How many weary and over-burdened people came to Jesus – the lepers, the woman bleeding, the woman begging for her daughter, the centurion, the widow whose son had died, blind Bartemeus, and so, so many others, all carrying too much and all reaching out to God – help me. And he always did. He always does.

Come to me, if you are tired.

Tiredness is not always about needing to sleep; often it’s about carrying too much, sometimes carrying the things we don’t need to carry. Things we were not made to carry.

Many of us are feeling tired – many of us need rest;

You will have heard of famous people who, according to legend at least, barely slept. —Thomas Edison never slept, but took naps through the day and night. Winston Churchill used to try to take a rest during the darkest days of the London blitz because he knew he needed his energy. And Margaret Thatcher famously got by on four hours a night.

But maybe they shouldn’t be our role models –

There is also a legend about John the Apostle. One day someone found him playing with a tame partridge and criticized him for not being at work. His answer was, “The bow that is always at full stretch will soon cease to shoot straight.”

We need to rest. We need rest for our bodies, our minds, for our spirit. For our souls.

God is offering us deep and real rest, but in a 24-7 culture when we most need it, many of us re too busy  to hear it.

Some of us are tired  because we are getting old, the body has put in plenty of hours, and it wants to slow down, take its time, and it tells us so in every way it can. If we listen to our body and go at its pace; it’s good; if we don’t, whatever age we are, the result is exhaustion.

Some of us feel tired because we simply do too much – by choice or by necessity.

Ironic really, because were we not told that technology would mean we’d all end up working much less and have lots of leisure time on our hands! In reality, smart phones mean we’re always available, always able to check emails, and of course everything costs so much more too. Food is going up, mortgages and rent – the truth is that we as a community have never had more and yet we’ve never been working so hard! The treadmill is a reality for many.

So some of us are tired because we are growing older

Some of us are tired from feeling overworked.

Some of us are probably just feeling spiritually and emotionally drained, and in many ways that is the toughest form of exhaustion to deal with.

When your body is tired and you can get yourself a good night’s sleep you generally wake up feeling a lot better.  But when you are exhausted in your spirit, you go to bed tired and you wake up tired, and sometimes it can be very hard to muster up enough energy to make it through the day.

Some of us struggle with the old ‘black dog’ (as Winston Churchill used to term his depression).

Many great saints from Martin Luther to Mother Theresa have been ‘clinically depressed’ (as we now term it).

I know people who suffer from depression – that feeling of being dragged down, to a point where you can barely breathe, barely lift your head, and you can’t seem to go forwards or backwards. The black dog follows you. Some are Christian and they say, and I agree with them, that the idea that having a relationship with Jesus is something that should always fill you with constant joy is not helpful. It can just add to the burden.

Jesus was not someone who was constantly jolly so why should we expect to be? Jesus wept! And God knows, Jesus rested. He says to us, as he said to his disciples when they hadn’t eaten, in Mark 6,  come away with me, and have a rest. Have a rest.

We all need rest.

The thing about over-work in particular is that it can be necessary but it can too be a habit.

Let me illustrate this from my own experience. I became a single mum when my children were twelve, eight, and two. I had no family around at all and the sense of personal responsibility for these three little lives was completely over-whelming. I felt that if something that needed doing didn’t get done by me, it wouldn’t get done – if I didn’t earn money, we would have no food, if I didn’t remember to pay the bills, there would be no heating; if I didn’t sit up all night with a sick child, who would; if I didn’t create the perfect magical Christmas, their childhood would be like some bleak Dickensian novel. Much of that was not really true, but I thought it was, and so the sense of needing to be juggling plates all the time  became quite overwhelming. It was necessary – these things did need to be done.

But it became too a habit of mind. If I stopped, the world might stop turning. I don’t apologise for over working when my children needed me, but the thing is, by the time they didn’t need me, and they are now adults, I had lost the ability to stop over-working. It was a mind-set. My mind was set.

When overwork is a habit, or caused by a wilful desire to be in control, to be needed, it can become quite idolatrous.  Tom Wright wrote an amazing book called Virtue Reborn – it speaks of how Christian character, or virtue, is formed by habits – we practice charity until it becomes part of our being, so too prayer, or humility or any Christian virtue.  Not one of us is born a saint.  But vices can also become habitual – and unnecessary over-work is one of them. When we get our sense of self-worth or idea of meaning or purpose, our identity,  from our work we can forget that we are not first and foremost, a hairdresser, or a doctor, or a florist, or a priest; we are first and foremost a child of God – when  work becomes who we are, rather than merely what we do, then it is a problem. It becomes idolatrous.

We can rest and God calls us to rest.

Come unto me all who are weary

For my yoke is light. But how is this helpful?

A ‘yoke’, as you probably know, is something you put around an animal’s neck to help it drag along a plough or some similar weight.

Yoke here in this passage refers to the sometimes heavy burden of the law placed on people by the Pharisees and the Sadducees. In  Jesus’ day every Rabbi had his disciples – his followers; and following their teaching was the yoke they carried. It was determined by their teaching; their take on Mosaic law. Don’t pick corn on the sabbath for example, or speak to women.

My yoke is light, and I share it with you, carry it with you.

Leave your burden with God; and rest, knowing he is carrying you. Because if God is carrying our burdens with us, then sometimes we can afford to put them down. The world won’t stop turning. Note to self.

God won’t let go.

When we can’t hold him, he still holds onto us;

When  we are too tired to carry the world on our backs, as we think we should, he says – don’t worry, I have done the saviour of the world bit, you don’t need to.

When we feel over-burdened he says put those burdens down, give them to me, you’re carrying the wrong stuff and you were never made to carry it on your own anyway.

Have a rest. Take time out. You’re not indispensable.

Come unto me, all that are weary and heavy laden.

Matthew 11: 25-29 NIV – The Father Revealed in the Son – At – Bible Gateway