Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Welcome to the Crema Chaj podcast.
[00:00:08] Great. Thank you.
[00:00:10] Take a seat.
[00:00:15] Well, here we are, the autumn term.
[00:00:19] But what a summer. The sun came out.
[00:00:24] I don't know what your lawn was. Anyone got a lawn here?
[00:00:27] Yeah, it's not a sin. It's okay.
[00:00:31] My lawn looked like it completely gone died. It was like desert.
[00:00:36] And then a tiny bit of rain for Lester, and it's completely green again.
[00:00:46] What was dead is now alive. Isaiah says this. The desert and the parched land will be glad to. The wilderness will rejoice and bloom. And I think it's a picture of what we've just seen over the summer. You know, you think something's dead and hopeless, and there's, you know, nothing you. You. You can do, but just a little bit of rain, a little bit of water, and the life returns. Everything is growing. And, you know, some of you, when we started the summer, we sowed seed, and you put it on your.
[00:01:19] On your lawn.
[00:01:21] And then did you know, it might have. You might have gone, oh, no, it's gone.
[00:01:25] It's like it's. It's. It's died. But you watch as the. As the rain comes on upon it. You watch what Jesus does. All right, deal.
[00:01:35] Good.
[00:01:37] So one of the things that saps our spiritual life is religion.
[00:01:47] The things you have to do because you think God wants you to do them.
[00:01:54] And if you don't do these things, God will be angry with you. Do you know that one?
[00:02:01] You do. Come on. Come on. We've all been there. You know, God, you know, I'm sorry, Lord. I didn't pray enough this morning. Or even pray you'll be cross with me.
[00:02:12] Or I lost it with the kids on the way to school. Somehow God is cross. Or I'm failing in my job. If only I was a better witness. You see, religion tells you God is cross.
[00:02:25] Religion tells you that somehow God is just miffed all the time.
[00:02:31] You know, online, I often see Christians attacking the church from, you know, just different parts. You watch it online. You. You know we're preaching the wrong gospel or we're not making disciples or we're singing the wrong songs, but the church is his bride, you know, there's no such thing as an ugly bride, right?
[00:02:54] Look, if you're getting married, and I know there's a lot of weddings going on at the moment, and you're standing at the front of church and the music starts, everyone stands and your bride comes in the room, and you look back and go, you're marrying the wrong woman.
[00:03:10] Okay? And you see, when Jesus looks at the church, he sees his bride.
[00:03:17] She's beautiful. And he's going to present her pure and spotless.
[00:03:22] Even us he's going to do that. He loves us.
[00:03:28] And you see, Jesus walked the earth so we would know what God is like.
[00:03:32] From the first pages of the Bible, God is revealing himself. And the invitation is always, come, follow me.
[00:03:41] So find your Bibles, find Matthew's Gospel, and we're going to pick up, we're going to do chapter 11, verse 25. We stand again, we always stand for the word of God.
[00:03:56] This is really good for you. Not the exercise. I'm talking about standing for the word of God, actually. But the exercise is good for you as well.
[00:04:04] Verse 25, Matthew 11. At that time, Jesus answered and said, I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and have revealed them to babes.
[00:04:18] And the question you should ask is, what things?
[00:04:22] Okay. And if you just look back a page, it's the story of John the Baptist sending people to Jesus, saying, are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?
[00:04:32] And Jesus says, go back to John and tell him what you see. Sick are healed, the dead are raised, lepers are cleansed.
[00:04:39] He goes on, even so, Father, for it seemed good in your sight. All things have been delivered to me by my Father. And no one knows the Son except the Father, nor does anyone know the Father except the Son of and the one whom the Son wills to reveal him. You want to know. You want to know the Father? Look at the Son. You want to know the Son? Look at the, look at the Father. And then Jesus says this. Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 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. For my yoke is easy I, and my burden is light.
[00:05:27] Grab a seat for a moment.
[00:05:35] So last week we were talking a little bit about finding God in the storm.
[00:05:43] This week we're going to talk a little bit about finding God. You know, just walking with Jesus, the God who transforms us.
[00:05:52] And Jesus says, come to me, all you who labor and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
[00:05:58] What he's saying is, come to me, all you who are working really hard, but you feel like you're spinning your wheels.
[00:06:06] No matter what you do, no matter which way you go, it feels like you're getting nowhere. Or, come to me you who are carrying a load that is just too heavy and you feel like you're doubled over with the weight of the load, he says, come to me and I will give you rest.
[00:06:24] And the word rest means literally, I'll refresh you.
[00:06:28] But first you must come to Jesus. He calls us to himself. You see, religion pushes us away.
[00:06:35] You are bad, therefore you cannot come. That's what religion says to you. Jesus says, come to me. Why? Because just like my grass, he knows you're not dead.
[00:06:44] Just a little bit of water will change everything in your life. If you're thirsty, he says, come and drink.
[00:06:54] Jesus bids us come close.
[00:06:57] He never pushes you away, even when you are in sin, because you're forgiven.
[00:07:06] So what he does is he draws us close and leads us out of sin by making us new creations, new people.
[00:07:15] And you know what? Some of you have come to Jesus from a real mess.
[00:07:22] In fact, actually, all of us have come to Jesus from a mess.
[00:07:28] Some of us just forget where he's brought us from. You know, maybe your marriage is a mess. Maybe your partner's not saved. Or maybe they're acting like they're not saved. Lord, if you would just sort them out. And he goes, nope, I'm going to sort them you out.
[00:07:45] I'm going to sort your stuff.
[00:07:47] Or you come from addiction and all addiction is just what we do with pain.
[00:07:56] So when we're in pain, where do we go for the relief? When something hurts us or we can't cope, where do we go? And Jesus bids us come to him.
[00:08:09] Find your help in Him. Not drugs, drink, work, relationships. Come to the Lord Jesus Christ. You see, the load you are carrying is just too heavy for you. And I don't think Jesus is just talking about salvation, but our life with him and without Him.
[00:08:32] The load is too heavy for us to carry. Remember before we met him, we couldn't do it.
[00:08:40] Well, we still need Him. It's not like we meet him and then suddenly we grow muscles. We walk with him because the load is still too heavy. Remember the prayer we do every week. And we'll do it this morning when people give their lives to Jesus.
[00:08:57] Forgive me, Lord.
[00:08:59] Come into my life and I walk with you all the days of my life. That walking with Jesus is a choice.
[00:09:08] So he calls us to himself. I'm going to move quickly this morning. Then he says the second thing. He says, take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. You see what Is God like, how do you see your heavenly Father?
[00:09:33] And Jesus gives us an invite to be yoked to him and learn from him. You know, too often we're trying to learn without being yoked or to be yoked without learning.
[00:09:50] We need both. So what does it mean to be yoked with Jesus? Because it's not a word that we use now or even something that we're very familiar. Familiar with. So I. I talked to my third best friend. Obviously, the Holy Spirit is my first one. My wife is my second, as we learned last week, and Chatgpt is my third. So I asked it for. I said, what are we talking about with yoke? And as by wonder, that's what Jesus is describing. Take my yoke upon you.
[00:10:27] And.
[00:10:32] This is a picture of being yoked together, but it's an invitation.
[00:10:40] You give your life to Jesus, but it's your choice to stay with him. So the next one, which has some cattle, you see those very handsome beasts, you see that Jesus is the big, powerful ox.
[00:10:59] We tie our life to Jesus, we take his yoke.
[00:11:06] And as we walk with him, as we're tied close to him, we learn from him.
[00:11:14] So where he goes, we go.
[00:11:17] How does Jesus start the day? Well, we're with him, so we find out, how does Jesus deal with pain and rejection? We're walking with him, so he teaches us. What does Jesus prioritize? You see, what we find is he leads us in a very different way than we might choose to be. To be led.
[00:11:37] It's his way, not our way.
[00:11:39] And even when I try to pull my way, he is stronger.
[00:11:49] Where's Aaron? He's asleep. Come on. Come over here. Come here. No, he's not. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. All right, so in, this is Jesus for illustration purposes. Okay? Okay.
[00:12:03] He is the ox, the one. And he says, take my yoke upon you.
[00:12:12] And you see, it's a great illustration, because what he does is he says, sorry about this. We're getting. Can we be close just for a moment? Okay, So I am tied to him.
[00:12:23] So no matter, you see, he leads. And I might want to go this way, but with him, if I'm tied in, I'm not going anywhere, all right? Because I can pull as much as I want to go, but he's not even moving. I mean, my feet are hardly on the ground.
[00:12:39] All right? And that's the picture. What Jesus is saying is, take my yoke, be yoked to me.
[00:12:47] And so that as I walk, he leads me. Thank you.
[00:12:56] Okay.
[00:12:57] The other place we hear about yokes is in marriage.
[00:13:02] So when we get married, we're yoked together, okay? And Paul says, don't be unevenly yoked. And he says, what is light to do with darkness? And of course, we immediately think, oh, I've got to marry a Christian. And that is true, because if you don't, you're going to be pulling in different directions. Dom, Dom, come here. Come on. Come up here. When did you get. You've been married how long? Two weeks.
[00:13:30] Four weeks. Oh, my goodness, you're experts. Come here.
[00:13:33] Come here.
[00:13:36] Four weeks of marriage. All right, so you are yoked together, okay? So put your arm around her. It is allowed in church, okay?
[00:13:46] We're okay.
[00:13:47] Now, what so often happens in marriage is sometimes, you know, we dish out our roles in marriage. And we might say, well, I'm the prayer. I'm the spiritual person, and I know the practical one. So you do the spiritual stuff, and you do the practical stuff. And what happens is there's like a yoke in this side, okay? And so with Dom, and for this illustration, I'm Jesus, okay? And they're married, just if there's any confusion. So what happens is, so I lead them and we walk, and I'm taking them on a journey. But you see, I'm yoked here, and they're yoked here. And sometimes there's a bit of a pull, especially if there's some uneven yoked. So we assume that Jesus would be one end, but actually get apart, gone, separate.
[00:14:39] What actually it looks like in marriage is way more like this, where Jesus is in the center and both are yoked to him. So we walk together in his presence.
[00:14:53] Do you see? And so they can pull either way, but Jesus is leading. And that's part of being yoked to Jesus. Thank you. Good job. Stay married. Good four weeks.
[00:15:10] Do you get it?
[00:15:14] You see, Jesus invites us to take his yoke on, and then he says this. He says he is gentle and lowly.
[00:15:24] What does that mean? And let me say, if you're going to get yoked, all right, make sure they're gentle and lowly of heart.
[00:15:32] Otherwise it's slavery.
[00:15:36] And that's where you came from?
[00:15:38] That's where we all came from.
[00:15:41] You see, before Jesus, we were yoked to sin.
[00:15:46] Sin was your master. Jesus said, whoever sins is a slave to sin.
[00:15:50] Sin says, come this way. You follow. Believe in its promises, freedom, satisfaction. But actually, you discover that you aren't carrying the yoke. The yoke is controlling you.
[00:16:05] Sin promises freedom but produces Bondage, it gets progressively heavier. Guilt, shame, fear, destructive actions, and ultimately death.
[00:16:19] The heavy burden. This is the heavy burden that Jesus is talking about. Come to me who are carrying this heavy burden. And Jesus says, take my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart.
[00:16:32] Heart. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
[00:16:37] Jesus doesn't say, take your yoke off.
[00:16:41] He says, take my yoke.
[00:16:45] Become my friend.
[00:16:47] Choose to walk with me.
[00:16:53] Let me just finish because I want to show you this in practice with an Old Testament story.
[00:17:02] Remember Elijah? I mean, he's the superman of prophets, right? He calls fire down from heaven and fire comes and he rids Israel of the prophets of baal.
[00:17:16] Superman of heaven. He's God's prophet and he's ready to write his best selling novel. You know how to call fire down from heaven.
[00:17:27] But Jezebel Ahab's wife threatens his life and says, I'm going to kill you for what you've done.
[00:17:37] And he runs into the wilderness and we find him sitting under a broom tree.
[00:17:45] This is all in 1 Kings 19. And he says, it's enough now. Lord, take my life.
[00:17:53] Have you ever thought, how did he get from calling fire down from heaven to wanting to die?
[00:18:02] What happened?
[00:18:04] Was there something wrong with him?
[00:18:08] You know, how do you get from a glory night to sitting in your staff room thinking, I can't go on.
[00:18:16] This is too hard for me.
[00:18:19] There must be something wrong with you.
[00:18:23] You may have sinned, or maybe you failed God.
[00:18:26] No, no, no, no, no.
[00:18:29] You're carrying a load that is too heavy.
[00:18:36] You see, sometimes the load we're carrying is too heavy even when we're doing God's work.
[00:18:45] So Jesus says, come to me. Stay close to me and I will refresh you. I said it earlier, before Jesus, you couldn't do it.
[00:18:55] Why would you think you can do it post Jesus without Jesus?
[00:19:00] You see, the whole inviting him in is, I couldn't do it there. I really messed up. It went totally wrong. So Jesus says, now come and walk with me.
[00:19:09] But that's an invitation. And Elisha is exhausted and he's overwhelmed. And I love the story. In chapter 19, an angel appears to him and says, arise and eat. Because he's fallen asleep under the tree and God provides bread and water. And then he lets him sleep again, and then he feeds him again. This is what God is like. And then he says this. The journey is too great for you. You to Elisha. The journey. This. This journey is too great. We see this over Again with the disciples. They forget the bread, they fall asleep. They don't understand and get things wrong. But they are with Jesus.
[00:19:52] That's the difference.
[00:19:54] What is God like?
[00:19:56] What? What is Jesus like? He's gentle and lowly of heart.
[00:20:00] He knows the journey is too great for us, so he invites us to be yoked to him so that he takes the load. Jesus doesn't crush us because we are weak. He calls us to himself always.
[00:20:15] And I love it. Elijah ends up hiding in a cave, and there's all the noise of the world outside, all the anxiety, the threats, the possible failures that could happen. And the wind is blowing, and it feels like everything is coming down, but God isn't in the wind.
[00:20:37] And then an earthquake hits and it shakes your world.
[00:20:41] But God is not in the earthquake.
[00:20:44] And then there's blazing fire of criticism and offense, but God is not in the fire, and I love it. But then comes the still, small, gentle and lowly voice that invites Elisha to draw close.
[00:21:02] You see? Don't you love the Lord?
[00:21:04] He deals with his exhausted servant gently.
[00:21:09] That's how he deals with us.
[00:21:12] That's how Jesus deals with us.
[00:21:16] The Lord loves us even when we're all over the shop. He deals with us gently.
[00:21:23] But as with Peter, gentleness doesn't mean God simply leaves Elijah where He is. God speaks to him, he gives him new instructions, and he sends him back into his calling.
[00:21:35] And the next part of the story is enter Elisha.
[00:21:39] You see, when we are exhausted, we find rest in Jesus, not in anything else. When we are hungry and thirsty, God refreshes us. He says, come take a drink. And that's what you were doing this morning? That's what we were doing in worship. We're just drinking from the fountain of the Holy Spirit.
[00:21:56] When we are afraid, we draw near to God, and He draws near to us. We become aware of his presence.
[00:22:04] When we are discouraged, the voice of the Holy Spirit speaks gently. Keep going. Push through, push through. When we lose perspective, he brings correction by leading us. You know, we're pulling over here, and that big ox is going, no way. We're going this way. And we're yoked with Him. So we do.
[00:22:25] And when we want to give up, he recommissions us.
[00:22:28] You see, Jesus says, come to me and I'll give you rest. I am gentle and lowly in heart. My yoke is easy and my burden is light.
[00:22:39] Religion says, try harder.
[00:22:42] But Jesus is saying, I know the journey is too great for you. Be yoked to me and let me Take the load.
[00:22:50] Let me carry you through life.
[00:22:54] You see, God's calling may take you beyond your own strength, but he doesn't demand that we carry it out in our own strength. Let me say that to you again.
[00:23:05] God may take you beyond your own strength, and he probably will, but he doesn't demand that we carry it in our own strength.
[00:23:18] He gives us the strength, and he walks with us wherever he leads us. And, you know, I wish I could stand up here and say, you know, I can leap tall buildings in a single bound, just like Superman.
[00:23:34] You know, nothing, nothing hinders me anymore. I can do anything, but I can't.
[00:23:44] Outside of Christ, inside of Christ, I can do all things.
[00:23:49] But without Jesus, those are still big buildings, and I ain't getting over them.
[00:23:56] But with him, you see, what I've learned is, as I stay close to Jesus and learn from him, I take his yoke.
[00:24:09] Life doesn't get easier.
[00:24:12] But he takes the load from me so that I can walk through life with him.
[00:24:20] What does God look like? Look at Jesus.
[00:24:23] He's so kind. He's so forgiving, loving.
[00:24:26] But there is a strength about him that enables us to finish the race with Him.
[00:24:34] His invitation to every one of us is the desert. And the parched lands will be glad. The wilderness will rejoice and blossom.
[00:24:45] Look, you only need a little bit of rain and everything comes back to life.
[00:24:52] You only need to walk close with Jesus and receive from the Holy Spirit, and everything comes back to life.
[00:25:01] You only need to become aware of his presence, and every perspective changes. Why we sang it this morning. He's in the room, which means heaven can happen.
[00:25:14] That's what Jesus is talking about. Take my yoke upon you.
[00:25:19] Everybody who's burdened and carrying a load that they can't manage, take my yoke. Learn from me, walk with me, and I will give you rest for your soul, because my yoke is light and I'm calling you into my presence.
[00:25:40] Deal.
[00:25:42] Why don't you stand? I'm done.
[00:25:45] Thanks for listening to the Chroma Charge podcast. If you enjoyed this message, you can like and subscribe. You can also join us and subscribe in person or online every Sunday at Cromer Church. For more information about us, including our ministries, events, worship, and how to donate, visit our website at Cromer Church.
