Weight vs. Pressure
Matthew 11:28-30 (NLT) “Then Jesus said, ‘Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.’”
It never fails. When I wake up in the morning I have a zillion details on my brain. I don’t know if it is just being a woman or that my mind has had time to process during the night, but my husband can attest to the fact that if there is a detail that has gone uncovered, I will find it by morning. So I am then faced with a choice: will I give way to the pressures of life and all the unanswered questions or will I rest in the Lord and allow the Holy Spirit to help me order my day.
One of the definitions of “pressure” is: the feeling of stressful urgency caused by the necessity of doing or achieving something, especially with limited time. Everyone feels pressure at different times in life, but there have been times when I have felt it everyday and something was out of place. Jesus never intended for me to live life stressed. In the scripture passage above, the word “easy” actually means “not pressing”. So when I am feeling pressure, it’s not God!
Most of the time the pressure I feel comes when I am trying to measure up to some unrealistic standard that I’ve created for myself. For example: my house needs to be clean at all times, I need to be more organized, I need to be in better shape, etc… These are all good things to strive for, but they are most likely coming from outside influences that I have chosen to compare myself to.
“Weight”, on the other hand, can be defined as: the importance attached to something; the ability of someone or something to influence decisions or actions; the heaviness of a thing. For the most part I feel the weight of things when I have attached a lot of importance to them, i.e. home-schooling my children, fulfilling the call of God on my life, or serving at church. It’s a different feeling than that of pressure because it’s coming from the inside of me, like a divine responsibility that has been given specifically to me to take care of. I can feel the weight of it, but if it is from the Lord then, as the scripture says, it should be “easy to bear”.
I love that Jesus says in the passage, “Let me teach you…and you will find rest for your souls”. It just shows how much He cares. He doesn’t expect us to know how to take His yoke upon us, He just says “Come to me”. So, that is what I need to choose to do every day. I simply come to Him and let Him teach me and show me what His burden should feel like today…not pressing, not hard to bear, but light and restful.
Let’s pray: Father, I thank you for sending Jesus to show me how to live life in fellowship with You. In Your Word I see that life is not supposed to be stressful or pressing on me but that Your calling is easy and light to bear. I ask You to help me today, Holy Spirit, and show me what the important things are. Thank you for loving me enough to care about the smallest details of my life. You are so good! In Jesus’ name, amen.