Yoke is Easy, Burden is light!

Matthew 11:28-30 (ESV)
Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. [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. [30] For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."
My yoke is easy and my burden is light. This is what Jesus tells us. So often though, I run into Christians who have not experienced this. Really, their experience seems to be the opposite of this. I run into sheep weighed down by the cares of the world disguised as religious considerations. I run into sheep who are lost, and care not to be found. I run into sheep sore from a life of religious abuse. It troubles me.
It is this sort of thing that made me want to become a pastor. For years though I’d go to church and hear nothing but law. It didn’t matter if it was a fundamentalist or a Liberal, they had no gospel, they had law straight up, or watered down but no gospel, no living water of Jesus Christ that wells up to eternal life. One week condemned for spanking your children, the next week condemned for not spanking your children, and almost nothing to say for those who had not yet become domesticated.
But the Christians running around telling everybody not to listen to such and such a type of music, not to drink, not to smoke, or not to eat this and that, would normally be the ones who reacted in the most unloving ways to their neighbors, and would later confide to me about how hard it was to be a Christian. “Really?” I’d think. “You don’t say?” In the back of my head I would wonder if they knew what Christianity was. What they believed and what I believed were very different things. And when I’d explain what I believed, I could see them picking up stones in their head. But one would think that if the burden was so heavy, they might take pause to think if they believed in the same Jesus who said the words above.
Forgiveness, that is at the heart of Christianity. Whatever else it says it lives and dies with forgiveness. The Christian life is always a matter of returning to forgiveness, and forgiving others, as we are forgiven. And if you aren’t doing that you aren’t giving anyone else a reason to believe.
Of Course that was a thought I was having the other day. People are going to resist every apologetical argument you make if you don’t first get them to the point where they want to believe. And if you aren’t preaching what Christ gave us to preach, good news of forgiveness, than know one is going to want to believe anything, all you are doing is laying upon them a satanic burden, heavy with law.