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Jesus’ invitation

“Come to me, all you who labour and are burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matt 11:28). The Com­plete Jew­ish Bible (CJB) trans­lates this pas­sage as “come to me, all of you who are strug­gling and burdened, and I will give you rest.” Nat­ur­ally, labour or labour­ing implies strug­gling. And he or she who struggles, tends to be tired and invari­ably, needs rest. In place of labour or toil, some trans­la­tions prefer weary. The mes­sage of this verse is con­tained in these words: labour/weary-burdened-rest. The Greek term kopi­aō could be used both in the lit­er­al and emo­tion­al senses. In the phys­ic­al sense, it means to become tired or weary. Such wear­i­ness could be as a res­ult of work or after walk­ing for a long dis­tance (cf. John 4:6). As regards its emo­tion­al usage, it is an invit­a­tion not to be dis­cour­aged nor to give up (cf. Rev 2:3). Besides the lit­er­al and emo­tion­al usages, kopi­aō could also be used in the gen­er­ic sense. In this sense, it means to work or strive hard, to struggle. Phort­izō has both lit­er­al, fig­ur­at­ive and meta­phor­ic­al sig­ni­fic­ances. In the Chris­ti­an (New) Test­a­ment, it is used espe­cially meta­phor­ic­ally and fig­ur­at­ively. In our con­text, Jesus used both verbs lit­er­ally and fig­ur­at­ively. In oth­er words, while people get wear­ied because of their aim­less and eph­em­er­al toils, they are burdened or weighed down due to dif­fi­cult situ­ations they get involved in their pur­suit of worldly things. Again.….….

Conclusion

Basic­ally, leg­al­ism involves abstract­ing the law of God from its ori­gin­al con­text. The gos­pel invites people to repent­ance, faith­ful­ness, holi­ness, and god­li­ness. Because of this, the world finds the Gos­pel offens­ive. But woe to us if we add unne­ces­sar­ily to that offense by dis­tort­ing the true nature of Chris­tian­ity by com­bin­ing it with leg­al­ism. Because Chris­tian­ity is con­cerned with right­eous­ness, justice, mor­al­ity and eth­ics, we can eas­ily make that subtle move from a pas­sion­ate con­cern for godly mor­al­ity into leg­al­ism if we are not care­ful. Leg­al­ism means.….….….…

FOR DETAILS, GET YOUR OWN COPY OF THE BOOK “THE WORD OF LIFE: SUNDAY REFLECTIONS” (vol. I)!! The reflec­tion for the 14^th Sunday is found on pages 359–367. Happy reading!

For details on how to get it, con­tact the author on this link: https://m.me/uchennabiblia?fbclid=IwAR2yeg4a6sDGBp9QGkIvKj6FSADumMokN6lshdE0zuo-JHs6qOmlhA7jyHo or email me at: postmaster@uchennabiblia.com or simply send an SMS on 08116100926, and I will get back to you.

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