Matthew 11:28-29
Scripture Explained · Pairs with New Beginnings
“Come to me, all you who labor and are heavily burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart; and you will find rest for your souls.”
Matthew 11:28-29 · World English Bible
What it meant then
Most of the people crowding around Jesus to hear this were tired in a literal sense: day laborers, debtors, the sick, people fined or shamed for failing to keep every point of religious law they’d been handed. A “yoke” was a wooden crossbar binding two oxen for plowing, and by extension a common rabbinic image for the discipline of following a teacher, the “yoke of the Torah,” the “yoke of the commandments.”
Jesus was speaking into a season of mounting opposition from the religious leaders of His day, and He doesn’t tell this tired crowd to set the yoke down altogether. He offers His own in its place, one He calls easy, attached to a teacher who is gentle and humble in heart. For people used to being measured and found wanting, a yoke that was still a yoke, but light, carried by a teacher who wouldn’t grind them down, was the actual offer.
What Hudson Taylor wrote
Pairs with
This verse is one of the cards in the New Beginnings Scripture Card set, and pairs with the New Beginnings journal.
Taylor described the turning point of his spiritual life as the discovery that rest was something to receive, not achieve: “Abiding, not striving nor struggling; looking off unto Him; trusting Him for present power.”
“It was resting in Jesus now, and letting Him do the work — which makes all the difference.”
Hudson Taylor, quoted in Hudson Taylor's Spiritual Secret