I wonder what you most associate the word ‘rest’ with? For many of us, it is a place, perhaps part of our homes, that we go to when we need to decompress and recharge. Perhaps it’s a public space, like a coffee shop or a bookshop or an area of natural beauty. For others, it’s a special location: a holiday resort, locally or globally, which has become the epitome of downing tools and taking things a bit easier.

Perfect rest is the theme of our current series of articles, looking together at an oft-neglected topic in society and in Christianity: what it means to rest. In the last instalment, we thought about rest and the Law, and witnessed that this theme has always been part of God’s programme for us. The very rhythms of life and labour point us to the need to rest body and mind.

In this article, we are going a step further, looking at rest that goes beyond physical toil and physical respite, thinking together about spiritual rest, about how we can find it in our very souls. The main focal point of everything else that follows below is that this kind of deep internal rest is located uniquely in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Receiving instruction that we should rest physically is reasonably easy to understand, even if it is hard to apply in our busy lives. But how do we rest spiritually? What does it mean to ‘rest in the Lord’ and how can we achieve this? I want to suggest that we need to recognise two main things:

We need to recognise the human condition

The eleventh chapter of Matthew’s gospel is a passage packed with human life. We find Jesus’ words in this passage at their kindest and at their most severe. He has pronounced deserved condemnation on people and places: the towns of Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum come under the censure of the Saviour. They have witnessed his miracles and heard his teaching, and yet they won’t repent. These places and people have no recognition of their need, nor of Jesus’ capacity to meet that need, and Jesus consequently reserves some of his strongest words for this proud resistance to him and this proud insistence on self-sufficiency: the day of judgement will be sore for them.

Jesus sees the stubbornness of people who are willing rest themselves on anything other than him, but he also praises the Father.

At that time Jesus said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and revealed them to infants. (Matthew 11:25 CSBA)

On the flipside of foolish rejection on the part of the towns in Jesus’ immediate vicinity is divine revelation from the Father. There are people to whom the Father will reveal the Son, people who will come and trust this Son. This is all of God. These are people who will see the Son (v27), and seeing the Son, they will recognise the Father’s love and rest in him.

All of this leads to the greatest invitation to weary people ever uttered:

“Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”
(Matthew 11:28 CSBA)

Note how Jesus describes the human condition: weary and burdened. Jesus has people in his acquaintance, in his sphere of influence, who find themselves troubled and taxed, weakened and worn. These people are not just weary but burdened. DA Carson has said that ‘weariness is active, the result of our own efforts; being burdened is passive, something laid on our shoulders by others, weights put on the shoulder where consent is incidental.’

Jesus sees this among his listeners, and he speaks it to his listeners. Part of his invitation will be to recognition, for people to see their own plight and respond accordingly. It is not merely an invitation to Christ as Saviour, but to a clear sight of oneself. Resting in the Lord means we recognise the human condition. We see ourselves for what we are, where we are, and how we are. We own the turbulence and trouble of our lives, the weary wrangling and wrestling that are ours, and honestly audit our souls.

The primary audience for Jesus’ speech in this passage is those who are not yet his followers. They have had burdens laid on them by the legalism of their day, and they are weary from carrying them. They are plugged into a religion which says, “Do and live.” Later in Matthew’s gospel Jesus gives a snapshot of what this looks like: the Pharisees, he says:

…tie up heavy loads that are hard to carry and put them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves aren’t willing to lift a finger to move them. (Matthew 23:4 CSBA)

After all their toil, these people don’t find rest or respite or resolution, just more weariness, just more burdens. They are spent and fatigued spiritually, suffering a kind of breakdown in their energies. They know they can’t reach God, but they keep on grasping. They can’t finally please God, but they keep on trying. They are lost in the maze of legalism. Every turn takes them further from the centre, further from solace, further from consolation.

We need to respond to the Saviour’s invitation

In contemporary terms, we might apply this invitation from Jesus to non-Christians and Christians alike. Over the years, many of the non-Christian people I have had conversations with about the gospel want heaven, and they hope they are doing enough. Others are weary and burdened, not from the weight of seeking God, but from sinning against God. To all such people, Jesus extends an invitation to rest, to find in him what their souls are yearning and grasping for. When we reach out with the gospel to our family, friends and neighbours, it is good to remind ourselves of the simmering restlessness of the human soul, and to point those we love to the unique rest found in our Lord and Saviour. Repentance and faith bring relief and rejoicing in Christ, something that unbelievers might be surprised to hear!

But we also need to remind ourselves of the human condition as Christians too. We don’t start the Christian life by entering into Christ’s rest and then get busy trying to keep him on side. If our lives are distracted and diffused, if our relationship with God has become one of obligation, an ethic of do more and feel better, only to try harder and feel worse, slipping into old works-based habits, that is not what Jesus desires, and it doesn’t bring us closer to his heart. It is certainly not the rest he is offering to us in Matthew 11.

Jesus invites us to himself and, in so doing, beckons us to a rest we can find nowhere else. If we have understood the gospel correctly, Jesus should be our primary image of rest, more than the mere props for rest that we lean on in our daily lives. Jesus’ beating heart of compassion for weary and burdened people is the wellspring of all other rest we might enjoy in life. Finding forgiveness and fulfilment in him alone, locating the termination point of all of our heart-restlessness in the wholesome rest he offers, is at the core of what Christian contentment is.

At a season when many are turning their thoughts to holiday and relaxation, this might be a good time to audit where we are truly resting. Are we so wrapped up in the rat race that we forget that our rest is in Jesus? What kinds of surrogates are we relying on to prop us up and propel us on, instead of leaning on him and trusting his heart for our good? Jesus says ‘come to me’ and to do that we need to come to our senses, own when and where we are spiritually weary, honestly weigh the burdens we bear and constantly apply to him for the rest we so desperately need.

In our next instalment, we will consider the quality of the rest that Jesus offers, and the difference it can make in how we live our lives day by day.

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Andrew Roycroft serves as Managing Editor for Grace Publications. He holds Masters degrees in English Literature and Theology from Queens University Belfast. Before entering the world of publishing full-time, Andrew served as a pastor for 24 years in Northern Ireland. He is married to Carolyn, and they have two teenage daughters.