The Lord’s Yoke Is Easy and His Burden Is Light

The following is a prerecorded program. Hey friends, welcome to today's broadcast on the line of fire. This week is a special week. I am in Fort Worth, Texas, attending the ETS, Evangelical Theological Society annual convention. Several thousand evangelical scholars come together, theologians, people of different backgrounds, but with the common denominator of loving biblical scholarship and theology and being evangelical believers. And we come together for a few days.

I haven't participated in this for years and years and then finally did again in recent years. And you deliver papers back and forth. You share different viewpoints. You have discussion sections. People deliver plenary papers that everyone listens to. So it's a good stimulating time.

Above all, it's a time to catch up and see people you don't normally get to see. So I'm presenting a couple of papers this week. And for the most part, what we've done is prerecord brand new broadcasts. So this is not a previously aired.

This is not a best of show. This is a brand new broadcast, but specially prepared for those days where we're not able to broadcast live and take your calls live. So I really believe you're going to be enriched with the content along with the teaching today. We're also going to be talking through many reasons why people are leaving the faith. It's something we've talked about a lot. I address it in my book, Has God Failed You? Finding faith when you're not even sure God is real. But I have to admit I was surprised when I posted on social media just earlier today and I said, okay, in your mind, in your opinion, what are the main reasons why many people are leaving the faith?

I have to admit I was surprised with the flood of comments from people wanting to weigh in. So we're going to continue to address that and interact with some of your social media comments. And when we're able to broadcast live during the week, we will absolutely be doing that and plan 100% to be back in studio in our home studio at the end of the week on Friday taking your questions and calls. So I won't give out the phone number now, but as I prayed and thought about what would bless you, what would help you, what would you find practical? Again, we're here not just to deal with controversies and tackle difficult subjects, but we want to see you healthy. We want to see you thriving. We want to see you living an overcoming life in the Lord, bearing much fruit, blessed by Him and being a blessing to others. So if you're in a really rough state now, we want to get you healthier. If you're strong, we want to get you even stronger. If you're running your race, we want to put an even greater vision in front of you and infuse you with faith and truth and courage.

That's why we're here on the air. And I want to thank all of you who pray for us. I want to thank all of you who share our broadcast with others. I want to thank all of you who give financially, especially those who do so sacrificially. Thank you. Because your giving, your helping is making a great, great difference.

All right. You've probably heard these words before if you've been in church at all over the years. You've heard these words. I want to read this to you from Matthew chapter 11. Yeshua's words as He's with His disciples. He's just said that no one can know the Father except as He reveals.

No one can know the Son unless the Father reveals. And He says this, Matthew chapter 11, beginning in verse 28. He says, Come to Me, all you who are laboring, burdened, heavy laden, come to Me, and I will give you rest. And He says, Learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

So here from another translation, the NIV. Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you.

So this is the image of an animal wearing a yoke. 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. And some would argue that the best understanding of the Greek word easy there means it fits just right.

So think of it like that. The Lord's yoke is easy, meaning it fits just right, and His burden is light. Okay, let me first give you cultural background, then I want to give you contextual background, and then I want to minister grace to you. Whether you are a believer and you've been serving the Lord for 20 or 30 years, whether you are brand new in Jesus, whether you are full-time minister of the gospel, I believe you're going to get some really life-giving truth from the Word of God today. Let me read to you what David Stern says in his Jewish New Testament commentary to these verses. Judaism speaks of the yoke of heaven, the commitment any Jew must make to trust in God, and the yoke of the Torah, the concomitant commitment an observant Jew makes to keep the generalities and details of Halakhah, meaning Jewish law. So you take on you the yoke of heaven, that is the responsibility to believe in and confess and follow the God of Israel. And then the yoke of the Torah, that is now taking on yourself the responsibility of following all of God's laws. He continues, Yeshua speaks of His own easy yoke and light burden.

These two are sometimes contrast in a way implying that in comparison with Judaism, Christianity offers cheap grace. But this saying of Yeshua's must be put alongside remarks such as 1038, so Matthew 1038 or Luke 9, 23, 24, which is about deny yourself and take up the cross and follow Him. If you try to save your life, you lose it.

If you lose your life, you save it. Dr. Stern continues, The easy yoke consists in a total commitment to godliness through the power of the Holy Spirit. So it's not an easy way.

It's not a cop-out way. It's not a way of saying, well, Judaism is really difficult, but Christianity is really easy. No, there is a supernatural empowerment and grace that God gives.

Dr. Stern says, It at once requires both no effort and maximal effort. No effort in that the necessary moment-to-moment faith cannot be worked up from within, but is a gift of God, Ephesians 2, 8, 9. And maximal effort in that there is no predeterminable level of holiness and obedience sufficient to satisfy God and let us rest on our laurels. I often say we come to a place of rest and then we run.

We come to that place of acceptance, knowing that we're loved by God, and that we run a race for Him. Here's what Dr. Craig Keener says in his Bible background commentary. Of course, he comments much more extensively in his Matthew commentaries. He says, Verse 28, God offered rest to the weary, Isaiah 40, 28 through 31, and he goes on with other parallels.

This was not the promise an ordinary teacher would make. So you don't find these words commonly among the early rabbinic teachers, come to me and find rest. Then, Verse 29 and 30, when a man carried a yoke, he would carry it on his shoulders, as in Jeremiah 27, when Jeremiah does that as a demonstration, as a sign. Judaism applied this image of subjection to obedience. Jewish people spoke of carrying the yoke of God's law and the yoke of His kingdom, which one accepted by acknowledging that God was one and by keeping His commandments. Matthew intends Jesus' words about rest as a contrast with Pharisee's Sabbath rules in the following passage, Chapter 12.

The promise to rest for your souls comes from Jeremiah 6.16, where God promises to stay as wrath if the people turn to Him instead of the words of the false religious leaders found elsewhere in that chapter. So what about the context? We know the background, the cultural background about taking the yoke upon you. So Yeshua says, my yoke, not the yoke of the Jewish traditions, not the yoke of the religious world, but my yoke. So we are living in obedience to Him. Relationally, we are sons and daughters. Vocationally, we are bondservants and slaves. We live to serve Him.

We have been bought with a price. So we take His yoke, that yoke of obedience to Him, but He says it fits just right and that His burden is light. Now, immediately after this, we get into the 12th chapter, and Matthew positions this differently than Mark and Luke. And here's where you have two incidents involving the religious leaders.

In one, there's a man with a withered hand in the synagogue, so he's crippled in his hand. And Yeshua tells him to stretch out his hand, and he does, and people are angry. And he says, well, hang on, is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath? And if you can save a life on the Sabbath or bring relief on the Sabbath, shouldn't you do it? Well, in the Jewish tradition, which is now adding to many of God's laws, adding something beyond what God had said, that helping someone medicinally or bringing a miraculous cure, you could theoretically do that on any other day. So it's not an emergency.

It's not like the person's dying if you don't heal them now. So do it another day, not the Sabbath. And he's saying, you're missing the whole point of the Sabbath. And then his disciples, they're walking through the grain fields, and they're grabbing some grain to munch on, and the religious leaders, the Pharisees say, hey, your disciples are violating the Sabbath. And they say, no, that's not the case.

And then he gets very pragmatic. You know, that David went to the temple, and the tabernacle then, as it was, and he needed a sword, needed some bread. We've got Goliath's sword and the bread of the presence that's for the priest, well, give it to me and my men. We need it. And it's fleeing from Saul. Give it to us.

We need it. And he says, well, something greater than the temple is here, and someone greater than David is here. That's the point of it, that, hey, it's fine in my presence to do this, and it's just being practical. So on the one hand, he's saying that his ways are different than the ways of religious tradition. I love holiness. I hate legalism. I love the conviction of sin. I hate condemnation. So there are big differences. I love the truths of God and the teachings of God and the laws of God.

I utterly reject binding human tradition. So Yeshua wants to set us free from that. But in what sense can he say that his burden is light? Could he tell the apostle Paul, the burden I've put on you is light? You've been flogged multiple times. You've been beaten with rods.

You've gone about naked and homeless and been shipwrecked and hated and reviled and stoned, rotted in prison, ultimately beheaded. Could Jesus actually say that to Paul? Hey, my yoke is easy. It fits just right, and my burden is light. Yes, yes, he could.

He could. And that's what I want to share with you today. I want to talk about the importance of understanding what God gives you to do and what he calls you to do.

In fact, when we come back, I want to share an illustration from an old preacher. I guess he's my age. I guess in his 60s when I heard him preach when I was a teenager and I was amazed by his energy and passion and spiritual insights and vigor.

Yeah, I'm about the same age he was, maybe even older now and feel full of life. But from that perspective, I was amazed by the insights of this quote, old man of God. I want to share that with you. I want to share some things I've learned in my own life. So share this with a friend, call a friend, tell them to tune in. If you listen to my podcast, share the podcast with someone. I want to minister this word, this grace to as many people as I can. If you understand it, it really is life changing.

It really is life transforming. OK, stay right here. We'll be right back. It's the line of fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Get into the line of fire now by calling 866-34-TRUTH.

Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Hey, friends, thanks for tuning in today. It is a special teaching broadcast, so I'm not taking your calls.

If somehow you're tuning in in the midst of the show, just driving your car and happen to tune in, do your best to catch all of it, because I believe it will really bless you. We're talking about the Lord's words at the end of Matthew 11, where he says to come to him and we'll find rest, that we're to take his yoke on our shoulders, and that his yoke fits us just right, and his burden is light. How can that possibly be? I was interacting with a friend of our ministry who's been very generous with us over the years, and he was explaining one of the reasons that he supports our ministry. He has Jewish background as well, but he said it's not primarily that that drew him to me, but rather speaking the truth in love, tackling the difficult issues, the controversies, the challenging apologetic issues, but doing it in a way where I'm not angry and railing on people, that we're tackling the controversies and speaking the truth, but we're doing it in love.

And he says that's one of the reasons that he really gets behind what we're doing, and I'm grateful to say that many others stand with us and support us for those very reasons. And then he said, look, it's got to be difficult to tackle what you tackle. It's got to be challenging to be a truth teller when so many don't want to hear the truth. And yes, there is a price to pay. I do pay a certain price doing what I do. There is a certain pressure that comes my way.

There is demonic attack. There are many, many challenges to overcome. Daily discipline is required. Faith is required. Many doors have been shut in my face because of stands we've taken and truths we've spoken. Nonetheless, I can tell you, overall in God, regardless of my schedule and life and everything, I can tell you, yes, personally speaking, his yoke is easy and his burden is life, that I am made to do this and called to do this and graced to do this. And if I get in my proper lane in the Lord and run the race that he set before me, there is grace to do it. Yes, it's challenging. At times it can feel overwhelming.

Yes, the attack can sometimes be ugly. But I'm telling you, I've learned in the midst of it to find even more grace. I've learned in the midst of it to get even lower and lean on him even more and recognize when I'm in his will and when I'm out. And when I'm in his will, I can say again, his burden really is light.

I could list everything I carry and you think, that's impossible. Just you in your own life and just your team that, uh-huh. And I can tell you with a smile, there's joy, there's grace, there's comfort, there's encouragement, there's hope, there's life. Yeah, every single day.

I can tell you, his yoke fits just right. I referenced this Pentecostal preacher I heard. I still remember sitting where I was. We had services in Springfield Gardens, Queens, New York, and in Oceanside, Long Island. So we started in Springfield Gardens only then bought property on Oceanside and ultimately built a building there. But for all we had, we had services in both places for some time. So when the doors were open, I would go. Ultimately, I'd be in church Sunday school, Sunday service, Sunday night service, Monday night prayer meeting, Tuesday night service, Wednesday night service, Friday night service. And then sometimes on off days we'd visit people or do evangelism and knock on doors. So yeah, zealously going after it.

But I remember sitting there in the building that was in Oceanside. I remember this Italian Pentecostal preacher preaching and he was illustrating something that happened as he was talking to a young lady on the plane and talking about being a Christian and living a holy life. And she said to him, isn't it hard to be a Christian? And this fellow, he's preaching it.

I'm a teenager, maybe 18, 19, listening to this guy preach and thinking, he's got a lot of energy for an old guy. And he says to her, he says, I look at the bird in the sky. I look at that bird and it's flying, it's darting, it's swinging here and there and its wings are flapping and it goes higher and higher and it glides down. And I say to him, isn't it hard to be a bird? Isn't it hard to fly like that?

Isn't it? He goes, no, God made me a bird. It's my nature. It was then I look in the river and I see the fish swimming in the sea. This is what he's telling the gal on the plane.

You must have been blown away by his answer, right? And I look at the fish in the sea and it's darting here and there and it's going in the deep and it doesn't have to breathe. And I say, isn't it hard to do that? And the fish says, no, I'm a fish. It's my nature.

And he says to us, since I've been born again, I have the nature of the Lord Jesus in me. It's not hard. It's my nature. What an answer.

What an answer. Now, I know on the one hand, we're still in this world. We're still in this body. Trust me, I've had battles with discouragement. I've had battles with demonic attack. I mean, some of them have lasted for months and it feels like you're treading through mud. You're trying to run through knee deep mud just to live a normal life.

And yes, we've been battered and we've had losses and I live in the same world you live in. But ultimately, I want to say again, when you give yourself to what God fashioned you to do and to be, when you don't resist his calling, when you make yourself available and then draw on his life, draw on his strength, draw on his ability. Say, how do you do it? I remember asking myself that question. I was going to college. I remember this distinctly.

I'm going to Queens College for classes one day. I'm listening on the radio to the old Let's Talk About Jesus years before Wayne Mambla and those in New York would know about it. The original Let's Talk About Jesus. And this fellow who led the show before Wayne Mambla, he's talking about, you know, it's not I who live, it's Christ who lives in me. And it's the resurrected Christ who lives in me. And I remember saying, yeah, but when I wake up in the morning, it feels like me. When I'm being tempted to sin, it feels like me.

It's like, how do you get that? But some of it is just spending quality time with God. Some of it is just being with him in his presence.

Some of it is just living life with the Lord and walking in obedience to him and you begin to see, hey, he made me to do this. You know, some of you, you got a bunch of kids, your moms, and you never really pictured yourself being married with kids. And you always had other ministry plans or work plans, but then you met the man that was right for you. The two of you deeply in love got married and you wanted to have children.

And it's, I want to do this. And now you're like, amazing. And your husband looks at you and he goes, honey, how'd you learn to be so good with the kids? Well, he made you for it. He gifted you for it.

He graced you for it. Just like if he wanted you to preach to a million people a day, he gives you grace for that. Whatever the calling is. Often, we don't know what our calling is. And we're running like crazy to try to figure it out and to please God.

I want to encourage you to step back. God never calls you to walk in frenzy. God never calls you to walk in a sense of constant upheaval and just step back and worship him. Even now, some of you that are so stressed out, God never calls you to be stressed. He may call you into stressful situations, but he'll call you by his grace. He may call you into difficult situations, but he will empower you in the midst of that. Isn't that what Jesus says in John 16, 33? That he says to his disciples, in this world, you'll have tribulation, you'll have trouble, pressure, stress, testing, but be encouraged of overcoming the world. The tribulation, the difficulty, that's not the end of the story. The end of the story is that Jesus has overcome. You say, well, how does that encourage me? He did it.

Okay. But he doesn't do it alone. We overcome with him. We ride on his coattails. You ever see in the elections, there's a massive swing for the president, and then his party just wins big. They said they won on the president's coattails. Or it could happen in a statewide election, the same way they went on the governor's coattails. It's really popular. Because in other words, people just press one button, Republican, Democrat, for this one, for that one.

They press one button for the whole party. So we ride in on Jesus' coattails. His victory is our victory. He died to sin. We die with him.

Heroes, we rise with him. You say, how do you do that? You renew your mind to it. You pray for God to make it real. You confess with your lips that what the Word says is true.

Lord, it is true. You said it through baptism and through faith. I have died to sin.

I can't live in it any longer. Lord, you've said in your word, I'm not under law. I'm under grace. You've said in your word, do not let sin have dominion over you. Lord, I will not by your grace, by your power.

I'm a new creation in the Messiah. You repeat these things, not to create a false reality in the realm of fantasy, but to take hold of real spiritual reality to your heart and mind, agree with it, and take hold of it. Grace is there for whatever situation you find yourself in.

But I want to fine-tune this. I want to share some of my own personal life experience because I believe it's really going to help you. Because many are just living stressed out, living under a constant sense of pressure, constant sense of falling short. And because of that, whatever you're trying to do for God, with God, there's not a sense of joy, there's not a sense of deep satisfaction. Please understand, I'm an achiever by nature, so I pretty much start every day with a fresh slate. It doesn't matter if I just finished traveling and preaching five times yesterday. It doesn't matter if I just finished the deadline on the latest book.

It doesn't matter if I ministered to individuals through the day or taught classes. The next day starts and I haven't done anything yet. And I still feel that way often until I've finished writing late in the night. Now I feel, okay, I've done something.

So I'm not one who's just sitting back chilling. And yet I want to say once more that you come to the Lord and He gives you rest. There is rest from the striving, rest from the struggle, rest from this constant, I've got to work harder, fight more to somehow find a way to please God. He gives us that rest. And when we come to that place of rest, knowing we're accepted and loved and we've been cleansed by the blood of the Messiah, now we can run our race, not so as to gain His favor because we have already received His favor. I'm going to get more specific when we come back. It's the Line of Fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown, your voice of moral, cultural and spiritual revolution.

Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Thanks for joining us today on the Line of Fire. I have specially prepared this broadcast for you to minister life and grace and strength and encouragement and hope.

And I want it to be as practical as possible. Jesus said, we come to Him, we receive rest. We learn of Him.

He's humble and gentle in heart. We receive rest for our souls. And this rest specifically consists in the fact that His yoke is easy. His yoke fits just right and His burden is light. Even those who've suffered for the Lord, who've been beaten for the Lord, who've been martyred for the Lord will ultimately say His grace is sufficient.

So I'm not taking calls today. I want to spend the entire time digging into the Word and ministering to you here. So let me get very specific with you. We're going to go over to Romans, the 12th chapter. Romans chapter 12. And Paul calls us there and says, therefore, this is in light of the mercy that's been poured out with which he ends Romans 11. Therefore I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship, or your reasonable service. You're not conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is, His good, pleasing, and perfect will.

How do I work that out, Paul? What do I do next? I want to be fully obedient, give my body, my whole life to the Lord. What do I do?

How do I live this out? He continues, for by the grace given me, I say to every one of you, do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you. For just as each of us has one body, with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Messiah we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts.

Let's say that together out loud. We have different gifts. We have different gifts according to the grace given to each of us. So the grace, not meaning unmerited favor here, but the empowerment given to each of us.

If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith or in accordance with the faith. If it is serving, then serve. If it is teaching, then teach. If it is to encourage, then give encouragement. If it is giving generously, then give generously.

If it is to lead, do it diligently. If it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully. Now here's the thing as we look at these verses. When you are functioning in your gift, what's hard for someone else is easy and natural for you. And when you are functioning outside of your gift, there is not sufficient grace. There is that chafing.

There is that feeling of something not being right. Okay, let's step back and think about this. In the late 80s, early 90s, I was leading a Messianic Bible school in Maryland. Messiah Biblical Institute and Graduate School of Theology. Prior to that, it had just been more or less a mentoring program at college and grad level. And I was able to develop it into a full-time school, college and grad school. So even though our student body was small, the big night classes we would have could draw as many as 150 people. But the overall program during the day was more dozens or scores of students. It was not like a regular college campus, university campus. It would be like a small department, a specialized department within a school.

But that's fine. That's what we were there to do. And we were recognized by the state of Maryland to do what we were doing. So I had this grace on me to develop all the courses, to develop the guidelines and everything.

And here's the number of the class, and you need these credits to graduate. All this meticulous kind of stuff, because God had called me to help raise up this school. And I taught, led the school, and started in 87, but ended in 93. And I remember one year before I gave the school over to others, I just felt something wasn't right in my life. Like I was carrying something I wasn't supposed to carry. Do you ever have something that's just, something's wrong, I can't figure out what it is. Or with your body, with a vehicle, or something's just not right.

But you can't figure out what it was. And earlier in the year I thought, maybe I'm not supposed to be leading the school now. Maybe I'm, I don't think I'm supposed to be leading the school now. Talked to Nancy about it, and then talked to the leader of all the ministries. So we had several different ministries and organizations, the school being one of them.

So the leader that oversaw all of those, talked to him about it, but he felt no strongly I was supposed to do it. So I thought, okay, let me just continue, because I love doing this, but it feels like something's not right. So I continued to travel around the world and speak. I continued to teach at the school and lead the school, and do other things that I was doing. The whole year, feeling something's just not right.

What is it? And then finally just got extra time to be alone with God in prayer, and really seek his face, slow down what I was doing, and really seek his face, and boom! Right in front of my eyes, you're not supposed to be leading the school anymore. Oh, oh, it's only about a year earlier that I felt it, but I didn't stop long enough to really pray it through. And that's how it is with some of us. Now please hear me, I'm not talking about shirking responsibility. I'm not talking about copping out. Sometimes when we just cop out, we feel relief, but it's temporary relief, and it's only going to bring a greater pain.

You know, like I can't handle this, I can't do it, we quit, and then we feel miserable afterwards, and the thing still has to be done. I'm talking about when you're outside of your calling. You say, if I don't know what my real calling is, then you really got to press into God. Yes, we serve, and often as we're walking with the Lord, it can take some years before we really find out for this season of life, or for all of our life, what our real calling is, what our real anointing is, what we really have grace to do.

And always, we have to serve in other ways. I mean, to this day, leading our ministry and having a great team that carries so many things I can't carry, and does so many things I can't do, or that if I did them, they'd just completely weigh me down. And they take so many things off my plate so I can give myself to what I'm called to do. There are always little things I have to do I'd rather not do. And even as much as I love to travel and minister, there are aspects of traveling I wish I didn't have to do.

So there are always these burdens you carry. But I'm saying, my overall life is infused with grace because I'm doing what He made me to do. So I can almost guarantee you, if you spent a week in my shoes doing what I'm doing, and maybe in the midst of having to do a really difficult debate, and then getting a ton of hate mail one week, and maybe some death wish is coming your way, and then all the deadlines that I have to meet, and all the responsibilities. For most all of you, I can almost guarantee, as strong as you are, you wouldn't make it through a week. I pretty much guarantee that for most all of you, because God's made me uniquely and graced me uniquely. But let's turn this around. I could almost guarantee you that if you are really in the center of God's will, and doing what He called you to do, and graced you to do, and anointed you to do, that you are doing it and thriving in it.

And if you put me in your shoes, I probably wouldn't make it for a week. That's why we always look at other people and think, how do they do it? Because God's given them the grace to do it.

Because He's given them the calling to do it. If you're calling a service, and you serve, you just love to serve. For me, if I'm just helping people, let's say in the parking lot, and I'm, you know, five services on Sunday, and we're getting people on a Saturday night and Sunday, and I'm there overseeing the parking crew, and getting people in and out, it's like, okay, I'm happy to help, but I've got to go write. I've got to book to write. I've got to be on the rail. I've got to be traveling, preaching.

Because that's, yeah, we all serve in different ways, right? I'm at the airport yesterday, flying back from where I was, and getting on the escalator, and the woman's walking slowly. She goes, go ahead of me.

She goes, I'm about to die. I thought, okay, get to the bottom of the escalator. And I turned and said, are you okay? She goes, oh, I've been walking around for an hour.

I can't find a baggage claim, and I don't know where. I said, okay, listen, do you know where you came from? I stopped what I was doing. I said, let's walk over. Let's find out.

And then she spotted herself. Well, of course we all serve. We're decent people, right? But God has not primarily called me to do those things. And, you know, you go through the list that Paul gave. And when you give yourself to what he made you to do, right? And don't try to be something else. Don't compare yourself to somebody else.

Don't try to function in someone else's gifting or someone else's anointing or measure yourself by that. Look, we love our daughters and loved raising our daughters. There were challenges we had over the years.

We always joke, especially with our older daughter, we always joke with her about it. What a great mom and wife she is today. But there are challenges, but we were devoted parents. And Nancy was a very devoted mother.

The girls, our two daughters, are very close to her today. So she was a devoted mother, but she was not a homeschooler. And I was not a homeschooler either. As much as I'm teaching and training others, I was not a homeschooler. She was not a homeschooler. And for some years of their lives, we had homeschools.

And this was before you had so much curriculum available and just doing it on a computer and all this. And that's not who she was. We know these other moms, you know, 11 kids and they're homeschooling seven at a time and changing diapers.

We are stunned, like, how can somebody do that? But Nancy was a super devoted, super involved mother that really cared for what was best for our daughters. And would take difficult stands and do difficult things because she knew it was in their best interest.

But boy, she was not a homeschooler. Others, they look at her and her moral courage and her integrity and her unbending convictions. And they say, how do you do it?

They just cave up. You can't compare yourself to someone else. The fact that when I was 18 years old, I was memorizing 20 verses a day, 17, 18 years old.

I was doing that month in, month out without ever missing a day. Don't compare yourself to that if God hasn't given you that same grace and that same discipline to do it. In the same way, trust me, I look at many other people and think, that's amazing. I look at pastors that do hours and hours of difficult counseling and think, how do you do it? I look at others that do detail work and, you know, like the accounting type thing that, you know, counting every dime and penny. It's like, that would wear me out and steal my faith. But they're like, I love doing this.

I love balancing the books like, oh, don't even talk to me about the books. Find your lane. It doesn't mean you don't serve. But find what God made you to do. Find what God graced you to do. Find what God anointed you to do.

Find what he uses you in most effectively. Rather than say, I'm supposed to be preaching. Or I'm not spiritual if I'm not praying six hours a day. Or I'm not a good mom if I'm not a homeschooler.

Or I'm not a good dad if I'm not a super athlete. Don't compare yourself to someone else. Yield yourself wholly to God. With every fiber of your being, lay your life out before God.

I belong to you. You are my God, my Savior, my strength. My entire life is devoted to serving you and living for you. I don't live for self.

I live to please you. And then out of that you'll find your lane and you'll find His burden, His life. It's the Line of Fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown, your voice of moral, cultural, and spiritual revolution. Here again is Dr. Michael Brown.

Welcome, friends, to the broadcast. Michael Brown here, your voice of moral sanity and spiritual clarity. Here to infuse you with faith and truth and courage so you can run your race, you can be strong for the Lord. Do you get my emails?

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So you want to get these, tell your friends, together we can be strong and make a difference. All right, as we're talking today about the Lord's yoke being easy or fitting just right, and His burden being life. Again, it's by doing what He called you to do. Years ago, I was in Texas and sharing a suite with one of my closest friends. And he, literally morning, noon, and night, he was meeting with people and having meals with people. And this was a conference where I was about to deliver a paper. And it was an academic event and delivering a paper, I believe, from the book of Isaiah.

So I was really studying it and writing carefully and digging into this. And he said to me, he said, hey, do you want to have breakfast with so-and-so? I said, oh, no, sorry, I can't do it.

Please send my life. Hey, Mike, you want to have lunch with so-and-so? I said, no, no, hey, tell him I'd love to see him, but no, I got to work here on this paper and get ready. And he said to me, at a certain point, he said, Mike, he said, man, he said, I wish I had a mind like yours. I said, if you had a mind like mine, you wouldn't be meeting with people day and night being you. He's a smart guy, but in other words, we're wired differently.

We're wired differently. And for him, being with people is life, and it brings life to others. I do that as well, but it has to be in a very, very different schedule because I've got to be alone. I've got to be with God. I've got to be in his presence more. I've got to be writing more. So if he compares himself to me, I'm not as smart as Mike, but I don't write the way Mike writes. I compare myself to him. It's like, I'm like a loner. I'm just not spending people with people, loving people.

Don't compare yourself to someone else. You know the famous line, Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire, when his sister asks him why he's going to the Olympic Games before he goes on the mission field, right? And what does he say? God made me fast, and when I run, I feel his pleasure. When I'm writing an article, I feel God's pleasure. Here, when I am annotating a book, it can get very tedious, but when I'm filling in end note references, footnotes, and detailed stuff, I often feel God's pleasure. Professor Craig Keener, one of the world's most prolific and brilliant New Testament scholars and a dear brother and friend, indexes his volumes. I cannot imagine indexing a volume. He indexed his Acts commentary, 6,000 pages of material. Even all the indexes in the books, you get CDs with the additional indexes.

I cannot imagine doing that. In fact, when he's doing indexing, he catches up on past broadcasts of the line of fire. Hey Craig, if you're listening to that, hey man, cheering you on, buddy. But he said, while indexing one day, indexing, he felt the pleasure of the Lord. The Lord said, yes, that's what I want you to do.

Isn't that amazing? But look, somebody's got to do this, and somebody's got to do that, and it's through you and me that God's going to work. Now, sometimes we don't feel grace because we're pushing against God's will.

We're not surrendered to it. Sometimes we don't, yeah, it's not God, I don't feel grace. We don't feel grace because we haven't crucified that self-life that wants to do its own thing and is not willing to yield to God. Sometimes the reason for lack of grace is we haven't surrendered to the purpose of God.

But I want to say it again. If you are in God's will, even through difficult times, he will give you grace to endure. And, although you've probably gone through a crisis or two along the way, I've been through quite a few, and you think, I can't do it.

I mean, over my head, you get to this point where your inability becomes his ability. It's almost like the picture of you're underwater and you can't get your breath, and the last thing you know, you pass out. And then, soon enough, you're just swimming underwater because you've taken on God's supernatural ability. So sometimes, I don't like it, I wish I could learn to avoid it even more, but sometimes, in order to get to the resurrection life, you have to go through this fresh crucifixion. But as the years have gone on, I've realized, okay, this is good. This is healthy. This is bringing me to the end of myself and the beginning of God's grace.

Look, I've shared this before, but I want to share it again. When I got saved, not long after I was saved, I heard people in the church saying, yeah, there's a calling on your life, and the pastor sees there's a calling on your life, which meant to preach. So, basically, we knew you could be a pastor or you could be an evangelist. Now, you could teach, you know, teaching the body, but the idea of being like a Bible school teacher, we didn't really like seminaries or Bible schools. You know, this is the church I got saved, and this was kind of the traditions.

So, he didn't really think about being a writer. So, the main ways you could serve, if you were called to preach, this is our way of thinking then, was as a pastor or an evangelist. And the pastor was just in one place and preached certain kinds of messages and did teach, right? And the evangelist would travel and speak and more like kind of the intense message and then, you know, miracles and that. So, I remember talking to the pastor, I'd begun preaching in the church when I was 18, and talking about the sense of calling, I said, hey, you're an evangelist. And he even said, look, you know, when you're around some other ministers or things, if they ask you about preaching, just have a card to give them with your name and number, Evangelist Mike Brown. So, I did that. And I never promoted myself.

In fact, if I was around a bunch of pastors at some meeting somewhere, I kind of went the other way a little bit rather than push myself so that if it was God, then I'd be invited because they were really inviting me. And I started to travel, not by plane. It was all places where I could drive. So, different parts of New York, Long Island, into Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, those states, that was pretty much it.

Travel and speak. When Nancy and I were engaged, she'd sometimes travel with me, and they'd put us up in, you know, different rooms and things like that. But I just, something didn't feel right. And I still remember, I remember the name of the church, it was Brother Bedgood's church, had about 100 people, which was then a lot of people for me. And I preached on a Sunday morning, and I gave a call for fresh surrender to the Lord, and 100 out of 100 came forward.

100 out of 100. And I remember talking to Nancy afterwards, thinking, okay, you couldn't possibly get a better result as a traveling speaker, and yet I didn't feel right. And then at night, I thought, was an evangelist supposed to pray for the sick, and it's supposed to be miracles, and I prayed for people, and I said they were healed. I got home that night, and I'm like, I don't know if they were really healed.

Did I really test it? I don't know if it really happened. Some just didn't feel right. And eventually I kind of lost some of that zeal to preach, and found a great gifting with teaching, and a great gifting with academic study, and that flowed so naturally in me that I just got caught up, and I actually became an idol in my life. And Nancy could always resist some of the academic thrust in my life, not because she didn't believe I was called to academics, but because she saw it becoming an idol that was taking me away from my first love.

But that's how I lived for years. And I just get my Ph.D. in New York, Near Eastern Languages and Literatures at New York University. After my first couple of classes there, I had full scholarship, didn't have to pay for any of the classes, even got a stipend of a couple thousand a year. So I had a full academic scholarship, you know, 4.0 all the way through grad school, and loving it and thriving in it. But it's because I'd also left my first love and wasn't as intimate with God during that time as I should have been. And when he reignited the fire in me, I laid the academics down, and he gave it back to me as a tool rather than as an idol. And it's been a tool to this day, and I love using it to this day.

It's not a day in my life where it's not part of my life. And in Jewish apologetics and other things, it's been so important. So it was the Lord's will, but I just let it get out of balance. But when the fire started to burn in me, and when I started to understand my calling, not primarily evangelists, not primarily someone seeking to win the lost, I do that in Jewish ministry. But when I travel and speak, I don't speak as an evangelist.

When I go overseas, I don't speak as an evangelist primarily. I speak to the body. I speak to stir the believers. When I recognized the calling on my life in terms of preaching and traveling was more of a revivalist, to wake up the sleeping church, to stir people towards repentance, to be revived and renewed in God. And in that sense, the prophetic calling to wake up the church, not calling myself a prophet, but the prophetic calling, that burden to address sin and to confront culture and to turn people to God.

When I gave myself to that, oh, now I could say his yoke fits just right. And now I could say as I've literally traveled to over 30 nations of the world, over 150 trips overseas, brought thousands of messages overseas, spent several years of my life overseas and several years of my life on planes, all while going day and night writing over 40 books, publishing over 2,000 articles, doing 13 years of daily talk radio, leading schools for years, teaching at schools for years, debating, doing everything we do. I'm thriving in the midst of it.

Let the hate mail come, let the resistance come, let the challenges come, let the obstacles come. I'm not speaking foolishly. I'm saying whatever happens, God's grace is there. And yes, I can tell you with everything that I carry from the heart, his yoke fits just right and his burden is light. Even if it means serving him with my last drop of blood, I'll be able to say his yoke fits just right, his burden is light. Friends, not just for me, it's for you. So let him help you, adjust you, give you grace, grounded in his love, grounded in acceptance through the blood of Messiah. Now go run your race, rest and run what you're calling investment.