Grace Alone Gives Us Rest
July 5, 2026 • The 6th Sunday after Pentecost • Proper 9A
Zechariah 9:9-12 • Romans 7:15-25a • Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
I’m exhausted. I suppose that’s not good news considering I just got back from two weeks of vacation. As one of our children declared, this wasn’t a vacation; it was a trip—implying that, instead of relaxing, we set a grueling pace, seeing and doing everything we could. I am still a little jet-lagged, and my feet still hurt, but that’s not the kind of exhaustion I’m talking about. I’m talking about spiritual exhaustion.
I’m exhausted—emotionally, spiritually, soulfully—because I live in a world that doesn’t allow people to rest. The demand for superior performance follows us without abatement into every corner of our lives. It’s one thing to be expected to give our best at school or at work, but that same expectation comes home with us every day. We have to be the best spouse, best parent, best neighbor, best friend, best all-around person all the time. In fact, ironically, school and work have become the only places in our lives where we are occasionally given a break. You can’t take a “mental health day” from being a mom.
The worst part of it all is that the church, which is supposed to be the one institution in this world in which God’s unconditional love and acceptance promise rest to anyone who seeks it, so often exchanges the good news of the gospel of grace for a substitute message that invariably boils down to some version of “God wants you to try harder.” For example, last Sunday, I heard an Anglican preacher use Jesus’ words in Matthew 10 to charge the congregation to offer Christ-like welcome to other people—prophets, the righteous, and little children—in order to guarantee their heavenly reward.
On the surface, it was a fine sermon. Who doesn’t think hospitality is a good thing? But what happens when I can’t muster the emotional or physical strength necessary to be as welcoming as Jesus? What about those people whom I don’t have the capacity to welcome into my heart? What about individuals who represent a real threat to me and my family? What happens when I have to say no? Do I lose my reward? The preacher probably didn’t mean it this way, but what I heard her say was, if you want the reward of a righteous person, then you’d better find a way of becoming righteous. That’s not the gospel. That’s not grace. That’s “try harder,” but trying harder isn’t working.
Just ask the apostle Paul. “I do not understand my own actions,” he confesses in the seventh chapter of his Letter to the Romans. “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Paul was faithful to God for his entire life. First, he was a zealous Pharisee. Then he became a devout follower of Jesus. In both chapters of his life, he sought to honor God with every fiber of his being. Paul spent more time studying, praying, practicing, and disciplining himself in the search of faithfulness than almost anyone else on the earth, and still he couldn’t summon the strength of character or the willpower necessary to do what is right. In fact, the inevitability of his failure became for him a rule of life: “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.”
Paul could write those words because he had learned in the most dramatic way that wanting to do what is good and right is not the same thing as doing it. His zeal for the Jewish faith and the promised deliverance of God’s people had led him to persecute the church of Christ. Doing what he believed to be God’s will, Paul devoted himself to the destruction of the Way of Jesus. Everything he knew about God and God’s promises had led him to conclude that God’s salvation is closer to righteous people and further away from sinners. And, in Paul’s mind, Jesus and his ragtag group of outcast followers threatened to push God’s salvation further away by teaching people that holiness of life and keeping the commandments of God didn’t matter anymore. So Paul did anything and everything he could to stop them—until Jesus met him on the Damascus Road.
Imagine Paul’s horror when he realized that his earnest attempt at faithfulness was actually working against God and God’s anointed one. It was enough to transform his whole understanding of how salvation works. Paul learned that God’s grace, acceptance, and love do not come to those who love God or who seek to do God’s will, no matter how hard they try. They are given to us wretched sinners by the grace of God and by nothing else. In his realization that God loved him enough to save him even when his actions were working against God and God’s love, Paul discovered a freedom that he wanted the whole world to know.
That’s the good news we come to church to hear. The gospel of Jesus Christ is freedom from needing to get it right all the time. It is freedom from needing to be the best at everything. It is freedom from the consequences of our failures. It is freedom from needing to be good enough for God because there is no amount of wanting and trying to do the right thing that can make us good enough. Only God’s grace can do that.
In spite of ourselves and our best intentions, we fail every day—in what we have done and in what we have left undone. Wretched sinners that we are! Who will rescue us from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! Paul knew the hope and relief that can only come from God’s grace. With faith in Jesus Christ, we admit that we aren’t good enough, and we know that that’s okay because Jesus is. Christians aren’t perfect people. We are not immune to the power of sin. The forces of deception still infect our bodies and constantly lead us astray, but, because of God’s grace, we are immune to their eternal consequences. And that at last allows us to rest.
God loves sinners like you and me. Convincing the world (and ourselves) of that isn’t easy. The God of holiness—the God of perfection—chooses to love, redeem, and save imperfect and unholy people like us—not because of our best efforts but despite them. That doesn’t make sense. And that’s why Paul wrote these words in Romans 7—because he knew that being honest about ourselves and about sin is the only way we will ever know the power of God’s grace. It is the difference between being set free from our failures and being buried beneath them. It’s the difference between coming to church and leaving with a fresh dose of guilt and spiritual exhaustion and leaving with that restorative sense that God’s love will always be bigger than your best efforts and your worst failures.
Jesus did not come to the earth, minister to outcasts, proclaim liberty to the oppressed, and be killed upon the cross for doing so in order to teach us that we need to try harder. We don’t need to try any harder in order to be loved by God. Anyone who says otherwise isn’t preaching the gospel. Jesus came to set us free from the burden of our failures—free from the crippling weight of not being good enough. “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens,” he says, “and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
© 2026 Evan D. Garner
