Working Man Blues

But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel:  Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. -- Isaiah 43:1

It’s not an earworm.  Brain Jig, maybe – it’s a recurring thought that I have or keep recognizing in what someone else says or some experience that I have.  The reason I call it a jig is that things fit together in it. 

Did you ever know a person who made everything more complicated and harder than it needed to be?  Have you ever been that person?  I can answer both questions in the affirmative.  In a way, following Christ is challenging.  It can be a serious struggle, day after day, and so it is described as a battle and race.  Yet, Jesus calls to those who are “weary and heavy-laden” – some of us, as we talked about yesterday – and offers us rest and a lighter load to bear. 

In fact, our battle is to step aside and let the battle be the Lord’s.  We work hard to overcome the mindset of the world and enter the rest of Christ.  For years, beginning long before I surrendered to that Holy Hunter who dogged my steps, my typical way of saying good-bye was to say, “Take it easy”.  I still say it a lot.  I might have originally picked it up from the Jackson Browne/Eagles song that played about once an hour on the AM radio in my orange Chevy back in ’72.  It’s still good advice, but the paradox of fighting for peace remains true. 

We are stuck working out our “own salvation with fear and trembling” while God is “working in [us], both to will and to act for His good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12-13).  Every time I read that, I feel like saying, Make up your mind.  Is it me, or is it God?  And the answer is – Yes, that’s right.  We will never enter Christ’s rest unless we work, and we will never work our way into His love and His grace.

We belong to the Lord.  He calls us by name, and we bear His name.  If I look at my inadequacy and my failures, I am afraid, and I feel that I need to try harder.  Yet even I, as flawed and foolish as I am, I am accepted in Christ.  Here is my Rock.  Here I may stand, and the battle is to believe it.            

Legend of the Fallen

And he said to all, If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. -- Luke 9:23

Jesus bore our burden of sin upon the cross.  The good news of His death, burial, and resurrection is the revelation of His love for us, our salvation, justification, reconciliation, and peace with the Father.  He offers to take the burdens that weigh us down and wear us out, and in exchange, He offers us a sack of slack to carry, a yoke that is easy and light.  How does this square with the daily cross Jesus says each of us must take up?

I have been talking around this, I think, all week.  I’ll probably talk around it today, too.  The Cross frees us from the captivity and delusions of the world, the flesh, and the devil, but I’ve still got this natural human life to live out.  We do not suddenly get translated to heaven when we rise from the waters of baptism.  It would be a lot easier to be a Christian if that were the case. 

Instead, we spend the rest of our lives dealing with, resisting, renouncing, and, ultimately, overcoming the sin nature.  As I may have noted in the post about 1 John 3, Matthew Henry argues that Jesus did not carry away “ our moral infirmities, our proneness to sin”.   I don’t know about anybody else, but I know for certain that my own “proneness to sin”, if it has been taken away, still calls home a lot. 

My problem in this world is me.  That’s the daily cross.  It’s my tendency to blame other people, my feelings of selfishness and self-righteousness, my inclination to believe that I am better, somehow, than the people who get in my way.  It’s easy for me to think that life should please me and go my way, that others exist for my benefit, that things should be fair and that, at the same time, I ought to be able to do pretty much as I please.  So, constantly, daily, I get up and I pick that cross up, and I do a hundred things that go against the grain.  I give in.  I give others the benefit of the doubt.  I help somebody else.  I sacrifice, and, if I’m not careful, at the end of the day, I get to thinking I’m a really good guy.  As Rick and Father Stephen point out, self-improvement is a loser’s game.  The reason I carry this cross isn’t to make me better but to put my old, fallen self on fully display for what it is. 

I watched I Am Legend, which might not have been the best choice under the current conditions, but I got through it.  I watched the alternate version which makes more sense.  One thing that really hit me is when Neville is offered the chance to leave and join other survivors, he resists, insisting that New York City is his site.  “I can still fix this,” he shouts. 

That’s one of my favorite phrases.  I can fix this – except, I can’t.  I can’t fix my self.  But I can take up my cross and bear it.

The Rest of the Story

Thus says the LORD: Take care for the sake of your lives, and do not bear a burden on the Sabbath day or bring it in by the gates of Jerusalem. -- Jeremiah 17:21

This is not about whether you and I keep a Jewish Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday nor if we have to work on Sunday.  I do think it is good to consider Sunday the first day of the week and, when possible, to take time that day to dedicate the week to the Lord.  But I used to have a job that had a Thursday-Friday weekend.  There are people who keep things going for the rest of us.  We don’t always get to set our schedule the way a more agricultural, less electrified society did. 

It’s good to have a day of rest.  I appreciate this more now that I am older, and remembering the Sabbath to keep it holy is one of the Ten.  In the gospel narratives, though, one of the things that drove the conflict between Jesus and the religious leadership was the Lord’s apparent liberality in interpreting Sabbath rules.  The Pharisees were very strict, but [Jesus ] said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.  So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27-28)

The Sabbath is not a rule to bind us, but a rule to release us.  And, being set free, we ought not allow ourselves to go back into bondage.  The people of Jeremiah’s day were working and ordering their lives by the rules of the unbelieving world.  Keeping the Sabbath by shutting down business as usual, letting their servants and their animals rest, stopping for twenty-four hours to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Lord over their lives would have broken the chains of fear, greed, envy, and covetousness. 

In the same way, for us, the Sabbath is the symbol of the reality that our salvation and our relationship to God are not dependent upon our works.  Gentile Christians were never bound to keep the Sabbath as evidenced by the Jerusalem Council’s letter in Acts 15:28-29:  For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well.

That’s because Christ is our Sabbath rest.  We can read Jeremiah’s warning this way:  Stop carrying your sins around.  Stop trying to come into the City of Peace a burden of guilt and shame that has been dealt with and taken away by the Cross.  Trust the Lord and lay down your burdens before you try to come through the gates into the City of God, into the presence of the King.  But Jesus said it better than anyone else can:

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Busy Business

I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. -- Ecclesiastes 3:10

Solomon and I have one thing in common, we have seen the business wherein we are busy.  In my case, it looks to continue right on through, unabated by the weekend, though I do anticipate a little respite after that. 

Excessive idleness can be as wearying as excessive busyness.  We truly rest when we can rest in our labors.  Some people conclude that God has given us the business and are bitter and resentful.  I've done that myself, but if I can see, instead, that all this is God's business and that what He has given me to do -- as overwhelming as it may seem at times -- is from His hand, I can be at peace.

My body gets tired a lot more quickly than it did even ten years ago.  I just logged yet another birthday.  Still, it's relatively easy to rest from physical weariness.  You may wake stiff and sore the first day or two, but you sleep well -- dead to the world, as we say.

Soul-weariness is the killer.  Mental and psychic exhaustion cannot be cured with sleep -- if the sufferer can sleep.  To receive relief from soul-weariness we need a different kind of rest.

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light (Matthew 11:28-30).

The Rest

It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.  Let him sit alone in silence when it is laid on him – Lamentations 3:27-28

Be still, and know that I am God – Psalm 46:10

For fifteen days I strove to prove that there could not be any functions like those I have since called Fuchsian functions. I was then very ignorant; every day I seated myself at my work table, stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of combinations and reached no results. One evening, contrary to my custom, I drank black coffee and could not sleep. Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak., making a stable combination. By the next morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions, those which came from the hypergeometric series; I had only to write out the results, which took but a few hours. – Henri Poincaré

It doesn’t matter what we strive to do, striving is necessary – if only to prove that striving alone is insufficient.  Discipline, bearing the yoke, if we carry it through to the end, will lead us to a summit of silence.   

Paul calls the Law a guardian, a nanny, a pedagogue – something formal and pedantic to help us get started in the right way.  

So it is with all the burdens we carry in life – with life in this world itself.  Our journey here, all of it, long or short, is mostly boot camp.  Some of us will advance a little beyond and be more of a help than a hindrance to our fellow travelers, and we will all know our joys as well as our sorrows along the way.   

At times, really, the weariness seems too much. 

For those times, God has given us the gift of silence.  The space between, the stillness that holds the rhythm.   Rest.

Put the Load Right on Me

Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.  — Galatians 6:2

To bear the burden of another is not merely to help someone out in need.  That is a work of Christ as well, and pleasing to God.  But look what it says, "and so fulfill the law of Christ".  Certainly Christ's law is to love one another, but Christ's law is the law that governed Christ, that made Him our Substitute, the anti-type of the scapegoat that bore away the guilt of a nation and a people into the wilderness, into forgetfulness.  Christ is the Burden-Bearer:  Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Jesus is our High Priest.  Consider the ministry of Aaron, the high priest:   And you shall set the two stones on the shoulder pieces of the ephod, as stones of remembrance for the sons of Israel. And Aaron shall bear their names before the Lord on his two shoulders for remembrance.    ... And in the breastpiece of judgment you shall put the Urim and the Thummim, and they shall be on Aaron's heart, when he goes in before the LORD. Thus Aaron shall bear the judgment of the people of Israel on his heart before the LORD regularly.

As the high priest of Israel bore the nation upon his shoulders and over his heart, so Christ bears us.  Yes, He carried our iniquity, but He also stands in for us in everything.  Do we struggle with fear?  Jesus will bear it.  Were we abused, misused, mistreated?  Jesus will bear it.  Are we burdened with guilt and regret?  The Lord will carry it.

He can carry all that we will give Him but only what we give Him.  There is a price, of course.  As we are freely forgiven, so we must freely forgive.  As we have been given much, so of us much is required.  As our burdens have been borne, so we are called to bear the burdens of others.  First Peter tells us we are "... to be a holy priesthood ... a royal priesthood".  In other words, we are to stand in for others, to bear the burdens of those around us, to carry the fears and the failures of those who will relinquish them to us.

Christ asks us to take His yoke and bear His burden, which is lighter and easier than our own.  How can that be?  It is hard to explain but easy to see.  I pass my burden over to Jesus.  He can bear it easier than I because it is mine and not His.  Someone else passes his or her burden over to me.  It was a horrible weight to that person, but in passing it to another, some of the subjective magnitude goes away.  It is easily bearable for me no matter how personally and with what empathy I enter into it.  I carry only the objective weight.  The subjective is, more or less, lost in the surrendering.

To take His yoke upon us means to step into the work of substitution alongside our Lord.  We cannot live in isolation — as appealing as that is to a lone wolf like me.  He calls us to the communion of the saints, to drink from the same cup —  the same cup as Jesus, but also the same cup as our brothers and sisters who are battered and tormented by the wars and tribulations of life.

I say often that we should be careful with whom we share our troubles, careful of the prayer partners we choose.  You cannot ask just anyone to pray for you — it is foolish to do so.  But there are those we can recognize as burden-bearers.  We know them when we meet them.  With those who are yoked to Christ, we may share our deepest sorrows.  They can be counted on to carry away our load and free us from the burden — not that we might be unburdened but that we might be free to step in and lift up someone else. 

Just look at how many who name the Name of Christ stumble and fall.  It may have happened to us or not, but surely we can understand the temptations of another, even if only by proxy or likeness.  When we see someone struggling, perhaps a prominent person, should we mock and ridicule them for their weakness, or should we seek to take up their burden?  It may not be possible to contact them personally and offer to shoulder the load, but we can speak to the Father and ask Him to allow us to stand in in bearing that addiction, that pressure, that terror for the one who is brought low and fallen.   It is our duty, our priestly duty, and it is not limited to those who are called to full-time ministry or to a particular vocation.  All believers are called to this ministry, to be yoked together with Christ, the Burden-Bearer.

Crazy Chester followed me, and he caught me in the fog.
He said, "I will fix your rack, if you'll take Jack, my dog."
I said, "Wait a minute, Chester, you know I'm a peaceful man."
He said, "That's okay, boy, won't you feed him when you can."

The Band -- The Weight

Working for the Living

And when they found Him on the other side of the sea, they said to Him, “Rabbi, when did You get here?”

Jesus answered them and said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you seek Me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled. Do not work for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man shall give to you, for on Him the Father, even God, has set His seal.” -- John 6:25-27

Jesus had fed the multitudes with five loaves and two fish. He sent the crowds and His disciples away. He crossed the Sea of Galilee on foot in a storm during the night. The crowds that followed Him had seen miracles of healing and restoration. Jesus was at the height of His popularity. The people wanted to make Him king.

Most of us would have looked at this as success. Isn’t this what Jesus had come to earth to do? Wasn’t the Messiah’s job to restore the kingdom and the throne of David? Did Jesus not have every right to this adoration, to this position? Didn’t He have, we might say, even an obligation to accept their adulation? Yet instead of offering encouraging words, Jesus begins one of the most difficult discourses in the Bible. He all but mocks those who follow Him – or so it seems to them.

Jesus begins by throwing their motives in their faces. You are following Me not because of messianic signs, He says, but simply because I was able to fill your bellies with free food. They were beginning to think that following Christ was a picnic everyday. There’s no need to work or struggle, and no need to go hungry. There is an element of truth in this -- Come to Me all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest, but the spirit is wrong.

God is often extremely gracious to believers early on in their walk. Everything just seems to flow to them as they are following, studying, and hearing much truth for the first time. But there comes a point when we are challenged, when we transition from milk to meat. Having entered the Kingdom as children, we must grow into sons able and willing to do the Lord’s work.

Do not work for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life. This is akin to the favorite verse of my late friend Eddie, Matthew 6:33, Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you. Jesus emphasizes the object for which we are to work. Laboring to gratify our appetites may be more virtuous than stealing, but our true goal should be to acquire spiritual vittles that satisfy fully the hunger in our souls.

Dear God, I thought I had learned this lesson long ago, but it seems that I must necessarily relearn or refresh from time to time. Christianity, fortunately, has a built-in continuing education program. The Lord will provide for me, but the physical provision I get so concerned about is incidental. It is the spiritual provision that matters. If one gets full enough of Spirit and Truth, he will not worry, nor need to worry, about having enough cornbread and beans.

Bob has been talking about economics and the threats we face from a socialist system. In the days to ahead, a certain kind of temporal prosperity to which we have become accustomed may be lost. An interventionist government, pandering to unions, environmentalists, and other non-productive elements, could easily cause the engine of our economy to seize. It’s a good time, right now, to invest in canned goods, staple food items that can be stored long-term, basic tools, heirloom seeds, ammunition, and barter items. The prices of the things we need are going to go higher.

But the most essential of my possessions are my hard copies of the Bible (and related Good books). Even more vital to my ability to survive and prosper – and do the will of God in trying times are those portions of Scripture that are in my heart. I know, for example, Then they cried out to the LORD in their trouble; He saved them from their distresses. As much as I love my Springfield XDM, I don’t depend on it to do that.

I delight to do Thy will, O my God; Thy law is within my heart. -- Psalm 40:8

Put the Load Right on Me

Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, because 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. – Matthew 11:28-30

I want to say that is my favorite verse in the Bible, but I’ll probably say that about another passage sooner or later, so it seems kind of silly. It is a comforting statement. It is a distillation of the mission of Christ.

Imagine living before Christ. Whether you lived under the demanding but clear constraints of the Law as the Hebrews, or under the capriciousness of the pagan gods as the Greeks, what would it have meant to hear someone say, “Come and rest your soul.” This rest is what we all seek. Atheists seek rest for the soul. They do it by denying the soul, by saying that what we call “soul” is some sort of brain-body gestalt, a sort of simulacrum, perhaps, but still and all an illusion is still an illusion even if it is useful. Their rest is the rest of the paralytic, if not the rotting corpse, an illusion of rest for the illusion of their soul.

I think we notice it more during this season of the year, when we are harried by the hounds of the holidays. We need this promise. Rest for the soul means deliverance from fear, the meeting of every need, and the fulfillment of every desire. The promise Jesus makes is immediate, “Come to Me ... I will give you rest.” He offers those who would trust in Him relief right now, release like the flipping of a switch. In a moment, the believer can go from restless to resting.

There is another aspect that is delayed. “Take My yoke … learn from Me … you will find rest.” In the Gospels we are told of those like the woman with the issue of blood who merely touched Jesus and were instantly healed. Yet there were others who followed Him every day, abiding with Him, sharing His life, and learning from Him. Jesus gave those who touched Him rest; those who followed Him found rest.

He calls us to receive from Him immediate rest, but He also calls us to be His disciples. He calls us to wear a yoke and bear a burden, to work. Yet in that we find an abiding rest that will not depart.

The difference between working for the man and working for the Man is in the yoke and the burden. For man, everything is one-size-fits-all, and you are on your own, baby. With Jesus the yoke is tailor-made, perfectly fitted, just your size, and, if you look to your right, you will see that you have a partner. Yes, you still have a burden to bear, but it, too, is perfectly sized for your frame. A well-fitted harness and an appropriate load are not hard to bear. I think, in fact, we need a burden.

I see the Amish going along the roadsides. Most of the time the horses have their heads up and seem to be enjoying the trip themselves. A hound on the trail, no matter how hard the run or elusive the quarry, is a happy hound. The hound is not content in the pen. A horse is not content in the pasture. A man is not content without a burden, a purpose, a reason for being here.

Rest comes first from the yoke. Put a poor-quality, ill-adjusted pack frame on and you will suffer carrying ten pounds. With a good pack, well-adjusted, I might carry five or even ten times that and not suffer as much. God knows not only what we can bear, but how best for us to bear it.

Next we learn from Jesus. This is not a singletree, it is a doubletree, and on the other side, helping us pull the load is Christ Himself. He says, “Learn from Me, because I am gentle and humble in heart.” Team the wise horse with the one you want to break to the harness – let the knowing one gently instruct the inexperienced not to fight the yoke, not to get too far ahead, not to overreach, but settle in to the pull, be steady and patient. To learn from Jesus, we need to abide in Him. Partake of His nature. He’s not going to push us too hard. He’s not standing behind us with a whip. He’s right here beside us. Our difficulty and pain come from our own failure to emulate Him, to be also gentle and humble in spirit.

It requires a certain amount of surrender – no, that’s wrong. It requires a full surrender. Surrendering some of my life to Christ is worse than surrendering none.

My granddaughter has become a fan of rollercoasters. I ride them with her because her grandma just can’t handle it. The first thing you learn about a rollercoaster is that you are not in control. You can’t stop it, and you can’t get off. The next thing you learn is that as long as you stay where you are until the end, you will be fine. Sure, you may puke up a corndog, but it’s not fatal. Just hang on and enjoy the ride. In other words, surrender.

Probably no one else is stupid enough to have tried this, but I know from painful personal experience what it is like to do some things my way. Not that I was ever an especially agreeable person, but struggling to run things myself makes me even more irritable and unpleasant than normal. I am mean, ugly and in a rage – all the while claiming to be a Christian. It is not a pretty sight.

Far better to trust God completely, to be – not indifferent, but accepting. That’s an important distinction. God does not want me to say, “I don’t care.” He wants me to say, “Thy will be done,” and to believe that it will. God forgive me for the hours I spent trying to change His mind and get Him to say, “Your will be done.”

No, prayer is to lay out my situation before the Lord and say to Him, You do what’s best. This is my prayer of rest:

Lord, this is what I’d like to see happen, but, I’ll happily (honest, Lord, happily) accept what You do. And now that I have prayed, I am confident that what comes to me will be, indeed, Your will. So that’s cool.

I don’t think you have to add “in Jesus’s name” because I’m fairly sure if you can pray like that with sincerity and a straight face, it is in His name. You can leave the “amen” to Him as well.