The easy yoke of Jesus

It’s often preached in church that we ought to come to Jesus for rest and peace because he promises it in Matt. 11 – “Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

But what does it really mean to “find rest in Christ”, to “take up Jesus’s easy yoke?” Growing up in the church I found Jesus’s yoke to be neither easy nor light! The Christian life is about growing in Christlikeness, transformation of character, growth in holiness. I am so so far from the person I should be, or God calls me to be. There is so much work to be done! Easy? Light?

Herein lies a reality that I never heard preached when I was a younger Christian – It is possible for Jesus’s easy yoke to feel heavy to us.

Jesus’s yoke is objectively easy and light because he says it is. One might say that he experiences his own yoke as easy and light, in no small part because he learnt to live a life of complete and utter dependence upon the Father. That was the source of the ‘lightness’ and ‘easiness’ of the yoke.

But what about us? All of us who were born in sin grew up carrying our own yoke. These are the ways in which our hearts are innately and also gradually warped in our development in a fallen world. The ways we learn to navigate, control, manipulate the world and relationships around us in order to survive and thrive. Our yoke consists in the habitual needs and responses of our heart to secure love and affection for ourselves, the deep desire to carve, create, and secure an identity for ourselves (making a name for ourselves like the builders of Babel), the ways that we seek greatness, grandiosity, and approval, all the people/relationships that we look to in order to ground our sense of value and self-worth. These are all part of the yoke we grow up with.

And it is not easy to lay down. In fact, it is a fantasy to think we can lay it down just by hearing a sermon, or just by one monumental act of the will/commitment. That is a much too shallow and naïve view of the depth of human persons and the reach of our sin and brokenness. But we cannot truly begin to take up Jesus’s yoke until we first learn to lay down our own.

And we cannot learn to lay down our own yoke without first coming to be aware of what our own yoke is. We are told by Paul to “put off the old man”, but it is impossible to put off what we are not aware of. That is why awareness (or self-knowledge in Augustine and Calvin’s terms) is always the first step in the process. In reflecting on our current character, we are called to understand how we’ve come to be the kind of person we are. Why do we have certain character traits and not others? What are our “strengths” and “weaknesses?” How did they arise? Are you really a naturally submissive and reserved person “by nature?” Or is that how you’ve learnt to survive in life in the midst of chaotic relationships and being surrounded by stronger personalities? Are you really gregarious and outgoing “by nature?” Or is that how you’ve learnt to project confidence in order to mask deep insecurity, anxiety, and suspicions of self-worth? What are the ways that I’ve learnt to navigate life and the world around me? What does my yoke look like?

Of course, self-knowledge on its own is utterly worthless unless it leads you to abandon your life to God in truth. In learning the contours, shape, and weight of our yoke, we come to a deeper understanding of why we are the way we are currently. And we also come to a deeper realization of why Jesus’s yoke feels heavy, why it is difficult to truly find rest in him. There is no rest without the easy yoke.

At this point, many of us might be faced with the truth of our heart – A part of my own heart doesn’t want to lay down my own yoke. This yoke is heavy, it is suffocating, but it is familiar. It fits the contours of my misshapen and deformed heart. It is, in a sense, comfortable. Jesus’s yoke is foreign. It is a different shape. It doesn’t fit naturally onto my heart. It feels oddly unsettling to carry. I don’t like it.

For the person who has largely succeeded in carving an identity our for himself, securing and maintaining that identity in the power of the will and fortitude, Jesus’s yoke will be terrifying. Because it is a call to lay down all attempts to secure one’s own identity and self-worth. Whatever you’ve taken to be of value and note, to contribute to your sense of self, Jesus calls us to lay them down. We are called to learn what it means to receive our core identity from him – as child of the Father. At our core, who we are is completely independent of what we can do and see of ourselves. This is why Paul says in Col. 3:3 that “you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” Our “true self” is grounded in a reality external to ourselves.

But we don’t want this. We want our self to be grounded in what we can do and what we have achieved. This is why “leaving a legacy” comes to be important to us past a certain age. But Jesus calls us away from that. No, it is not primarily about you. What you have done. But who you are in me. This is, in part, what it means for salvation to be by grace. We do not truly depend on God because of how much we have learnt to depend on ourselves, and we can’t help that. There is nothing more naturally and instinctive to the fallen human soul.

So we need to disavow overly simplistic notions of “coming to Jesus for rest.” In his grace and mercy, God does see it fit to grant peace and rest at times ahead of our character, and that is entirely his prerogative. But we must also be attentive to the normative way in which his Spirit works in most believers who aren’t able to have that experience when they come to him. And it need not necessarily be about them not knowing the right technique, or not having enough faith, or any such facile excuses. First and foremost, we do not find rest in Jesus because we cannot bear his yoke. We cannot bear his yoke because we are much too used to our own.

And as Dallas Willard once remarked, “Willpower is not all that powerful.” It is a fantasy to think that, just by a sheer act of my will, telling myself, “I will commit myself to God and his yoke”, that it will magically happen. No. We need to first ask God to teach us about our own yoke. What have we been carrying all these years, and how deformed our hearts are. This is a difficult journey. It might be painful. But that is the beginning of the path towards the easy yoke of Jesus.