This is an article I wrote several years ago. It has been available also on Douglas Jacoby’s website.
Perhaps the key differentiator Christianity has in the field of world religions is the unique concept of grace. In a world driven by competitiveness, performance measurement and the relentless march for increased return on investment and corporate profits, God’s grace and everything it affects is not well valued, simply ignored or even despised. Yet it is at the very core of our religion. If we have no other virtue as Christians, we must at the very least explain grace to the world in our actions, our words, and in our very thoughts. Yet we are far from this being the case. It is my contention that we have fostered a culture long on performance benchmarks but short on promulgating grace. In the quest for fast growth in our churches, the message of God’s grace has often been distorted, ignored or even hijacked.
The stage of world history is littered with the corpses of men and women who have been trampled in the quest for world domination of an ideology. Christianity, Islam, Communism, Imperialism, Nazism and so forth have all sought worldwide influence and impact. The leaders of these movements in their respective day were driven by the deep belief of the superiority and excellence of their cause. But of course the excellence or purity of a cause in the minds of its leaders is not a sufficient measure of its excellence overall. The human costs of spreading social, political or religious doctrine has been enormous. A curious paradox has emerged’in the pursuit of something so “high” as the pervasiveness of a guiding ideology, the results have been so “low”. The collateral damage of untold millions of wrecked lives did not appear to enter into the calculations. After all, the world was being won…
The word of God however seeks to protect mankind from all of this. Yes, the stakes are high -eternal salvation, but the central tenet that provides this salvation in the first place must not be betrayed in the achievement of it. Paul expresses it succinctly “If I have the faith to move mountains but have not love, I am nothing” (1 Cor 13:1-3). World evangelism at the expense of love for the individual has proved to be a costly error. However apparently noble the mission may be, if it is one without true love and grace, it is in the final analysis and potential effects, no different to the worldwide spread of any other manmade ideology.
Many Christians in our churches today subscribe to a mindset of “burdened-ness”. They have been taught to equate a sense of spiritual acceptability or maturity with a notion of “feeling the burden” sufficiently. One’s burdened-ness can be measured by a blanket evaluation of one’s preparedness to “go anywhere, do anything, give up everything”. Any residual desire to place emphasis on other facets of life could be interpreted as not having an adequate love for the mission or the lost, or even as being ‘worldly’ in outlook. This dynamic is well recognised. The purpose of this article is to provide some Biblical help to embrace what I believe to be a state of heart and mind that God wants his children to have:’a state of being unburdened.
There is a pattern throughout both the Old and New Testaments, about the way God interacts with his people. What we find is a theme of God being all about being a lifter of burdens, not a placer of them.
GOD LIFTS BURDENS
(Num 11:11-17 NIV) He asked the LORD, “Why have you brought this trouble on your servant? What have I done to displease you that you put the burden of all these people on me? {12} Did I conceive all these people? Did I give them birth? Why do you tell me to carry them in my arms, as a nurse carries an infant, to the land you promised on oath to their forefathers? {13} Where can I get meat for all these people? They keep wailing to me, ‘Give us meat to eat!’ {14} I cannot carry all these people by myself the burden is too heavy for me. {15} If this is how you are going to treat me, put me to death right now–if I have found favor in your eyes–and do not let me face my own ruin.” {16} The LORD said to Moses: “Bring me seventy of Israel’s elders who are known to you as leaders and officials among the people. Have them come to the Tent of Meeting, that they may stand there with you. {17} I will come down and speak with you there, and I will take of the Spirit that is on you and put the Spirit on them. They will help you carry the burden of the people so that you will not have to carry it alone.
Here we get an insight into how Moses was feeling as the leader of an ungrateful nation and people of God. He complains of the heavy burden he feels leading all those people. How does God respond to Moses? Does God admonish him to stop his whining? “Be more faithful Moses!” No! Rather God acts to lift the burden. It was a burden. No wonder Moses was feeling it’he was understaffed by a factor of 70!
Let us now examine a key passage in the New Testament. In Mt 11:1-30. Jesus had send out the twelve, and was now on a preaching and teaching tour of Galilee. John sends his disciples with some questions to Jesus. Jesus talks about John, and goes on to address his audience. There seems to be confusion reigning in this passage: John is confused about Jesus, the people are confused about John, and about the nature of the Kingdom of God. Cities that saw miracles are cursed. Worldly seaports and the byword of Sodom itself are lifted up. Religion has blinded the people, and God wants that turned upside down.
There is a common thread running through these incidents. Jesus is challenging the concepts and ideas people have about their religion. John wasn’t sure about Jesus it seems. Healing the sick, curing the lepers, opening the eyes of the blind was perhaps not what John was anticipating. Jesus corrected that notion with a Scripture. Then Jesus addresses the people. “What were you expecting with John? A weak and insipid religious guy? Or a wealthy tele-evangelist type? You got more than you bargained for didn’t you!’ It’s always easier to complain about the messenger than to embrace the message and change.
Jesus goes on to denounce the Jewish cities of Korazin, Betsaida and Capernaum. The Bible belt of the Holy land perhaps. Sodom would be better off? What was Sodom known for? Sodomy. Imagine the furore in conservative religious circles today if Jesus came preaching this!
Jesus thanks God for hiding the truth from the “wise”, and revealing it to the child-like. Soft hearts are needed for this message, not hardened religiosity.
As the true explanation of God (v27), we are encouraged to listen again to Jesus’ message rather than continue to stumble along blindly with deeply held traditional but off-centre religious beliefs. Grace? Are you really sure that’s what the gospel is all about?…
Then there is the key passage of all:
(Mat 11:28-30 NLT) Then Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. {29} Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle, and you will find rest for your souls. {30} For my yoke fits perfectly, and the burden I give you is light.”
What are the burdens Jesus is talking about? Many people would quickly apply this passage to difficulties in their own lives: their busy job or difficult relationship perhaps. This might be possible, but the context of the passage as discussed above seems to demand that the application of these verses lies in the realm of one’s faith and relationship with God.
Consider also Psalm 146, referred to by Jesus:
(Psa 146:6-9 NLT) He is the one who made heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them. He is the one who keeps every promise forever, {7} who gives justice to the oppressed and food to the hungry. The LORD frees the prisoners. {8} The LORD opens the eyes of the blind. The LORD lifts the burdens of those bent beneath their loads. The LORD loves the righteous. {9} The LORD protects the foreigners among us. He cares for the orphans and widows, but he frustrates the plans of the wicked.
Jesus appealed to this Psalm when answering John’s questions. It portrays God as a keeper of promises, a freer of prisoners, and a lifter of burdens.
A true relationship with God is not about heavy burdens. Jesus makes this point clearly in his famous “woe to you Pharisees’ discourse:
(Mat 23:4 NIV) They tie up heavy loads and put them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.
(Mat 23:4 NLT) They crush you with impossible religious demands and never lift a finger to help ease the burden.
The religious world imposes burdens. Jesus states explicitly that he will lighten the burden.
A doctor working with leprosy sufferers in India wrote of burdens, stress and yokes:
Too much stress on ones body is detrimental. Conversely, too little stress also affects living tissue. Cells need exercise. Without it, they will atrophy’a condition common to anyone who has worn a plaster cast. I once treated an Indian fakir who had held his hand over his head uselessly for twenty years, as a religious act. The muscles had shrunk to nothing, and all the joints had fused together so that his hand was like a stiff paddle. Healthy tissue needs stress, but appropriate stress that is distributed among many cells.
Those principles apply directly to the stress caused by a joke on the neck of an ox. In the hospital carpentry shop in India, I helped fashion such yokes.
If I put a flat, uncarved piece of wood on an ox’s neck and use it to pull a cart, very quickly pressure sores will break out on that animal’s neck, and he will be useless. A good yoke must be formed to the shape of an ox’s neck. It should cover a large area of skin to distribute the stresses widely. It should also be smooth, rounded, and polished with no sharp edges, so that no one point will endure unduly high stress. If I succeed in my workshop, the yoke I make will fit snugly around the ox’s neck and cause him no discomfort. He can haul heavy loads every day for years, and his skin will remain perfectly healthy, with no pressure sores.
And now, I think I understand the strange juxtaposition of phrases in (Matthew 11:28-29). Jesus offers each of us a well-fitted yoke, of custom design. He does not call us to the kind of rest that means inactivity or laziness’that would lead to spiritual atrophy. Instead, he promises a burden designed to fit my frame, my individual needs, strengths, and capabilities. I come to him weary and heavy-laden. He removes those crushing burdens that would destroy any human being, and replaces them with a yoke of appropriate stress designed specifically for me. “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,” he says, “for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
We are to take Jesus’ yoke upon us. The promise is that the burden will be light. This flows from the yoke being one of custom design, tailored to fit the needs and situation of the individual Christian. Managing such an inventory of one-off yokes does not fit with any man-made system, but it is typical of the glorious variability we see throughout God’s creation.
We however have sought to standardize Christianity and have taught or implied that everyone needs to perform to the same single standard in God’s kingdom. This teaching seems to be at odds with what Jesus is saying here. Jesus’ yoke is a snug fit, not an impossible fit.
If we take an area of spiritual activity such as evangelism for example, what we must acknowledge is that different individuals will have different evangelistic impacts throughout their lives. Some will influence many directly to become Christians. Others will influence only a few. Some may influence no one. The constant admonition to bear fruit evangelistically that has been a feature in many of our churches has produced an ill-fitting yoke on the necks of many disciples. Thy feel burdened, unable to measure up to this demand. Such burdens are not of God, they are of man and his programs. No wonder people feel burdened! They are not carrying Jesus’ load, but somebody else’s!
To add to this notion that God is a lifter of burdens, consider the following:
– (Psa 55:22 NLT) Give your burdens to the LORD, and he will take care of you. He will not permit the godly to slip and fall.
– (Psa 145:14 NLT) The LORD helps the fallen and lifts up those bent beneath their loads.
– (1 John 5:3 NIV) This is love for God: to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome.
– (1 John 5:3 NLT) Loving God means keeping his commandments, and really, that isn’t difficult.
LEADERS LIFT BURDENS
What then does God expect of his leaders? There are many examples of both good and bad leadership to be found in the Bible. Let us look at two of the good ones: Nehemiah and Paul.
(Neh 5:14-19 NIV) Moreover, from the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes, when I was appointed to be their governor in the land of Judah, until his thirty-second year–twelve years–neither I nor my brothers ate the food allotted to the governor. {15} But the earlier governors–those preceding me–placed a heavy burden on the people and took forty shekels of silver from them in addition to food and wine. Their assistants also lorded it over the people. But out of reverence for God I did not act like that. {16} Instead, I devoted myself to the work on this wall. All my men were assembled there for the work we did not acquire any land. {17} Furthermore, a hundred and fifty Jews and officials ate at my table, as well as those who came to us from the surrounding nations. {18} Each day one ox, six choice sheep and some poultry were prepared for me, and every ten days an abundant supply of wine of all kinds. In spite of all this, I never demanded the food allotted to the governor, because the demands were heavy on these people. {19} Remember me with favor, O my God, for all I have done for these people.
Nehemiah’s actions were in stark contrast to the worldly leaders that preceded him. He willingly forsook certain privileges available to him out of his reverence for God and for the sake of his people. The earlier leaders placed a heavy burden on the people, in the form of taxes. Encouraged no doubt by their superior’s attitudes, the assistants too lorded it over the people. Nehemiah however refused to be like that. Instead, he set a personal example by devoting himself to the work. Instead of dining off the backs of his countrymen, he fed 150 of them every night. He never made use if his rights.
What do we learn from the example of Nehemiah? Great leaders sacrifice for their people. Worldly leaders burden their people.
Let us turn to the example of Paul, perhaps best illustrated in his relationship with the Thessalonian Christians.
(1 Th 2:6-12 NIV) We were not looking for praise from men, not from you or anyone else. As apostles of Christ we could have been a burden to you, {7} but we were gentle among you, like a mother caring for her little children. {8} We loved you so much that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well, because you had become so dear to us. {9} Surely you remember, brothers, our toil and hardship we worked night and day in order not to be a burden to anyone while we preached the gospel of God to you. {10} You are witnesses, and so is God, of how holy, righteous and blameless we were among you who believed. {11} For you know that we dealt with each of you as a father deals with his own children, {12} encouraging, comforting and urging you to live lives worthy of God, who calls you into his kingdom and glory.
(2 Th 3:8-9 NIV) …nor did we eat anyone’s food without paying for it. On the contrary, we worked night and day, laboring and toiling so that we would not be a burden to any of you. {9} We did this, not because we do not have the right to such help, but in order to make ourselves a model for you to follow.
Paul writing to the Thessalonians, asserts that ‘as apostles they could have been a burden to them”. He means, they could have supported him financially while he was with them. But he chose to work night and day so as not to burden this fledgling church. Rather, he was determined to encourage, comfort and urge them as a father does his children. As it turned out, the Macedonian churches did end up supporting Paul financially as we see in 2 Corinthians 11:9.
(2 Cor 11:9 NIV) And when I was with you and needed something, I was not a burden to anyone, for the brothers who came from Macedonia supplied what I needed. I have kept myself from being a burden to you in any way, and will continue to do so.
Such example teaches powerful lessons. Paul didn’t want to be a burden to those he was preaching to. His example taught The Macedonian churches (of which Thessalonica was one) well. We learn that after Paul had moved on from there, they were spectacularly generous despite their severe poverty (2 Cor 8:1-2). There seems to be a strong link between people’s willingness to give financially and the leaders willingness to not take advantage of it.
Time and time again we see godly leaders determined NOT to burden their people, but to serve them.
WE ALL LIFT BURDENS
Serving and burden-bearing leaders are not sufficient for a healthy church however. What is required is that we all become burden lifters in our relationships with one another. This will be a major cultural shift for some, but a Biblically mandated one.
One of the greatest burdens we routinely face in our spiritual lives can be in dealing with our sin.
(Psa 38:4-5 NLT) My guilt overwhelms me’it is a burden too heavy to bear. {5} My wounds fester and stink because of my foolish sins.
Paul talks of vulnerable women, burdened with the guilt of sin and controlled by many desires (2 Tim 3:6), a spiritual condition not limited to women necessarily.
Sin can be a big deal to people. We are all familiar with the power of sin and guilt. It stops people from coming to church or reading the Bible. This is Satan’s home turf. When people need the succour of spiritual encouragement, they feel more driven to avoid it. It is like saying “I am too sick to go to hospital”.
Sin in our lives is certainly a burden. Some however, are over-burdened with “imagined sin”. Every act or thought is put under the microscope and examined for the slightest trace of sin. ‘You’re not submissive enough, faithful enough, bold enough, humble enough, committed enough. Sin, sin ,sin ,sin, sin, sin!’ This type of thinking has also been a feature of our church culture unfortunately, and needs to be reversed.
As Christians, we need to take sin seriously, but not neurotically. Mark 9:42-45 shows that we must deal decisively with the causes of sin, yet we do not see a continual scrutiny on the sin in people’s lives in the pages of the New Testament.
As an example of this, the apostles had a great opportunity to spell out moral requirements to the Gentile churches when they circulated the letter that bore the landmark outcomes of the Jerusalem Council in the mid first-Century. What we see however is just four sins mentioned!
(Acts 15:28-29 NIV) It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements: {29} You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things. Farewell.
The focus was not on burdening people, but on freeing them. The name the sins to avoid and then encourage them by saying ‘You will do well to avoid these things. Farewell!’ They didn’t berate the point. The apostles did not want to burden the people turning to God. We shouldn’t either.
Finally, the Bible has some advice for us in our relationships with one another, in dealing with sin in each other’s lives.
(Gal 6:1-2 NIV) Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently. But watch yourself, or you also may be tempted. {2} Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.
The first lesson here is that if you are not spiritual, perhaps don’t get personally involved. But more importantly, we are taught to restore your brother gently. Some of us are more likely to burden people down than to effectively restore. We draw ourselves up to our full height: “Brother, that’s a disgusting sin. How could you. You need to go away and repent. You make me sick.” Such words spring from a false notion of God’s attitude toward the sinner. The ‘go away and don’t come back until you repent’ school of theology is not of God. It does not reflect God’s graciousness and it carves out a deeper foothold for Satan.
We are to restore our brothers gently. Draw him in. Build him up. Point him to God. Carry his burden.
CONCLUSION
The message of the gospel is good news. It is unburdening news. God is a lifter of burdens, not a placer of burdens. Our teaching and our example need to reflect this strongly. We have some work to do in our churches to reverse an ingrained mindset that is the opposite to this. It starts with our individual relationship with God and view of God as a burden lifter. It requires leaders who are prepared to be burden-bearers and it ultimately devolves to how we interact with one another on an individual level as channels of God’s grace, mercy, love and peace.
(Mat 11:28-30 NIV) “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.
