.

Jesus is the doorway to salvation, abundant life, and his heavenly father.

There is no other way.

There are no shortcuts, there are no workarounds.

Jesus is the only one with the power to save us and bring us to his heavenly father.

So Jesus, he reveals the Father to those who approach him with a sense of childlike humility and openness.

So after taking the time to explain these two truths, Jesus moves on to the invitation.

Look at verses 28 through 30 with me.

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

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.

So now we come to the very heart of this passage, and probably one of my favorite passages in the entirety of Scripture.

And in it we find four things.

We find three commands and a promise.

Those promises are come to me, take my yoke and learn from me.

Or the commands, sorry, come to me, take my yoke and learn from me.

And the promise you will find rest for your souls.

So notice, notice how the invitation here, the invitation it isn't to a thing.

Instead, the invitation is to a person.

Jesus doesn't say, come to my system.

He doesn't invite you into his program where you're gonna find rest at the end.

He doesn't say, come and try harder.

There are no caveats at the end of what he's saying.

He simply says, Come to me.

You are personally invited to the person of Jesus.

And look at the qualifications that Jesus says here.

The only qualification that Jesus says is need.

It's requirement to receive this invitation.

The only invitation, the only so easily forgotten.

I forget it all the time.

You may say, because of what I did to my friend, Jesus replies, I see your guilt.

Come patterns of sin in my life, then come to me.

But then Jesus replies all the same, I see your nine through ten reads, The heart is I the Lord, search the heart and test the mind to get Jesus has already searched your hose, the things in your life that make your heart you can say to Jesus doesn't already know a nation each and every time.

And I love you.

Now the rest, that Jesus invitation to come to Jesus, life will go away.

But that would be a very false teaching.

When we come to Jesus, we still feel tired, we still feel burdened, and at times we even feel exhausted.

Jesus He doesn't offer us a life with no yoke at all.

Instead, he offers us an Amish.

We don't often use, I mean, unless you grew up in an Amish country, we don't often use carts and oxen to pull things around anymore.

So I do think a quick explanation here is helpful.

The yoke, it's this heavy beam placed across the necks of two oxen.

And then in the middle, there's a strap and it goes back to the cart, and it allows the farmer to steer, and it enables the oxen to share the load so that they can carry more things and move more efficiently.

Now, in Jesus' time, what farmers would do is they would they would get a young ox and they would pair it and yoke it next to an older, more experienced ox, so that the seasoned ox, I've never said ox this many times in one paragraph, so that a more seasoned ox would carry most of the load and set the pace.

And then the younger ox, all it had to do was just follow along and learn as the older ox took the yoke and taught.

Now, as Jesus takes up the yoke alongside us, we hear the third command.

Learn from me.

So we were like the young ox, the untrained ox, who simply learned by walking alongside the older and more experienced ox.

When we are yoked to Jesus, we don't learn where to go by studying maps.

We don't learn what our pace is by looking at someone else's pace and think, oh my goodness, I need to match that person.

We don't learn how much we can carry by testing our own strength.

We learn simply by walking alongside Jesus and sharing his yoke.

And notice, and this is truly incredible, this part of this passage, notice here what we learn about Jesus in verse 29.

And incredibly, this is the only place in the Gospels where Jesus tells us about his own heart.

And how does he describe it?

Jesus describes his own heart with two words, gentle and lowly.

Now, the one person throughout all of history who could rightly boast, who reveals the posture of those who can know God, who holds all the power and authority of our Heavenly Father in His very hands, and the one who is the very door to the Father, he describes his heart as gentle and lowly.

So we have these three commands come to me, take my yoke and learn from me.

Now we come to the promise, and you will find rest for your souls.

For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

So in this we don't we don't find the absence of all effort, but we find true rest for our souls.

Now, when most people think about what rest is, and when I think about what rest is, I think about it as like cessation of activity.

I think about rest as stopping something.

It's uh it's extra sleep, it's a day off, it's a vacation.

I think of rest as this passive thing, right?

You stop doing things.

It's temporary, right?

Rest normally ends whenever weariness kicks back in.

And it's circumstantial, right?

It depends on quiet, it depends on comfort, it depends on the setting that you're in, it depends on reducing your stress.

And rest, in my mind, it's it's largely arranged by me, right?

Rest is largely arranged by us, right?

We we find time to get some rest.

We we schedule time in our calendars to go on vacation and take a break.

Now, the rest for our souls that Jesus is inviting us to, it points to something so much deeper on several different levels.

Now, first, the rest for our souls that Jesus is offering, it's internal rather than external.

Now the Greek word used here is rest for the soul, but it means something much deeper than that.

It's not just rest for your soul, it's rest in your inner most inner being, rest in your core, rest in the very center of who you are.

Now, the weariness that Jesus is addressing, it isn't it isn't mainly tiredness from work.

At its core, the weariness that Jesus is talking about is the crushing weight of trying to make yourself right with God through your own effort.

Right?

Soul rest, the true rest.

That Jesus is talking about.

It's relief from all the expectations we place on ourselves before responding to Jesus' simple invitation come to me.

Now, second, true rest for our souls, it comes through discipleship, right?

It does come through work.

Normal rest is found by putting the yoke down so that we can move more freely on our own.

Now, this rest that we find in Jesus, it's found by taking up a different yoke, by coming to Jesus and learning from him.

It's a type of rest that you actually carry into your labor and weariness rather than one that you have to escape from to find.

So it's a rest that we take into our work with us rather than a rest where we put all of our work down and find rest.

It's a rest that we receive.

So lastly, and this is what is truly incredible about Jesus.

Lastly, soul rest, this deep rest that Jesus is talking about, it depends on the character of the teacher, not on the circumstances of the student.

Jesus, he grounds this invitation to come to me in his description of his own heart.

I am gentle and lowly in heart.

The yoke is light and easy, not because there's nothing to do, but because of the character of the one that you are yoked to.

In other words, the yoke is never crushing because it is fitted by the one who made you and shared by the one who loves you.

The yoke isn't crushing because it's shared by Jesus, and it's shared by the one who loves you more than you could ever imagine.

And when I was thinking of a way to um to wrap this up, and I promise I'm about to wrap this up and land this plane, but I kept thinking about the first month of being a father, right?

Our son Jack was born February 25th, so February into March.

I kept thinking about this time, and it was uh it was a really, really difficult and hard month for me.

Like I mentioned earlier, I was in the hospital with a Crohn's disease flare for eight days in December, and then Jack was born on February 25th.

So now I was also wondering at the same time, how are we gonna move to a new home with a two-week old?

And there was there was one night I remember my parents had come over to help us out, and I was, it was Jack was about a week old, and I was sitting at the kitchen table talking to my parents, and I was I just started weeping.

I I just started, I just started crying because I felt like I was at the end of my rope.

And then God has a really funny way of working sometimes.

Because about a week later, he showed me the greatest picture of what resting in him really looks like.

So it was about 3 or 4 a.m.

Jack was about three or four weeks old, and uh it could have been 3 or 4 a.m.

Time was kind of irrelevant at that point.

But I think it was about 3 or 4 a.m.

And I was sitting next to Jack's bassinet, he was asleep, and I was I was just praying, like, God, please just have him sleep, right?

Like, please, God, just don't have him wake up right now.

But um, that prayer was not answered.

He did wake up.

Um, and then I heard him crying, and my heart started to it sank.

Right?

But I stood up, I somehow found the energy.

I stood up, I picked Jack up, I started doing little circles around the room as I was bouncing him, and he was crying.

And as I held him and we walked around in circles, his his cries got quieter and quieter.

And eventually he let out this big sigh, and his body just went limp, and he fell asleep in my arms, right?

And in that moment, in that moment, something clicked for me.

I thought, I thought to myself, this is what it means to come to Jesus and receive rest.

Jack didn't have, he didn't have to do anything.

He also didn't have anything to offer and had no expectations.

He just, he just simply needed me.

He just needed me in that moment.

He needed me to comfort him, to love him, and promise to do the same thing again and again so that he could find sleep and rest.

And I thought to myself, why can't I lay down my own expectations, my efforts, and my anxieties and my plans, and finally recognize that I need Jesus in the same way that my own son needs me?

Why do I have such a hard time learning that recognizing my need for Jesus is the only prerequisite I need to accept his invitation to rest?

And why can't I depend on and trust Jesus in the same way that my own son depends on and trusts me?

And honestly, I don't know the perfect answer to this question right now.

In fact, I don't know if I'll perfectly know the answer to this question, this side of heaven.

But what I do know is this.

What I do know is this.

If we come to Jesus with childlike humility, recognizing that he is the only one.

I've been watching it the whole time.

Sorry, everyone.

I thought that would be a terrible experience.

It would be.

Thank you for for that.

Just about to get to the big finale.

The Lord shows me how to how to rest and take a breath.

Mid-sermon.

The Lord is at work here.

But um so anyway.

I thought I thought to myself, why can't I lay down my own efforts and expectations and my anxieties?

Finally recognize that I need Jesus in the same way that my three-month-old, three-week-old son needed me.

Right?

Why do I have such a hard time learning that recognizing the need for rest is the only prerequisite I need to receive the invitation to rest?

And why can't I depend on and trust Jesus the way my own son depends on and needs and trusts me?

Right?

And I honestly, what I was saying, I honestly don't, I don't know the right answers to this question.

And I don't know if I'll ever know the right answers to this question, this side of heaven.

But what I do know, what I do know is this.

If we come to Jesus with childlike humility, recognizing that he is the only one who can make the invitation, and we take up his yoke, and we learn from him as we walk alongside him, and we begin the lifelong path of discipleship, Jesus, who is gentle and lowly in heart, will give us rest for our souls.

Now I hope and I pray here, I hope and I pray that every person here has wholeheartedly responded to Jesus' simple invitation.

Come to me.

I also hope and pray that you will join me and that we can come together as a church as we learn what it means to be yoked to Jesus.

Because it isn't something that you figure out on your own, something that you figure out in a community of believers as we're all yoked to Jesus together, learning to walk this path of discipleship.

And that is how we begin to find this true soul rest that Jesus offers us.

So now to close, would you pray with me this morning?

Lord God, I'm so grateful that you're a God who reveals yourself to those who are humble, to those who recognize how badly we need you.

God, I thank you that you are the only door to the Father.

God, I thank you that you offer us true rest.

God, I thank you that you see us in our sin, you see us in our struggle, you see us in our anxieties, Lord, but you still say to us in the midst of all of that, come to me and I will give you rest.

Lord God, I pray this morning that as we as we sit here, as we hear your word together, Lord God, that in the silence, in the stillness, God, we can hear you say those three words.

Come to me.

And Lord, I pray that you'll guide us as we're yoked alongside of you in this path of lifelong discipleship.

And that we together as a church, Lord, can learn what it means to find rest for our souls.

We love you, Jesus, and we thank you so much for how you love us and invite us to come to you.

We pray this in your name.

Amen.