Meditation

Rest for the Weary

Volume 5 | Issue 9
Rev. Herman Hoeksema
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.—Matthew 11:28

(This meditation is from the pen of the late Rev. Herman Hoeksema and is reprinted from The Standard Bearer 1, no. 10 (July 1925).)

Toiling!

Do you know by experience the sad and disheartening implication of that word?

Nay, if you would understand its meaning, do not summon before the eyes of your imagination the picture of the daily laborer in the shops, or of the husbandman in his field, who rises early in the morning and returns home in the evening, tired and weary, and longing to forget the burdens of the day in restful sleep. For, however heavy the work may be which he finds awaiting him every morning, and however fatigued his frame may be when the daily task is finished and he lies down to rest, in the evening of every day he returns home in the consciousness that the task is accomplished and that he may forget the struggles of the day.

Rather imagine the man who is groaning under burdens too heavy for human strength to bear. Or think of the man who is laboring at a hopeless task. All the strength of body and mind he exerts to exhaustion. To accomplish the work is the ambition of his life. From early morning till late at night he struggles and strives and ponders and plans. Incessantly he labors with all his might. Yet he fails. And after all his attempts he finds in the end he is farther from the goal than at the beginning. Real toil is to strive with all our strength of body and mind for an end that is never achieved. It is to labor hard and incessantly at a hopeless task that can never be accomplished.

And are you acquainted with the spiritual significance of the word?

It is the spiritual toilers under burdens too heavy for them that the Lord calls in the text.

It is a toiling which in its deepest root is born from the heart’s desire to get right with God, to know that we have peace with the Most High and that His favor is with us. The heart, then, somehow realizes that His loving–
kindness cannot be enjoyed, and that the objects of His favor we cannot be, except on a basis of a righteousness that is valid before Him. For He is righteous, we know, and spotlessly holy. It feels, too, that this basis of righteousness and justice cannot be established, except the law be fulfilled and all its demands are perfectly satisfied. And we begin at the task to gain the desired peace in the way of accomplishing our own satisfaction of the entire law. But as we labor and toil to fulfill the law of the Lord, we experience that she is a severe mistress. And though we may labor with all our might, anxious to hear from her the sentence that it is enough, repeatedly she flings us back with her terrible, “Cursed is he that doth not abide perfectly in all that is written in me!” And toiling on still, we find that we increase our guilt daily, that the task is a hopeless one, and, groaning under heavier burdens than before we commenced the struggle, we are inclined to abandon the attempt and hang the harps in the willows, still longing, yet despairing.

Are you sin-weary?

Do you find the burden of the law too heavy to bear? Have you toiled with it and groaned under it and been oppressed by it, till you succumbed in grief and despair?

Take, courage, then.

For “the wise and the prudent” do not know this weariness. They care not to be righteous or boast of a righteousness that is a vain thing before the Lord. And never would they acknowledge that the natural man can only increase his sin daily.

Take courage, for the Lord calls you by name: Weary toiler, come unto me!

He will give you rest!

Rest!

Blessed word!

Thrice blessed for the weary and toiling soul!

It is not simply to cease from toil and struggle, it is far more. It is to cease in the consciousness that the task is accomplished, that the work is done, that the end is achieved, and to rejoice in the finished product. It is the glorious feeling of body and soul that we may enter into and enjoy the fruit of a completed work.

Thus it is naturally.

And thus it is spiritually.

Ah, what a task to be accomplished pressed down upon our weary soul! What mountains of sin and guilt rose up before our consciousness to be removed. Sin in our actual walk, sin with all the members of our body, sin in our thoughts and sin in our deepest heart and in all our planning and desiring, sin in what we did and said and thought and wished and sin in what we did not do and think and say and wish, sin in the present and sin in the past, sin everywhere, as far as the eye could see.

And then, when we penetrated more deeply into this horrible reality of sin, we found that it was not merely a matter for acting but a question of our very being. For out of the heart are the issues of life. And that heart is corrupt, hopelessly corrupt; and from it, as a boiling and bubbling fountain, rise all these actual sins. So that, before we could hope to remove the mountain of our actual guilt, that heart must be cleansed. The corrupt fountain of iniquity must be changed into a clear stream of love.

And searching more deeply still into this awful mystery of sin, we discovered that the deepest source of this foul fountain of iniquity is not even in our individual hearts and lives, but that it is connected with a rushing stream of sin and guilt that leads us, for its source, back into paradise of yore. And we found that it would be of no avail even to attempt to cleanse the fountain of foul sin in our own heart, unless we could first cleanse that deepest and original source of it all.

What a task!

How disheartening to know that there is no life, no peace, no comfort and joy for our troubled soul, unless the task is finished, guilt is blotted out; the stain of sin is removed, the heart is cleansed, the foul fountain of iniquity is changed into a stream of living love! And then, to have struggled and toiled till all our strength was exhausted, and to know that we utterly failed, so utterly that the end of all our toil is greater sin and heavier burdens.

And then to learn that there is rest!

To know that the task is accomplished, that the stream of our guilt is washed away, that we may cease from toiling, in the blessed knowledge that all is finished, that there is righteousness and sanctification, wisdom and redemption, peace and joy and comfort and eternal life in God’s blessed communion.

Comfort, weary toiler, for you.

The task is accomplished.

Accomplished for you.

Rest!

I will give you rest!

He is the Rest-giver because it is He that accomplished the task.

He put His shoulders under our burdens, the burdens of our guilt and sin and condemnation. For the Father gave Him a people from before the foundations of the world, a people whose Savior He was to be, their Head and their Redeemer, and whom He was to bring from the horrible slavery of sin and death into the glorious liberty of the children of God. He, therefore, was to take their place, and to assume their burdens of guilt and sin, to carry them way down into the dark and deep valley of His agony and death, to leave them there forever.

And He did so, according to the will of His Father.

He did put His shoulders under their heavy burdens, under which they would have been crushed into death and hell.

And He was strong, for His Name was Almighty God.

He was able to bear these burdens even unto the accursed tree of the Place of Skulls, to enter with them into the dark abyss of death and hell, to toil and labor with them until He had shaken off the load of guilt and the shackles of death, and, first from Calvary, then soon from Joseph’s garden, He might send forth the glad tidings: It is finished!

He accomplished the task.

With Him there is rest.

And the Rest-giver He is, too, because it is He that causes us, by the irresistible operations of His Spirit and grace to enter into His rest.

By nature we would not even seek to enter into that rest. Surely, we may seek rest, but we do not desire His. Rest we seek and imagine to possess in the accomplishment of our own righteousness, which is abominable to Jehovah. But He never forgets His people, neither leaves them alone. Into their hearts and minds He enters by the Spirit of grace. In that heart He knows how to create unrest and worry. He reveals unto them the greatness of their sin, the abomination of their vain righteousness, their own impotency to fulfill the demands of the law, their proneness to all evil, and the corruption of their heart and mind.

And with unrest He fills the heart, till every last basis of self-confidence is removed, till from the heart the cry is wrung: “O God, be merciful unto me, a sinner!”

And then, when all the wisdom and prudence, all the righteousness of works, all self-conceit and self-confidence to carry our own burdens and remove them is uprooted, and the heart longs for a righteousness that is not its own but God’s, He stands forth in all the beauty of His salvation, in all the glory of His power, and says: “Weary toiler, it is finished. The task thou laborest to accomplish is completed. The work is done!”

It was done for you.

Completely finished by Me.

I will give you rest!

Come unto Me!

Blessed summons, when by the gracious call of His Spirit, He makes it resound in our soul!

And blessed soul that obeys that summons and comes!

It is a coming which is the result of Father’s drawing. For no one can come unto Him except the Father which sent Him draw him. The drawing is first, and the coming second. The drawing is the cause, and the coming is the result. It is the drawing of that love which is always first, and the coming of faith which relies on that love.

It is a coming which begins when we cast away all our own righteousness and every basis of confidence in self. For we cannot come unto Him with aught of self. Empty and poor and naked, weary and exhausted, as the drowning man who struggled with the tempestuous sea till his strength was gone, thus we must come to Him Who is our all.

It is a coming that continues when we see Jesus as we never see Him with our natural eye, full of grace and glory and life and rest and peace, the fullness of our wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and complete redemption, and when our soul, hungering and thirsting after righteousness, desires to possess Him above all the treasures and pleasures of the world.

It is a coming by which we draw nearer, when we hear Him address us, as with the natural ear we could never hear, so clearly and distinctly as if He were calling us by name: “Weary toiler, heavily burdened one, cease from toiling at your impossible task. I have finished. Come unto Me and rest!”

It is a coming whereby we know and trust that when He bore the burden of His people’s sin, our transgressions and our iniquities were also upon Him, so that we believe His promise and trust for life and death with all our soul in that promise: I will give you rest!

And that promise He fulfills.

He fulfills it when He sheds forth the love of God into our hearts, that love in which there is no fear, and when He gives us the faith by which we shout in joy and redemption: “We, therefore, being justified by faith, have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” He fulfills it when, if we would return to the old burdens and the slavery of sin and death, He draws us back unto Himself and assures us, “Your sins are forgiven.” He fulfills it, when amid the battle and strife of this present life in the midst of the world, He makes us partakers of the peace that passes all understanding.

And He will fulfill it to the last.

For the final rest is not yet.

There still remains a sabbath for the people of God.

The eternal sabbath.

And the Rest-giver will surely bring that final rest. When all of life is over and all the weary night is past, and the last one of His toiling people shall have been brought into the rest He accomplished, then He shall come again and lead His people into the perfect rest. Then the toiling and groaning creation shall be delivered from the yoke of vanity and corruption and partake of the rest of God’s children.

God, through Christ, shall have completed His work.

And into that completed work we shall enter.

God’s tabernacle over all!

The rest of eternal joy!

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by Rev. Nathan J. Langerak
Volume 5 | Issue 9