“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.’” – Matthew 11:28-30
This is one of my absolute favorite passages of Scripture.
Ever since I was a little kid, no more than eight or nine years old, I’ve been a worrier. Honestly, I’m not really sure where it came from. No one in my life ever made me feel like I had to carry the weight of the world on my shoulders; I just…did. If my parents were out late at night, I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I knew they had arrived home safely.
I was also empathetic to the extreme. One time in elementary school, one of my best friends looked at my lunch—hand-packed by my mom—and said, Does your mom pack your lunch every day? I said, Yeah, does yours? She said, She doesn’t have time. So then I worried her mom didn’t love her as much as my mom loved me. I’d watch my siblings as they opened their gifts on Christmas morning to make sure they reacted well and said thank you, so our parents wouldn’t feel bad.
As I’m sure you can imagine (especially if your story is similar), this carried over into adulthood, with pretty harmful side effects. I worried about everyone and everything—all the time. I’d lie in bed and think about my siblings and whether they were happy. I’d think about work, always afraid I was one mistake away from getting fired. I’d think about my friends: Did they know I loved them? Was that joke I made insensitive? I worried I was sick and didn’t know it. I worried people were mad at me. I worried I had done something extremely wrong and there was a horrible consequence lurking just around the corner.
I just worried.
Come to Me, All You Who Are Weary
That’s why I love this passage so much, and why it’s continuously been a source of comfort for me when I find myself neck-deep in the quicksand of worry.
Come to Me.
I mean, what an invitation. Until recently, I don’t think I’d truly recognized the purity of it. Come to Him when I need to repent, sure. Come to Him when I need wisdom, come to Him to worship. Those all make sense to me.
But He says, All of you who are weary.
Wait, so—come to Him…when I’m tired? He cares about that?
Yes.
All those years I spent lying in bed, tossing and turning, worrying over things I had no reason to worry over…He cares about that?
Yes.
And not only does He care about it, He wants to give rest.
Take My Yoke
A yoke is a piece of wood placed over the necks of two oxen, and attached to a plow or cart that the animals then pull. The purpose of the yoke is to equally distribute the weight of the cart between the two animals so that one isn’t more heavily burdened than the other.
So what’s Jesus getting at when He says, Take My yoke upon you?
The most important thing to understand about this verse is that Jesus is not saying, Come to Me and I’ll solve all your problems, come to Me and I’ll make your life perfect and pain-free. There’s still a burden to carry. One day God will make all things new, yes. He’ll wipe every tear from our eyes, all our pain will be gone, and we’ll get to be with Jesus forever (Revelation 21:4). But until then, we have to live in this fallen world. And sometimes that hurts. Sometimes it’s really hard.
But what Jesus is saying is that in the meantime, in the space between here and eternity, He will carry more than His share of the burden. When we yoke ourselves to Jesus, it’s not 50 percent of the weight on us, 50 percent of the weight on Him. He tells us, …for My yoke is easy to bear and the burden I give you is light. His Yoke isn’t oppressive, it’s not full of splinters, it doesn’t rub our necks wrong.
Jesus died on the cross and took the weight of our sin on Himself so that we would, first and foremost, be reconciled to God. But also so that we wouldn’t have to be shackled to burdens we were never strong enough to carry on our own anyway.
Humble and Gentle
Letting go of burdens doesn’t come naturally to most of us. I think that’s why Jesus said, Let Me teach you. He knew it would be a process. He knew we would cling and cling and cling to our burdens like our lives depended on it. Personally, because worry was my default state for so many years, I sometimes find myself feeling anxious if I don’t have something to worry about (which sounds crazy, I know…).
Let Me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart.
Jesus invites us to come to Him, He invites us to take on His easy yoke—and then the Savior of the world, the God of the Universe, with all humility and gentleness, offers to show us the better way. I love this quality of His character so much because it reminds me that there is not a stern, disappointed, frustrated Father waiting on the other side of my many mistakes to punish or condemn me; instead, there is a loving, kind, patient Father who wants me to rest in His freedom and joy.
You Will Find Rest
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spoken these four words over myself. On long, sleepless nights; on days where my workload seemed insurmountable; in moments when anxiety had such a stranglehold on me that it felt like I’d never be able to breathe easily again.
You will find rest.
This is the promise on offer. All you have to do is yoke yourself to Jesus. Lay the full weight of your burden at His feet, and notice that when He picks it up and puts it in the cart, the heft on your shoulders doesn’t seem proportionate to what you just put down. That’s because it’s not.
My Yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.
If you’re weary, I want you to hear this: Jesus wants to refresh you. He wants you to come to Him and lay it all down.
I love what Psalm 127:2 says: “...for God gives rest to his loved ones.” (NLT). You are His loved one. And He wants to give you rest.
