Come to Me

Preached on 09-09-01

"COME TO ME"

A Sermon by the Rev. Patrick A. Rose

"Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." (Mt. 11:28)

IS THE LORD OUR FRIEND? Or is He a stranger? The fact is, He may well be a stranger. It is easy, very easy indeed, for us to treat the Lord as if He were a stranger. He may, for example, be someone we think about only occasionally. We may think about Him when we are in church. We might think about Him once in a while at other times. But if we only think about the Lord in passing, when something reminds us of Him, then He is as much a stranger to us as someone we might just happen to pass in the street. Perhaps, though, we talk about the Lord more than this. We may enjoy discussing doctrine, and the things of the church. And indeed this is something that we should do. However, if when all is said and done all we ever do is talk about the Lord, and never actually talk to Him, then He is still really a stranger.

If the Lord is to be a real person in our lives -- if we are to actually know Him, then we must talk to Him. And we must talk to Him, that is, we must pray to Him, in a real and a living way. We shouldn't just go through the motions of praying to Him, without thinking what we are saying. Such unthinking shallow conversation is for casual acquaintances, not for real friends.

All too often, though, people have such a relationship with the Lord -- a relationship that is distant and remote. Why is it that the Lord can so often seem so far away -- not a real part of our lives? Is it because He is too far above us? Is it because we have trouble understanding Him?

The Lord, though, is close to us. And He is someone we can understand. Indeed, He was born on earth, He became Man, so that we might be close to Him, so that we might be able to picture and understand Him. Jesus Christ is the God of the universe. He created and governs all things. He is all-powerful and all-wise. But He is also a Man. He is God-Man, a Divine Man. He is a Person, a Person who loves us, and a Person we can talk to. He is not some abstract philosophical concept. The Lord God Jesus Christ is a Person -- a Person we are to love, a Person we are to trust, a Person we are to talk to in prayer.

If the Lord seems distant, if He does not seem to be a real Person to us, a Person who is part of our everyday lives, then the problem does not lie with Him. It lies with us. We have within us a tendency to turn away from the Lord. If we are evil, if we are selfish, if we are proud, then we don't really want to be close to Him. To know the Lord, to really know Him, is to know a Man who is pure love. If we are evil, we do not want to know someone who is pure love. Certainly we do not want to know the Lord if we are selfish and proud. To know the Lord is to come into the presence of someone infinitely majestic and infinitely more powerful and wise than ourselves. In His presence we are small. And a selfish and proud man doesn't want to feel small.

And so there is this tendency in all of us to turn away from the Lord . . . to avoid Him. There is something in us which prefers Him to remain mysterious, incomprehensible and abstract. It wasn't mere stupidity which led men in the past to think of God in terms of a mysterious Godhead. Rather, it was because they felt more comfortable that way. They could keep their incomprehensible God at a distance -- He was a God they could pretend to worship on Sundays, but He was not a God they had to live with during the rest of the week.

If a small child has done something wrong, he tries to avoid his parents, and when he sees them, he is obviously uncomfortable in their presence. It is the same with us. When we do wrong, or, rather, because we have done wrong, we can be uncomfortable in the Lord's presence. We unconsciously try to avoid our Heavenly Father. Is it any wonder, then, that the Lord can seem far away? Is it any wonder that we can forget to pray, or, if we do pray, fail to really think about what we are saying? And is it any wonder if we fail to find pleasure in the reading of the Lord's Word.

Yet without the Lord we cannot be happy. When all is said and done, our lives are meaningless without religion; and religion itself is meaningless without the Lord. We can fool ourselves, of course. We can imagine that we live fairly respectable lives, and that there is nothing really wrong. And we can also go through the motions of being part of the church -- by attending services and so on. But we also need to look within ourselves. If we live fairly respectable lives, does this make us good? Much of what people do is simply a matter of going through the motions. They do what other people expect of them, because they are concerned with what others may think. They live respectable lives simply so that they will be respected, not because of any spiritual desire to do good. Worship also can be solely a matter of keeping up the appearance. People can go to church, and yet be present only in body. Their minds can be far removed from the things of worship. Yet if they are not thinking of who it is they are worshiping, if they have no idea of the Lord as a real Person, then they are not really worshiping.

When people are in such a state, they are without good, and they are without religion. They only appear to have these things. Deep down they are in bondage. They are governed by their own petty ideas, and are ruled by their own petty motives. If one could see into the other world, one would see their spirits in bondage to the devils of hell.

It is dangerous indeed for someone to look only at his outward life and his outward worship, and to conclude that he doesn't really need to come closer to the Lord. A person whose spirit is in bondage to evil spirits can quite easily appear on the surface to be good; he can appear to worship the Lord. But when he does these things, it is for selfish and worldly reasons (HD 167). He is bound by the love of self and the love of the world. He is in bondage to evil spirits, and evil spirits are cruel; they dominate a person and treat him as nothing (AC 905). They take from him all happiness, all satisfaction, and everything of peace. Deep down, someone who is in their clutches is burdened with unhappiness and misery.

And so it is that the Lord says to us: "Come to Me." "Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." We may think of these words as words of comfort for when we are in the midst of problems, words for those times when our minds are weighted down with worry and anxiety about worldly difficulties. It is indeed comforting to think that when we have problems, when we have difficulties, we can most certainly turn to the Lord for comfort. "Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." But when the Lord says these words, He is not talking primarily to those who are burdened with worldly anxieties. He is talking to those in evil. The Lord had just finished upbraiding those cities in which He had been doing miracles, upbraiding them because the people in them had not repented. It is to the unrepentant that the Lord is talking. The burden He is talking about is the spiritual burden which rests upon those in evil. When the Lord says, "Come to Me," He is calling us to repentance.

We all know that we should live good lives. We all know very well that all religion is of life, and that the life of religion is to do good. But it is easy to twist this truth, and to think that what the Lord wants is for us to make a general attempt to be good. But to have some vague general feeling that we should somehow try not to be bad, and that we should try to be good, is not enough. Such an idea, because it is vague, is not likely to lead to any real improvement in our lives. The repentance spoken of in the Writings is something far more definite. It is a series of definite steps which must be repeated at regular intervals throughout our lives.

The first step is to take what we know about sin, and apply it to ourselves, by examining, not only the way we live outwardly, but also the thoughts we harbor in our minds, and the motives from which we act. The second step is to recognize specific deeds or words, or specific motives and thoughts in our minds, as wrong and as sins against the Lord. This means seeing specific things we have done wrong, and making ourselves responsible for them -- not making excuses for ourselves. The third step is to confess our sins directly to the Lord Himself. This means getting down on our knees, and speaking to Him. We must ask Him for mercy, ask Him for help to resist these things in the future, and we must ask for a desire to do good. And we must confess before Him that we now see that we have sinned against Him. The fourth step is to begin a new life -- to go forth and put away the specific faults we have seen in ourselves.

This series of steps, beginning with self-examination, must begin anew at regular intervals, perhaps several times a year preceding the Holy Supper. Then, even if we only discover one or two sins in ourselves at a time, we are doing the work of repentance, and the Writings say that we are then on the way to heaven (TCR 530).

This work of repentance is indeed work. It is described as a yoke. "Take My yoke upon you." And it is work we tend to put off doing. Yet the longer we put it off, the more difficult it becomes. People who are not used to working hard and regularly become lazy. Being lazy, they view the thought of hard work as a terrible burden. It is the same with the work of repentance. When someone is not in the habit of regularly going through these four steps of repentance, then he becomes scared at the thought of actually doing so. With such people, the Writings say, there is often "sadness, dread and terror at the thought of repentance" (TCR 561). And yet, as the Lord says, this work of repentance, this yoke, is not as difficult as we might think. "For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light."

We do not, as some have thought, have to renounce the world and its pleasures. We can still enjoy life while doing the work of repentance (see HH 359). Nor is the process of repentance exceedingly difficult once we begin. It is, the Writings say, a habit to be acquired, and once it is a habit, once it is something we are used to, then, like anything else we become accustomed used to, it becomes relatively easy (cf. HH 533, TCR 563). Then there is, above all, the fact that in this work of repentance we are not alone. We have help. If we have some job to do, something we have doubts about, something that perhaps scares us at first, it becomes so much easier if there is somebody who comes with us, somebody who gives us courage. When we embark upon the work of repentance, the Lord is with us. We have a Person, a Divine Person, with us, holding our hand. If we talk to Him -- pray to Him -- then, though He cannot take away the temptations we need to undergo, He will give us the strength to endure them, and to do what must be done. He will be with us.

Immediately before telling us to come to Him and to take His yoke upon us, the Lord says: "All things have been delivered to Me by My Father." In Him is the fullness of Divine Power. God Himself, who in Himself would be incomprehensible to us, can be known by us, and be close to us, for God Himself became Man. When we turn to Jesus Christ, we turn to God Himself, and as we turn to Him, He can help us.

The work of repentance includes confessing our sins before the Lord and asking His help. Without this step -- if we were to shun evil by ourselves -- we would be helpless. By ourselves it is impossible to resist the power of the evil spirits. But as we repent and turn to the Lord, He comes close to us and lends us His strength.

It is thus a dangerous fallacy to think of the work of repentance as a cruel burden. The cruel burden, the difficult yoke, is the one we take upon ourselves when we do evil. The burden evil spirits then lay upon us is truly oppressive. With the Lord it is completely different. Whereas evil spirits strive to subjugate us, the Lord leads us gently. He shows us love and kindness. Through the ministry of angels, He gives us as much help as we need. This we realize once we take the Lord's yoke upon us, once we do the work of repentance. "Take my yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart." The Lord is gentle. He is not harsh. What He asks of us is not difficult. It is comparatively easy. There are difficult times, it is true. But once we have turned to the Lord and made a habit of the work of repentance, once it is something we do on a regular schedule, it is far easier than we would ever have imagined.

In this way we come to the Lord. He is no longer distant. He is no longer a stranger -- someone we talk about rather than actually know. The Lord becomes our Father and our Friend. "Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

Amen.

Lessons: 2 Sam 12:1-7; Mt. 11:20-30; TCR 530