I'm turning this evening to the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 11 and verse 28. The Gospel of Matthew, chapter 11, verse 28, these tremendous words, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." And our subject is Christ's most famous call to the soul. And it is an astonishing call. There is so much that can be said about it. It is a call like no other call. You will never hear a call like this. Of course, it is a call to the soul. And you will not hear in this world calls to the soul apart from that made by Christ, our Lord and Saviour. It is a call with such authority. It's a summons, really. And yet at the same time, It's a call of great tenderness and loving kindness, a call of longing, a persuasive call, an appealing call, combining those seeming extremes, authority and tenderness and desire. It's not a literal call. Of course, that was understood the very day it was made. that Christ was not speaking in terms of space. Walk over here. Come to me, literally. They were there, the great crowd in front of him. They heard his every word. He'd been telling them glorious things and some very severe things also. But now he says, come unto me. They know this is not a physical matter. This is a spiritual call. The call means, in effect, not come in terms of space, but come in terms of trust me, yield to me, believe in me, rely and depend on me. For what? Well, obviously for reconciliation with God, for pardon and forgiveness of sin, for new life, for eternal destiny. These were the things that he would be talking about. And this is the call, trust me to secure these things. He was speaking at that time to Jews. And the problem with the Jewish church at that time is they'd misunderstood, or their principal clergy had at any rate, their scriptures. And instead of realising that salvation and reconciliation to God was something that had to be sought and God would give it freely and graciously, they were teaching that salvation is secured by working. God has given us a system of worship. He had the system of worship consisting of forms of worship and sacrifices. These were pictures, illustrations, almost prophecies of what God would one day do, and how he would solve the sin problem, and how he would obtain a way of salvation whereby people could be forgiven. A great price would have to be paid. Of course, we see it all now. A savior was coming. who would make an atonement for all who believed in him throughout the history of the world. But in those days, the worship was in terms of pictures, symbols, and teaching from their teachers and their prophets. But they had twisted it, if you like, and they said to themselves, or the leaders did, Whoever complies with the ceremonies of worship and the details of the law of God, that person will be safe and will be accepted by God and will be saved by your performance. Do you have reconciliation with God and communion with Him? by your success, particularly in keeping to the letter, the ceremonial. And then there was another problem, that over time, the clergy had added to the law of God. So there was not only the forms of worship that were set down by Moses, but there were all kinds of additional rules and regulations, not in the Bible, which the clergy had brought in. the Jewish clergy, the priests, and the scribes, and so on. And these were impossible to keep to the letter. There were so many of them. They were so minute sometimes, so legalistic in character, and so earnest people. They laboured to keep these things. So they spoke of the burden of the law, the burdensomeness of keeping every tiny regulation and principle. And it's in that context that Christ said to those people, no, no, no, no, come unto me. I will provide forgiveness and salvation. He would go to the cross of Calvary. He would suffer and die in the place of sinners. His death would be a substitutionary atonement for all who would be saved, millions and millions of people. So he says, come unto me, all ye that labour. The first meaning is labour, toiling, to keep all those minute rules and regulations and those that the clergy have added. Come to me for what I require of you is easy. My burden is light. It is a way of saying reconciliation with God, acceptance with God is by grace. That is to say it is undeserved and unearned and there is nothing to do. accept, to trust in Christ, to believe what he's done on Calvary's cross, to make an atonement for you, to repent of your sin and to yield your life to him. And that's easy. That's made simple. We cannot work We are lost sinners. We cannot earn. We cannot rise to the purity and holiness of God. We are fallen sinners. Though we have good points and good capabilities, we are poisoned with depravity and evil hearts and ways also. We cannot earn our salvation. That's the meaning of the text. Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, striving to find acceptance with God through these burdensome rules, and I will give you rest, peace, reconciliation. Take my yoke upon you. Learn of me. I am meek and lowly in heart. I remember years ago when these kind of inspections were done. The fire officer, visiting fire officer from the London Fire Department, as they used to do to all large places within so many miles of Charing Cross, came on a regular annual inspection of the premises. And among other things, he examined what we call the crash doors, the emergency escape doors, with their familiar to you from many places of meeting, with their bars across the back of the doors. And you push the bar, and it operates the catch, and you can get out and open the door. And this man almost crouched in front of doors. This was many years ago. Doesn't happen today. And he touched them with his fingers, like this, to see if they would open. And I happened to be there, and I was looking on, mystified. And he said to me, I have to be as a child. Can a child actuate this door? And that illustrates how God has made it so easy for us to come to him. We couldn't possibly earn his forgiveness, his love, his acceptance, his power, giving us new lives, a place in heaven. And so salvation is by grace. We believe and we repent and we trust and a child can do it, friends. A child can open that door. So this call is to something immense and astonishing and momentous. And yet this call can be obeyed so easily. There's nothing like it in human experience, apart from the call of Christ. So not a literal call, a call of love, the call of Christ. is a call of love, a love from before the foundation of the world. It's a call of mercy. It's a call of good intentions. He will have mercy on all who respond, forgiving mercy. It's a call of good intentions because he plans for you, to rebuild you, to make you a new creature, to change your life, to put a new nature in you and a new heart, to give you reconciliation with himself so that your soul, the spiritual element in you, the soul, that invisible faculty within you, which is the possibility that you have and the equipment to communicate with Almighty God. That soul of yours is dormant, it's sleeping, it's inoperative because you're away from God and you're a worldling and you're living for yourself and flesh and time and the present But the intention of God is to call you to himself so that he can bring your soul to life and you can know him and relate to him and be in his family and pray to him meaningfully and call upon him and be assured that he is your God and you are his child. He can bring you to life spiritually. What a call this is. It's a call from a stranger. If you've never been converted, you don't know him. You have no fellowship with him. You avoid him, probably. You may avoid all conversation about him. You may avoid all challenge to your soul. You may be irritated by it. Divert to something else as soon as you can. Clutch hold of something that will encourage your unbelief and your rejection. Listen to some atheistic video which ridicules faith and is wrong in most of its arguments, but you don't know that. And most of its criticisms are bent and crazy, but you're not aware of that if you're away from God. and you won't listen to the call. It's from a stranger to you. What does God want with me? What does this have to do with me? But be careful, because while it's a call from a stranger, it's a call from the mightiest being in the universe. It's a call from Almighty God, and it's a personal call to you as an individual. You may hear it in a church like this. You may hear it from a preacher. He may not know your name or who you are or where you're from. If the congregation is large, he may not even be aware that you're there. But God sees you and knows you. And the call is ultimately from Him. He made you. He crafted you. He determined your whole makeup, your genes, just what mix you would be of what qualities and gifts and powers. He gave you your memory and your mind and your reasoning, faculty. He gave you your emotions. He's given you everything and life and breath and consciousness. What a gift, consciousness. God sees you. So while the call comes from a stranger, it comes from the landlord of the universe, the creator and owner of all things, the one whom one day you will stand before to give an account of the life that you've lived and what you've done with him and how you treated him and how you regarded him and whether you paid any homage to him, and whether you obeyed him and his law. So it's a call from a stranger, but that stranger knows you through and through, and made you, and have a right to you. It's an amazing call. While it comes to us as individuals, it comes in some shape or form to everyone. The university calls only those who qualify. Only those. The army only wants the young. The military is very selective. The world of athletics only wants the exceptionally fit. But Christ, in his amazing kindness, calls everyone. Everyone. Intellectual, uneducated, rich, poor, strong, weak, influential, non-influential. From the top to the bottom of society, no matter what you've done, how you've lived, there is mercy for you in the call of Christ if you respond and if you trust Him. What a call! It is not selective in that sense at all. We speak of the universal tender of salvation. Some call it the free offer of the gospel of Christ. I want to just to talk about the call because it is so profound and it is so wonderful. It is so unique, the call of Christ. You can pass over this text in your Bibles with such ease, but just pause Come unto me, says the second person of the triune Godhead, equal with the Father, Jesus Christ the Lord, who is God, who became man in order to be our Saviour. Come unto me, and I will give you rest. It's a call of destiny. Just a little more about this call. Any call is a call from somewhere to somewhere, in a sense. Though it's a metaphorical call, which means, trust me. It's a call to you to leave where you are, the life that you're in, and to come to the life which he will give you. You come from one manner of life to another manner of life. That is in this call. Come unto me from a life of materialism, from a life without any eternal prospects at all, from a life of ignorance of God. You don't know anything about him. You don't grasp him. You don't understand him. You have no experience of him and his goodness and power. You don't know what his plans are. You don't know what he'll do with you. A life of ignorance of God. A life of sin. A life in which you don't know it, but you are increasingly captured and embroiled in the power of sin. If you're young, say 25, and you're selfish now, you don't realise how selfish you'll be when you're 50. Because sin always grows worse. If you're inclined to be a hapless liar now, you don't know how bad you'll be in a few years' time. If you lose your temper now, you don't know what trouble you'll wreak a few years from now. You are embroiled in your sin. It starts more gently. It gets worse and worse. And you haven't the power to defeat it. Or, in a small way, just now and then. But not mostly. And it'll capture you and it'll bring you down. It's a call to you to bring you out of where you are, away from where you are. You may be unclean in your thinking, captured by pornography, disloyalty, or worse. And it'll get worse. The young philanderer is the older, shocking philanderer. It's a call away from everything that should grieve you, everything that will bring you down, everything that will take you to hell. And it's a call to the help of God, the increasing righteousness and holiness and godliness and niceness and generosity of spirit and unselfishness and cleanness that comes only by the help of God with the new nature that he gives and walking with him. It's a call from one state to another state. This is a wonderful call. It is a call to a life that will never end. If Christ calls you and you hear the call and you come to him and He changes you, you are eternally saved. You will never be lost. You are on the road to heaven, an everlasting life. Christ has said, none shall pluck you out of my hand. What a call this is. It's wonderful, dear friends. It's an exclusive call. And by that, I mean to respond to this call You must respond to this exclusively. I want to go to heaven. I want my soul to be saved and be safe. I want to walk with God. What will I do? I'll trust Christ and I'll try and do better. Well, that's noble, but it won't work. Trust in Him exclusively. Say, my salvation will be 100% from Him. I can contribute nothing. I must trust Him. Don't say, I'll try some Christ, and I'll try some of my old superstitions, too. I'll keep them up. Two faiths, as it were, will surely be better than one. No. It must be exclusively Him. Come unto me. He alone must be trusted. You give your life to Him alone. You can't give your life to Him and to the world, say. You cannot serve, says Christ, God and mammon. You cannot serve Him and live for the pleasure of materialism and kicks and all the rest of it in this life at the same time. Coveting and making gods of the trinkets of this world doesn't work. He won't help you on that basis. He must be your saviour and he must be all your saviour. when you come to him. There's a great deal to learn from the call of Christ, and it's important to know it's an exclusive call. It's a call from self-righteousness, a call from self-service. It's a call from pointlessness, aimlessness. Listen to the videos pumped up by the atheists. Life is nothing but molecules buzzing about. The whole thing is a matter of chance and there's going to be a great explosion one day and everything is going to disappear into oblivion. And everything you've ever learned, everything you've ever thought, everything you've ever done and accomplished, it's gone, it's finished, it's worthless. Every effort in the entire world, there's nothing to the future. There's nothing to live for. And you say, that's what I want. That's what I believe. Atheism. Why ever would you want to believe that? It's this inner rebellion against God, clutches at things like that. This is a call away from pointlessness to God, to meaning, to purpose, to walking with him, to knowing him and having him forever. I said that Christ addressed this to Jews. Come to me, all ye that labour, trying to deserve God by your efforts. But he applies it to us also. Come unto me, all ye that labour. What are you labouring at, friends? What are you saving for? What are you toiling for? There may be much good in it. I'm toiling to get a home together. I'm toiling to get married, say. I'm toiling to have a family and to look after children and train them up and make them happy. I'm toiling to give them security and provision. Yes, but all that's good. But what ultimately are you toiling for? What is going to be your satisfaction? Oh, I've got to have a such and such size screen and enjoy this and enjoy that. I must have this possession and that possession. I must be able to satisfy appetites and longings. Is all that in the package? Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, struggling and struggling for promotion, there's much laudable in that, but it becomes a god, and you don't get it, and how crushed you are, and life is so hard, and it hasn't worked out quite as you hoped or anticipate. Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, trying to answer the demands entirely of this world alone, which never keeps its promises. So come unto me. It's not only addressed to Jews of old, it's addressed to us, living for the world, worshipping the world, trusting the present and the world. So much in this call. Come unto me. Friends, our time is almost up. I need to talk about Christ. Why should you trust in him? What can he do for you? Well, he can do what no one else can do. No one in the world can help you as he can help you. He can forgive everything you've ever done which is an offence to God. Every sin, every stain, all your guilt, every outburst, every rotten thing, every cruel thing, every selfish thing, every mean thing, every dirty thing. He can wash it away from your record He can forgive you. Why is it we say only he can forgive you as God? Only he can cleanse you? Because he is the only being who has come from glory, entered into human flesh and personality, and made himself on Calvary's cross a substitute for us. taken our guilt upon him, if we are among those who will be forgiven, because we come to Christ, and said to his Father, punish me instead of them. And in six terrible, terrible hours, he took the eternal punishment due to us for our disobedience and offensiveness toward God in six hours of unimaginable pain and suffering, in His Holy Soul, burdened by our guilt and separated from His Father. Only He has died an atoning death to be the Saviour of the world. Only He can help you. Only He can wash you. Only He can rebuild you. Only He can give you life. Only He can give you eternal life. That's why you need to come to Him. That's what He can do. And He calls in love. A lady wrote to me, and this kind of thing has happened to so many people. And she said that by accident, by accident, she stumbled across our broadcasts on television. And she began to watch them. She lived in another part of the country. She didn't really know any church people, churchgoers. She was getting on in life. She was desperately unhappy with her life for any number of reasons. People had let her down. She was now lonely and things not going right. And she listened and listened and listened. And some few years ago, I was speaking on this text, not the message I was taking tonight. I was looking at a completely different aspect of this call. And she said to herself, when it was God working within, I must respond. I must trust Him. I must repent of all my life and hand it over to Him. And she did so. And she found a new experience. And she walked with God. And she came to Him. As a lady who visits this church from afar, from time to time, and she's a businesswoman, and very, very successful at what she does. And she had a nephew, and he was a businessman, even more successful. And he flew from the Far East to London to New York and back again, constantly doing his transactions and his business. And she would send him messages from this church for years. Little cassette tapes, when we used to do them, then the discs, then of course referring to what went online and he sent her from time to time a note about one thing and another saying, I will never listen to these things but one day He was sick and in New York in a flat he has there. And he had nothing to do and he was bored. And he said, well, for a laugh, I'll listen to one of these things. And he did. And the Spirit of God worked. And his attention was riveted. This successful man who had no time for spiritual things. I didn't know all this, he said. Nobody told me these things. And he began to listen. He had a great battle in his mind. He had any number of objections. But he listened, and he listened, until his heart broke. And he bowed the knee, and he responded to the call of Christ. And he repented of his sin, and trusted in Christ, and became a new man. I can tell you the story, and this has been repeated, of a refugee, came for a better life, but he found a far better life when he found Christ and he heard the call, come to me. That's what we need to hear tonight, the call of Christ. Maybe somebody online will hear it, the call of Christ to their heart. and the Spirit will work, and they'll feel their need. That's how you come, you know. It's so easy to come to Christ. All you need is your need. All you need is your need of forgiveness, your need of new life. your need of eternal life and help and communion with God. Come, dear friends, come to Him. Ask Him to change you and save you and make you His child. Trust in Calvary alone. Tell Him you're the sinner who needs cleansing. Repent of your sin and give Him your life. and it will never be the same again for you. You will have heard this call. Heard it, did I say. It's inaudible. You may hear a preacher. You may hear somebody telling you this has happened to them and they've found the law. But you can't hear the voice of Christ. This call is inaudible. But you know it's more powerful than if it was sounded out at a thousand decibels. Because somehow when you hear it, it gets hold of your heart. It gets hold of all parts of you. Your mind, your thinking faculty, your heart, your feeling faculty, and your will. and you must respond. The call of Christ has come to you. Come unto me, and you trust him. Let's pray together. O God, our gracious Heavenly Father, look upon us all and help us this night. Foster in us that great sense of need and that trust in Thee, that we may come to Thee. and seek thee, and call upon thee, and surely find thee. Help us all, O Lord, we ask these things. In our dear Saviour's name, for his sake. Amen.