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Isaiah 59: Matthew 5: 1-16; Roman 5: 1-5, Scripture Readings.
Texts: "Be careful for nothing; but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God which passeth all understanding shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus." Philippians 4: 6-7.
"Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest, Take my yoke upon you and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Matthew 11: 28-30
This study has to do with results in this world, results of all the causes that have gone before in the series we have just studied. Every one who really thinks knows that there is an absolutely unbroken line of cause and effect running through everything in this world; that things today are the result of things that have gone before and will be the cause of things to follow. And this is no more true of the world itself than of each human life in the world. This applies to your life and mine as well. What we are this moment is the up to date cumulative result of all we have been and are to be.
This is no rationalistic sermon, outlawing God and Christ as great controlling factors in human life, individual and collective. God is the GREAT FIRST CAUSE, first not only in point of time but also in point of importance. He not only made all things but by Him through Christ, at this minute and every minute "all things consist" or hold together. And He is the Great Continuing Cause. But God, in spiritual things, as in physical, works through great unchanging laws, both in the physical and in the spiritual world, are simply God's methods of working.
Every physician knows that men and women transgress every physical law of health. When the inevitable result of illness and impending death are manifest, they send a hurry call for some magic pill that will break this line of cause and effect and cut off the present harvest of past sowings. Precisely so is this in the cure of souls. Men and women go on transgressing spiritual laws and then want a panacea to obviate the results. When a preacher faithfully shows them these great spiritual laws in their outworkings as revealed in Christ and in the sacrifices, they say it is too deep for me, give me some other lesson or present me to Christ as the magic cure. You can get that in the Roman Church reduced down for present use to a magic wafer, but neither Christ or the apostles ever presented salvation in any such a way. On the contrary you have the ringing statement of the Master, "Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap." "A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can an evil tree bring forth good fruit."
Our study today is the Peace offering which might consist of almost anything that was without blemish, from a bullock down. It must be presented freely, rejoicingly. Certain portions of it, the breast and right shoulder was reserved for the food for the Priests. The remainder of it was burned on the burnt offering, with the memorial of the food offering. It was the final one of the progressive series of five offerings and represented the final result so far as this world is concerned. This final result could be arrived at in no other way. Jesus fully experienced the spiritual significance of all these sacrifices and so in Him type met antitype and the divine promise its full realization. Christ, who in His eternal manifestation, instituted these sacrifices to show us the way and in His earthly manifestation entered into peace and rest and joy by this way, and now wants us to see the same way in Him. So He says "I am the way, the Truth and the life, no man cometh unto the Father but by me." He knew that our only spiritual rest and peace and happiness was in God.
Jesus had in His heart a picture of the great toiling, sorrowing, rejoicing, suffering mass of humanity, when He uttered the words of my text: "Come unto me, Take my yoke upon you." The yoke is the symbol not of rest but of work, of service. You place the yoke on the cattle not when you turn them out to rest but when you start the day's work, so this meant peace and rest during service not at the end of the road but here and now. The yoke of Christ, which He found light, and which brought Him rest and peace, is the service He gave, giving His life in the true and fullest realization of all those sacrifices. In other words, "presenting His body a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable unto God," Christ's yoke, which He presents to us as the secret of rest and peace.
Read Matthew 5 and Roman 5, and see if it is not possible that Christ had some secret of rest and peace and joy which the world, even after all these years has not yet learned. One thing we know that the world has not yet learned how to be happy. It has invented safeguards against fire and water, but not against misery and unrest. The whole progress of human knowledge has been along the line of inventions to make toil less wearisome, but the mere gratification of desire cannot furnish rest or peace.
Byron was a man who inherited health, wealth, wonderful ability and a seat in the House of Lords, but he was not contented with his fortunes, he wanted to win more of the world's favors and praise. Perhaps no one during his life has ever found the world more generous of praise than he, and when he wrote the First Canto of "Childe Harold" he said "I awoke one morning and found myself famous", yet we find him writing later such verse as this:
"Count over the joys thy life hath known
Count over the days from sorrow free,
And know whatever thou hast been,
'Tis something better not to be."
And at last, we read that in all his life he could only count eleven happy days.
Abdurer-Rahman III, the Moorish Calif of Spain, during the reign of this Calif the Saracen power rose to its greatest height, that gave us the Alhambra, is said to have only had fourteen happy days in all his life.
Happiness seems to be an exotic if transplanted from some other clime is not adapted to culture here. It would grow luxuriantly in an ideal world, but no amount of money can successfully create an artificial climate for its growth here. But Jesus and Paul both tells us of a joy that grows rooted even in sorrow, and of a peace and rest that triumphs over persecution, sorrow and even over death. It is written "The wicked are as the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt." What is the trouble with the sea at such a time! Its waters are at war with themselves and their surroundings. The waves buffet each other. What a picture of the hopeless conflict of the two natures of the unregenerate man. "The Spirit lusteth against the flesh and the flesh against the Spirit."
Two classes of people; one trying to save its life the other trying to save others, and giving their life, letting it go in service and sacrifice. Instead of happiness being negative, the absence of pain and toil it seems compounded of the things that comes in and neutralizes and glorifies them.
O my brother, the true man or woman has to learn to give his life away, without money and without price. That is the yoke of Christ; the given life. "Whosoever saveth his life shall lose it." Take His yoke upon you. Present your bodies a living sacrifice as Christ did and learn the lesson of the sacrifices, the peace offering burning on the burnt offering with the food offering; then and only then can you find peace and rest.
"And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose."
George E. Fifield
Nothing is clearer than that the Bible teaches that a separation of true Christianity from the false, so-called Christianity will take place prior to Christ’s return to this earth. Some people believe this separation will take place over the day that will be observed as the Sabbath; and, so they go about devoting almost their entire effort to getting people to observe the right day, and necessarily paying little attention to getting people to experience the spiritual meaning of the Sabbath, since they have not had that experience themselves. In other words, they put the sign before the experience signified, just as the later Jews did with the sign of circumcision, and just the opposite from the way in which, it is clearly stated, God gave circumcision to Abraham. This inevitably puts the Sabbath into the Old Covenant, just as the Jews put circumcision there, and teaches the people to seek their righteousness through obedience, instead of seeking to be made righteous by the divine indwelling, so they can truly and spiritually obey.
Salvation is ever a personal, inner transformation of character which can only be wrought out in the individual personally, where he is by the omnipresent Christ of which the incarnate Christ was a manifestation and a revelation. - George Fifield, from the Sermon Steps Back to God (Burnt Offering)