His Burden Is Light — So We’re Told
If it is, then why is it so hard to pick up?
I was sitting in church Sunday, and everything felt very familiar. The worship time was powerful and soul-moving, the coffee and donuts were typically…typical. The sermon time started with prayer, and the foundational Bible passage was one I’d heard hundreds or thousands of times: Matthew 11:28–30.
Then Jesus said, “Come to me all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear and the burden I give you is light.
I don’t know why, but this was a total record-scratch moment. I knew these verses by heart, but I hadn’t heard or read them in a while. For some reason, hearing these verses on this exact day threw me into a super weird headspace of doubt and confusion. One question rang out in my head and would not stop pounding downward into my heart and my gut:
If His yoke really is so easy and His burden really is so light, why are they so hard to pick up?
I realized that, though I had heard those verses over and over again throughout my life, I had never really meditated on them. Reading scripture, memorizing it, and recalling it on queue has always seemed like the Christian thing to do, but I was missing an important step in my relationship with God’s word: dwelling in it. Because I had not done that, I was missing something in the passage itself.
Look again at that passage. Can you spot what I was missing? It took me a while to find it, but once I did it changed my life.
Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls.
It is so easy to get overwhelmed when God instructs us to do something, even when words like “light” and “easy” come in those instructions. We can get so caught up in the circumstances of life — our earthly burdens — and have a hard time believing that simply surrendering to God will fix all of that. We can get so wrapped up in our heads that just resting in God seems like an impossible task — a heavier lift than that scripture guarantees.
Jesus reveals His heart in this passage, and I totally missed that. I was thinking of God as this distant, seemingly unreachable deity when He has been telling me all this time that He is right here with me, promising rest. I simply wasn’t letting Him teach me.
Simply put, His yoke seemed hard and His burden seemed so heavy because I was waiting for God to come to me. I was waiting for Him to swoop in and fix me. The first words of that passage say, “Come to me,” and I didn’t do that.
If you ever feel distant from God, or that He isn’t engaging you where you are, take a look at yourself and ask, “What am I not getting about Him?” Guaranteed, the overwhelming feeling of impossibility that exists between you and God is on your end of that relationship.
Come to Him. Surrender your circumstances. Let Him teach you. In that place, you will find rest for your soul, and you will find that He really is a place of restoration and valuable instruction.
You’ll find it’s easier than you thought.
