Matthew 11:28
“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
PREFACE
"The heart never rests until it finds rest in You.""You only are rest."
"Let my heart, a great ocean swelling with
billows, be calm in You."
"Fix there, then, your resting-place, O my soul!"
–Sentences from Augustine.
Who, in their memories of Switzerland and Italy, can fail to recall the HOSPICES for storm-beaten travelers which stud the higher and more perilous passes? One specially dwells in recollection, possibly because it was the first seen--the familiar hospice in the Pennine Alps; bringing still before us, though half a century has elapsed, the experience of pitiless sleet and darkness outside; and of log-fires, shelter, and genial fellowship inside. Others of more primitive form are constructed of pine or blocks of rough-hewn granite; at times with a motto or word of welcome surmounting their porches.
Such are surely typical, with a singular significance, of gospel realities--GOSPEL HOSPICES; and peculiarly of One whose motto of golden lettering occupies the prominent place in the pages which follow. It is the monograph of inspired monographs--words which, amid the priceless sayings of Jesus, "the Church throughout all the world" most lovingly clings to, and would be the last to part with--a strain of heavenly music which seems only endeared by repetition, as if the rehearsal brought out ever new and hitherto slumbering harmonies. The heart of humanity throbs responsive to this solitary solution for unrest.
How often has this verse, in many forms and phases, been recognized as an inspired teacher! Its rhythmic syllables have been enshrined in Art, and Music, and Sacred Song.
Into how many millions of aching hearts this saying of Jesus has found entrance, and brought with it the olive-branch of peace? It has formed for six thousand years the response to the cry of weary, care-worn humanity--a cry embracing every nation and every climate, from the yearnings of heathendom to the longings and aspirations of the present hour. From the tumultuous sea of the world's unrest the cry has gone up like a dirge of baffled souls– "Oh, where can rest be found?"
"Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."
This verse has been cherished by fevered toilers in life's weary struggle. Yet in that stern, diversified battle--it may be with the humbling memories, the unrest and agony of conscious sin--in the season of pain and suffering and bereavement, in the loneliness of the supreme hour of all--how often has that word turned the storm into a calm! the weary and heavy-laden, the tearful and the fearful, sobbing themselves to rest in the peace of Christ!
The traveler groping in tempest, with every star apparently swept from the sky, yet looking wistfully amid the blinding hail and drifting snows for some HOSPICE of shelter, is at last able to record his experience--"I looked on my right hand, and beheld, but there was no man that would know me--refuge failed me; no man cared for my soul. I cried unto You, O Lord--I said, You are my Refuge [Hospice] and my Portion in the land of the living" (Psalm 142:4-5).
As will be seen, the invitation, recorded alone by the first evangelist, is taken as the golden prop which supports many of those other restful words ("rest-texts''), which we owe to the lips of Him who spoke as never man spoke--"The words which I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life." The Rock of Ages is one, but its clefts are many; each with its own silent answer to the quest, "Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest" (Ps. 55:6). The Sun of heaven is one, but encircled with many attendant stars and satellites. The Gospel Hospice, with its conspicuous motto of 'welcome', is one, but its chambers of repose and refuge are many. In accordance with the true plural rendering of the Hebrew in one of the most precious portions of the Psalter, we can say, as we enter the gracious Hospice for all pilgrims, "Return unto your Rests, O my soul!"
"And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus." (Phil. 4:7.)
PASSPORT AT THE GATE
"Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."
"Whoever shall do the will of My Father who is in heaven, the same is My brother, and sister, and mother." Matthew 12:50
These seem appropriate opening words, addressed to us by the Great Rest-Giver, on entering the Pilgrim-Stronghold. Mother, sister, brother, are names suggestive of the most hallowed Hospices of earthly affection. Earthly love in its depth and constancy is identified with them. When other trusted friendships fail--when other trusted fellowships, like strong mooring cables, suddenly snap asunder, and we are left drifting aimlessly in unsympathetic isolation--the relationships of home and kindred are rendered more sacred and endearing than ever. The world, at times ungenerous, may do its worst; but nothing can diminish or impair the love of father, mother, sister, brother.
The earthly is a parable of the heavenly. Christ offers a divine homestead to all those that do, or--what is all He asks or expects from imperfect natures--who seek to do the will of His Father in heaven. He offers and promises that in Himself the reality of these varied relationships, individually and combined, shall meet. No, more than all--at times through misconception, at times from sadder causes, son may be estranged from parent, brother from brother, sister from sister. But there is a Friend that sticks closer than a brother, or than any human relative. "Come unto Me!"--He offers a sure and abiding Hospice to the orphaned and fatherless, a stormless haven to the tempest-tossed. There is no contingency in His words--"And you shall find rest unto your souls."
If one of the most comforting themes brought into greater prominence in recent times be the Fatherhood of God, so also is this its counterpart and complement--the Brotherhood of Christ. He is linked in communion with universal humanity--"God, yet my Brother; Brother, yet my God." Wondrous thought! that the ties most endearing on earth, the sanctities of the family and home, have their highest and truest expression in the love of the Brother of brothers, the Friend of friends. He knew, surely, the finer impulses of the soul which these varied earthly relationships suggest, who reserved His last benediction for His beloved human mother, and the brother-heart of His dearest apostle.
I may be enabled to appropriate these privileges and enduring fellowships by striving to fulfill the Savior's one stipulated condition--of having my own way and will coincident with the divine, my nature more and more brought into delighted consecration to the service of Him whom it is alike my duty and honor to obey. If there be a fervent desire to do it, that "will" can be done anywhere--everywhere. "In all places I will come unto you and bless you"--in life's public ways, or in life's sequestered by-paths; in its "loud stunning tide" and noisy crowds, or in its enforced silences; in the fever-heats of mart and exchange, or in quiet retirement of the study, or in seclusion of the sick chamber; in the glare of day, or in the hush of night. Nor does the doing of that Father's will involve or exact great efforts or conspicuous deeds. Little services, little self-denials, the conscientious discharge of little responsibilities are acceptable (shall we say, most acceptable?) in the eye of Him who looks not on the outer appearance, but who looks on the heart.
"They also serve who only stand and wait."
"The deeds that He would have me do
Are wrought by love and prayer;
A world of lowly charities
Awaits His servant's care.
I need not seek some high emprise,
Or lofty work for God,
While crowds of simple duties rise
Like daisies from the sod."
Drudging commonplace work, worthily performed, with the right motive and spirit, is transfigured into divine service. Many a common coin may thus be stamped with the image and superscription of heaven. Many a voice feeble with pain and sorrow, may be made to resound with divine music.
One other thought our verse of today suggests. The purest and closest of human relationships--the affection subsisting between mother, sister, brother, taken here by Christ Himself, in the aggregate, as types of "a greater love"--are in themselves, and at the best, precarious, finite, perishable. Death may have defrauded, or at any moment may defraud, the earthly pictures of their charm, leaving only blank memories behind. But the "doers of God's will"--"pilgrims of the night"--in their impregnable, unassailable Hospice, are authorized to make the challenge, embracing this world and the next--"Who shall separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord?" In Him the earthly and heavenly affections, with their golden links welded together, will be strengthened, perpetuated, intensified in the unblighted Home and Hospice above--the life immortal.
Meanwhile let me live under the sovereignty of the lofty motive power, the purest and grandest of all spiritual forces, to walk and act so as to please God; inspired with the ambition, not of "serving Him much," but of "pleasing Him perfectly;" following the example of One whose motto was--and never more so than when the shadows of a deeper than this world's darkness were gathering around Him--"Not My will, but may Yours be done!"
O Christ! help me to some feeble reflection of this Your divine consecration; that, accepting the accompanying promise You do here make, I may serve myself heir to these peerless relationships. Knowing by increasing experience that Your service is self-rewarding and self-satisfying, may I be able to say, in Your own prophetic word– "I delight to do Your will, O my God--yes, Your law is within my heart."
"This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12
THE PILGRIM VISION
"Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."
"Blessed are the pure in heart--for they shall see God." Matt. 5:8
To see God! What a Hospice! every window ablaze with Deity!
The Psalmist's ardent aspiration, as he anticipated through the troubled dream of life the morning of immortality, was this--"I shall be satisfied, when I awake with Your likeness" (Ps. 17:15). "Yet in my flesh," said a yet older pilgrim, weary and heavy laden, "shall I see God" (Job 19:26).
But the promise has not a future and heavenly anticipation only. That realizing sight and sense of the invisible, is a present beatitude bestowed on the "pure in heart." To them the unveiling of the divine glory is a special prerogative. It is this transparency of soul which imparts the capacity for "seeing God." We cannot see the splendor of the material sun through the pane of glass blurred with dust and cobwebs. The Divine Being can alone be discerned through the translucent windows of the holy renewed nature. "I shall behold Your face in righteousness." It was the prophet-spectator whose lips were touched with the live altar-coal who could say, "I have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!"
"Come to Me," says Jesus, as He invites to this Hospice, "and I will give you rest." There is a wonderful rest in the conscience void of offence both toward God and toward man. The soul that is the haunt of passion or impurity, seeking rest, can find none. To the owner of a throne, with gilded halls, and lordly surroundings, and an illustrious pedigree--if there be degraded memories and a blemished life--happiness is impossible. We can understand Paul's noble protestation before King Agrippa. Rather "these bonds" with a pure conscience; than a crown on the brow, scarred with dishonor (Acts 26:29).
O Great Rest-Giver, impart this purity of soul, that holiness without which no man can see the Lord. Alas! it is too often nebulous vapors of our own creating--the noisy jars and turmoil of life, its feverish and fretting cares--which dim the Infinite Vision. "But those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength." The higher the spiritual Pilgrim ascends above mist and valley, the more is his moral sight cleared, and he insures the serenity of the soul at peace with God.
Try to build around you a fortress that will render as impossible, as may be a disloyal thought, a lapsed purpose, an unworthy aim, an aggrieved and corroded conscience. Let Purity and Love be the two ministering angels which keep the fire burning on the shrine of the heart-temple. Aspire after loyalty to truth and duty. Seek to be able to cherish the memory, not of defeat and failure, cowardliness and surrender--but the happier retrospect of vanquished temptation, struggle ending in victory, the conquests of goodness. Thus under a serene sky may the vision and blessing of the pilgrim patriarch be yours, who, as he paused on his journey, called his Hospice "Peniel"--"for," said he, "I have seen God face to face."
Or the similar realization by faith of a near and ever-present God--the shadow of the Almighty--which nerved Moses in the midst of his wilderness trials, and gave him grace to suffer and be strong. "He endured, as seeing Him who is invisible." It was in his case the ratification of the outset promise--"My Presence shall go with you, and I will give you rest."
While blessed are all those who enjoy this soul-sight, this luminous spiritual vision, it was enjoyed pre-eminently, O Christ, by You! Your heart was the home of unsullied purity. You were the true "Lily of the Valley," without speck or stain on its petals; and, being such, You did know, as none other could, the delight, and "rest," and reality of Your own beatitude. Creature-purity can at the best be a feeble approximation to that of You, the Sinless One; the dim luster of candle or glow-worm compared to the glory of the meridian sun; the finite as compared to the infinite. But seeking as a life-long, habitual aim, to be gradually conformed to Your image, with some good measure of lowly confidence may this be my avowal, combining an earthly and a heavenly meaning– "We all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory."
"This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12
THE DOOR OF ENTRANCE
"Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."
"I am the door--by Me if any man enters in, he shall be saved." John 10:9
Where or what is the entrance-gate to these "peaceful habitations," these "quiet resting-places"? (Isa. 32:18)
To this question varied have been the answering voices echoed through the ages. Many--most of these are false, delusive, unsatisfactory--men, like the citizens of Sodom, "wearying themselves to find the door." Naaman's preference for his Syrian rivers--the streams murmuring amid the groves and gardens of Damascus, and his rejection of the waters of Israel--Jordan and the tributary brooks that fitfully fed it--is a just reflection and picture of the many gropings after the false rest, and the many evasions of the true rest. Some strive to enter through the gateway of ethical system and philosophic code and tenet. Others, through the gateway of human merit. Others through ceremonial observances--fasts and vigils, penances and pilgrimages, rites and ceremonies, creeds and dogmas, party badges and contrived shibboleths. These, and such as these, are alike spurious and unavailing.
Christ is the true and only true Door of entrance. "Look unto Me, and be saved, all the ends of the earth;" and "neither is there salvation in any other." There was but one way for the Israelites of old to avert the sword of the destroying angel. They might have resorted to measures of their own devising. Massive blocks of stone, immense as those of the familiar pyramids, might have been piled in front of their dwellings--walled up, for that part, to heaven. They would avail nothing as a substitute for the blood-sprinkled lintels and door-posts.
Again--in the lofty poetry of the prophet, Lebanon might have been transformed into a high altar, its forests of oak and cedar converted into fuel, and the cattle roaming their glades laid thereon as a burnt-offering (Isa. 40:16). All would have been inadequate and worthless. As there was but one door to the ark, one gate to the cities of refuge, so there is, to every seeker and climber, only one entrance to the spiritual Hospice, with its challenge and rebuke to whatever is false and artificial--"This gate of the Lord into which the righteous shall enter." "Come unto ME," says the Divine Rest-Giver; "I am the way, and the truth, and the life."
"To whom, O Savior, shall we go?
We gaze around in vain.
Though pleasure's fairy lute be strung,
And mirth's enchanting lay be sung,
We dare not trust the strain.
You have the words of endless life;
You give victory in the strife–
In life, in death, alike we flee,
O Savior of the world, to Thee."
We gaze around in vain.
Though pleasure's fairy lute be strung,
And mirth's enchanting lay be sung,
We dare not trust the strain.
You have the words of endless life;
You give victory in the strife–
In life, in death, alike we flee,
O Savior of the world, to Thee."
And gracious to every pilgrim is the assurance, that through this solitary entrance all are warranted and all are welcome; no moat or iron gateway to prevent reaching direct the open portal. Thousands have entered in and been saved, and yet there is room.
Other hospices of the world are restricted to privileged classes--the favored few. Not so here. "If ANY man." The sun and the light of heaven are not more free than the offer of salvation. The King has flung wide the gates to the most fainting and toil-worn. No flaming sword of cherubim bars the way. No adversary can obscure or erase the motto and superscription on its portico--"Behold, I have set before you an open door, and no man can shut it."
O God, I come, weary and heavy laden, to this sheltering Refuge. If, until now, I have been a stranger to safety and peace, let me hear Your voice, and let faith accept the offer--"Come in, you blessed of the Lord, why do you stand outside?" "Enter in and be saved." The invitation and the promise have lost none of their divine efficacy and gracious music since they were first uttered. There is no other call so reliable; there is no other security so strong. There is no such "finality" in any other of earth's utterances. Time writes its wrinkles all around. What seems most enduring is subject to flux, vacillation, disintegration, decay. The globe itself, as in long past epochs, so even now, is subjected to geological and climatic variations--inappreciably, but none the less surely, to strange alternations of heat and cold. The apparently most stable things are not stable. "The world goes spinning down the ringing grooves of change." The old "hearts of oak," Britain's pride, have given way to iron-sheathed leviathans with their sleeping thunders. The mechanical agencies and triumphs of modern discovery may possibly, before a few decades elapse, have to abdicate in favor of other kingly forces and motive powers, some new dynamics hidden in nature's laboratory.
"Our little systems have their day–
They have their day, and cease to be."
They have their day, and cease to be."
But while other gates of brass may be broken, other bars of iron wrenched asunder, there can be no change in the portals of the Gospel Hospice. He who is Himself the Entrance Gate, and who stands holding it in His hand, who opens and no man shuts, whose unwearied invitation is "Knock, and it shall be opened," is "Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and today, and forever."
"Open to me the gates of righteousness--I will go into them, and I will praise the Lord!"
Take me to the fold, is the inarticulate cry of the wanderer of the flock. Take me to the ark, is the inarticulate longing of the dove, as, conscious of its homelessness, with weary wing and wailing cry it roams the wilderness of waters. Take me to the Hospice-gate, is the yearning of the belated traveler battling with blinding hurricane of hail or snow. Take me home, take me to my father, is the plaintive monotone of the child that has lost its way in the noisy thoroughfare, unheeded by the passers-by.
Humanity has ever borne attestation to this soul restlessness--that the world at its best, with its glittering prizes, glowing visions, and winged ambitions, cannot satisfy. But HE can satisfy; He does satisfy. "And He said unto them, Did you lack anything? And they answered, nothing" (Luke 22:35). How many can joyfully appropriate the words of Bunyan in his great allegory, "When I came at the gate that is at the head of the way, the Lord of that place did entertain me freely, and gave me such things that were necessary for my journey, and bid me hope to the end!"
Many refuges may prove too often refuges of lies, counterfeits, figures of the true. But shielded, guarded, shepherded by Christ, safe in His keeping--safe within the wicket-gate of the Fold and the portals of the Pilgrim-Hospice, may I be able in reposeful confidence to say– "My flesh and my heart fails--but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion forever."
"This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12
THE CHAMBER CALLED PEACE
"Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."
"Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you--not as the world gives, give I unto you." John 14:27
No diviner or more soothing music than this--the great lullaby of lullabies.
What a Hospice the words must have been for those to whom they were first addressed! The pilgrim apostles, laboring and heavy laden, were about to be overtaken by whelming tempest. Thunder clouds they had little anticipated were at the moment gathering ominously around them. In that valley of the shadow of death they were entering there was no blue opening, no rift in the sky. Their best Friend, as they had been forewarned, was soon to be removed. The voice would soon no longer be heard which was used to say in seasons of depression and sadness, "Come apart into a desert place and rest awhile." They would be left alone to buffet the storm.
But, before the valley-gloom is encountered, the gracious Rest-Giver, in a divine, spiritual sense, utters the conventional greeting--so well known to all Orientals, and specially the Jews--Peace! "Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you."
It was a true Hos-peace, "a House of Peace," whose gates He was opening to them. He who came to give peace on earth welcomes the weary ones in. The customary Jewish salutation conveyed little meaning. It had degenerated into mere formal parlance--no more. "Mine," says Christ, "My promised gift, is no mere verbal form of expression, but a reality."
And, though first spoken to the disciples, it was a farewell promise--a parting legacy for all--for you and for me. Death-bed sayings are always affecting and sacredly treasured. Here is a keepsake intended for the Church and for believers of every age; all the more precious because uttered within shadow of Gethsemane.
The walls of this Gospel Hospice are built of peace of Christ's own procuring--"peace through the blood of His cross." The pilgrim who reaches the threshold of "the chamber called peace, whose windows open to the sunrising," is safe, restful, secure, happy.
"All my favorite passages in the Holy Scriptures," says one of the greatest of our poets in the days of her simplest devotion (Mrs. Barrett Browning), "are those which promise and express peace--such as, 'The Lord of peace, Himself give you peace always and by all means;' 'My peace I give unto you--not as the world gives give I;' and, 'He gives His beloved sleep.' They strike upon the disturbed earth with such a foreignness of heavenly music." The last of these she makes the refrain in the most familiar of her verses–
"His dews drop mutely on the hill,
His cloud above it saileth still–
More softly than the dew is shed,
Or cloud is floated overhead,
He gives His beloved sleep."
"His dews drop mutely on the hill,
His cloud above it saileth still–
More softly than the dew is shed,
Or cloud is floated overhead,
He gives His beloved sleep."
"O Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, grant me Your peace!" Your peace is "not as the world gives." The world's rest, the rest of creature comforts and external blessings, is fitful, uncertain, unstable--ours today, gone tomorrow. Often its greeting is, "Peace, peace, when there is no peace."
And yet, if it be not an apparent paradox, "not as the world gives" implies another, almost opposite characteristic; and the thought ought to be one of comfort to many. Let none, in the pursuit of peace, be downcast or discouraged by reason of harassment, mental and moral discords and disharmonies. These are often preludes to truest cadence. If I might venture to expand the thought and illustration of a gifted writer (Professor Elmslie, "Memoir and Sermons," page 291), the world's peace is often not worth the having, just because it takes the shape of an easy-going quiescence--no more. It is alike artificial and superficial. The peace of Christ, on the other hand, that which is best and noblest, frequently comes after conflict and out of conflict. It is a peace which has its travail and birth-pangs--a peace which at times has its pedigree in defeat, baffling enigma, mysterious discipline, bewildering doubt, barely vanquished temptation. Two of the small but beautiful lakes among the Allan hills, near Rome, so peaceful and serene, with myrtle and olive trees mirrored in the quiet waters, occupy the craters of extinct volcanoes. Their cradles of rest were rocked by unrest. First, struggle, upheaval--forces of terror and destruction, a seething caldron, then peace. First, wild convulsion and paroxysm; this followed by nature's loveliest pictures and features of repose--"quiet waters," the song of nightingales in the adjacent woods, trails of vine, a cascade of wild roses, a golden canopy of moss and lichen on the surrounding rocks.
"Not as the world gives," says the great Peace-Giver. "I have chosen you in the furnace [the crater] of affliction." "After you have suffered awhile, establish, strengthen, settle you." "These are those who have come out of Great Tribulation."
Yet, true as this often is, it is equally true that when once the boon of this unworldly peace is secured, how reliable and permanent it is! "The peace of God which passes all understanding, shall keep [as in a stronghold or Hospice] your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus." "Keep;" it is the guarantee of security. The promised gift is alike present and future--a peace which the world cannot give, and which the world cannot take away; peace ringing its silver bells in unlikeliest places--in peasant hut and lonely garret, and amid hum of busiest industry, yes, too, even amid uncongenial and repelling environments; peace in joy, peace in sorrow; peace in the varied vicissitudes of life; peace, above all, in the solemn hour when the spirit is about to wing its arrowy flight to the Great Beyond. Peace floods the death-chamber with its own mellowed celestial radiance. The Hospice catches the earliest sunbeam, and is gilded with the last evening ray.
"These things have I spoken unto you, that in Me you might have peace."
"This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12
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