Looking For Rest? It’s Found in a Four-Letter Word.

I once wrote a twenty-word “fast fact” for a corporate report that got slapped with a 200-word disclaimer by the legal team. Imagine, twenty words saddled with ten times their weight in unwieldly corporate claptrap—connected through an asterisk and buried in 8-point type.

Makes me think.

I’m so glad Jesus didn’t complicate things. He just put His offer out there, didn’t He? “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”

Here it is, He says.

Do you want it? 

No disclaimers, asterisks, or 8-point type. Just come.

When people disagreed with Him or told Him to leave, Jesus didn’t incite cancel culture. He just kind of canceled culture.

He held his longest one-on-one conversation with an adulterous woman of a reviled race. He eviscerated the Old Testament limit of forgiving three times with crazy talk about seventy times seven. He aimed grace at sinners during questionable dinners. And He rebuked elitists who made God’s law cumbersome and heavy—those who slapped 200-word disclaimers on twenty-word fast facts.

He craned His neck above culture to illuminate a better way. (In fact, His followers then were known simply as people of the Way.) Today, He still cuts through the claptrap with an invitation as longed-for as it is lovely. 

And He does it in sixteen words.

~ Matthew 11:28

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