He Bears Our Burdens

Listen Online:

Watch Online:

Transcript:

On the way in tonight, as Charlie and the kids got here, Charlie saw the older kids come to the door, and he screamed like he was on fire. I said, what is wrong with Charlie? Anything that Charlie doesn’t like, Charlie screams like that.

What’s wrong with Charlie now? Turns out he wanted to be the one to open the door. Okay, let’s humor him.

I don’t always, but let’s humor him. Benjamin, let him open the door. So Charlie runs up to the door He pulls and he’s not getting anywhere Apparently it’s easier to open him from inside Than from outside for a little guy Because he can escape pretty easily So Charlie finally says Charlie can I help?

And she puts her hand on the door No! So he tries again He stands there and he pulls Still not getting anywhere And she said can I help? No!

We’re going to be here a while aren’t we? So we stood there. I feel like it probably was maybe 30 seconds, but it felt like it went on all day.

And finally I said, I’m going to help because I don’t give him as many options as Mama does. So I just kind of, I let him pull, but I kind of just gently added a little bit, let him think he was doing it because he wasn’t getting anywhere on his own. Even, I mean, we open those doors, we don’t think a thing about it.

But as little as he is, those doors are a heavy burden to bear. And I thought that’s a great segue into tonight’s message. Because I deal with this a lot with Charlie.

I try to help him with things. And sometimes he just would rather have mama. And sometimes he just doesn’t want help.

Last night, trying to get his shoes off of him. It may not have been last night. It’s the last couple nights.

They all start to run together after a while. Trying to get his shoes off of him. And he’s trying to jump ahead of me so we can put his jammies on.

He’s trying to jump ahead of me and take his pants off. But buddy, we’ve got to get your shoes no pants. And he’s pulling and he’s pulling.

Sometimes your pants just don’t want to come off over your shoes, right? I don’t know if you’ve been bored enough to try that. He pulled and he pulled and as hard as he pulled, he couldn’t get them off.

And finally, I had to say, Charlie, you can pull harder, but it’s not going to make a difference. You’ve got to let me help you take this shoe off first. And we do the same thing, though, with God. We want to carry the burdens.

We want to deal with it on our own. We think we’re supposed to. Maybe that’s part of it.

Maybe we think we’re supposed to bear it on our own. Maybe we just think we can. But all too often we’re wrong, and we overestimate like a little kid does.

We overestimate what we can handle on our own. I said years ago that this idea that God doesn’t give us more than we can handle. It sounds good, but it’s a lie.

It’s unscriptural. I had a lady pull me aside and say, no, it says right there in 1 Corinthians. I can’t remember right offhand where the verse is, that God doesn’t give us more than we can handle. That says God doesn’t allow us to be tested beyond what we can stand, but He allows a means of escape.

If you’re talking about burdens, if you’re talking about situations that we cannot handle, that we can’t deal with on our own, the Bible’s very clear that God does allow us to run into things that we can’t handle. Now the good news there is that God never gives us anything more than He can handle. God all the time gives me things I can’t handle, But God never allows anything to come to me that He can’t handle, because there’s nothing that He can’t handle.

And so tonight I’d like to look at a passage that I started looking at earlier this week, and boy, I didn’t know how applicable it was going to be in a variety of circumstances tonight when I picked it out, but that’s often the case when God leads you to a Scripture. In Matthew chapter 11, if you would turn with me there, and when you get there, if you would stand with me as we read together from God’s Word. Matthew chapter 11, and we’re going to start in verse 25 tonight and read what Jesus said here about burdens and us trying to bear them and how we really need Him to bear them for us.

Starting in verse 25, it says, At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and have revealed them to babes. Even so, Father, for it seemed good in your sight. All things have been delivered to me by my Father.

and no one knows the Son except the Father. Nor does anyone know the Father except the Son and the one to whom the Son wills to reveal Him. Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls, for My yoke is easy and My burden is light.

You may be seated. You know, we do this, as I said, just like a toddler, sometimes we will say, no, I can do it myself. God, I’ve got this.

Really, God, I’ve got this. And God the whole time is saying, no, you don’t got this. Let me help you.

Let me carry this for you. Let me open that door. Let me pull off that shoe so you can get the pants off.

Let me help you. And it’s to our own peril that we ignore that and it’s to our benefit that we say, okay, God, I’m not as strong as I think I am. So as we read this passage, it tells me first off that Jesus sought out people who were struggling, not those who were self-sufficient or thought that they were self-sufficient.

And we get this idea that if I just work harder, that’s what God wants me to do. Now the Bible’s not against hard work, but if I just work harder, if I just buckle down and I always pull myself up by the bootstraps, if I’m self-sufficient, if I take care of it myself, that’s what’s going to please God. And I think God does want us to work.

I think God does want us to be diligent. I think the Bible bears that out. But at the same time, it’s an attitude of self-reliance that keeps us from relying on God.

And so this idea, God helps those who help themselves. No, a lot of times God helps those who acknowledge we can’t help ourselves. We’re just working through all the cliches here tonight.

God helps those who help themselves. God never gives us more than we can handle. They sound good, but they don’t completely square with the text of the Bible.

In this text here, in particular, Jesus began praying to the Father after He was rejected by the people in the towns of Chorazin and Bethsaida. If you read earlier in Matthew 11, He was speaking to these cities, and after He had taught them, after He had offered to come to them, they rejected Him, they wanted nothing to do with Him. And He tells them, you know, it’s going to be better for the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah at the Day of Judgment than for you people.

And that’s a pretty disturbing indictment if you were them. He said, you’ve seen evidence. And he looks at these other cities and he says, if the people in Tyre and Sidon had seen what you have seen, they would have repented.

But you’ve seen the evidence. You’ve heard me and you’re ignoring me. You’re rejecting me.

You want nothing to do with me. And so Jesus sort of washes his hands of them. Not a hateful thing, but I’ve got a limited amount of time here on this earth with people to reach and people to teach.

And so you don’t want to be taught, I’ll move on somewhere else. After they have rejected Him, it’s then that He turns and He prays to the Father. Because they were prideful, they were self-sufficient.

It said earlier in verse 23 that they were exalted to heaven. And because of this, they refused to repent. They rejected Jesus.

And so Jesus then thanked the Father in this prayer for sending Him to proclaim the good news to those who recognized their need. It wasn’t the people in Chorazin and Bethsaida who thought they had it all together who were the ultimate mission of Jesus. He came to reach those who recognized they didn’t have it all together.

Because this passage tells us He doesn’t require us to be the wise and the prudent. He came to reach babes, meaning babies, meaning those who don’t know everything, those who aren’t filled with worldly wisdom. He said, you’ve hidden these things from the wise and prudent and you’ve revealed them to babes.

Now why is that? Because when we realize we don’t have it all figured out and that we don’t have it all together, suddenly we’re open to hearing what he has to say. We’re open to being taught by him.

And I think it’s good news for, I don’t know about you, but I think it’s good news for me that he doesn’t require us to be wise and prudent. He doesn’t require us to have everything all together. Verse 28 said, he came for those who are struggling under their burdens.

Aren’t you glad tonight that He doesn’t require you to have everything figured out and have your life all together before He’s willing to have anything to do with you? I’m glad for that because I don’t have it all figured out and I don’t have it all together. I may look like it, probably not.

I may make it look easy, but I don’t. Not any more than you do. But these are exactly the people that Jesus came to reach.

There’s a song that I fell in love with back during the shutdown. I hadn’t really paid any attention to it. And then I saw where the choir at First Baptist Moore, they recorded it over Zoom.

So there’s a video on Facebook where they’re all in little boxes, and they’re singing together. And I just thought it was the most incredible thing. And it got me to listen to the song, Nobody But Jesus.

And the lyrics of that song say, Why you ever chose me has always been a mystery. All my life I’ve been told I belong at the end of the line, with all the other not-quites, all the never-get-it-rights. But it turns out we’re the ones you were looking for all this time.

See, we think in our minds, God came for those who have it all together. But it’s people like us who are broken, who make mistakes, who are carrying burdens that we are way too weak to carry. Those are the people that Jesus came to minister to.

And the good news there is that He offers us the opportunity to unburden ourselves with Him. He didn’t just come to say, it’s okay, and to comfort us and cheer us on, although that would be great enough. He came to actually bear our burdens.

He came to give us the opportunity to unburden ourselves. It was to the regular people, those who don’t have it all together, to the desperate, to the sinners that Jesus said in verse 28, Come to me, all ye who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. He didn’t say, come to me, all you who have it easy, have it all figured out, and I’ll tell you what a great job you’re doing and give you a gold star. He said, come to me when you labor and you’re weary and I’ll give you rest. And many of the people that he was talking to, they were the ones who were burdened down by the weight of trying to earn God’s approval by their good works.

They were trying to earn it. They were trying to have it all together and have it all figured out. They were trying to do all the religious rituals.

They were trying to do all the good works and fill in all the boxes and cross all the T’s and dot all the I’s and not only live up to exactly what the Scriptures say, but to follow the rules that the Pharisees put in place over the Scriptures. They were trying to do all of that. And it would be exhausting.

It would be exhausting. Not only trying to keep all of the. .

. Have you read some of the rules in the Old Testament that were given for Israel? I’m not just talking the Ten Commandments.

None of us keep that perfectly either. But you read the dietary rules, and the rules about what you do on certain days, and the sacrifices you have to keep straight. It is exhausting trying to wade through all of that.

and you take that and you add on to it the extra rules the Pharisees had put there so that people were thinking, if I could just be this religious, if I could just do all of these things perfectly, then God will like me. And they were wearing themselves out and getting no closer to God’s approval. They were burdened by the weight of trying to earn something they could never earn and they were burdened by the weight of their sin. Have you ever felt burdened by guilt?

Maybe burdened by guilt because you know you’ve sinned against God, maybe burdened by guilt because you’ve said something thoughtlessly to somebody else, you’ve offended them in some way, you’ve done something to them, and as soon as it was done, you thought, I was wrong, I can’t take it back, I feel terrible about what’s happened here. Have you ever just felt guilty over something you’ve done wrong? That to me is one of the worst feelings, that feeling I have every time I sin that I have just let my father down.

And they were walking around with that with no way to get out from under it. And we have the benefit of being able to confess it to the Father and have it under the blood of Jesus Christ and be forgiven and be reconciled to the Father. But they were walking around thinking, I’ve got to do something or earn my way back into God’s good graces.

They were bearing this enormous burden that they couldn’t get out from under. And in lieu of those burdens, instead of those, instead of carrying that around, instead of trying to earn it themselves, Jesus told them that He would give them rest. Think about the weight of that guilt that you felt. Maybe you feel it tonight.

Maybe you just remember feeling it in the past. Think about how heavy it is and how hard it weighs down on you and how exhausting it is. And think about what Jesus is offering here. Come unto Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. He doesn’t say, come and I’ll show you how to earn God’s forgiveness.

Come and be as good as Me and I’ll take your sin away from you. He says, come to me and I will give you rest. He offers to take that burden off of you and give you rest. And He offers to teach us with gentleness and humility. He says, take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and lowly in heart.

Now, it’s important that He’s going to instruct us in the ways of righteousness, that He’s going to teach us what it means to follow the Father, because we don’t want to keep going back to the same sin and the same burdens that we’ve always carried once He takes them away from us. But have you ever had a mean teacher? Some of you, have you ever been a mean teacher?

Not everybody who’s taught you has been nice about it, have they? He says, take my yoke and learn from me for I am gentle and lowly in heart. And He’s going to teach us with gentleness and with humility.

He’s going to teach us in a loving way. He’s not going to hit our knuckles with a ruler every time we mess up. He’s going to lovingly take us by the hand and teach us.

And what He brings us is the peace with God that we so desperately need. I look around at the world we live in today, and I think part of the reason, I think the biggest part of the reason why the world is not at peace with itself tonight is because the world is not at peace with God. And I think that’s why so many people are angry with each other, is because they’re not right with God.

Because I know when I think about what God has forgiven me of, when I think about what God has done for me, When I think about the grace that He has shown me time and time and time and time again, it gets a lot harder to be angry with other people. Now, I get angry. You heard my story about the bank this morning.

I get angry sometimes, but it gets a lot harder to get me angry, and it gets a lot harder to stay angry. So many of our problems in this world are because what we are designed to have is peace with God. What we are in need of is peace with God.

What we’re looking for, whether we realize it or not, to fulfill us is that peace with God. But mankind looks in all these other places to fulfill it. We don’t have that peace with God, and so we’re never at peace with ourselves or with one another.

And the only way for us to find that peace with God that we need is through Jesus Christ. And so He offers us the ability, the opportunity to come and unburden ourselves with Him. We ought to take it. I’m not just talking about in the context of salvation.

I think that’s part of what he’s talking about here. He’s inviting the unbeliever to come in and get out from under the burden of that sin. But I think for us as believers, too, once that sin’s been forgiven, we still carry around burdens with us that we were not designed to carry.

I got a phone call this afternoon that just kind of sent me into a tizzy. I wasn’t mad at anybody, but it’s one of those, you know, I was talking to Christy Thursday about, you know, there’s been so much that’s happened in my life, there’s not that much that bothers me or upsets me. this was one of those things that does.

We were talking about that because I’d gotten the phone call from Charla on Thursday about Carly Jo needing surgery, and she was practically hysterical, and I’m just going, okay, so we’re doing surgery now. And yet I got a phone call today that upset me. And immediately I start thinking about, okay, how do I make this better?

How do I fix this? How do I head this off? And I talk to Charla, and I talk to my mother.

I told you all, I whined to Charla, and I whined to my mother. And they made me feel a little better. But within myself, there’s still just a tornado of all this stuff going on.

And I finally said, stop. Do you remember what you’re preaching on tonight? Oh, yeah.

I have conversations with myself. I came in here. Like, hopefully nobody’s here yet.

I can have quiet. And God can hear you. It doesn’t have to be in the auditorium.

But I thought, I’m going to come into the auditorium to help me focus because there’s too much other stuff in my office that dings and lights up. So I walked in here, knelt down here. First of all, ask God to forgive me for so quickly forgetting the message I’ve spent all week studying.

And I had acknowledged to him, I can’t fix this situation. First of all, there may not even be a situation. We build things up in our minds.

But I can’t fix this. Charla can’t fix this. My mother can’t fix this.

The President of the United States can’t fix this. But God wasn’t surprised about this ridiculous phone call. And he’s got it under control.

I said, God, forgive me for looking everywhere else to get rid of my burdens. When Jesus said, come unto me, all ye who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. And I just asked him to take it. Maybe that’s why I was so tired afterwards.

Maybe I just worn myself out. But you know what? I felt better.

I know it’s not all about feelings, but I felt better. The reason for that is because he’s the only one capable of bearing those burdens. Those things that are too heavy for us.

Whether it’s the spiritual burden of the weight of our sin or trying to be religious enough, trying to be good enough for God. He’s the only one with shoulders big enough to carry that burden. From those burdens on down to just some of the things, the stuff we deal with in life that you’re thinking, God, this is too big for me.

This is going to crush me, but I don’t know what else to do, so I’m going to try to carry it anyway. He’s the only one big enough to carry it. He said, we weren’t designed to.

He said, come take my yoke on you. It’s easy. It’s light.

I will carry that burden for you. and it’s not just trying to get away from it. He doesn’t tell us just lay down our burdens and walk away from them.

He says give them to Him. We’re not escaping. We’re handing them over to Him and saying we trust You.

We’re not forgetting that these burdens exist. We’re realizing how much more important it is to trust Him than to trust our ability to deal with this. We can lay these burdens down only because He’s the only one capable of bearing them. And so as we look at this, and I think we get this idea, I could stand here and talk for 10, 15 more minutes idea, but I think you get the idea, don’t you, that He’s got big shoulders and He invites us to come and lay our burdens down with Him.

Once we understand that, all that there is left to do is to actually do it, is to actually trust Him with those things. And I understand, I understand how hard that is to do. I understand that that is not always our first instinct, but He tells us to do it.

And we can try, just like Charlie, we can try to move that burden. We can try and try and try to move that burden, And despite all our effort, we can be no closer to moving it. Or we can take Him at His word when He says, Come to me, and I’ll give you rest. And you think, well, you might think, God doesn’t care about my burden.

It’s just a little thing. God has His hands full doing other stuff. I’ve heard that before.

Let me tell you this. God does not have His hands full. This whole world and all its insanity is not beyond the capability of God to handle.

We’re not getting anywhere close to meeting the capacity of His capability. God has got plenty of time and interest and power to deal with your problems, to deal with your life. That’s why He tells us in 1 Peter to cast all our care upon Him, for He cares for you.

It doesn’t matter how big your problem is or how small your problem is. He tells us to come to Him and find rest because He cares for us. I was in Brother Huey’s Sunday school class this morning.

He had the teenagers discussing, does prayer change God’s mind? And they were given scriptures and had to take a position, yes or no, and then debate the, this is a great way to study this. Although I told him, I said, I think there needs to be a third option between prayer changes God’s mind and prayer does not change God’s mind.

I don’t know what that third option is, but I think there needs to be a third option. But I told him, you know, I’ve studied this. I’ve struggled with this.

I wrote a paper on this back in the spring and some of the greatest theological minds in the evangelical world go back and forth on this. And our teenagers are having to wade through it. I thought this was great.

But he came back to something at the end of the lesson when we hadn’t arrived at a satisfactory conclusion. And we may not know the answer to this, this, or this, but what we know is God loves us. 1 Peter says, He cares for you.

Cast your burdens on Him because He cares for you. You may not understand how He’s going to deal with the burden. You may not know what to do with yourself next after you lay the burden down.

All you need to know is that He loves you, and He’s promised that you can come to Him and find rest.