Exchanging Your Heavy Burden For a Light One
28 Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 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. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
Matthew 11:28-30 NIV
You know what’s really beautiful? God’s design.
God created man to have shalom (peace) in the garden. Not the evil we see in today’s world due to our sin breaking our relationship with our Creator. When we look at God’s Word, we see the story beginning and ending with this shalom.
Matthew 11:28-30 reveals that while we live in-between the beginning and end of the story, Jesus wants to give us rest, learn from Him, and release wordly burdens so that we can be burdened for His Kingdom and walk in His ways by His strength.
Rest in Jesus
If you’ve heard the good news of the gospel, you know that it is because Jesus’ finished work alone that we can receive salvation. We are not brought back into relationship with the Father because of our works or our own self-righteousness. We don’t have to strive hard enought to earn rest- our good works won’t bring that. We were designed to have shalom by being in relationship with God, right-standing with Him is where true peace is found.
The light burden that Jesus provides is opposite to the exhausting rules and traditions that the Pharisees were burdened by. The works of the Pharisees only wore them out and hardened them, it could not provide the rest they were looking for. This rest can only be found in Jesus.
In John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the main character; Christian, takes a journey while carrying this heavy burden on his back. Imagine carrying this heavy burden on a long journey, how weary and tired would you feel? Christian’s heavy burden in the book represents the weight of his sin and shame. When he arrives at the cross on his journey the burden falls off his back and with joy he screams “He hath given me rest, by his sorrow; and life, by his death!”
“First, we rest by faith in Jesus (through His death), and next we rest through obedience to Him (in copying His way of life)”
-Charles Spurgeon
For those who are in Jesus, our reality is that Christ loved us and bore our burdens while laying down His life in our place. He has generously provided us rest and we can now enjoy this wonderful relationship with Him. This truth should well up worship within us, we are free from the burden of sin! Now, this friendship with Christ changes us and leads us to joyfully reflect His way of life.
Learn from Jesus
It’s really funny how when we spend time with someone we begin to mirror their ways, humor, lingo, even manerisms. Naturally, I have my dad’s eyes and my mom’s smile but as they raised me I picked up my dad’s style of teaching and my mom’s way of praying.
When I’m around this next generation, Gen Z; I find myself picking up their slang (I refuse to say 6-7 at this point), trending tiktok songs, or viral quotes off instagram reels.
But besides the slang and social media that this generation might be known for, do you know what the world has labeled Gen Z as?
Gen Z is known as “the anxious generation.”
Even though the statistics show that they may be the most anxious, I believe that God wants to re-write what Gen Z is known for. I believe God wants to take this next generation and change them to be known as a generation that belongs to Him, that rest in Him as Lord, and looks like Jesus. The Messiah who would not be described as “anxious.”
When you search online what the opposite of anxious is, you find:
bold, brave, calm, collected, composed, confident, courageous, happy, unafraid, unconcerned, unfearful, unworried
Whether we are part of Gen Z or another generation, this is what God wants us to look like. For our own good and His glory, Jesus wants us become more like Him.
“Learning from Him means submitting to His authority and becoming His servant, as all disciples did.”
- R.C. Sproul
Do you consider yourself a disciple of Jesus or is He just your ticket to Heaven? Do you know Him and are you known by Him? Really trusting Him and obeying Him as you surrender your life to Him? If this is true, the character of your life will look a lot like Jesus.
When you spend time with someone you become like them. When we walk with Jesus, behold Him, and walk like Him as Lord of our lives, our burdens look different. When Christ is Lord, His yoke is easy. Jesus' "yoke" represents His way of life and teachings. If we yield to His yoke, we are led by and learn from Him.
What you follow is what you are worshipping. If you are living without the yoke of Jesus, you are being led by something created instead of our Creator and it will always keep you in a cycle of restlessness. It will not satisfy like you were designed to be satisfied in Jesus. Yielding to Jesus will bring us freedom from sin, life, joy, and peace even when life looks hard.
"Life with God is not immunity from difficulties, but peace in difficulties"
-C.S. Lewis
When difficulties come, what do we find our rest and peace in? Relationship with God doesn’t mean we are guaranteed an easy life. Rather, we are guaranteed His help and a deep, unfathomable peace while He empowers us to handle and navigate the hard times. It frees us to live in response and serve Him, worship Him with our lives. When you walk with Jesus and receive what you need in Him, it is a delight to serve Him in response!
Serve His Kingdom in His Strength
Our savior cares more about our heart than what our hands can do for Him. As He is Lord of our hearts, our desires and burdens begin to line up with His. When we rest rightly in His finished work, we become burdened for things that would bring His Kingdom here on earth. This light burden is a burden is a response to what Jesus accomplished, not for us to earn anything more than what He already gave us. Burdens that call us to be obedient to Christ, such as prayer, worship, loving God and others, caring for the hurting, the lost, seeking justice- just to name a few. If someone were to ask you, “What are you burdened for?” Would your burdens look more like burdens for God and His people or burdens that keep you self-focused?
Life with Jesus is a marathon, a journey, and when we finish in this life, we want to be able to say what Paul said, "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith." and to hear God say “Well done good and faithful servant.”
When things get heavy in life, we end upslipping the backpack again without realizing it and add burdens to our backpack while we try to run this marathon. We think these things will bring us rest but they actually end up burdening us down with weariness.
We are looking for a fake rest in other things but Jesus when were:
Talking to Chat GPT to find answers more than you are talking to God.
Numbing out with excessive videogames, pornography, scrolling for hours. Our screen time is higher than combined time in worship, prayer, scripture reading, and time spent in Christian community.
Obsessing to achieve in school, work, or body image- just to feel that we’ve secured a positive identity.
These things we think we are finding rest in end up weighing us down with anxiety, depression, grief, heartbreak, unforgiveness, shame, or stress. When we look to ourselves or the world, they place a heaviness upon us instead of a lightness to walk in. These burdens end up taking our eyes off of Jesus and the Kingdom work He has for us.
When we don’t deal with these burdens and lay them down at the cross, we pick them up and carry them with us on this journey. If they aren’t brought to Jesus they slow us down, get in the way of us having an intimate and life-giving relationship with Jesus, and hinder our service to Him and others.
To serve God’s Kingdom while being empowered by His strength, Jesus invites us to come to Him. He leads us to not sulk in the dead things of sin, but to find life abundantly in Him. He instructs us to humbly draw near to Him, lay down our pride, release the things that burden us, and look to His goodness. As we rest in the fact that He is God and we are not, we walk differently, less anxiously, more like Him.
Wherever you may be on your journey with Jesus, let me encourage you to come to Him today. He wants to exchange your garment of heaviness for one of praise. He wants you to abandon the heavy burdens that are causing you to be weary for His light burden that will give you rest in Him. He will burden us for His Kingdom and be participaters in the shalom here on earth that we were orginally created for.
“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”
-Matthew 11 :28-30 MSG