October 8, 2009 THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF CHRIST

Matthew 11:28 - Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.
So simple and yet so difficult – Christ calls us simply to come. We don’t need to prepare, we don’t need to dress up, put on makeup or vacuum the dog hair off the couch. We just need to come to him, transparent and open to the leading of the Holy Spirit. Yet so often we just won’t. We cling to our struggles and miseries, seemingly unwilling to let them go. Chambers says:
In every degree in which you are not real, you will dispute rather than come, you will quibble rather than come, you will go through sorrow rather than come, you will do anything rather than come the last lap of unutterable foolishness – “Just as I am.” As long as you have the tiniest bit of spiritual impertinence, it will always reveal itself in the fact that you are expecting God to tell you to do a big thing, and all He is telling you to do is to “come.”
It is a bit like a woman in a bad relationship. She knows it is terrible, but she knows it. She knows what to expect there. She knows what it is and how it goes. To abandon it is to seek the unknown - sometimes the known misery is somehow more palatable than the unknown mystery. “What if I end up all alone?” she wonders. And in contemplating changing my life and living out my faith, sometimes I’ve wondered “What if I end up all alone?” My husband once said “I never want to be the guy who when I walk up to the group, everyone else stops talking” and admittedly, I’ve never wanted that either. There are always “reasons” we can stay the course we’ve chosen apart from Christ: fear, pride, selfishness, but the truth is that we will never find what we are looking for until we answer that call to come – simply come to Christ and he will give you rest.
“Come unto Me.” When you hear those words you will know that something must happen in you before you can come. The Holy Spirit will show you what you have to do, anything at all that will put the axe at the root of the thing which is preventing you from getting through.
So what is it that holds us back from coming to Christ? It isn’t just the “unsaved” that need to answer this question. Even as believers, many times we hold back from truly submitting to Christ – we come to Him, but only so far. We try to give “just enough,” to do “just enough,” but if we seek the peace and rest Christ offers, “just enough” is everything we have and are. The Holy Spirit will show us what we are clinging to, and sometimes we want to ignore it and pretend we don’t sense what it is, but when we are honest with ourselves, we always know what it is that is holding us back, and until we are willing to “put the axe at the root of the thing” we won’t experience the fullness of our relationship with God. Chambers closes saying:
…God has stood with outstretched hands not only to take you, but for you to take Him. Think of the invincible, unconquerable, unwearying patience of Jesus – “Come unto Me.”
God never gives up on us. Jesus never turns His back and says “Too Late!” He waits for us, with outstretched arms, offering all He is for all we are. There is nothing we have that is more precious than what He is offering us – nothing we cling to in this world even comes close to what He offers us in exchange. The peace and rest of Christ awaits us if we will simply answer His call “come to Me.”