How does Jesus speak of labour and rest?
Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, because I am lowly and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
Matthew 11:28-30 (CSBA)
Getting caught between the Sunday Scaries and the Monday Morning Blues is not a pleasant experience. For those in employment, it can be hard to handle that sense of dread that can spread through our thinking and affections on a Sunday evening into Monday morning. On the one hand, we have had the blessing of rest, and on the other, we are presented with the privilege of labour – but getting our brains to count those blessings at that point in the week can be tough. At the heart of this struggle is the nature of changing gears in terms of our energy and focus, slotting back into our time being crammed with tasks and deadlines after a short respite where the clock could be forgotten. If this is the case at the end of a weekend, it is even more pronounced when we are returning from holiday.
In our last article in this short series on the theme of rest, we heard Jesus issue an invitation to us as human beings to stop wrestling and start resting, to lay down our heavy burdens and to find repose in him. However, the verses from which that counsel comes conclude with Jesus talking about work again, this time by making use of the image of the yoke. How do we reconcile the fact that Jesus calls us to rest in him while sending us to work for him, and what difference can understanding this well make to how we live day by day? How do we transition from finding relief in rest to contemplating fresh labour without hitting the spiritual equivalent of the Sunday Scaries? And how does all of this speak to the ways in which we frame the call to service in the local church?
Neither indolence nor frenetic industry
The call of Jesus at the end of Matthew 11 is spiritual counsel in its most refined and compassionate form imaginable. Jesus is speaking to people who are spiritually overloaded, who cannot bear the burdens placed on their backs, and who are feeling the weariness that follows such fruitless spiritual overwork. Jesus invites these people to cast aside their man-made burdens and impossible demands, to come to him with their spiritual brow soaked in the sweat of self-effort and to lay all at his feet. His promise is pure and true: ‘I will give you rest’.
But this rest is not that of indefinite reclining, nor luxuriating in the thought that no more labour awaits us. Jesus’ invitation to rest is accompanied by a parallel invitation to work. The yoke is a primary metaphor for labour in Jesus’ world, the easily recognisable piece of technology that allowed farmers to harness oxen to work the land. In Matthew 11:28, Jesus says, ‘I will give you rest,’ but follows this with his counsel to ‘take my yoke upon you’. Jesus liberates us from the burden of self-effort; he grants free salvation to us, and he sends us to serve him with a totally different spiritual work ethic than we have experienced before. This is neither indolence nor frenetic industry but the responsive labour of a heart at liberty, the ready effort of a redeemed soul at constant rest in its all-sufficient Saviour. Jesus offers both rest from our labour, and labour from our rest.
Labouring and learning under the love of our Lord
The key distinction between those who labour with heavy loads and those who live under Christ’s yoke is the nature of their master. Good works and our attempts at self-redemption lead to overloaded labourers who can never shift the load, who cannot make headway, and who are condemned to restless wrestling with a task that is beyond them in every way. By contrast, the believer, the one who has come to rest and repose their all in the Saviour, can now labour and learn with liberty, because of the love of the Lord who calls them.
The yoke the believer wears is not the unreasonable and unachievable demands of mere moralism or legalism, but a yoke which reflects the character of the one who gives it to them. The nature of the Lord calibrates the nature of our labour – he is ‘lowly and humble in heart’. He is not a slave driver but a loving Saviour, our lowly Lord who himself bore the burden for our sins, and who calls us to shoulder the easy yoke of yielding our lives to him in service because we are loved, and we love him. This dynamic of service is distinctive and utterly at odds with the blood, sweat and tears of Christless effort. This is also labour that learns from the example of its Lord, who sees how he himself has first served us and calls us to serve him as a response to his grace. It is labour that entails lifelong learning: not the endless repetition of pattern and routine without change, but the dynamic of discipleship. We observe the Saviour before we serve the Saviour; we learn as we labour, and such work is light-yoked, joyful and full of the love of the Lord who calls us to it.
Spiritual and practical lessons
All of this teaching from Jesus places a call on our lives, but it should also give rise to caution in terms of how we serve him or expect others to. The summer months in local church life can provide us with an opportunity to scale back our ministry programmes and to leave some room for gospel labourers to rest – whether that work is fulfilled in a ‘part-time ‘, ‘ free time ‘, or ‘ full-time ‘ capacity. This is an ideal period in which to assess how the principles of the Saviour fit with how we seek to work for him.
Is our expectation of those who serve in the local church that they will grit their teeth and get on with things, or do we make it explicit that all of our labour for Jesus springs from his love, learns from his lowliness, and should find lightness under his gentle lordship? Are our calls to service marked by the crack of a whip, or by the sight of a yoke that Jesus himself has made for us and remade us for by redemption? Do our programmes and our expectations reflect Jesus’ invitation to simultaneously rest and work, to labour and learn?
These are good questions for elders to ask in terms of their expectations of church members, and for church members to ask in terms of their expectations of their elders, especially of their ‘full-time’ pastors. Is the culture of our congregation one where the lowly love of our all-sufficient Lord serves as the backbone, the determining structure, for everyone’s labour?
These are good questions, and honest answers to them might liberate faithful gospel workers to labour on, but to do so with a workload which is suffused with the lightness the Lord promised; a workload which springs from saving grace, is marked by sustaining grace, and that allows us to serve Jesus while resting in him and enjoying him day by day.
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.
