Show Notes
Clay
Chapters
- (00:00:01) - Jesus: Come to Me, All You Who Are Worn Out
- (00:06:58) - Coming to Jesus: The Lord of My Life
- (00:10:59) - How Does the Resurrection Affect Who You Are?
- (00:15:16) - Thank You for Your Salvations
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Last three weeks, we've been looking at this one verse, unpacking, just one verse over three weeks, Jesus said, come to me, all you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I'll give you rest.
[00:00:13] The first week, three weeks ago, we started with the tail end of that. We looked at each week, I was looking at the relationship between things. The first week I was looking at the relationship between what it means to be weary and heavy burdens and what it means to be at rest.
[00:00:28] This is fundamentally an offer, in Christian terms, we would say salvation.
[00:00:35] To be at rest means to no longer be at war, to no longer be fighting, to no longer be struggling.
[00:00:44] And fundamentally, from Jesus perspective, the thing that is causing undue burdens is that we are fighting and struggling against God. When we, as Ben said, when we submit to God, when we stop fighting and struggling against God, we can finally be at peace. We can finally find rest.
[00:01:04] We looked at a verse from Romans chapter 6. And when Paul is describing to these first Christians in this early church what it was like for them after their transformation into a life of rest, he says, now you do those things that lead to holiness and result in eternal life for the wages of sin is death. But the free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ, our Lord. When. When we submit, when we come to him, and when we quit fighting with him and we allow him to be Lord, we allow him to be the one that's making the decisions. We submit.
[00:01:41] He is not interested in holding our past against us. He's like.
[00:01:47] Jesus calls him Father because he is like a good father who simply wants his children home.
[00:01:53] And when we come home to them, to him, Paul says, it's like holiness.
[00:02:00] You're set apart. You're different than you were before. Holy. Literally. It doesn't mean like, holier than thou or like better than anyone else. It means you're not like you were before.
[00:02:13] You weren't at a. In a state of conflict, in a state of, I'm fearful and I feel like I need to, like, struggle to get what's mine.
[00:02:21] I trust that God, that my Father loves me and I can be at rest in that.
[00:02:26] So we looked at that the first week that when we come to Jesus, the offer that's given to us is to move from a state of conflict with God to a state of peace with God, and that is salvation. To be at peace with God, that is salvation.
[00:02:44] The second week, we looked at the relationship between me and you.
[00:02:52] The me that Jesus describes, I think is most of us would say, like, of course we're talking about God, but when you look at the names of God in the Old Testament, I mean, he's given like so many different names. A few of them. The God who sees me, the Lord, shepherd, Lord provider. The Lord who heals, the Lord who makes holy.
[00:03:10] Each of these words actually describe not just a generic form of salvation, but a specific salvation that individuals experienced in the face of exact of struggles that they were experiencing that was leading to some deformation of their spirit. They were becoming. They were becoming less human as a result of their need to struggle against things. One of a great example of this is as the Israelites come out of Egypt, you see God perform miracle after miracle after miracle. And. And God is. God is given names by the Israelites as they experience, experience these salvations from experiences. But when they finally get to their destination in the book of Joshua, like hundred, like a dozen times over and over again, just be strong and courageous. Be strong and courageous. Be strong and courageous. The salvation wasn't about the safety from the external factors. The salvation was primarily about becoming a different kind of individual that was no longer controlled by external circumstances that we felt were too overwhelming. Before having experienced these multiple salvations, externally they were made holy. They became different people. Internally, they became people who were willing to do whatever God said to do.
[00:04:36] You go back and you read Joshua. The confidence and the clarity of the Israelites at that point was very unique throughout their history. They had finally gotten to a point coming out of Egypt, that they were strong and courageous and were following him.
[00:04:55] But ultimately, the me that we're describing is, is this one who is always saved. Not just generically, but specifically.
[00:05:04] However sin has deformed you, God can remake you out of your circumstance.
[00:05:13] And the last week we looked at the first part of this where Jesus says, come to me, and looking at the relationship between coming to him. Like, if I say, if I say, hey, Allison, come here, she would, like, physically, I mean, first of all, she'd be like, you just gonna tell me what to do? But say, say, for instance, she wanted to do what I asked her to do right there. Allison, would you please come here? If she wanted to, she would, like, stand up and walk over to me, right? But when Jesus says, come to me, he's not actually saying like, stand up out of your chair and walk over to me.
[00:05:47] The Bible uses a lot of like. For instance, I was talking to Nick about this just yesterday.
[00:05:56] Like, when we talk about hearing, I've heard, hearing from God. Christians aren't necessarily talking about, like, oh, hark.
[00:06:04] I hear God's gravelly voice speaking to me like, from, like. It's not when we say. When we say that God, we hear from God. It means that he. We are experiencing God. We are. We are aware of his presence and what he's doing. And we are.
[00:06:21] We have clarity about what he's up to and what we can be a part of.
[00:06:26] In the same way, when he says, come to me, he doesn't mean get up physically come to me.
[00:06:32] In Romans, Paul has, I think, the perfect description of what he actually means when he says, come to me.
[00:06:39] Coming to Jesus means to openly declare that Jesus is Lord. This is Romans, chapter 10, verse 9 and 10.
[00:06:46] If you openly declare that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is by believing in your heart that you are made right with God. And it is by openly declaring your faith that you are saved. So there are two parts that Paul describes here to come to Jesus. One is that Jesus is Lord.
[00:07:05] I've said this a lot, but for those of you who haven't heard it, being Lord just means that you're the one that's in control of your stuff. So you are like, you are the Lord of your car. If I walked over there and, like, grabbed your keys off the seat, got in your car and drove away, you could totally call the cops and say, like, this dude has my car. I didn't say he could have my car. You know, it would be mean of you to do that because I thought we're friends, but you could do that because it's not my car. You are the Lord of your car. That's your stuff, right? When you are God's stuff, when he's your Lord. When.
[00:07:41] When you say God is my Lord, what you're saying is, I am prepared for him to tell me what I should and shouldn't do. I'm prepared for. I think he is smarter than I am about how I should live my life. That's really what it comes down to. And I'm prepared for him to be Lord of my life.
[00:08:00] Now, that's not enough.
[00:08:03] We talked about this, that you know Peter, like, the leader of the disciples kind of guy that would always speak up, he was quick to call, like, who do people say that I am? You're the Messiah. You're the Lord. Like, he was like, you're my Lord, definitely. And you look at Peter's life all throughout the Gospels, and you're like, yeah, that guy made some bonehead choices. Like, he, you know, he was a dude, you know, but he was definitely somebody who early on decided that God was Lord. When you look at him after the resurrection, on the other side of the resurrection, it's almost like there's two different peters. It's like something happened to him that made him from, like, awesome that everybody said, like, okay, you're cool. Like, you're like. You're like the chief. You're like the disciple that speaks up first. You're kind of like the leader to God. At the end, it's like, oh, you're like, you're like next level, like, follower of Christ. What changed was not that. Not that God was Lord. Not that he was willing to say, I am prepared for you to make decisions for me.
[00:09:06] But I have seen and I know that death isn't what I thought it was before.
[00:09:15] The resurrection of Christ is the thing that unlocks all the rest of this sentence.
[00:09:22] To come to Jesus doesn't just mean that he's Lord. It means to believe that he was raised from the dead. And it means that all of the decisions and choices that you have to make are, are no longer kept or like, controlled by death.
[00:09:38] It means every good choice that you make will resonate for eternity.
[00:09:43] And it means a lot of things that the world thinks are really important won't last because they're not things that don't belong in heaven. Imagine, Imagine the things that God that are. That would be considered like, rare or precious in heaven verse. Rare and precious here.
[00:10:03] I don't think it's an accident that when imagery is used to describe heaven in the Bible, it says, like, the streets are pure gold. Like the dirt is the thing that. Here you'd be like, man, if I just had a handful of that, I'd be set for life in heaven. It's like, you know, you wouldn't spend a minute trying to collect that because that's not the thing that endures. It's not the thing that matters. Like, thinking about, how can I live my life currently based on an eternal life that matters forever in the kingdom of God? When the early disciples did this, they made entirely different decisions with their life.
[00:10:48] Their life looked nothing like their life did before the resurrection and before we take communion today. That's what I wanted to reflect on for a little bit.
[00:10:59] There's going to be three questions on the screen for us to come to me, all you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I'll give you rest to experience that. Salvation means that we are prepared first of all, we recognize that we have heavy burdens. If you don't need to be saved, you don't need a savior.
[00:11:24] And Jesus was quick to say, that's fine, I'm not here for you.
[00:11:28] But, you know, if you're the kind of person who could use some help being human a little bit sometimes, maybe, maybe you could be like Peter, who was incredible before the resurrection and unrecognizably special after the resurrection compared to the one he was before.
[00:11:59] Maybe there's a version of you you can't imagine yet. Peter couldn't outside of the Resurrection.
[00:12:06] So I'm going to have three questions up on screen, and I want you to just contemplate, really let yourself, let your mind kind of wander and imagine. Use, like, holy creativity to imagine your responses to these questions.
[00:12:24] How does the resurrection affect who you are? After the resurrection, the earliest disciples looked back on their last meal that they had with Jesus. And it was carried a lot of meaning. It was very important to them.
[00:12:37] Jesus had a lot of things to say to them. He prayed over them, he talked to them about what was going to happen.
[00:12:43] But one of the things that he did that stood out the most was that he actually took the bread and he took the juice and he made it symbolic of his very life.
[00:12:56] Paul records this about what was told to him. He wasn't there, but it was told to him by his friends, by the disciples who were there.
[00:13:06] He said, jesus broke the bread in pieces, and he said this. This is my body, which is given for you.
[00:13:11] Do this in remembrance of me.
[00:13:14] In the same way he took the cup of wine after saying, this cup is the new covenant between God and his people, an agreement confirmed with my blood.
[00:13:24] Do this in remembrance of me as often as you drink it, as often as you eat and drink.
[00:13:33] Remember the sacrifice that I made.
[00:13:37] But they didn't remember that sacrifice without remembering the resurrection as well.
[00:13:43] For them, the death, the sacrifice and the resurrection were all wrapped up in the same project, the same thing that Jesus was doing.
[00:13:54] Everybody dies.
[00:13:57] Jesus returned to life.
[00:14:01] That was what was significant to them, and that's what changed their life today. We wanted to give you an opportunity too, as you remember the resurrection of Christ, just as those earliest disciples did, to receive a symbol of that last meal that the disciples had with Jesus, to receive bread and to receive juice and as you're consuming it, to continue to reflect on the resurrection and to think about how your life is different as a result of the resurrection of Jesus and what that means for your eternity as well, if anyone here is a believer, has.
[00:14:40] Is prepared to.
[00:14:41] When we take this, when we receive communion, we're literally, we are ingesting who Jesus is. We're taking him into ourself. We are.
[00:14:52] We are taking on what it means to be a follower of Christ as we're receiving this. And so if you are a follower of Christ, we encourage you to participate with us. If you're at the point right now where you're burned in some way that you don't feel comfortable doing that, just have a seat. It's no big deal. Whenever you're ready, you can come down front yourself, receive some bread, receive some juice, and go back to your seat. Need it.
[00:15:16] Let's pray.
[00:15:19] Father God, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the testimony of the salvation that you have given through Christ, but you've also provided throughout humanity, throughout all of history. We are grateful for the salvation that you continue to provide, that we can look back on our own life and we can name you so many different names for all the experiences we've had where you have saved us over and over again. But God, we want to, most importantly, thank you not just for external salvations, but for the internal salvation that you have made us different, even in the midst of pain and suffering.
[00:15:56] Lord, as you experienced trials, we know we will experience trials as well.
[00:16:02] But as you experienced resurrection, we know we will experience resurrection as well.
[00:16:09] God, we are confident in that hope and we live in your salvation.
[00:16:13] In your name. Amen.
