This month, we are studying the ways that God has designed us to glorify Him both in our rest and our work. As we saw in last week’s letter, God has designed the world with built-in rhythms for both:  He has designed the day for activity and the night for sleep.  He has designed seasons for harvesting and seasons for reaping.  He has designed six days for working and one for rest.  He even gives us a few months off from cutting grass each year!  These rhythms all point to the wise design of an caring God.   

No Rest for the Weary

If such rhythms are baked into creation, why do most of us find ourselves so unhealthily busy?  Let us return to the distinction between rest and restlessness that we looked at last week: Just as Adam and Eve were restless in their hiding and search for security and identity after sin came into the world, so too are we.  Instead of seeking these things from our Creator, we seek them in the creation, thereby upsetting the very rhythm by which we could otherwise find these things our souls crave.

This is why in our contemporary culture, perhaps more than in any other in history, work has become the means to secure those things.  Carl Trueman addresses this difficulty well in his excellent The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: “Is job satisfaction to be found in the fact that it enables me to feed and clothe my family?  Or is it to be found in the fact that the very actions involved in my work bring me a sense of inner psychological well-being?”[1]

As a result, we have come to believe that who I am is defined by what I do.  And because there is always more to do, rest seems only to get in the way.  From this perspective, work is all-consuming, and rest is burdensome.

It may not appear this way at first, but such an attitude is deeply theological.  Pastor David Murray notes several errors that we communicate when we refuse to rest as God has ordained to us:

I don’t respect how my Creator has made me. I am strong enough to cope without God’s gift of sufficient daily sleep and a weekly Sabbath. I refuse to accept my creaturely limitations and bodily needs. I see myself more as a self-sufficient machine than a God-dependent creature … I don’t trust God with my work, my church, or my family. Sure, I believe God is sovereign, but he needs all the help I can give him. If I don’t do the work, who will? Although Christ has promised to build his church, who’s doing the night shift?[2]

Indeed, there’s no rest for the weary.  But how can we rest from our labors when the work is never done?  

“It Is Finished!”

By resting in the One who fulfilled all that was required of us (Gal. 4:4).  When the Lord Jesus hung upon the cross, His final cry was tetélestai (“it is finished!”), pronouncing that not only was His work finished, but so too was all that God requires of us for salvation.  

In order to understand this in relation to rest and work, we must seek to understand the full scope of our salvation.  Most of us tend to think of salvation in terms of Christ bearing the penalty for our sins.  Hallelujah!  What kind of God would forgive rebel sinners as we are at such expense to Himself?

But astonishingly, God’s kindness to us does not stop at the forgiveness of our sins; all of Christ’s perfect righteousness is imputed to us!  Every day for 33 years, He perfectly and actively obeyed every single commandment of His Father to the utmost.  No jot or tittle of the Law was left incomplete.  Here we see the only perfectly righteous man who ever lived, One who absolutely abounded in good works, and the full record of His perfect righteousness is imputed to me, wrapped around me as a brilliant robe.  

Theologians refer to this as “double imputation”[3]: My sinful deeds are imputed to Christ on the cross, and His righteousness is imputed to me.  This glorious double truth is captured in 2 Corinthians 5:21, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin (the imputation of our sin to Christ), so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to us).”

A stunning picture of this is in Zechariah 3, when the prophet had a vision of the high priest Joshua standing in the presence of God.  Yet Joshua’s appearance was completely inappropriate attire to stand before God: his garments were covered in utter filth (the Hebrew indicates that it was actually excrement- far from the attire fit to be the presence of a mere man, much less the Holy One of Israel!).  Joshua’s appearance is a picture of our standing before God because of our sin.  God had every reason to condemn him. 

But God did the exact opposite: He directed the angels to remove those soiled garments and give him clean clothing.  In his narrative of the vision, Zechariah explains that the soiled garments represented Joshua’s sin, and the removal of them signaled God’s forgiveness: “Behold, I have taken your iniquity away from you” (Zech 3:4).  This is a picture of our guilt being taken away by being laid upon Christ. 

It would have been a stunning act of grace if the scene stopped there, but God’s grace to Joshua didn’t stop there: “I will clothe you with pure vestments.” (Zech 3:4).  These are not mere “clean clothes”, but rather a dazzling display of beauty that could only be created by God Himself!  Isaiah gives us more detail of these divinely-woven garments: “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord; my soul shall exult in my God, for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation; he has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself like a priest with a beautiful headdress, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels” (Isa. 61:10).

Where do we find these garments?  They are not found in any formula of mere Christian propositions; they are found uniquely and perfectly in the person of Christ.  What the Old Testament describes in vivid word pictures, the New Testament portrays with beautiful simplicity: “For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (Romans 5:19). 

Without the finished work of Christ, rest is an impossibility; in Christ, rest is an objective reality. 

Find Rest for Your Soul

In Matthew 11:28–30, Jesus speaks what I believe are some of the sweetest words ever to come from human lips: “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn from Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”

Our precious Savior is inviting us to a very specific kind of rest: one that finds its comfort and security, not in what we do, but what Christ has done.  In regard to work, this means that my work, my success, what others think of me, none of that defines who I am.  The single most important thing about me as a Christian is that I belong to Jesus Christ, and He belongs to me! 

Moreover, He also invites us to wear His yoke and promises that when we do, we will find rest.  One of the jobs commonly done by a carpenter in the ancient world was to make yokes for livestock.  There is an old story- probably not a true story- but it’s illustrative nevertheless, which says there was a sign outside Joseph’s carpenter shop in Nazareth that read, “Our yokes fit well.”  Myth or not, the carpenter’s Son fashions a yoke for us, one in which we are joined to Himself. 

We enjoy Christ as our true rest when we look to Him as the Friend of sinners, the One who loves and accepts us, not just the way we are, but despite the way we are.  And He says to us, “the rest that you have sought through work, the peace of mind and heart that your soul craves, the rest that can be found only in coming to Me and trusting in Me and leaving behind and turning away from everything else—that rest is now being offered to you, and you’ll find it in Me.  So come to me, my dear child.”  

I’m reminded of the words of one of my favorite hymn writers, Horatius Bonar:

I heard the voice of Jesus say,
Come unto me and rest;
Lay down, thou weary one, lay down
Thy head upon my breast.
I came to Jesus as I was,
Weary and worn and sad,
I found in him a resting place,
And He has made me glad.

Ultimately, resting in Christ is both a present reality and a future hope for believers.  It is the assurance that in Christ, we find forgiveness, acceptance, and eternal life, both now and in the age to come.  This concept permeates the Christian life, serving as a foundation for understanding the believer’s relationship with God and self.

So today, let’s come again to the Lord Jesus and find our souls refreshed, renewed, and rested in Him.  Or perhaps you need to come to Him for the very first time and discover that He’s meek and lowly in heart, and He invites you Himself to come to Himself.  Come then, let’s trust Him and find rest.