My Yoke is Easy and My Burden is Light

(Matthew 11:28-30)

This is a beautiful piece of scripture for in it we see the Lord reveal the essence of walking with him under the New Covenant.

Being a Christian and walking with the Lord is not a hard thing to do. Sure there may be hard times that need to be faced and issues dealt with, but it is not a hard thing to walk with Christ.

Walking in the New Covenant is a simple matter. It is not a complex set of rules and regulations, with intricate instructions, processes and methods of worship. It does not require special training and tools to walk with Christ. You do not need a degree in divinity or theology to understand the teachings of the New Covenant for as Jesus has said in this section, “…my burden is light.” (Vs. 30)

Jesus has not burdened his people or made it a hard and wearisome task to walk with him. Instead he has taken away all of the difficulties and obstacles to walking with God under the Old Covenant and stripped them down to a few bare principles. At its simplest form, to walk with the Lord all you need to do is to believe and have faith in Jesus Christ. You can sum up the minimum requirements of the Christian faith in the following few words. Jesus is the Son of God who came to this earth to die and set us free from sin and the law so that we could be transformed into the nature of God and live with him into eternity.

Yet even in these few words there is a depth of knowledge and understanding required that those who choose not to follow his path would never see. The revelation of the truth and the revealing of God is not something a man can understand by himself. Jesus said, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light,” and he has provided the means by which we can find these things out. He has given us a teacher, guide and counselor in the Holy Spirit to teach each and every one of us the depths of the New Covenant.

The Spirit reveals all things to us that we need to know. We do not have to transform ourselves, and in truth we can’t anyway, for no man knows or understands the nature of God. The Holy Spirit knows the nature of God for the spirit proceeds from God, as we see in John 15:26, “But when the Counselor comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness to me.” The work and task of the Holy Spirit is to do the work of transformation in us. As it says in 2 Corinthians 3:18, we, “…are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.” And in John 14:26 we see the teaching and guiding work of the Spirit, “the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.” And again in John 16:13, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.”

So we see that with all of this power given to us from God to teach, guide and transform our lives, there is little for us to do other than to be receive God’s word and to accept Jesus as our Saviour through faith. The rest of the work is his and is being performed by the Holy Spirit. Our part in this process is to learn and apply the teachings as we are taught, and to have faith, trust and hope in Jesus Christ.

These are not burdensome things and thus as Jesus said, his yoke and burden are truly light and easy. The Apostle Paul showed best that this is Jesus’ work in Ephesians 2:10. “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” And as we are his workmanship and he is doing all the work, our load is light and easy.