Sermon Title: Spiritual Recovery: When Everything Feels Like A Burden
Scripture: Matthew 11:28-30 ESV
Introduction
We are continuing in our series on Spiritual Recovery. We’ve looked at spiritual dryness, burnout, and weariness, which are all pieces of the same pie of our spiritual struggles. Today we’re going to look at a condition called spiritual faltering. It is when everything in your life feels like a burden, causing you to falter as the burdens you carry begin to overwhelm you. This is not simply about exhaustion of the body, but exhaustion of your spirit and soul. And no amount of sleep, relaxation, or time off seems to help.
When everything feels like a burden, it can begin to change you. There is a loss of joy and thanksgiving, patience with other people, and relationships become strained. You become increasingly irritated, frustrated, and short-tempered over small things. Kindness and grace in your words and actions become less frequent. You withdraw from people, from church, you talk less, laugh less, and even smiling feels like a burden. You become increasingly critical of others, bitter, resentful, judgmental, and unforgiving. You find more and more things to be dissatisfied with in your life.
And this affects our spiritual lives as well. Prayer and reading the Bible become another burdensome chore. Worship feels mechanical and emotionally detached. Growing in faith, fellowship, and being part of the life of the church no longer hold interest. Walking in obedience to God’s Word, living holy and righteously, becomes a suffocating obligation. Doing what is good and right becomes exhausting, so you begin to distance yourself from God. We no longer respond in gratitude to the blessings we have been given, and our hearts no longer respond to the grace we have received from Christ on the cross.
Spiritual Faltering
The reasons why we fall into this condition are numerous and can be unique to each person. We may have unrealized expectations where we cannot reconcile what we know of God and His Word with the accumulation of our experiences in life, especially when those experiences exceed our own strength and limits.
A person might be dealing with financial struggles, marital problems, relationship issues, sickness, loss, grief, family responsibilities, workplace pressures, and disappointments, sometimes a combination of these simultaneously. Even one of these things can be enough to leave us feeling beaten up and broken. And the passing of time can add to our burdens. You may start out thinking, sure, things are not great, but you’re holding up okay. You tell yourself and others, God is good, and I trust in Him. But then one month becomes two, and eventually years. What seemed manageable at first eventually swallows you up.
Our faith journey can be like that sometimes. When we consider today’s passage within the context of Matthew 11, we see that Jesus is speaking to people who were burdened by the Law and the traditions imposed upon them by the religious leaders. They were trying to live up to the demands of the Law, which the religious leaders themselves could not perfectly keep. The Law, which reveals our sin and our need for God's grace, had become associated with a burdensome system of religious performance and obligation.
And we can fall into something similar. You may have started out with passion and love for God, a desire to serve Him and His people, and to further God’s kingdom on earth. But over time, that changes into a desire for performance so that everything runs well. We begin finding our security and identity in being a good Christian, a good parent, a good person. Failure is no longer an option because it is tied to our identity. As a result, we try to produce results that we were never meant to produce because they are ultimately the work of God.
Your greatest concern becomes making everyone happy, solving every problem, meeting every expectation, and never disappointing anyone, including yourself. Instead of looking to God’s grace, you begin counting your inadequacies. You start thinking, I have to be better, try harder, work harder. I just need to pray more, read the Bible more, do more, and if I do more, everything will be better.
I’m sorry, but that’s not how it works, because God is real. If that actually worked, then we wouldn’t need God in the first place.
We also become burdened when our sins remain unresolved, when we do not repent, or when we continue carrying guilt and shame. God may have forgiven you because that is His promise, but you have yet to fully believe in His forgiveness because you don't feel forgiven. And you have difficulty believing in the finished work of Jesus Christ, who declared as He hung on the cross, “It is finished.”
The Remedy
The remedy for this spiritual condition is made very clear in Matthew 11:28–29. Christ provides rest, true rest for your soul. But what is this rest, and how does it work? The rest that Christ gives begins with a two-fold invitation.
1. First, Christ invites us to COME TO HIM.
This is a personal invitation by Christ to Himself. When we consider John 6:35, Jesus says, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.” We understand that coming to Christ requires faith, believing in the One who invites us to Himself.
This invitation also requires that you recognize where you are in your life, your spiritual condition, and the state of your relationship with God. Be honest with yourself and honest with God. Whatever the reasons may be, whatever circumstances or unresolved sins you have in your life, take them to the Lord in honesty.
This invitation calls us to humble ourselves and recognize that we cannot sustain ourselves. So many times we go through life thinking that it is by my hands, my skills, backed by my intelligence, education, and strength that I can do all things. But Christ invites us to recognize our weakness and our need for Him. Humble yourself.
2. Second, Christ invites us into DISCIPLESHIP.
Matthew 11:29: “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.”
Jesus does not simply offer momentary relief from our burdens, nor does He promise to take away every difficulty in our lives. He invites us to take up His yoke, to continue learning from Him, following Him, and growing in our relationship with Him.
Whether we realize it or not, human beings are restless creatures. We try to find peace for that restlessness by yoking ourselves to something in life. For some, it is money, people, status, achievement, materialism, church, marriage, or even our own expectations. We look to these things for security, identity, purpose, and rest.
Jesus invites us to take His yoke and learn from Him. The image of a yoke provides an excellent picture of discipleship. A yoke is a harness that connects two oxen together so that they can work together in carrying a burden. But that is not all it does. The yoke connects the oxen so that they do not wander off in different directions. It helps them coordinate, walk at the same pace, and move in the same direction.
Often, a more experienced ox would be paired with a younger, inexperienced ox so that the younger one could learn to work properly. And when two oxen are yoked together, the stronger ox is able to contribute more strength to the work. Now, between Jesus and us, who do you think is the stronger one?
When we are yoked to Christ, we are yoked to the One who is strong, who never exhausts His strength, never grows weary, who sustains us and supplies us with what we lack. Discipleship is the yoke through which we learn more about Christ, His strength, and His character, that He is gentle and lowly in heart.
Unlike the world that demands your strength, Christ gives you strength. His yoke is not oppressive and heavy. He does not demand your perfection and performance as the basis of your acceptance before Him. He knows you and sees you at your weakest. He patiently teaches us to learn and grow, and He does not abandon us when we fail.
He has power and authority, but He does not use it to torture you but to nurture you, not to hold you down but to raise you up. He is humble and lowly in heart, such that He is not only willing to lay Himself down for you, He has already laid Himself down for you so that you may have life abundantly. Our Lord Jesus Christ does not turn away those who come to Him in weakness. He is the God who promised in Isaiah 40 that He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak.
Conclusion
How does this two-fold invitation lead us to the rest that Christ offers? The answer is found in Matthew 11:25–27, where Jesus speaks of the Father revealing Himself through the Son. Verse 27 says, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”
Brothers and sisters, the reason why Christ invites us to come to Him, the reason why He invites us into discipleship, to learn from Him and follow Him, is because the rest that Jesus offers us can only be found in a relationship with God. Jesus is the very image of the invisible God. He is the One through whom the God of the universe is revealed. Through Christ, we come to know God, for He is Immanuel, God with us.
Christ does not promise to take away all of our burdens. He offers us His yoke. And the burden Christ gives us is good because it is a life-giving relationship with the Most High God!
Taking on Christ’s yoke means that you are free from self-serving, self-saving, performance-driven burdens. You are free from being yoked to things that can never give you rest. You are free from carrying your burdens alone and from depending entirely upon your own strength. You begin to understand that obedience and rest are not opposite things.
True rest for the soul is not about stopping work or stopping service. True rest comes from following Christ and growing in our relationship with God. True rest is not about inactivity, but about having a right relationship with God. It is not about taking time away from God, from the church, and from God’s people. That is not God's way, that is the world's way. God says, come to Me, and I will give you rest.
Brothers and sisters, when Jesus says His yoke is easy and His burden is light, it does not mean that following Him is effortless or always emotionally easy. In fact, Matthew 16:24 tells us that following Christ involves sacrifice, denying ourselves, and sometimes suffering as we carry our cross. However, the yoke Christ offers is completely different because the One to whom we are yoked is good.
The life of God’s people is not a life without a yoke, but a life lived under the good and right yoke, in a right relationship with our God.
Reflection
Brothers and sisters, in your times and seasons of spiritual faltering, when everything in your life begins to feel like a burden, when you feel overwhelmed and crushed, who have you been turning to?
Have you been trusting in the promises of God? Have you been relying upon your own strength? Have you been wondering why you have not been experiencing the rest that God offers? I encourage you to look deep within and see whether you have been depending upon something other than Christ.
Our sinful nature causes us to habitually do the opposite of what we should do when we falter. We distance ourselves from God, from the church, and from other people. We run away from the very source of strength and rest that we need. We try everything else to distract ourselves through entertainment, pleasure, and other things. These are not necessarily bad things in themselves, but we begin to yoke ourselves to them.
But Christ offers us something better. And brothers and sisters, lest you misunderstand, the rest Christ offers is not a prize or something we deserve because we have done x, y, and z. It is completely the work of God, a gracious gift to those who receive His invitation to come to Christ, take up His yoke, and follow Him.
Do not allow the situations and circumstances of your life to drive you away from Christ. Walk in obedience to His words that say: COME TO ME!
