Following Judah's Lion

Learn of Him

Matt.11:27-30 - All things are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.
28 Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
29 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.
30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

There it is. Man’s soul is continually restless. He strives for contentment with different levels of earthly success. He exercises and takes vitamins in order to feel good and elongate his earthly life. He fills his mind with knowledge about things in order to fell superior and enhance his ability to make money. He marries and then marries again. He needs new clothes when the old ones no longer excite him, and new cars when his eye catches the commercial. Man is relentless in his restless quest to find happiness and contentment.

But the Lord Jesus is the source and destination of all true and eternal rest and contentment. Once a sinner has come to know Christ as Savior he ceases his hunt for eternal life. It is well for us to remember that Jesus was and is the Creator of the universe since many times the church assumes it was the Father, and that although Jesus is still God, that his divinity is somehow subordinate to the Father. That is simply not true.

Jesus is all that a man needs. That is correct, and if we as believers would ever come to fully embrace that truth we could be stripped of this world completely. Do we not labor here on earth? And by “labor” Jesus is not referring to making a living, He means do we live with burdens? The church is full of people who carry emotional, mental, and spiritual burdens constantly. And all of it stems from things upon this earth.

I have never met a believer who carries a burden because he wonders about the specifics concerning heaven. No one worries about Jesus. No one wrings their hands over the Father or the Spirit. They worry about earthly and temporal things. But Jesus clearly teaches us that those burdens can and should be removed by learning and meditating upon Him. This is no positive thinking technique or twelve step program, this is what it means to be a believing follower of the Lord Jesus.

Jesus has evolved into a heaven ticket and not the source of all life and the Lord of every believer. Should we not approach everything with prayer and supplication as the Word directs us? The words “as He is so are we in this world” should be a vibrant challenge each and every day. And this challenge goes far beyond just being respectful and kind to everyone. To walk “in His steps” is a decisive and fundamental alteration of every single area of our lives. Nothing can be immune from a complete inventory that juxtaposes the Word upon our lives and joyfully and dutifully removes all that is outside the will of God.

And although that sounds very close to legalism, it is in fact the rest for which we search. Oh can we not see it? Can our hearts not burn within us with conviction because we have embraced a life that does not diligently seek Him? I know, it sounds so unsophisticated and simplistic, but in reality it is the pinnacle of absolute truth. The Person of Jesus, Yeshua Hamashiach, is the embodiment of all truth and He is the giver and sustainer of all life. And Jesus is the exclusive way to eternal life for all sinners, but after a sinner has been led to Christ and been born again by God’s Holy Spirit, the journey has just begun.

To know Jesus initially at the moment of your conversion is wonderful and exceedingly glorious, but there are caverns of expansive glory awaiting that believer who truly and passionately embarks upon a journey to know this Jesus.

Eph.1:17 - That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him:

Oh to be filled with the knowledge and the revelation of Him! Can we not see doctrine in its true light? Doctrine is not an end in and of itself, but it is the spiritual canvas upon which the Spirit reveals a living portrait of the Lord Jesus and seeks to burn that image upon our very souls. Oh to know Him with such a reality that we must contain our exuberance lest we be seen as mentally unstable. Too often we have to contain our flesh lest we succumb to sin, but how often does the knowledge of Him control our lives with such force that we are almost unable to function here on earth? Even though people mean it as a slight, I would love to meet the believer who is “too heavenly minded to be any earthly good”. I’ve yet to meet that guy.

The divine exhortation is “learn of Me”. Now that would be quite narcissistic if it came from a man. But his exhortation came - and comes - from the very lips of the Creator God whose name is Jesus. But why has the church assumed that when we have come to know the basic narrative of Christ, born in Bethlehem - raised in Nazareth, etc., that we now know Him fully? And not only has Christ invited us to explore His majesty and his colossal glory, but He has sent the Spirit to guide and empower us in that loftiest of all endeavors.

So often we seek rest and comfort in things and in man. But in 37 years of knowing Christ I can say without reservation that nothing compares with the comfort of Christ through the Spirit.

Is.26:3-4 - Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee.
4 Trust ye in the LORD for ever: for in the LORD JEHOVAH is everlasting strength:

And oh the unbridled freedom that is experienced only in Him. How sorry I feel for those who believe that earthly freedom is the pinnacle of personal liberty when in fact it is a counterfeit. Christ alone offers eternal freedom, and when He becomes your Lord you can finally breathe in the fullness of eternal freedom and life. What can separate us from that freedom and from that love?

Rom.8:35-39 - Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
36 As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.
37 Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.
38 For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,
39 Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

You desire homeland security? There it is, my friends. That kind of security cannot be purchased or protected by bombs and bullets. This security comes only through Jesus Christ, and the more we learn of Him the more we experience that security. And what kind of threat can our enemies present to us when we are called to love them? Why do we worry when even death is a reward? Has Christ ever so permeated your mind that every single molecule of your being was saturated with rest and peace? If in a million years from now I will be with Christ, what can anything or anyone do to me today that can alter that truth?

We have used the verses in Matthew 11 as evangelism. But they should be used as exhortation and correction to us as well. How can we claim to be Christians and followers of Christ when He Himself is on the back burner of our teachings and in our lives? And when Jesus exhorts us to “learn of Him” He isn’t speaking of learning all the facts about Him and then organizing them into a neat doctrinal theology. The doctrine about Jesus is foundational, but to know Him must be a passionate journey that ventures beyond the bounds of systematic theology and escapes the clutches of the modern ecclesiastical norm.

Can Christ be known personally and with such intimacy that He revolutionizes your very being - daily? And if so, do you desire to know Him at that depth, and is your commitment to that desire so unyielding that it is the primary obsession in your life?

Read this exhortation.