His Yoke is Easy
(week 37/05)
Olubi Johnson
In our article last week we saw that God wants us to enter into His rest by labouring in the Word and prayer.
This week we will see how to find this labour an easy yoke and a light burden.
Matthew 11:28-30 NKJV: Come to Me, all you 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.”
1 John 5:2-4 NIV: This is love for God: to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome, 4 for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith.
Here, the scripture declares that His yoke is easy, His burden is light and His commandments are not burdensome.
However, in practice sometimes it seems hard to do the will of God; In fact the scripture says:
2 Timothy 2:3 NKJV: You therefore must endure hardship as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.
Philippians 3:10 NKJV: that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death,
This tells us we must endure hardness and partake of sufferings, seemingly contradictory to having an easy yoke and a light burden.
How then do we endure hardness and still find the yoke easy?
By the wisdom of God using the grace and mercy of God.
Ecclesiastes 10:10 NKJV: If the ax is dull, And one does not sharpen the edge, Then he must use more strength; But wisdom brings success.
1 Corinthians 15:10 NIV: But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them-yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.
Romans 9:16 NKJV: So then it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy.
By using the wisdom of God a difficult or hard task can be made easy. For instance, if you try to cut a lawn of grass using a cutlass you will find it hard but if you use a motorized lawn mower the same task will be much easier: the difference is the wisdom it took to make and use the lawn mower.
Spiritually the same is true: God’s people perish for a lack of knowledge (Hos. 4.6) of spiritual things and laws and so find spiritual tasks unnecessarily hard and difficult.
Furthermore, the grace of God makes the life of God available to us through our born-again spirits enabling us to do the will of God by supernatural strength. As you grow in grace, greater: multiplied (2 Pet. 1.2-4; 3.18) measures of life are given to you and so you will find things that used to be hard easy to do. For instance, I used to find fasting very difficult to do as a young christian but when I came into better teaching by Derek Prince and Kenneth Copeland showing me how to use the wisdom and grace of God to fast, I started finding fasting easy.
Finally, the mercy of God is the compassion of God that makes Him give life to us from the air causing our efforts to be crowned with success. Without the mercy of God even after working hard we may not be successful.
So by the combination of the wisdom, grace and mercy of God, which we get through prayer and the Word using a meek and lowly heart, like Jesus indicated in Matt. 11. 29-30 we will find His yoke easy and His burden light!
