THE REST AND THE YOKE

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Thursday, June 24, 1880

FromAdvent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 56, No. 1

THE REST AND THE YOKE.

BEFORE the soul can enter into the Christian rest it must take up the Christian yoke. The rest which Christianity promises is not magical, but experimental; it is the fruit of experience, and therefore the fruit of struggle; we must learn of Christ before we can rest in him. The Christian religion is never represented as a transition from bondage into license. It is, indeed, represented as a transition from bondage into liberty; but liberty is the opposite of license, freedom the opposite of freedom from law. To be free is not to be emancipated from law, but to be translated from a lower law into a higher. The highest freedom is subjection to the highest law; and the more subject we are, the more entirely are we free.

There is a yoke inseparable from the life of humanity. The only question is how it will affect humanity. There are three possible ways in which men may be affected by the yoke of life: they may struggle against it; they may be resigned to it; or they may acquiesce in it. The first state is slavery; the second is service; the third is perfect freedom. When a man reaches the stage of acquiescence, he has taken Christ’s yoke, has voluntarily made it his own. There are two ways of saying, “Thy will be done.” We may say it with that resigned apathy which is nearly allied to despair, or we may say it with that conviction of the divine love which represents the prayer of the angels in Heaven. This last alone is freedom.

No man has it in his power to choose whether God’s will shall or shall not be done; the will of God is inevitable. But every man has it in his power to choose whether God’s will shall be his will, whether he shall take, or simply bear, the yoke of Christ. When a man is able to take the yoke, he has ceased to view God’s will as a foreign power; he is no longer under the dominion of law, but law is under his dominion. The will of God has become the expression of his nature; the law of God is the order of his life. —Expositor.