'Come unto Me ... Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me.' These two
things are not the same. 'Coming unto Me,' as is quite plain to the
most superficial observation, is the first step in the approach to a
companionship, which companionship is afterwards perfected and kept
up by obedience and imitation. The 'coming' is an initial act which
makes a man Christ's companion. And the 'Take My yoke upon you, and
learn of Me,' is the continuous act by which that companionship is
manifested and preserved. So that in these words, which come so
familiarly to most of our memories that they have almost ceased to
present a sharp meaning, there is not only a merciful summons to the
initial act, but a description of the continual life of which that
act is the introduction.
And now, to put that into simpler words, when Jesus Christ says
'Come unto Me,' He Himself has taught us what is His inmost meaning
in that invitation, by another word of His: 'He that cometh unto Me
shall never hunger, and he that believeth on Me shall never thirst';
where the parallelism of the clauses teaches us that to come to
Christ is simply to put our trust in Him. There is in faith a true
movement of the whole soul towards the Master. I think that this
metaphor teaches us a great deal more about that faith that we are
always talking about in the pulpit, and which, I am afraid, many of
our congregations do not very distinctly understand, than many a
book of theology does. To 'come to Him' implies, distinctly, that
He, and no mere theological dogma, however precious and clear, is
the Object on which faith rests.
And, therefore, if Christ, and not merely a doctrinal truth about
Christ, be the Object of our faith, then it is very clear that
faith, which grasps a Person, must be something more than the mere
act of the understanding which assents to a truth. And what more is
it? How is it possible for one person to lay hold of and to come to
another? By trust and love, and by these alone. These be the bonds
that bind men together. Mere intellectual consent may be sufficient
to fasten a man to a dogma, but there must be will and heart at work
to bind a man to a person; and if it be Christ and not a theology,
to which we come by our faith, then it must be with something more
than our brains that we grasp Him and draw near to Him. That is to
say, your will is engaged in your confidence. Trust Him as you trust
one another, only with the difference befitting a trust directed to
an absolute and perfect object of trust, and not to a poor, variable
human heart. Trust Him as you trust one another. Then, just as
husband and wife, parent and child, friend and friend, pass through
all intervening hindrances and come together when they trust and
love, so you come closer to Christ as the very soul of your soul by
an inward real union, than you do even to your dear ones, if you
grapple Him to your heart with the hoops of steel, which, by simple
trust in Him, the Divine Redeemer forges for us. 'Come unto Me,'
being translated out of metaphor into fact, is simply 'Believe on
the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.'
And still further, we have here, not only the initial act by which
companionship and union with Jesus Christ is brought about, but the
continual course by which it is kept up, and by which it is
manifested. The faith which saves a man's soul is not all which is
required for a Christian life. 'Take My yoke upon you, and _learn
of Me_.' The yoke is that which, laid on the broad forehead or
the thick neck of the ox, has attached to it the cords which are
bound to the burden that the animal draws. The burden, then, which
Christ gives to His servants to pull, is a metaphor for the specific
duties which He enjoins upon them to perform; and the yoke by which
they are fastened to their burdens, 'obliged' to their duties, is
His authority, So to 'take His yoke' upon us is to submit our wills
to His authority. Therefore this further call is addressed to all
those who have come to Him, feeling their weakness and their need
and their sinfulness, and have found in Him a Saviour who has made
them restful and glad; and it bids them live in the deepest
submission of will to Him, in joyful obedience, in constant service;
and, above all, in the daily imitation of the Master.
You must put both these commandments together before you get
Christ's will for His children completely expressed. There are some
of you who think that Christianity is only a means by which you may
escape the penalty of your sins; and you are ready enough, or fancy
yourselves so, to listen when He says, 'Come to Me that you may be
pardoned,' but you are not so ready to listen to what He says
afterwards, when He calls upon you to take His yoke upon you, to
obey Him, to serve Him, and above all to copy Him. And I beseech you
to remember that if you go and part these two halves from one
another, as many people do, some of them bearing away the one half
and some the other, you have got a maimed Gospel; in the one case a
foundation without a building, and in the other case a building
without a foundation. The people who say that Christ's call to the
world is 'Come unto Me,' and whose Christianity and whose Gospel is
only a proclamation of indulgence and pardon for past sin, have laid
hold of half of the truth. The people who say that Christ's call is
'Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me,' and that Christianity is a
proclamation of the duty of pure living after the pattern of Jesus
Christ our great Example, have laid hold of the other half of the
truth. And both halves bleed themselves away and die, being torn
asunder; put them together, and each has power.
That separation is one reason why so many Christian men and women
are such poor Christians as they are--having so little real
religion, and consequently so little real joy. I could lay my
fingers upon many men, professing Christians--I do not say whether
in this church or in other churches--whose whole life shows that
they do not understand that Jesus Christ has a twofold summons to
His servants; and that it is of no avail once, long ago, to have
come, or to think that you have come, to Him to get pardon, unless
day by day you are keeping beside Him, doing His commandments, and
copying His sweet and blessed example.