Then Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.”
Matthew 11:28-30
This passage, though comforting in it's words, always eluded me when it came to understanding and applying it to my own life. To come to Christ in prayer was easy, but to find rest proved difficult. His yoke felt burdensome and the more I was taught through his Word the more of a burden it seemed to be.
Recently, while pondering this dilemma, I discovered that the problem didn't lie in the act of applying this Scripture to my life, but in my attitude about how I approached life in general. I had taken on to myself the burden that Christ already bore for me. I let myself get caught up in 'buying God's grace with good works'. Though a faith in Jesus should produce good works, if you are living as his disciple and striving to carry out His will for your life, those good works are not how we earn His approval. This is a lesson that I am still learning.
Perfection will only ever be accomplished by one man and that man was Jesus. We cannot earn His love or grace. We cannot earn our way to heaven. We need to humbly accept that only through Christ do we receive any of these things. If we were to even try our best to please God, compared to Christ, it would only be considered as filthy rags (See Isaiah 64:6 and Romans 3).
Instead, let us abide in the fact that the due price was paid and that we can neither add nor take away from that. Though we still feel we are not good enough, let us rest in peace knowing God loves us anyway and He always will no matter how imperfect we may be. He loves us so much that He lifted the burden of shame from our hearts and replaced it with our Comforter, the Holy Spirit. He gave us His only Son who invaded our world wrought with sin and dominated by Satan, bore our sin, then died and rose again to return to us and bring us home to Him someday.
That is why we can come to Him and find rest. He already carried the weight of perfection for us. All we need to do now is learn from Jesus; the way He lived and taught and also the way He, through the Holy Spirit and the Word, continues to guide and teach us.
May we also strive to be humble and gentle at heart. There is no pride in the fact that no matter how good we are, it would not be good enough. That's humbling. Let us stay humble and grateful knowing Christ already made it right.
