Let God carry your problems...

Matthew 11:28-30  Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy-laden and overburdened, and I will cause you rest.  (I will ease and relieve and refresh your souls). (29) Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me, for I am gentle (meek) and humble (lowly) in heart, and you will find rest (relief and ease and refreshment and recreation and blessed quiet) for your souls. (30) for My yoke is wholesome (useful, good – not harsh, hard, sharp or pressing, but comfortable, gracious and pleasant), and My burden is light and easy to be borne.

In Matthew 11:28-30 we are being given instructions on how to handle trials and struggles in our daily lives.  Notice here that we are not being told that we won’t have troubles and trials, as we all know, we have been told that we will have trials and troubles, but what we see here is that Jesus is telling us how to handle these hard days ahead of us.

We all have bad days and good days; we all have times we want to pull the covers over our heads and say, not today!   But then we have days where we could sing and dance all day with a light heart and light attitude.  Oh, how I wish I had more of those days then the days of wanting to shut out the world.

One of the things I have noticed is when I am having a bad day; it’s usually because I am focused on negative things or situations.  I am usually either being self-indulgent or I am spending too much time worrying about a situation, or person, I can do nothing about.

There are those days that when we wake up we are in a funk or the opposite life is shiny and new, but those days come far and few in-between.  Normally we have a pretty average mood and then something happens to sway us one way or another.  We allow our emotions to dictate the day and how we will react to it.

Jesus is telling us that no matter what kind of day you are having, you can rest those emotions, those situations on Him.  Not that long ago I had someone tell me that they could handle the situation we were in, because he had big shoulders.  Meaning his shoulders were large enough to carry the load or problem for both of us.   To me this is what Jesus is saying in Matthew 11:28-30.

Jesus says come to Me if you are feeling overtaken by life’s circumstances, bring them to Me and I will give you rest.   Not only am I going to give you rest, I will refresh you, I will relieve your souls.   He wants to take control of what is hurting us or bothering us, or keeping us from Him and He wants to carry that circumstance for you.

Have you ever had to carry a large, heavy object and you had multiple people trying to work together to successfully carry the object?  When one person stops carrying the load it makes the load heavier for everyone else, but it’s not impossible.  When you are one person trying to carry the load of life, relationships, money, children, family, parents, jobs, homes, food, friendships and your relationship to God, you are trying to carry everything and if you don’t distribute the load, it will end up crushing you.  It will overtake you and steal your happiness.

Jesus wants us to hand our lives, including all the to do lists, all the friendships, all the work problems, all the family problems and health problems to Him, so He can be the one who handles everything and you can focus on Him.

Remember, as I’ve said many times, God is a jealous God and He will remove whatever takes place of Him.

In verse 29 Jesus is showing us how to decipher if the yoke we are carrying is His yoke, the yoke of ourselves or the yoke of evil.  It’s important that we are able to recognize these things so we are able to bring whatever situation we are in to Him.  When you see that His character and His yoke is gentle, meek, humble, lowly in heart and that you should find rest in His yoke, if you are not experiencing these things you are not in His yoke.  You have either not handed over your burdens, and allowed Jesus to keep them, or you are being very deceived by Satan.

I am classic for giving God my problems, burdens, people and whatever else I am feeling at that moment, and then five minutes later going back and picking them back up.   I begin the process over and over again, thinking I can figure this out or my worrying about the things I've surrendered to God will make the answer come faster, and it doesn't.  All it does is cause me to lose my peace and happiness and put distance between me and God.

I also have a problem with trying to reason out my problems, I will begin to try and figure out each situation and then reason out the situation and weigh the pros and cons.   This is not leaving my problems with Jesus.  This is letting Jesus babysit them for a couple minutes and me thinking I can do it better than He can.

The truth hurts sometimes, but it doesn’t make it not the truth!

Jesus then in verse 30 gives us examples of what His yoke is not like.  His yoke is not harsh, hard, sharp or pressing, but it IS gracious, comfortable and pleasant.  His burden is light and easy to be borne.

When you are walking outside of God’s yoke, you are going to experience the heavy feeling, the anxious feeling; the I need to solve this right now feeling.  You are going to feel pushed and pulled and unsettled.  You will not have a sense of peace; in fact you will have the opposite, you will feel as if everything is falling apart. 

We all know this feeling and it is a horrible, heart breaking, gut wrenching moment or moments.   But again, Jesus was so gracious as to tell us how we will feel when we are not following His yoke, or His instructions.

Handing over the problems in our lives to anyone, who isn’t us, is hard and even harder I think to hand them over to God.  When you ask a friend to help you with something you can physically check on them, you can, to some extent, continue to have some control over the situation. 

When you truly release a problem over to God and don’t go back and pick it up, it takes great faith to walk away and enjoy the rest of your life, while God is taking care of the problem.

That is what we are to do to everyday.  The way we are created is not conditioned to handle problems.  We are created to surrender the problems to the one who knows exactly what we need, Jesus.

Jesus is asking for you to hand over your worries, fears, anxieties, money issues, family issues, health issues, all that you are, the sum of you, and let Him have them. 

He wants to you drop off the problems and then walk away, and enjoy your life, while He takes care of changing either you or your circumstance.  

Just a secret here between us, usually it’s you that changes and not your circumstances.

When we are walking in the rest of God we will feel exactly as the word states, rest.  We will not feel the “rat race” of life, or maybe I should say it won’t affect us, because we are living for God, and not ourselves.

We were born to commune with God, to have a relationship with God and one of the things that come with a relationship is trust and compromise.  God is asking us to trust Him with our lives and to compromise our own need to control our lives and allow the master of creation to take over!

I will take feeling refreshed, comfortable, pleasant and rested, over feeling burden, heavy laden, harsh, hard and pressing!!   

Now all I have to do is learn how to hand over my life and keep it in the hands of the one who created it!!