“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.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Here we are in the season of Advent. This is a season known for many things. I don’t know that I have the time to even try to list out most of them. But one of the things that sits prominently on the list is gift-giving. I suspect that you will spend more time this month than you care to admit racing around trying to find the perfect thing to give to a special someone. In that spirit, as we journey through this Advent season together this year, I thought we might give some attention to some of the gifts God gives us to help us get the most out of this time; the gifts God gives to help us learn to live more fully in His kingdom. Today, we’ll talk about one gift that is perhaps our most needed by the time we get through it: rest.

Are you with me in noticing that we seem to be busier during the month of December than at any other point in the year? At least, for the first couple of weeks of the month that’s the case. In my world, I find that because most people expect things to be even busier the closer we get to Christmas itself, they try to schedule their Christmas events toward the beginning of the month. I was invited to no less than three Christmas parties this evening. The kick is, when all of them try to be considerate like this, the beginning of the month winds up incredibly busy, while the second half turns out to be much slower paced. It’s a pretty nice thing actually. And it needs to be too, because by the time we get through these first couple of weeks, we’re ready to drop.

This busyness during the Advent season, though, isn’t just a once-a-year malady in most of our lives. It’s more of a concentration of a sickness that plagues us throughout the year. We live busy lives in a busy world. There’s always something to do. And, if we find ourselves without something to do, we fill that time with something to do. Almost never do we just sit and rest. Rarely do we pursue activities that are purely restorative of our souls and carry no other clearly discernible purpose. As a matter of fact, the world around us will look at us (not to mention talk about us) like we’re weird if we do that. We’ll be considered lazy or anti-social. It’s just not normal to not be busy these days.

So, we fill up our schedules with things. It doesn’t really matter which things. Each season of life brings its own things that are customary schedule-fillers. My family happens to be in a season when kids’ activities pretty well pack the picture. We have one child pursuing a spot on the local high school’s baseball team. Another is gearing up for basketball season. The third just finished being a part of the local drama club’s play and will transition smoothly into his own basketball season. When all three of those seeds come to fruition, we’ll be playing taxi service with multiple practices and games each week. In other words, we’re busy now sowing seeds that will grow into even more busyness later.

It’s no wonder we’re tired.

All of us are tired. All the time. We are weary. We are burdened. We are dragged down by the sheer weight of activities we constantly try to maintain in our lives. And then this season adds all of the extra stuff that sits on top of our baseline of busyness. Fortunately for me, my bride breathes organization the way most people breath air, so we’re finished with nearly all of the normal flurry of gift-giving activities, but we haven’t finished decorating. We have the tree up with three trays of ornaments sitting underneath it where presents will eventually go…when we find the time.

When you add all of this on top of the other burdens we carry from things like family drama and work pressures and complicated social interactions and sin and its bitter fruits, it’s a wonder that most of us can even lift our heads off our pillows in the morning.

Our loving heavenly Father doesn’t want this for us. Any of it. And so Jesus, knowing of our weariness and the doubts that it can bring into our lives, invited us to take up a new burden as a replacement for all our others. This new burden comes as an exchange. We lay all of our others down and take up this new one. And what is this new one? It is His burden, His yoke. And if that doesn’t sound like such a good deal, it’s because we don’t understand the imagery He’s using.

A yoke is a wooden bar that gets laid across the neck of two pack animals like oxen. It hitches them together so that they can work together at pulling a single load. The thing is, though, if one of the animals is much bigger and stronger than the other, that one is going to wind up doing all the real work. The other will be essentially carried along beside it. Smart farmers of old would occasionally hook up a younger, smaller ox alongside a larger, stronger one in order to train the younger one for later on in its life when it was the larger and strong ox. This is a little like what Jesus is inviting us into here.

He’s not inviting us to take up a new load on top of the rest of what we were already carrying. Neither is He inviting us to try to take on the weight of the entire world which is His load. He’s inviting us to link ourselves to Him in such a way that we are learning from Him as He does all the work in pulling His load. This way, we aren’t trying to wear ourselves out any longer trying to bear the weight of a load that isn’t really even ours to carry anyway. Because His load is the whole world, our load is never more than part of His load…which He is already carrying. We are trying to drag merely a portion of something we were never meant to bear in the first place. When we take up His offer, we are putting ourselves back in line with reality. We are giving up the illusion – the delusion, really – of being enough on our own, and are trusting in Him to be who He is.

When we do this, we will find rest. Real rest. We’ll find the kind of rest that satisfies us at the deepest levels of our soul. The more we entrust ourselves to His care, the more the weariness will subside, and we will experience the kind of lightness and joy that are features of life in the kingdom of God. And all of this is not something we earn or otherwise work to get for ourselves. We receive it as a gift. When that baby was born at Christmastime, this is one of the gifts He came bringing with Him. So, as we prepare to move forward in this season that can become merely another burden in our already heavy load, let us receive the gift of rest from our Savior. I can guarantee you’ll be glad that you did.