The stressless yoke

THE DARKEST part of the night is just before dawn, and the hardest time is often right before God’s breakthrough. Jesus said that when pushing through stressful periods in life, “Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.” Matthew 6:33 (NLT).

Seek God’s Kingdom first, respond obediently to God first, and the promise is that He is going to take care of everything else. When we operate in this way, God starts to share His mind with us and tells us what to do. He speaks into our situation and helps us to understand the moves to make as He directs our lives.

Jesus said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from me … For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” Matthew 11:28 (NIV). Ultimately, we find rest for our souls when we accept Christ’s invitation to live His life through ours. He uses the imagery of a yoke. A yoke is ‘… a type of harness that connects a pair of oxen’. Jesus uses it metaphorically to refer to submission to a teacher. In New Testament times, the phrase “to take the yoke of” was used by rabbis to refer to ‘becoming a submitted student of a teacher’.

Christ wants to become our teacher and talk with us through all the situations in our lives. He wants to be our counsellor, guide, instructor, and friend in all that we face. The yoke is a place of learning where we are invited to learn of Him. He then starts to walk with us and literally shares His thoughts with us, “… we have the mind of Christ” 1 Corinthians 2:16 (NIV). He wants to share His knowledge with us, but we can only learn of Him when we abide with Him. The yoke keeps us bound together with Jesus in a place of closeness where we can be taught. Christ desires us to be yoked together with Him so He can teach us.

A man went on to inquire from a farmer as to why he put two oxen together, one older and a little bigger than the other. The farmer explained that the older ox was the best ox that he had and knew its way around the field. The reason he put the younger one with him was so that the older, more knowledgeable ox could teach the younger one how to plough. If he didn’t put them together, the younger one would never learn. By himself, the younger ox would pull himself to death, but with the older ox, he learned to cooperate with and rest in the strength of the older ox. Some of us are pulling ourselves to death because we are alone and don’t know how to do live properly and healthily, but Jesus wants to teach and help us.

Jesus wants to teach us balance and help us in the areas that concern us. Jesus’ teachings should extend to more than just our professional or home life. He wants to transform our entire life. In the yoke we learn from Christ how to be patient in suffering, to walk humbly, to trust implicitly, to love intensely, and to rejoice exceedingly. When we take the yoke of Christ, we learn that what we do for Him eclipses anything else that we do. When we submit to Christ, we have peace that our Master is looking out for us and will worry less about life.