6 Steps to Growing More: Rest | Pastor Jimmy Kozy

Matthew 11:28–30

Matthew 11:28–30

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.

Well

hey, everybody.

Welcome to the weekend gathering at Christ Community Chapel.

I'm so glad that you've joined us.

Welcome to those of you here in the gym.

If you're seeing this on video, it's because I'm out in the tent

preaching out there, and the weather is much better than than

it is right now because it's pouring down rain.

My name is Jimmy Kozy.

I'm one of the pastors here at CCC, and I'm really glad

to have the opportunity to be with you for a little bit this evening.

Before I get into the message.

You know,

this was mentioned in the pre-service video,

but we have something to celebrate as a church this weekend.

I'm wearing a shirt for The Park Church in Chagrin Falls Park up

in the northern part of Ohio, and we set a goal when we started Orchard

NEO seven years ago that we would plant 60 churches in communities all around

Northeast Ohio by the year 2050, and the Park church launches this weekend.

On Sunday, there are first service there, opening services Sunday at 6:15

at the Sugar and Falls Park Community Center.

The Park Church is the 12th church planted out of Christ Community Chapel,

which is an amazing thing for Pastor Brandon and for that church.

Really excited for that.

And we are in between sermon series here at CCC.

So we just finished the More Than Religion series

last week, and in the fall, we're going to be launching into a series

where we're going to be going through the book of acts together.

It's going to be a blast.

Really looking forward to all that God has for us in that series.

But the topic today is rest, and you heard the verses from Matthew

Matthew 11:28–30

chapter 11, verses 28 to 30, read prior to the sermon, prior to the sermon.

And maybe when you listen to those, the idea that Jesus can give your soul

rest.

I don't know about you, but when I hear that, I lean in a little bit.

That sounds appealing to me.

That's something that I would want.

It's important for us to understand what that would actually look like.

And so in order for us to understand that, I have three points for us.

This will serve as my outline today and also give us a little bit of structure

for our time.

They are as follows.

First is needing rest.

Second is understanding rest and then third is getting rest,

needing rest, understanding rest and getting rest.

So we'll start with that first point which is needing rest.

So I had an encounter with a wild animal recently.

And I'd like to tell you a little bit about it.

So something you ought to know about me is that I'm a very routine oriented person.

I my day, when I look at the day, I like to know what's going to happen

every minute of the day.

I have a pretty tight schedule, and my schedule is what organizes me and it.

Part of it comes from the fact that, you know, I have a job, I have four kids.

They have to get to school.

Our household just needs to run on a routine

and in order for everything to work.

But part of my routine

is that every morning I work out pretty early in the morning.

And so in order to be as efficient as possible a few years back,

I ended up buying a treadmill and putting it in our basement

so that have to drive to a gym.

I didn't have to worry about the weather if I was going to run outside.

It was perfect.

It makes everything efficient and so it's in a room.

In our base of our basement is a walkout basement onto our patio.

And so one morning recently, I was downstairs.

It was super early in the morning, so it's dark outside.

The house was warmer than it was outside.

So I decided that while I was running on the treadmill, I would pop

open the door to the walkout basement so there's some cool fresh air would come in.

Make it just a better overall experience running on the treadmill.

As good as it can be running in the dark like Batman, that's what I was doing.

So I did my run and I finished up and I went outside and,

you know, every morning after I finished my workout, I have about

what I would call ten minutes of peace before the day

tips over the top of the roller coaster, and then there's no getting it back.

And so I was in that ten minutes of peace, sitting outside on a chair,

playing with my phone outside our walkout basement, and I looked up from my phone,

and about six feet away from me, there was a skunk.

And so the skunks backside was toward me.

Which I don't know

if you're familiar with skunk anatomy, but that's the wrong end of the skunk.

That's not the end you want to be.

I don't think you want any end of the skunk to be facing towards you. But.

So I didn't know what to do.

I froze and I started to panic a little bit,

so I tried to stand up and move away and luckily the skunk did not spray me,

but he did notice me and so he kind of wandered off.

And then I watched in horror as he wandered

down the side wall of my house, and then slipped right in the open

basement door that I had left open when I came in to sit outside.

So in this moment, I had no idea what to do.

I'm going to be honest with you.

So I ran over to our other basement door, and I'm happy

to say that for the first time in their entire lives,

my kids had locked the basement door

after they were playing outside, so I couldn't get in there.

I thought maybe I could head off the skunk at the past, scare them back out.

And so I realized there's a skunk.

It's pitch black outside. There's a skunk on the loose in my house.

I'm the only person in the family whose awake, and there is only one entry.

It is a dark doorway in which a skunk has just entered.

And so I realized, with great courage and great bravery,

that I was going to need to find a weapon and go in and defend my family.

And so I did.

So I found what I could find, which ended up being a pool noodle.

And so if you can imagine me shirtless, sweaty,

barefoot, tentatively walking in a pitch black basement with an iPhone flashlight,

poking things with a pool noodle, trying to see if I could find this skunk.

So I searched my basement for about 10 or 15 minutes.

No sign of the skunk, and so nothing's going on.

I stopped, I couldn't hear anything, no rustling, no odd smells.

And so I did what anybody would do.

I pulled out my phone and I asked ChatGPT, what should I do next?

And Chad told me, what you need to do is you need to go upstairs,

leave the basement door open, close the door and go about your day

and hope that the skunk will leave your basement on its own own terms.

So that's what I did.

So I went upstairs after about ten minutes of searching

and I decided I'm done searching for the skunk.

This skunk is on its own. Hopefully it leaves on its own.

And then I went to work.

So you can imagine what that goodbye conversation with my wife

was like when I said to her, hey, I'm leaving for work for the day.

I'll be back sometime after five.

I'll see you then. One small thing

I can't say that

there is isn't a skunk in the basement, or is a skunk in the basement.

There may be a skunk in the basement.

Okay, to make a long story short, well, at this point it's been over a week.

There is no evidence that the skunk is in my basement, so I think he's gone.

But neither have I actually seen him leave my basement so he could be down there.

I don't know, but I think he's gone.

But the reason I tell you that is because, like many of you.

My life has organizing principles.

I have a career, I have children, I have things that need to happen in a day

that dictate for me what my priorities are, that help me to make decisions.

And all of us have organizing principles

and all, and our organizing principles are good things.

There are things like our career, our family, our relationships, our money.

There are things that we should have

and that we should care about, and that should inform our priorities.

But the reason we're tired and we need rest

is because we have a tendency to take organizing principles

that are a part of our lives and make them way more important.

And the way that we do that is that we turn them into scoreboards

by which we assign meaning in value to ourselves.

And because of that, we're tired.

And the problem with scoreboards is scoreboards always create pressure.

Here's what I mean by that.

If you look at the scoreboard and you're ahead,

that immediately creates pressure because the next thought you will have

is, well, I need to do whatever it takes to stay ahead.

If you look at the scoreboard and you realize you're behind,

then of course that creates pressure, because what you think is,

I need to do whatever it takes to get back ahead.

And so your kids, for example, are a great organizing.

They should be an organizing principle for your life.

But if your kids become a scoreboard by which you determine

your meaning, that's going to change everything it's going to make.

Every time something goes wrong with your kids, it's

going to feel like a devastating failure on your part.

As a parent, if your career, a great and important organizing principle,

becomes your scoreboard by which you determine your meaning

and worth, a negative performance review or a missed

promotion becomes an existential crisis.

If you if your money, which is an organizing principle

for all of us, becomes your scoreboard, then you'll measure your worth

and let it rise and fall with your salary and your bank account balance.

Because when we do that, we're taking things

that were never meant to serve as our source of meaning and worth,

and we're putting them in a position that they were not meant to be.

And that's what makes us tired.

And that's why when we read what Jesus says

in Matthew chapter 11 verse 28, it's so compelling to us.

Matthew 11:28

Listen to what it says.

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy

laden, and I will give you rest.

Jesus calls this laboring and being heavy laden.

The idea that we need rest.

But what he says next is somewhat unexpected.

And that leads me to my second point, which is understanding rest.

So we need rest.

Now let's understand it.

Let me read for you from that same passage, verses 28 and 29.

Here's what it says.

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.

So in this, in these verses, Jesus says two things that are unexpected.

The first thing that he said, well, let me let me say this.

If I were talking to somebody who was struggling with feeling burdened,

feeling like they're laboring and being heavy laden,

this is not how I would talk to them.

I wouldn't say I would say something like, oh,

you're feeling I can take your burden, I'll carry it for you.

I'm strong, I'm mighty.

But that's not what Jesus says. Here's what he says.

The first thing he says, this unexpected.

He says, take my yoke upon you.

And he's using farming terminology.

But what he's really saying is, I have a burden for you.

Take this burden of mine.

So he's he's talking to people who he's saying you are a laboring

and are heavy laden and he's giving them work to you.

Why does he say that?

Then the second thing that he says is, for I am gentle and lowly in heart.

And again, what I might expect Jesus to say in this instance, to speaking to

somebody who's tired is to say, I'm strong, I'm mighty, I'm powerful.

I can carry it for you. But that's not what he says.

He says, you take my yoke, for I am gentle and I am lowly in heart.

And I think what Jesus

is getting at here is that we need to understand

what rest actually is, because what rest is

is not connected to activity or inactivity or the things we do,

but it's rather connected to what our lives are organized around.

Rest is connected to who Jesus is and the role that he plays in our life.

This is why he describes himself.

This is interesting that this is one of the very,

very few times in the Bible that Jesus actually describes his character.

He talks about his role and what he came to do plenty of times,

but this is one of the few times where he actually

describes himself in his character.

He says, I am gentle and I'm lowly, and that's interesting.

This is intuitive to us in the workplace.

You know, the experience of carrying a burden is directly

the quality of the experience of carrying a burden is directly

connected to the person giving you the burden.

It's like if you have if you've if you've worked in any job, you know

that the experience of work can be vastly different

depending on your relationship with your direct supervisor or your boss.

So you can have the same role, same title, same office, same responsibilities,

same workload.

And if you have a great boss, it can be a joyful and wonderful experience.

Very meaningful, impactful and great.

If you have a bad boss, it can be terrible.

It can be miserable

because the quality of that experience is not dependent on the work

you're doing itself, but rather on the person you're doing it for.

And Jesus is saying, when it comes to rest, the same thing is true in our lives

that we were meant to organize our lives around him.

But that's actually good news for us because of who he is

and the kind of person that he is for us.

He is gentle, he's lowly, he's caring.

You know, it's interesting the people that Jesus is talking to here,

they would have been contrasting him with the other religious leaders

of the time, who were known as the Pharisees

and the Pharisees. The way that they approached

the relationship with God was kind of like a ladder.

They would say, you know, you got to do as many good things as you can.

And by doing those things, you climb the ladder and the higher you want

are on the ladder, the more likely it is that God will accept you and love you.

And Jesus says, no, no, no, that's not how it works.

It's not about being high and mighty.

I am gentle and lowly.

That's the kind of leader that I'm going to be for your life.

And so what Jesus is saying is that what it means for us to rest

is to find a new organizing principle in him,

to allow him to reorganize our lives and in so doing,

separate our sense of meaning, value, and worth from what we accomplish

and what we achieve in different areas of our life and attach

to what he says is true about us.

So then the next question we would ask is naturally, okay,

how do we actually get this rest?

And that leads me to my third point, which is getting rest in.

In order to understand this, we have to look a little bit further back

in the passage, the three verses that precede the verses we read already today.

Let me read these for you Matthew chapter 11, verses 25 through 27.

Matthew 11:25–27

They say this.

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.

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.

So in those verses, Jesus says two interesting things that help us

understand what it actually looks like to get the rest that he's talking about.

The first thing he says

is that the son reveals the father, and the father reveals the son.

And what he means by this, what he's saying is,

if you want to know what God is, he's making an enormous claim about himself.

He's saying, if you want to know what God is like, you look at me.

If you want to know

what kind of relationship he wants with you, if you want to know

his character, his actions, how he wants to interact with you, you look at me.

That's why later he's saying, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you can.

And my my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

He's saying, look, if you want to know what God is like, look at me.

But then the other thing

he says that's interesting is that God has revealed these things.

The way to rest, the way to to peace.

He's revealed these things to little children.

And I think it's important for us to understand what that actually

what does he mean? What does he mean by that?

Maybe another way of saying that is, what do you little children know

that adults don't know?

Because it can't be that Jesus is saying only little children can understand God.

What he must be saying

is something about how we approach our relationship with God.

So the question is, what do little kids understand that it else don't?

Well, speaking as a father of four little kids

between the ages of six and 11, I may not be an expert,

but I do spend a lot of time around little children, and so maybe I can figure

out some things here.

So I have a six year old daughter.

Her name is Elena. She's a twin with her brother James.

He's also six.

That's how twins work. So she's six years old.

I so over the last couple of months, we have fallen into a little bit

of an unfortunate pattern in our house

where every night, sometime between the hours of 12 a.m.

and 2 a.m.,

we will hear Elena's feet thump on the ground,

and then she'll come running down the hall

and wake us up and climb into orbit, and she'll say, I can't fall asleep.

I'm totally unable to fall asleep. I can't do it.

I need somebody to snuggle me until I fall asleep.

So my question is, why does she think that it's okay to do that?

Like, let me put it this way, if I showed up at your house tonight

2 a.m., walked into your room, climbed into your bed and said, I can't sleep.

I need somebody to snuggle me until I fall asleep.

Totally different conversation.

So what does Elena.

No. Well, she knows a couple of things.

The first thing she knows is she can't do it on her own.

She knows she's helpless.

She's aware of her helplessness.

She can't do it.

But then the second thing she knows is that we love her.

And so because of that,

she trusts that we will accept her and that we will help her.

It's not as if Elena stands in the hallway outside our room

and says, wait a minute, was I a good enough six year old today?

Did I eat enough Cheerios?

Did I play enough? Did I do all the right things?

Maybe she doesn't think that at all.

She just knows.

She knows she's helpless.

She knows we love her.

She knows we accept her. So she just comes.

She comes believing that she will be loved and that she'll receive the help

that she needs.

And I think that's so important for

for us to understand that when it comes to how we approach our relationship

with God, the way to find rest in Jesus is to come just like that.

I think that's what Jesus means when he says that God has revealed

these things to little children.

He's revealed to these things to those who approach God with an understanding

of their helplessness and expectation of his love,

leading to his acceptance of us.

Another way.

Another way of saying this is that Jesus has reversed the order of performance.

What I mean by that is our other organizing principles are other burdens.

They ask us to pour ourselves out for them if we make them our scoreboard.

So if you make your career, your scoreboard

and define your meaning and worth by your career,

it will ask you to pour your life out.

Everything will be on the table for your career.

Same with your kids.

If they become your scoreboard, everything in your life will be poured out

in order that your kids will be where you want them to be.

If it's your money, the same thing is true.

But what Jesus has done is he reverses the order of that.

Jesus poured himself out for us when he went to the cross,

that we might have relationship with God.

And so what that means is that our rest comes from the knowledge

that we don't have to achieve anything in order to have meaning and value

and worth, and that everything that we ever needed to do to receive

God's love and his acceptance has already been done for us by Jesus

and credited to us through his life, death, and resurrection.

Second Corinthians 521 says this.

It says,

for our sake he made him talking about Jesus to be sin who knew no sin,

so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

What that's saying is what I just said, that

Jesus, when he went to the cross, he became sin.

And his righteousness, which was perfect, was credited to us

so that we might have relationship with God.

And what that means for us is that we no longer

have to attach our value to our achievement, to our accomplishment,

to the scoreboards all around our lives that we look to

to tell us how good we are, whether we're good enough,

whether we've made it, whether we've done it.

Instead, our meaning and value have been defined for us already,

through the fact that Jesus perfect life has been credited to us through his death

and his resurrection.

And because of that, we can rest.

We can come knowing that the one who is gentle and lowly

has already paved the way for us to be accepted by God, to be loved by God.

And we can rest knowing that our worth and our meeting

are not attached to our accomplishment, to the things that we do.

If we never accomplished one more thing, God would love us just as we are.

If we come to him knowing we're helpless, but presuming on his love

and affection toward us in Christ Jesus, that's what it means to rest,

to be free of achievement, knowing that Jesus has already achieved for me.

Let's pray together.

Father in heaven, we

thank you for your goodness toward us in Jesus.

We thank you that through him, everything we ever needed to do,

you've already done for us

and given to us through his life, death, and resurrection.

We pray that we would believe that.

We pray that we would fight to believe that when everything around us

tells us we need to achieve more, do more, be more, create more.

Lord, we pray that we would see the goodness of Jesus

and know that no matter what we achieve or don't achieve,

his love has already achieved everything for us.

That we need to be known and loved by you, and we thank you for that.

We thank you for your goodness toward us in Jesus, in whose name we pray.

Amen.