Rest

Ray Ortlund post:  Just as we are

“Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Matthew 11:28

“One is struck with the personality of this text.  There are two persons in it, ‘you’ and ‘me.’ . . . Jesus says, ‘Come to me, not to anybody else but to me.’  He does not say, ‘Come to hear a sermon about me’ but ‘Come to me, to my work and person.’  You will observe that no one is put between you and Christ. . . . Come to Jesus directly, even to Jesus himself.  You do want a mediator between yourselves and God, but you do not want a mediator between yourselves and Jesus. . . . To him we may look at once, with unveiled face, guilty as we are.  To him we may come, just as we are, without anyone to recommend us or plead for us or make a bridge for us to Jesus. . . . You, as you are, are to come to Christ as he is, and the promise is that on your coming to him he will give you rest.  That is the assurance of Jesus himself, and there is no deception in it. . . . You see there are two persons.  Let everybody else vanish, and let these two be left alone, to transact heavenly business with each other.”

C. H. Spurgeon, The Treasury of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, 1950), I:171.