When Our Burdens Seem Unbearable - Part 2

Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Friday, May 26th. God never intended for you to be weighed down by your problems. Instead, He offers to sustain you when burdens seem unbearable. Well, all of us have those times in our life when we feel burdened down. We all have those times in life when we feel like things are a little bit hopeless or helpless or we feel discouraged or disillusioned maybe.

Where do you turn when you have those feelings? Well, I want to tell you, my friends, you don't have to give up. You don't have to quit. You don't have to get on drugs. You don't have to get on alcohol.

You don't have to get on some sexual affair. Listen, God has a very clear biblical, workable, practical, sufficient, adequate, listen, answer to that need, to that burden, no matter what it is. And that's what I want us to talk about in this passage, which He gives us so clearly. So, to Matthew chapter eleven, look if you will, beginning in verse twenty-eight. He says, Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden, that is tired, burdened down, and I will give you rest. When He says, Come to me, I want you to notice there are four things in this passage.

First of all, here's an invitation. He says, I want you to come to me. Here's Jesus, the living Son of God, the sovereign God of this universe, now seated at the Father's right hand. And He says, All power has been given to me in heaven and earth. So we know that whatever burden you and I carry, He is able to deal with it. Because the Bible's asked a couple of times, Is there anything too hard for God? How can anything be too hard for God who is sovereignly in control of every single solitary thing? Who is omniscient, knowing all things, omnipresent, all things are in His presence. And He has the power to handle every circumstance of life. And what is He saying to us?

Come to me. Now, when He says, Come to me, how can I take a burden to the Lord? Not only does He say, Come to me, all you who are heavy laden, but listen, it is the scope of its universal. Anyone who is burdened about anything, we can come to Him.

Lost and saved. Now, a person who is without Christ can come to Him. The first thing they have to deal with is their sin problem. Once you trust the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal Savior, He's willing to deal with all the other burdens that you and I deal with in life. He says, Come to me, all ye. Not only can all come, but we can bring all types of burdens, no matter what they are. This heaviness that we have to deal with, we can bring every type of burden to Him.

Because listen, He knows exactly what to do and how to handle every one of them. So first of all, we have this wonderful invitation. And He says, I want you to come. And He says, I want you to give me your burden. I want you to lay it down.

I want you to let me handle it. And then notice what He says. He says, Secondly, I want you to do this. He says, Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me.

For I'm gentle and humble in heart, and you shall find rest for your souls. He says, Take My yoke upon you. So first of all, He gives us an invitation. He says, Come, I want to take care of it. Secondly, He says, Now, here's what you must do. I want you to take My yoke upon you.

Now, why did He say My yoke? His yoke is simply this, that we submit ourselves to Him as our Master and our Lord. And we walk in obedience to Him.

Listen, listen, obedience that is enabled by the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit. We don't walk in obedience to God so we'll get saved. We walk in obedience to God because He has saved us. We walk in the victory. We walk in the joy. We walk in the gratitude.

We walk in the peace. We walk in the contentment that He's given us because of what He's done for us, not what we do for ourselves. He says, Now, take My yoke upon you. He says, Learn from Me. Now, why did He say learn from Me?

He's simply saying, Be My disciple. Learn My ways. Learn how I operate. And here's what you'll learn. You'll learn that I love you unconditionally. You'll learn that whatever you face, I'm going to be there. You'll learn that whatever burden you bear, I'm going to be there to lift it off your shoulders. You're going to learn that I'm always there, reliably there, never leave you, never forsake you, that I'll always be adequate for you.

I'll meet every single need of your life. So He says, Take My yoke upon you. Submit to My will and to My way. Learn from Me.

Be one of My disciples. And He says, My yoke is easy. My burden is light. Does He say that we'll have no responsibility? No, we'll have responsibility. The truth is we all desire the yoke of submission to the Lord Jesus Christ. We want to be in submission to Him. We want to be subservient to Him. We want to walk obediently before Him. We want the yoke of the Lord Jesus Christ. Listen, which does not bear us down but lift us up.

Because you know what happens? He gets under the yoke with us. He lifts the burden off our shoulders. We are able to walk through the most difficult trying times of life, living in burdens that God may not remove for the present time or some burdens He may never remove in this life.

And so what happens? He teaches us how to live in them without being borne down by them. We don't feel weighted down. We don't feel discouraged. We don't feel disillusioned. We don't feel like we're going to give up. We don't feel like we're walking on the edge of life.

Somehow we're able to walk in the midst of those burdens with a sense of confidence and victory and assurance that God is in control and He will work out the circumstances in His own time, in His own perfect way. Come unto Me, He says, all you that live in the heavenly and I will give you rest. He says so. Here's the invitation. Come on.

Here's the command. Take my yoke. It's easy.

It's light. I may remove the burden totally, but if I don't remove the burden, I get up on it with you and you'll never feel it. Thirdly, He says, here's the assurance.

Let's make a difference. Come on. Not going to throw you aside. And He says, here's My promise. Look at this.

Twice. I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me from gentle and humble in heart. You shall find rest for your soul. For My yoke is easy.

My load is light. He says, you're going to find rest. Now what does that mean? Simply this, that when I give it to Him and I trust Him with it and I get my focus on Him, you know what's going to happen? I'm going to be able to rest in my soul without having turmoil. I'm going to be able to rest in my spirit without fear. I'm going to be able to rest in my understanding of my circumstances, that even though they may not change, there's going to be an awesome sense of peace until He does see fit to change them. This is the reason that some people can live in such dire straits, difficult circumstances and you meet them, they have a smile upon their face, joy upon their heart, a contentment in their soul. I'm sure that no one is always that way.

Nobody is always that way because all of us have our ups and downs, all of us have our moments of weakness. But listen, the key is that you know what to do with it and how to lay it right back down. Lord, you said I could come to you. I'm coming to you. God, I picked it up. Sorry I picked it up. Forgive me for my weakness. I'm giving it back to you. I'm trusting you with it.

I want to thank you for getting my focus back on you where it belongs and move on in life. Will you have all the answers? No. Well, you know what God is up to always?

No. You know what? He didn't guarantee me to tell me all He was going to do and how He was going to do it and when He was going to do it and why. But one thing He's guaranteed, rest to our souls. So when somebody says, well, I have burdens.

What do I do? The first thing you do is you bring them to Christ. Have an invitation, have a command, have a wonderful assurance and a beautiful promise. Now there's something else we can do.

That is we have to share them with someone else. Now watch this. Go to Galatians chapter six. Now let me ask you a question. How many of you, just out of curiosity, to be honest, how many of you thought that Matthew 11 was the answer and that was it? I was going to quit after that.

Anybody? Can't fool with you, can I? All right. There's one other thing you do with your burdens.

You carry them to someone else. You say, well, now wait a minute. Haven't you always been talking about God being sufficient? Absolutely. God being adequate?

Yes, He is. When you have Him, you have everything right. But remember this, you listen and say amen. You must always leave it to God to do things His way.

Now listen to what He says, Galatians chapter six. Brethren, even if a man or a woman is caught in any trespass, you who are spiritual, restore such one in the spirit of gentleness, each one looking to yourself, lest you too be tempted. Then He says, bear one another's burdens and thus fulfill the law of Christ. Bear one another's burdens. Well, how's somebody else going to bear my burden? Well, God may lay upon someone's heart to pray for me, but if someone else is to bear my, really bear my burden, they need to know what I'm really burdened about. Now all of us have had people call us or whatever it might be and say, I'm praying for you, there's something going on. But He says, we're to bear one another's burdens. That means that I have the right to share my burden with someone else.

Now listen to two things, now watch carefully. A lot of people will go to their grave with a lot of excess emotional baggage in their life that God never intended for them to carry. They don't know how to leave it with Him. And secondly, they're too prideful to tell anybody else they've got baggage. Well, let's just face it right now, everybody has baggage. Everybody's got it. No such thing as a perfect person.

If they were perfect, we couldn't stand them, so therefore God knew better than to make anybody perfect. And so therefore, we all have our burdens we have to deal with in life. I've got them, you've got them. We all have them, things we have to deal with. Now you may be one of those persons who's just too prideful to do it. Then my friend, remember two things. You're going to miss a blessing and you're going to cause somebody else to miss a blessing because you see, if you go to a person and share with them your heart, how you're hurting, the deep burden that you're feeling in your life, something that you're going through, remember this.

All you have done is you've practiced what Jesus practiced. There's a moment in his life when he said, I need my friends to be close. I need to tell you this is getting pretty close to all I can handle. I certainly have somebody I can go to. I have a friend, more than one friend, that I can go to any time of day or night. They would never shut me down. They would never accuse me. They would never blame me. They would listen very carefully, openly, lovingly, understandably. Thank God for that kind of friends.

But you know what? The only way I've developed that kind of friendship with them because I've said, I want to tell you about my life. I want to tell you what I'm feeling. I want to tell you where I'm hurting. I want to tell you how I'm aching. I want to tell you my burden. I want to share with you what's on the inside. And you know what happens? It teaches the other person to be transparent. Now you can't just do that to anybody.

You look for a godly person who will accept you the way you are, who will understand you, who will not be critical, who will be honest, who will apply the principles of Scripture to your heart, but not be critical, not be judgmental. My friend, you can't fool me or anybody else. Everybody needs somebody, somebody else.

Now wait a minute now, wait a minute now. Isn't God sufficient? Yes, He is. But isn't it interesting that God calls people to be counselors? He calls people in that ministry. And some of the greatest counselors do not have a shingle out.

They're godly people just like you who have a heart that's open and transparent, that's sensitive, that's loving, that's forgiving, that's caring, that's understanding. And they can come to you and say, let me tell you how I'm hurting. Let me tell you what I'm feeling.

And my friend, if you are so tied up in such a knot that you cannot tell anybody, not share anybody, you have a major problem that you need to deal with. And it begins with pride. You may say, but I'm so afraid.

You know what? You don't have to be afraid. But what will they think? It doesn't make any difference what they think. What makes a difference is what God thinks.

And what did we hear? He said, I'm going to be kind to you. I'm going to love you unconditionally. I'm going to take you just the way you are. I'm going to understand you. You can't tell me anything that's going to cause me to be disappointed.

I think I have a couple of friends like that. I hope you do. You see, because God chooses to use human beings oftentimes to do for us what He knows we need. Now sometimes God will send somebody into your life.

It will be the Spirit of the Living God on the inside, God on the inside of that person coming to you and saying, you can tell me. You can share with me. I want to pray with you. I love you. What can I do to help you? That's just as much God doing what He promised to do as me getting on my knees and crying out into space into God somewhere out there.

And Lord, please help me answer my prayer. Here's my burden. It is somebody on the outside to whom you go who can see this from a whole different perspective. They can see where you are in a way that you can't see yourself.

So what can they do? They oftentimes can pass on a word of admonition, a word of caution, a word of encouragement. You say, oh, I never thought about that.

I hadn't seen it that way. That's not, that's God. God has all kinds of ways of helping us, and one of the ways He has to help us is through somebody else. You know what that should say to all of us? Every single child of God is an awesome potential blessing to every other child of God.

Every single one of us can be a potential blessing to someone else if we'll make ourselves available and transparent, and if we can love and accept people just the way they are. Not accuse, not condemn, not argue, not defend. Just listen with love and see what God does through you.

I don't know what you're facing. I don't know where you are in life, but this much I know. I know there's a Jesus. I know there's a God. His name is Jehovah.

Jesus is His Son, the Holy Spirit is the one who works in our spirit, in our life, in this life. No matter what you're facing, no matter how long you've faced it, no matter how heavy, how weighty, how awful you feel it is, He is sufficient and adequate to enable you, to sustain you, He says, to strengthen you. He may totally remove the burden that you find yourself in, and more than likely He will. But once in a while there are those burdens He allows for a season of time, a longer season of time than you and I would like, but He allows them for a purpose.

When His purpose is finished, burden's gone. But most of them He's willing to take now if we come to Him lay them before Him. Tell Him about them. Trust them with Him. Get our focus on Him.

You know what? He's more than happy. He delights. He says He bears our burdens daily.

If you'll let Him, He'll take yours. It may be that you are a believer and you're in a dire circumstance and you'd like to get out and you're crying out to God and you've just begun to doubt God and almost hate God for where you are. Why don't you just try this? Just say, Lord, I've heard something different today. I haven't done it very well. That's okay. He understands. And just tell Him that today you're laying it down. He knows you may have to pick it up tomorrow. Tell Him you're laying it down. And you're trusting Him with it.

You believe He's big enough to handle it. Desires to handle it. Just lay it down and see what God does in your life. And listen, if you pick it up again tomorrow, don't get discouraged.

We have all picked up some things every day for weeks and for months until finally we could lay it down. It's the only real genuine freedom, and that's through Christ. Father, what a wonderful God You are.

How loving and kind and understanding and sensitive and helpful and patient. And I pray the Holy Spirit will take this simple message You intend for them, everyone, to be simple so that nobody can miss the awesome truth that You love us and will bear our burdens. Thank You for bearing our sin burden. Thank You that You'll bear all the rest of them. And I pray that many people who hear this message will lay their burdens down and take up that wonderful light yoke of submission to Christ in whom is all of our hope.

But we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you for listening to When Our Burdens Seem Unbearable. If you'd like to know more about Charles Stanley or InTouch Ministries, stop by InTouch.org. This podcast is a presentation of InTouch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.