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Matthew 11:28-30
 
! Introduction
            The season of summer is upon us and for many people that means vacation.
How we look forward to a time of vacation!
We long for the hours when we don’t have to go to work.
We get excited about the time we will have to pursue the things that we enjoy doing.
However, before we leave on vacation, we have to make sure that everything is ready.
We have to cover our duties at work.
We have to make sure that the lawn is mowed and the pets are cared for and find someone to water the flowers.
In fact, sometimes we have to work so hard to prepare for vacation that we are exhausted by the time we get going.
Then we make the most of every moment and do things we are not used to and I have heard more than one person say that you need a vacation after a vacation in order to rest from your vacation.
It makes you realize that we are not very good at rest.
Are there areas in your life that make you tired?
Are there areas in your life in which you feel distressed?
burdened?
burned out?
When you are in that situation, where do you go to find relief?
Listen to Matthew 11:28-30.
!
I.
You Who Are Burdened
            Carla and I lived in The Pas for a number of years.
When we were there, we sometimes attended the Trapper’s Festival.
There were a lot of interesting events that took place.
We enjoyed the dog sled racing, the chain saw contests and other interesting events related to the King Trapper competition.
One of the events that we sometimes watched was the flour packing contest.
If you have seen it, you know that they have a special back pack which fits over your shoulders with a tump line that goes on your forehead.
They adjust the pack to fit your body and then they begin to pile on the flour.
They begin with lighter loads and the contestants have to walk a certain distance and then they help them take off the pack and another person tries.
Each round, they add more flour and it gets heavier and pretty soon they are not walking from one point to the other, they are staggering, barely able to keep standing.
At last years festival, the winner was able to carry 900 pounds of flour on his back.
I can hardly imagine that.
Such a burden is hard to carry.
You can’t carry it very far and each step must be painful.
Your whole self is weighed down and focussed on the burden.
Although few of us have probably carried heavy sacks of flour, many of us do carry heavy burdens around.
The burdens we carry can have just as much of an impact on our lives as the burden of 900 pounds of flour.
These burdens we carry impact our whole person.
We stagger around in life, hardly able to make it because of them.
Most of us carry the burden of sins that we can’t stop doing.
We know that certain things are wrong, but we keep doing them.
We become angry with others, we hate people, we lash out at people, we think impure thoughts, there are so many sins which have a great power over our life.
Sometimes I get angry and all of a sudden I look at myself and wonder, “why am I angry?” “where is this anger coming from?”
We know that these things are wrong, we know that they hurt us and others and we know that they displease God.
They are a heavy burden in our life.
Many of us also have a sense of the things which are good and right and which God wants us to do, but we can’t seem to do them.
We try desperately to please God and we set up all kinds of rules in our life and believe that if we can only keep all these rules, we will be OK.
Yet, we fail to be perfect in our rule keeping and soon we are burdened down with the awful feeling of failure.
This is the burden of legalism and failure to keep the law.
If we have any of these burdens, we will also carry another burden and that is the burden of guilt.
We know what God thinks of us and it isn’t good, but because we keep on falling into these sins, we keep ourselves under the feeling that God is angry with us.
No matter what our sin is and all of us have some sin, if we continue in it, we will have a sense of guilt and that guilt is a terrible burden.
Some of us may have the burden of unforgiveness.
At some time, someone has hurt us deeply.
The thing this other person has done to us was so bad and so wrong that we know it deserves punishment, so we punish the other person by holding a grudge against them and hating them.
But the anger in our hearts against the other person soon begins to take over our hearts and we are consumed with unforgiveness and bitterness and this too becomes a terrible burden.
What about the other burdens of life?
There are many - meaningless work, illness, relationships that aren’t what we wish they were, lost love and so on.
Our life may be weighed down with these trials.
Ultimately, there is the burden of the fear of death.
Sometimes we forget about this one, but a death close to us, driving by an accident on the highway or pictures of atrocities of war force us to face it.
How many burdens can people carry?
Some people carry several of these burdens and their life is weighed down.
They feel like the person who is carrying 900 pounds of flour.
They stagger about in life with the weight of the world on their shoulders.
What kind of burdens do you carry?
!
II.
Come And Find Rest
All of us have probably received invitations at some time.
Perhaps it was an invitation to a birthday party when we were children, or an invitation to the wedding of a friend or relative.
An invitation presents us with a possibility.
We look forward to what the invitation promises.
To those who are tired and burdened, Jesus makes an invitation.
!! A. Come To Me
            Several years ago, Carla and I, our son and his wife and our daughter, five of us, went on a canoe trip.
We had two canoes.
One was a 90 pound fibreglass canoe - quite heavy - and the other was a lighter canoe.
We paddled across a lake and spent the first night at a beautiful spot among the trees by the lake.
The next morning, we paddled a little way and then had to do a portage that was about a mile long.
Since it was that long, we decided that we would try to do it all in one trip.
We each took our backpack, our daughter took the extra bags, my son and I took the heavy canoe and Carla and our daughter-in-law took the lighter canoe.
My son and I went at the end, but the girls just could not keep a very strong pace and they were having trouble carrying the canoe because Carla is taller than our daughter-in-law.
So we decided that my son and I would go ahead and get to the other side as fast as we could.
Carla would take the canoe all by herself and do the best she could.
That is what she did.
When she got tired, the other two took the canoe off and gave her a rest.
In the mean time, my son and I went as quickly as we could to the other side, dropped our canoe and our packs and then came back to help.
When we got back to where they were and my son and I took the canoe, Carla was so glad to get rid of her burden.
When we got to the end of the portage, we all dropped our packs and put down the canoes.
What a relief to be able to shed the heavy burdens after having carried them for a mile.
Matthew 11:28 invites, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened…” The first invitation is an invitation to all who are burdened to come to Jesus.
What kind of an invitation is this?
It is an invitation to drop our burdens at Jesus’ feet.
It is an invitation to recognize that we need help to carry those things that are too heavy for us and to let Jesus carry them for us.
It is an invitation to see Him, the one who is “gentle and humble in heart,” as the hope for all our tiredness and burdens and losses.
!! B. I Will Give You Rest
            The promise is that if we come to Jesus with our burdens, He will give us rest.
Two times in these verses, Jesus promises rest.
In verse 28 he says, “I will give you rest,’ and in verse 29 he says, “you will find rest for your souls.”
How does Jesus give rest to those who are burdened?
Our family had a saying that we would use if one of us or someone we observed seemed to be going just a little but too fast.
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