Last blog I placed a good deal of Meyer’s sermon “God’s Rest” in the blog. Some have not heard of F. B. Meyer. He was born in 1847, and died in 1929. I would encourage you to read about this remarkable man of God. He was a man of “strong gentleness.” He was graduated from Regent’s Park College in 1869 and moved to New York in 1872, where he became pastor of the Priory Street Baptist Chapel. Two years later D. L. Moody and Ira Sankey ministered there. The meetings did not begin too successfully. But at one of the prayer meetings Meyer heard Moody preach on the Holy Spirit. He was so convicted that he spent the next two days wrestling with God. When he returned to the prayer meeting, he testified that God had met him and given him victory; that for two years he had preached without any special blessing. He said, “I was just beating the air.” This marked the change in Meyer’s life. In a future blog, I will share Meyer’s record of the experience.
For this week, I continue Meyer’s message “God’s Rest.”
“I will not speak now about the rest He gives—rest from the guilt of sin, rest from its penalty, rest from conviction, rest from an accusing conscience, rest from the dread and the wrath of God. That rest He gave you, beloved, when you knelt years ago at the cross-foot, and from those parched lips the dying Christ, your priest and intercessor, gave rest unto your soul, and being justified by faith you had peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
I will not speak of this, but of something deeper, because I find that there are tens of thousands of Christians who have got the first rest, but have not got the second. They could look death in the face without wavering, but they cannot look panic, disaster, bereavement, pain or trial in the face without disquiet.
“You shall find rest,” but you must look for it. I want to show you were to find it, and how; in three ways, which are one, for they converge in one.
First, You must take His yoke.“Now, at first sight it appears ridiculous that those who labor and are heavy laden should find rest by having the imposition of a new yoke or burden, however light. He says, “My yoke is easy, My burden is light.” But then, even an easy yoke with a light burden imposed on laboring and weary souls would surely not give them rest. How can it be? Ah, listen! It is not a yoke that Jesus imposes, but it is the yoke that He Himself carried, and a yoke by the very nature of it includes two. He says then—standing beneath a yoke—to you, weary soul: “Come hither and share My yoke with me, and we will pull the plow together through the long furrow of life.”
I have been told that there are farms in the West so large that you may start a furrow in the morning and pursue it all day, and only finish it at night, returning the next day. Whether that be true of not I am not here to say, but it will serve my purpose. One day I was at Northfield, Mr. Moody took me to Mount Hermon school. He had a yoke of beautiful white oxen, and he told me that when one of these oxen was being yoked in, if the other happened to be on the far side of the farmstead it would come trotting up and stand beside the other until it was yoked in also. Jesus stands today with the yoke upon His shoulder, and He calls to each one, and says:
“Come and share My yoke, and let us plow together the long furrow of your life. I will be a true yokefellow to you. The burden shall be on Me. Only keep step with Me, and you shall find rest to your soul.”
It was reading this part of the message that caused me to stop and weep. For I had been attempting to plow alone. It had seemed that no one was yoked with me pulling the same direction.
First we must be yoked with Christ and allow him to bear the burden. But beyond that, we must be sure that staff, deacons, and leaders are yoked together plowing the same direction. Do we share the yoke?
More of Meyer’s sermon, “God’s Rest,” later.
