Stop Stacking (Friday Devotional)

“Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, 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."

- Matthew 11:28-30

Waiting at a restaurant one day, our son (not quite a year old at the time) was getting impatient, and we needed some kind of distraction. Working with what little we had available, Lindsey grabbed the nearby container of individual whipped butter packets and they started stacking them on top of each other, one by one. Two became four became eight and, pretty soon, they had built a good-sized tower of butter packets. But, as you’d expect, the higher the tower got, the wobblier it became. It didn’t take long before they stacked one packet too many, and the whole thing came crashing down.

Life can feel like that sometimes—you stack one responsibility on top of another and another and another until you start to feel pretty wobbly yourself. Between your obligations to your job, your family, your friends, and any number of other spheres of life, it can feel like you’re going to collapse at any second.

So understandably, people sometimes look to God warily, convinced that his aim is to add more to their plate. Surely this cosmic Judge, with all his rules and demands, will make their lives even harder, even more burdensome.

But when you read God’s Word, you discover something incredible: God sent his Son to ease our load, not add to it. By taking on his yoke instead of the world’s, by relying on God’s grace instead of our own capabilities, we find peace and rest. When you trade in your way for his, surrendering pride for discipleship, you find strength you never had before—because it doesn’t come from you, but from him.

If you spend your life stacking your burdens on top of each other, all you will find is increasing stress and instability the higher you build—and a constant threat of collapse. Better then to start with a new, stronger foundation and a better, wiser builder. For when we are weak, he is strong.