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Intro:
Isaiah 10:27
Today, as we continue to study prayer throughout Scripture, the title of my message is, [Learning to Carry a Burden].
Burden is defined, a load, typically a heavy one Another word for burden is weight.
When I read our text, I thought of lifting weights.
It would be a lie to stand before you and declare that I have extensive experience with lifting weights, I do not.
But I can say that at different times in life I have attempted weight lifting.
In fact, my dad and brother both love lifting weight.
I can remember trying to move my dads weights when I was little, but they were too heavy.
When my brother was twelve or thirteen, he got a workout station for Christmas.
Christmas.
Imagine getting whatever you wanted, and it was weights?
The workout station eventually broke.
Stephen and his friends took off the weights and started standing on the back to see if they could lift the heaviest friends.
Dad quickly let us know that was against the rules.
In fact, I have always noticed how many rules come with lifting weights.
Don’t lift too much weight by yourself, or you could hurt yourself.
Don’t lift with your back, but lift with your legs.
Don’t forget to put the weight back where they go
Don’t forget to clean them off by wiping them down.
As a textbook rule follower, I was more focused on breaking one of the weightlifting rules that I rarely got to actually lifting weights.
But these rules are there for a reason.
When someone begins lifting weight, the sheer heaviness can hurt someone if they do not do it properly.
I am thankful to say that today, I am free, the WEIGHT has been lifted, mostly because I have not lifted weights in years!
When I think of weights, heaviness, or burdens, I can’t help but wonder:
Who has ever felt burdened?
Who has dealt with a sense of heaviness?
Who has gone through a season where we felt weighed down with the busyness and cares of life?
If we were to be honest for a moment, sometimes life can feel burdensome.
There are moments when we face weighty decisions.
There are times when a sort of heaviness seems to consume us.
How do we handle this as followers of Christ?
I would love to stand here and say, today, you can enter a new realm of Christian living where you will NEVER feel burdened again.
But that would not be true.
Therefore, I want us to see how we can learn to carry the burdens of life.
The burden of parenthood.
The burden of relationships.
The burden of work.
The burden of a calendar that seems to get fuller and fuller.
The burden of activities that seem to control our lives.
The burden of an ever-changing world.
The burden of stress.
The burden of feeling burnout.
There are many burdens we carry.
I will be upfront and explain, this is not a message on how to get rid of burdens.
Instead, I want us to leave learning how to carry our burdens.
We read a promise from the prophet Isaiah of how God will handle burdens.
I defined burden, but I want to explain the concept of a yoke.
Truthfully, as a child, I always thought it was a YOLK, you know the yellow part of the egg.
I thought, NO GOD, don’t remove the best part.
Instead, reading it, we see it is a YOKE.
In a natural sense, a yoke is used to pull animals in unison.
When the two animals are joined together, they have greater strength to pull.
But yokes are binding.
Once the oxen are in the yoke, they cannot get free on their own.
In Scripture, God used yokes to describe bondage or slavery.
It denotes a heaviness that will not leave until the individual is free.
When something was yoked, it is under a heavy burden that controlled its every move.
But there is a promise, God will deal with the yoke and the burden.
How then do we learn to carry a burden?
I have three points, [Yoked by Sin], [Yoked by Salvation], and [Yielded to the Spirit].
Let’s begin
1.
Yoked by Sin
Before we see the hope of Isaiah’s promise to destroy the yoke, we need to see what yoke needed destroyed.
God laid out a simple promise to His people in the Old Testament.
If His people were willing to follow His Word, they would enjoy the blessings of God.
However, should they opt out of faithfulness and follow the ways of the world, they will endure judgment.
Israel opted out of by sinning against the Lord.
They worshipped other gods.
They built altars and made sacrifices to other gods.
They ignored His prophets who called on them to return and repent of their sins.
Eventually, Judah, the Southern Kingdom, followed Israel’s example.
They too did not keep God’s commandments.
They rejected Him and eventually the Lord removed His protection and all of God’s people ended up in captivity.
Think of the burden that must have been.
They were once the greatest nation on the planet, and because of their willful disobedience they ended up in captivity.
But Isaiah began to prophesy, eventually He will deal with Assyria.
He will judge the nations of the earth who came against His people.
What we see here is God showing the penalty of disobedience.
We cannot live the way we want to live or do what we want to do and expect God to continue to bless us.
What is it then that causes people to go their own way?
What is the pull that tempts people to turn from God and disobey His word?
It all boils down to a three letter word— SIN.
Sin is a perpetual problem for humanity.
We were born into sin.
The wages of our sin is death.
Our sin separates us from God.
Therefore, at one point or another, EVERY person lived under the yoke of sin.
Just as Israel lived under the yoke, the bondage, and burden of their adversaries, humanity has to identify there is yoke called sin.
Remember, a yoke joins two animals together.
In a spiritual sense, a yoke joins people together.
At the start of life, we are yoked by sin.
Bound by sin.
Burdened with the problems that come with sin.
But what did Isaiah promise?
There will come a day where God will remove the burden from our shoulders and the yoke from our necks.
God never intended us to remain perpetually yoked by sin.
Therefore, let us look at...
2. The Yoke of Salvation
Eventually He was to take on the penalty of our sin and the judgement we deserved by dying in our place.
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