I was sitting in our Ladies’ Bible study class on the book of Matthew, listening to a discussion about treasuring Jesus as our greatest joy, when my eyes drifted to 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.”
How many times have I read those verses? Probably hundreds. But this time, the words, “Come to me” stood out. I drew a box around them with my pen. My parenting failures were weighing heavily on my heart. It seemed like no matter what I did, I never made any progress in enjoying my children and being more tender and patient with them (remember that pathetic “love” I described in the first part of this series?). I was weary; heavy laden; discouraged and defeated.
And here Jesus is, saying, “Come to me.” Not telling us to stay away so we don’t ruin His perfect holiness with our sin. Not angrily looking down on me for repeatedly failing, day after day, hour after hour, to give my children a genuine smile of enjoyment, or listen to their stories with true interest, or forget about my own selfish pursuits long enough to stay and cuddle for an extra five minutes at bedtime. As Dane Ortlund puts it in his book Gentle and Lowly, “You don’t need to unburden or collect yourself and then come to Jesus. Your very burden is what qualifies you to come… This, according to his own testimony, is Christ’s very heart. This is who he is. Tender. Open. Welcoming. Accommodating. Understanding. Willing.”
Ortlund goes on to say, “when Jesus Christ sees the fallenness of the world all about him, his deepest impulse, his most natural instinct, is to move toward that sin and suffering, not away from it.” And in a later chapter, he addresses my assumption that Christ’s perfect holiness must cause him to withdraw from our sinful selves by saying, “His holiness finds evil revolting, more revolting than any of us could ever feel. But it is that very holiness that also draws his heart out to help and relieve and protect and comfort… For those who do not belong to him, sins evoke holy wrath… But to those who do belong to him, sins evoke holy longing, holy love, holy tenderness… your sins evoke his deepest heart, his compassion, his pity… He sides with you against your sin, not against you because of your sin. He hates sin. But he loves you.”
I want to share a few more verses that describe God’s compassion, sympathy, and love for us:
Hebrews 4:14-16 – Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
John 6:37- All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. [This is Jesus talking!]
2 Corinthians 1:3- Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort…
Psalm 103:8-13 – The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever. He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us. As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.
Ephesians 2:4-7 – But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
Romans 8:31-32, then 38-39 – What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? … For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
1 Corinthians 3:16 – Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?
Does this sound like a God who holds us at arm’s length? He literally lives inside us!
I know I’ve already quoted Dane Ortlund several times, but I just have to include this as I finish these posts because it’s such a perfect description of what I found to be true about myself: “The Christian life, from one angle, is the long journey of letting our natural assumption about who God is, over many decades, fall away, being slowly replaced with God’s own insistence on who he is. This is hard work. It takes a lot of sermons and a lot of suffering to believe that God’s deepest heart is ‘merciful and gracious, slow to anger.’ The fall in Genesis 3 not only sent us into condemnation and exile. The fall also entrenched in our minds dark thoughts of God, thoughts that are only dug out over multiple exposures to the gospel over many years. Perhaps Satan’s greatest victory in your life today is not the sin in which you regularly indulge but the dark thoughts of God’s heart that cause you to go there in the first place and keep you cool toward him in the wake of it.”
I pictured God as quick to get angry with me (maybe even almost continually angry with me), thinking of me as a disappointing nuisance, and reluctant to love me in a genuine, personal way. What I’ve learned is that this is a description of my own personality. God is not like me. And this realization has the potential to transform me (and you!) into someone who loves more like God does.
Now, a passage like Ephesians 3:14-21 carries new meaning. When Paul prays that we “may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that [we] may be filled with all the fullness of God,” I know the reason for that prayer is because we DON’T understand the capacity of Christ’s love for us, even if we think we do- but when we start to catch a glimpse of it, it can change our lives.
Come to Him. He is gentle and lowly, and He is rest for your soul.
Krista Harmuth 