In the little word "come" is folded up the whole morality of the sentence, the very ethics of the Gospel.
I. "Come unto Me;" wherefore the all-important question is, How are we to come? We hear the call, we kindle into fervour at the Divine promise; but what are we to do? how are we to come? Faith is the hand that toucheth the hem of our Saviour's garment; or faith is the tongue which responds to the invitation, and saith, Lord, I come; faith is that which appropriates the merits of our Lord, and secures, through His righteousness, our justification. But this is not the coming. The coming is something additional to this. We come to the Lord whenever (aware that we can only be made righteous through the sanctifying influences of His Holy Spirit, and seeking for pardon and grace, for life and light) we exert ourselves to break off habits of sin; and a further step we take when saying, Lord, be merciful to me a sinner. We endeavour deliberately to form habits of good. Step by step we draw nearer and more near unto the Lord, as we advance from one degree of holiness to another.
II. Exertion on our part is implied through the whole Christian scheme. We are regenerated, renovated, sanctified, by the Spirit of Christ; but to receive that gift we must come by an endeavour to remove all those impediments to grace which His all-searching eye may detect in our moral nature, to eradicate whatever there may be in us of evil, and to cultivate whatever of good the Holy Ghost may have already imparted to the soul.
W. F. Hook, Parish Sermons,p. 294.
Notice:
I. That Christ has what He promises to give. Rest was the boon which the wandering Jew coveted, and which every wandering man covets now, but not rest from activity. The rest which we want is the rest of being fitted for our sphere. Give us this, and we can say, "Return, my soul, unto thy rest." We can do without all our happiness if we have this repose of inward faculty, and if we can retire from the world into ourselves, and find ourselves redeemed in God, and to be the temples of the Holy Ghost. (1) We are restless because our outward condition is not such as we deem compatible with our nature and temperament. Our deepest discontent, however, is not because there is a winter without, with many storms and shrivelling winds, but because there are wrong and frailty within. Christ was at rest with His own conscience. Men found no fault with Him; He found no fault with Himself. (2) Our unrest is deepened by our suspicions, if not by our certainties, of something beyond and above our life. Christ was strangely calm as He looked up and beyond, whether to the past or to the future. He was at rest in rest, at rest in action, and at rest in death, at rest with himself and with God.
II. He can give this rest under the conditions He imposes. His conditions are comprised in coming to Him, taking His yoke, and learning of Him. They are nothing more, when divested of figure, than that men are to submit trustfully to whatever influence He has to exert on them. The highest influence which is ever experienced in life is the influence of that indefinable thing called character. The unknown thing in character is being, life, consciousness; and we come to this at last, that it is by life that our life is moved and moulded. We find rest unto our souls through learning of Christ, and by being baptized into His great soul in our communion with Him. He will perform the offices of a Divine friend by us, and through His friendship we enter into the rest that remaineth for the people of God; and as we enter into the "peace of God, which passeth all understanding," we learn how, by the elevation of our consciousness, to pardon ourselves, and to relinquish our old because we need our hands to take the new.
J. O. Davies, Sunrise on the Soul,p. 211.
I. To come to Christ is to approach Him in the exercise of faith, for deliverance from sin and condemnation.
II. Coining to Christ has regard to the future as well as to the past. He who comes to Christ truly comes to be Christ's. To come to Christ is not only to trust Him to deliver us from the consequences of our past transgressions; it is also, in all the future, to submit ourselves to His control and government. Christ Himself teaches this in our text, "Take My yoke upon you." From the earliest ages the yoke has been the instrument by which oxen have been subjected to man, and compelled to toil in his service; and hence it has always been the symbol of the subjection into which men are sometimes brought to their fellowmen. So that what Christ invites and commands us to do is to submit ourselves absolutely to Him.
III. Whoever comes to Christ truly comes to be made like Christ. It is our nature to imitate. Every man has some model whom He strives to resemble. Now Christ says to us, "Make Me your model; strive to be like Me; become, like Me, meek and lowly in heart."
R. A. Bertram, Christian World Pulpit,vol. vii., p. 248.
References: Matthew 11:28-30. S. Leathes, Truth and Life,p. 219; Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. v., No. 265; vol. xvii., No. 969; vol. xxii., No. 1322; Ibid., My Sermon Notes: Gospels and Acts,p. 36; H. W. Beecher, Plymouth Pulpit Sermons,10th series, p. 141; Ibid., Christian World Pulpit,vol. x., p. 309; vol. xii., p. 220; E. Johnson, Ibid.,vol. xv., p. 264; T. M. Morris, Ibid.,vol. xx., p. 309; H. Platten, Ibid.,vol. xxxi., p. 273; A. M. Mackay, Ibid.,vol. xxxii., p. 134; Fergus Ferguson, Ibid.,p. 329; Preacher's Monthly,vol. i., p. 115; G. Matheson, Expositor,1st series, vol. xi., p. 101; C. Girdlestone, Twenty Parochial Sermons,2nd series, p. 163.