My Burdens Are Light Matthew 11:30

My yoke is easy and My burden is light.


The world lays a heavy burden upon us all, saved and unsaved alike. No one is exempt from carrying his burdens. A teenager wrote the following to me in an email, "I know that although I have mountains in my life, it is all in God's will. He would not put me this situation if He wasn't preparing me for something greater. One thing I always like to keep in mind is that faith makes it possible, not easy. Many times as Christians, we expectt things to be less difficult in our lives. God never said it would be easy, but He did say that He would always be there for us. Sure, we go through struggles and persecutions, but we are not alone. We have a faithful God who is much bigger than any of our tribulations!"

We all have personal responsibilities that we have to carry. We can however give those responsibilities over to the Lord and let Him help us resolve those responsibilities. Some of the responsibilities that we have to bear are directly related to our own faults and failures. While God can and will forgive and forget our sin, we still have to deal with the ramifications of our sin. Sometimes God takes our burdens and He removes them and sometimes He gives us the grace and the strength to live with them.

As we live our lives, we learn that life is full of burdens and cares. Paul tells us that we are to "help bear one another's burdens." (Galatians 6:2) As God's children, we all will have crosses to bear and trials to endure. However, Christ promises us that His yoke is easy and His burden is light.

What does this mean? How can His yoke be so easy and our burden be so heavy? That answer is really easy for us to understand. First of all, Christ could have demanded so much more from us. His demand is simple. We are to love God with all our heart and all our soul and all of our strength and we are to love each other as we love ourselves. The demands that Christ has given to us actually become blessings in and of themselves! As we surrender our hearts and our lives to the Lord and we walk in His Word, the journey itself becomes one of blessing and reward. As we follow the Lord's leadership and submit ourselves to His authority, we put ourselves in a position to receive His abundant blessings as well.

God's yoke is indeed easy and His burden is light. Jesus bore the burden for us all on the cross so that we would not have to. Our burdens come in two forms. First of all, because the world hated Jesus, so will it hate us and oppose our testimony and our commitment to walk with Him before the rest of the world. Then as I mentioned earlier, our own failure to walk by faith causes us all kinds of problems.

Our burdens will make us stronger when we let the Lord be our strength. We can know and trust that He will carry us through the storms that we will face in our lives. God's yoke is easy and His burden is light and so rewarding when we let Him be God in our lives with each and every decision that we make.