Call to Surrender

[00:00:00] Good evening, Christchurch. Thank you so much for making it out here. Look at us. Pack this place. Come on now. Let's go. [00:00:09] Thank you so much for coming today. If you wouldn't mind just praying with me. [00:00:16] Heavenly Father, I just thank you for your goodness. [00:00:21] I thank you for your presence in this room, that you are a God, that we get to stand and worship. [00:00:28] I thank you for your presence in our lives, Lord. And I pray that just tonight our hearts would be open to this message. Our hearts would be open to your word, that we would be inclined to desire you, that our spirits would want to chase you, and that our soul would find its rest in you. Lord, I thank you. You are good. Amen. [00:00:51] Okay, so I'm going to start off with something and you guys are all going to hate the start of this night, so I apologize in advance, but I need everyone to turn to a new person behind you, in front of you, beside you, introduce yourself and ask how they're doing. [00:01:42] Thank you for playing along. I appreciate you. Thank you. [00:01:46] All right, so I'm going to take a poll really fast. How many people that you talked to, did they say they were doing pretty well? They were doing good? Anyone? Oh, wow. Everyone's having a good day. Okay, I'll take it. Now on the flip side, how many of us got a response that the other person might have been tired or exhausted or busy or stressed? Any of those things? Anyone? [00:02:10] Okay. My whole sermon's relying on it. So is anyone feeling stressed or tired or exhausted? Okay, perfect. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. [00:02:18] So as Christian had started off our night, we often just get in this rut, this spiritual and emotional and physical and mental rut of exhaustion. I think we all reach a point. I think Wednesdays are honestly my point. I get to Wednesday and I'm like, can we be done with the week? You know, we just get so exhausted. And I think that this tiredness that we're feeling, this exhaustion we're feeling, it's deeper than just mental fatigue, deeper than just a physical tiredness. It's deeper than our social battery running out. It's a soul level tiredness. Our souls are tired. [00:02:59] And I think it's because we're carrying the weight we're not meant to carry. And I know that might sound weird and it doesn't make sense yet. Hang on for 20 minutes. It'll make sense, I promise. But our souls are carrying a weight that it's not designed for. I want you to picture for a second me, but like a couple inches shorter. My sophomore year of high school, I don't look any different than I did, like, four years ago. So picture me just a little bit shorter, carrying the heaviest backpack you could ever imagine. It was literally my weight in a backpack that I had slung on my back. I think I was, like, teeter tottering down the hallways. [00:03:36] And it's also no surprise if you look, I'm not meant to hold weight, okay? This body's not meant to weightlift at all. So it was just doing damage to my back that I didn't even realize. I actually went to a chiropractor, and I was flattered. She asked if I was weightlifting, and then I got to tell her it was from my backpack, so that's really awesome. [00:03:57] And I found out that I was doing damage to my back because it was carrying a weight that it wasn't meant to be carrying. [00:04:04] And I think that's what our souls are doing. We don't even recognize the damage that it's doing to our souls because we're so used to it, and we just tell ourselves, well, this is life. Life is busy. [00:04:17] Life has responsibilities and obligations and expectations that I have to meet. So it's always going to be like this. [00:04:24] And we convince ourselves that our souls being tired is okay because I'll have Saturday to refresh. You know, I'll go to church on Sunday, and I'll be good for Monday. It'll be fine. But by the end of the week, our souls are depleted. [00:04:39] And last week, if you were here, and if you weren't, we started our series on the purpose driven life. [00:04:46] Sarah had talked about how God gives us a purpose in life, that each of us are here for a reason. And if you weren't here, I would love to invite you to read this book along with us. Our whole church is going to be reading it. You just spend a couple minutes a day, and it's telling yourself and learning how to seek God in a different way, to find your purpose here on earth. [00:05:10] And today, I want to touch on the idea that we can have a purpose. And that purpose isn't to always be exhausted. Okay. God didn't design your soul to always be exhausted and stressed and overwhelmed. [00:05:24] I think a lot of us are carrying weight that we weren't designed for. [00:05:30] Some of us are carrying the weight to perform. And what I mean by that is, if you're like me, I family, we call it putting on the face. Every day I wake up and I put this smile on my face, and all day, I'm having the best day ever. So more than half of the room that raised your hand that I'm doing good, I'm fine. [00:05:48] Are we performing, or are we really doing good or fine? I think a lot of us feel this pressure to perform, but by the end of the day, I'm the worst person you'll ever meet. I get home and take off that face, and I'm so cranky and mean. I am not happy. And it's because I feel this weight and this burden to perform. And I think some of us in this room feel a weight and burden about our relationships. We feel burdened by the relationships we have in our life and the status of them. Some of us feel this weight and burden to plan perfectly or decide everything perfectly. Did you guys know that we make over 35,000 decisions a day? [00:06:26] I know that's a lot of decisions. And not only are we making 35,000 decisions a day, but I think a lot of us are trying to make those decisions perfectly. [00:06:36] And that's a lot of weight that your soul's not intended for. [00:06:40] And some of us here have this weight that we're carrying to earn more, to earn more money, to earn better grades, to earn a better title, to earn more likes or followers, to earn the love of that one person. And if they just loved you, then everything would be fine. To earn the acceptance of this group of people or to earn the approval of those parents, whatever it might be. We feel this pressure to earn more, and it's weighing on our souls, and our souls are tired. [00:07:11] And some of us here, we have this weight of religious burden. We have the weight of our sin that we're carrying that our souls aren't designed for, or we're carrying the weight of salvation and worrying about the status of it that we weren't intended for. [00:07:28] And some of us are carrying this weight to fit the expectation and check off all the christian boxes of going to church the same amount of time as everyone else and praying the same amount of time, and reading your bible enough time. And we feel like it's never enough because we'll never fit that mold. And we carry a weight that our souls weren't intended to carry. [00:07:50] But we have a God who sees our souls. [00:07:54] He sees the state of your soul. Because I think it's a completely different question. If I were to ask, how is your soul doing? [00:08:03] If instead we asked, instead of asking, you know, how are you doing? How is your soul doing? [00:08:11] And we have a God who sees our soul, and he recognizes the weight that it's under. He recognizes the fatigue and the exhaustion. He recognizes that our souls are depleted and he invites us into a different life because it's not what our souls were designed for. [00:08:30] Can you guys all flip with me to Matthew eleven? [00:08:33] We're going to go to Matthew 1128. If you have a phone, feel free to take it out. Go to the Bible app. It doesn't hurt to look at it, I promise. If you have a Bible, please slip there with me. I'll give everyone a second. [00:08:47] Jesus is inviting us into a different life, where we don't have to live exhausted every day, where we don't have to live a week on the same cycle of running out of energy, of our souls being drained. [00:09:02] He addresses this and he says, come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. [00:09:12] Take my yoke upon you and learn from me. For I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. [00:09:22] For my yoke is easy and my burden light. [00:09:27] He starts, come to me, all who are weary and burdened. He starts us with an invitation to come to him, all of us who are tired and exhausted and drained and stressed and overwhelmed. He says, come to me and I will give you a rest better than you could ever imagine. [00:09:47] And I have a little bit of context I want to give you. Right before this, Jesus is speaking, and he's actually, we would say, denouncing. He's proclaiming the wickedness of towns. And he uses this word and he says, woe to Bethsaida, which is not a term we would say, but I feel like if someone said that about my hometown, I'd be offended, you know, he said, woe to Bethzada, and he was saying, woe to all of these towns. Yet these were towns that Jesus had shown up and performed powerful miracles. So it makes us wonder, why would he be speaking out against these towns? Like Bethsaida is one I mentioned. It would have been a place where Jesus healed blind people. People would have received sight. [00:10:28] It was a town that was right by the lake, where Jesus would have walked on water. I mean, come on. Right? [00:10:35] But the key is these people in these towns, they weren't willing to turn to him. They saw how powerful and good and gracious he was. They saw his miracles and that they worked. They saw the power of God in him, yet they weren't willing to turn from their way. [00:10:52] They stayed on their path at their own pace, and they weren't willing to give it up. [00:10:58] And Jesus is saying, don't be like them. [00:11:02] And even if you're following along in verse 27, right before this. In verse 25, actually, sorry. [00:11:09] He praises his father in heaven and he says, lord, you've chosen to reveal these things to the little children. [00:11:17] He says you've kept these things from the wise and learned, and you revealed them to the little children. [00:11:25] So Jesus isn't saying that if you're an adult or if you're smart or if you're study, you're excluded. [00:11:30] He's comparing us to the people of these towns who aren't willing to give up their way. [00:11:36] He's saying, they're living independent from me. And that's not what your soul was designed for, for these people are unwilling to be dependent on me. So when Jesus starts with, come to me, all who are weary and burdened, he wants you to have a willingness to depend on him. We have to understand that when we accept this invitation, it's an acceptance to go into a different style of life where you depend on him and only on him, because it's what our souls were designed for. [00:12:08] And when he says, all the people there would have realized that he wasn't just talking to the people who had it all figured out, or the people who could check off all the boxes or who fit the mold, or who had all the relationships figured out, who planned everything perfectly, or who had the acceptance and approval of that group of people. He wasn't just talking to those people. He was talking to all of us, to all people whose souls are tired and that are carrying a weight that they weren't meant to carry. [00:12:39] And so he says, come to me, all who are weary and burdened, because these people at this time, they had to make 35,000 decisions a day too, right? They were burdened by that, and they were burdened by finances, and they were burdened by families and relationships. They were burdened by religion. They had Pharisees telling them that they had to fit the mold. They had to check off the boxes or God wouldn't want them. They had burdens and worries and await on their chest about who was ruling and governing over them. [00:13:09] These people were worried and burdened and stressed, just like we are. [00:13:14] And Jesus said, come to me and I will give you rest. And that word rest means to refresh, to replenish, to stop them from working so that you can recover. [00:13:27] He was saying, you don't have to work so hard when you do it my way. Your soul doesn't have to be drained by the end of the week when you do it my way, because I will give you a rest so good that it won't ever burn out. [00:13:43] And he says, take my yoke upon you and learn from me. [00:13:51] And this image of a yoke, we wouldn't really understand. [00:13:54] But he's explaining to us when we accept his invitation, our step then is to accept and take on his yoke. And a yoke would have been this wooden beam that joined to ox, to farm, to plow fields. Not an image we would be very familiar with, but he was explaining it to a group of people that they would have understood this. [00:14:15] It was where two auks would be joined together. They would plow a field together. They would move at the same pace, sorry, at the same path, in the same direction. [00:14:26] And he was comparing that to our lifestyles in which we let our souls be driven by. [00:14:34] So what he's saying here, to be clear, is, I see you're tired and exhausted. I see your souls are working so hard. When you do it my way, you don't have to work so hard. So put on this work tool, and it feels like it doesn't make quite that much sense. But what he's saying is, life takes work. He's not going to deny that you're always going to be moving in a path at a pace, but you get to choose what that is. [00:15:03] Do you want it to be the path at the pace of this world, where your souls are depleted and you have no energy and you're worried and stressed and overwhelmed, and your rest can never be fully replenished? [00:15:17] Or do you want to pick up a different yoke? [00:15:20] Do you want to move in a different path? Do you want to move at a new pace, where you don't have to earn, where you don't have to work like that anymore, where your souls aren't depleted? [00:15:33] See, we're all yoked to something. [00:15:35] And when we're yoked to this world, it's a sure sign that our souls are going to be depleted, because it's not what our souls were designed for. [00:15:44] But when we're yoked to Christ, we're back in the proper place, where our souls were designed to be reliant and dependent on him. And he will give us the rest that our souls crave. [00:15:58] And what's interesting is when we put on this yoke, he promises us some things. He promises us that will give us this rest. And it's not just a rest. For in this moment, I'm going to give you the rest you need so that you can recover and then go back to the stressful life you had before. [00:16:12] It's a promise of a rest that will follow you all day, every day, through every circumstance, whenever you ask for it, whenever you depend on him, he will provide the rest for your soul. And it's even a promise of an eternal rest where we will be joined to him one day in heaven for the perfect rest that our souls rightfully should get and back in its rightful place. He graciously gives us this gift that we didn't earn, we didn't deserve, yet our souls were designed for that rest. [00:16:48] He says, take my yoke upon you and learn from me. [00:16:52] So he promises to teach us we have someone who will walk through life with us and teach us. I don't know about you, but I cannot do my life. I do it terribly by myself. You know what I mean? He promises that he'll teach me. [00:17:05] He promises that he will be there and guide me. So when I take his yoke and I step in his path at his pace, I know I'm going to learn things, but I know I have to be obedient to those things, right? The ox didn't get to choose what they were yoked to, but we do. So let's choose carefully. [00:17:25] Do you want to be led by the path and pace of the world under its weight, or do you want to be led by your friend and savior, Jesus, who promises you an eternal rest that will forever fill and replenish your soul? [00:17:42] And not only will we learn from him, but it says something interesting. It says, you will learn from me. For I am gentle and humble in heart, and it feels like a weird flex, like, okay, you're gentle and humble. Okay, I see you, Jesus. But there's a reason for it, right? [00:17:59] He's giving us the qualification for why we should depend on him and why we should want to take on his yoke. Because he's gentle and humble in heart. [00:18:09] He's not going to be demanding. [00:18:12] It's not that. If you miss one of those boxes on the checklist, you're out. You've lost. [00:18:18] He's not a demanding farmer or a pharisee or a tyrant king. He's a friend and a savior who wants to get you through life with him. [00:18:27] He wants to be with you every step of the way, so you can experience his rest and his presence, and you can live in a different path, and you can move at life at a different pace. And you don't have to carry that weight on your soul anymore because he's carrying the yoke with you. [00:18:45] And interesting enough about this word gentle. It can also be translated as meek. Some of your translations might say meek. And we today would usually use meek to describe shy and gentle to mean careful. [00:18:59] But biblical meekness is super important and I want to spend a second on it. [00:19:04] When the Bible tells us that someone was meek or gentle, it's a meekness towards God. Biblical meekness towards God means that you submit and surrender to the will of God. It means that you trust in what God has. [00:19:18] Whether you're in the highest point of your life or the lowest point of the life. You can turn to God and say, God, I surrender to you. I submit to your will because I know you're good. I know your character and I know you're good. [00:19:31] So no matter where you are in life, Jesus is saying, I am gentle and humble in heart, so I submit to the will of my father in heaven. So when we pick up this yoke and we learn from him, we get to be guided in a path that directs us to the submission to God's will. [00:19:52] So take my yoke upon you and learn from me. For I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. [00:20:08] And when I hear that, I want to be like, okay, so it's going to be an easy ride. I'm in. Count me in. [00:20:14] Jesus isn't saying it's no sacrifice, little effort. [00:20:18] He's very careful. He uses the image of a yoke for a reason. Don't let that get lost on us. A yoke is still a work tool. [00:20:28] Life is still going to throw things at us. [00:20:32] Life is still going to take effort. But with Jesus in his path, at his pace, you don't have to earn anything with him. [00:20:43] A famous theologian, Dallas Willard once said that grace, the grace of God, isn't opposed to effort, it's opposed to earning. [00:20:54] With Jesus, you don't have to earn his grace. He never said, and you will earn rest. He said, and I will give you rest. [00:21:03] He sees what our souls need and he gives it graciously, even when we didn't earn it. [00:21:14] And when we're yoked to this world and we take on the yoke of this world and we're unwilling to depend on God and his plan for our life, our souls are left tired. [00:21:26] But when we're in the presence of Jesus and we're walking through life with him, our souls find rest. And it makes me wonder when I read this passage, why did I spend so long not walking in his path at his pace, under a light burden. [00:21:43] And this invitation is more than just this invitation, right? It's more than just come to me and find rest. It's also a call for us to surrender, to mirror his meekness and gentleness and humility before God. For us to say, God, this is the thing that's holding me back. This is the thing that's weighing down my soul. But today, I give it to you. Because you can't be yoked to the world and yoked to Jesus at the same time. [00:22:08] You can't be walking in the path and at the pace of the world and try to walk in the path and pace of Jesus Christ at the same time. Our souls were not made for that. [00:22:21] So let's turn and seek what the designer and creator of our souls, the savior of our souls, said to come to him and find the rest we need that our souls cry out for. [00:22:36] Because he doesn't expect you to earn anything. [00:22:39] He expects you to be present with him and learn from him and walk in his path at his pace. [00:22:50] So today, do you want to take on the yoke of the world that requires you to earn more, to plan perfectly, to decide perfectly? Or do we want to take on the yoke of Jesus? [00:23:00] We don't have to earn anymore, and our souls don't have to be tired anymore. And he will give us a rest that our souls are craving. [00:23:09] We get to enter into a new relationship with him, and a gracious one at that. Because anytime you start to feel that weight back on your soul, you are always welcome to the invitation to turn back to him and surrender the thing that's holding you back. [00:23:26] And don't let the weight of the yoke that you've already surrendered keep you from the yoke of Jesus Christ. [00:23:36] So today, we can stand before him and say, I know you see my soul, and I know you care for it. And I want this weight to be gone. Help me take this weight from me. And earlier, way back in the beginning, like 20 minutes ago, when I made you all ask how each other are doing, I think we often answer, I'm good. I'm fine. Because we don't really think anyone cares, right? It's really to feel, like, easy to feel like no one really cares. [00:24:05] But I want to promise you something. [00:24:08] There is a God in heaven who sees your soul and cares for it. He's committed to eternally caring for your soul. [00:24:19] We have a friend and a savior and a father who so desires your soul that he was willing to die for it. [00:24:28] He died a death on a cross for your soul so it didn't have to carry the weight. [00:24:34] And then he conquered death so that you could one day spend eternity with him in heaven, where your soul was destined and designed to be. [00:24:44] So today I want us all to take a second to ask ourselves, what is the state of my soul? [00:24:52] What is depleting my soul right now? What am I allowing to prevent me to fully walk in the light, in the path, at the pace of what Jesus is calling me to, what is keeping me from fully surrendering to the plan of God for my life? [00:25:12] And today we can declare to him that we surrender it, that we surrender the thing that's holding us back to him and that he can have his way in our lives. He can have his plan in our lives because he's waiting. [00:25:30] He designed your soul and he cares for it. And he wants to give you rest. And he's waiting for you to decide what you will be yoked to. [00:25:43] So today we can surrender the thing that's holding our souls back so we don't have to be exhausted and we don't have to be drained and so that God, our Father in heaven, can have his way in us. Let's pray. [00:26:00] Heavenly Father, I just thank you. [00:26:03] I thank you for being someone that invites us into your goodness, someone that invites us into a new life at a new path, at a new pace, one where we don't have to do it alone, where we get to depend on you and we get to receive your gracious gift. [00:26:22] Lord, today we surrender it to you. [00:26:26] We surrender the thing that's weighing down our souls. [00:26:30] And we submit our lives to you in a new way so that we can depend on you and walk in obedience to you and feel the rest for our souls. Lord, I pray that you would have your way in us. Amen.