christian living on Yoke

Gracious God, Your yoke is easy, and your burden is light. You say you will give us rest, yet we don’t always believe it. Forgive us for being distracted by our doing. Instead of finding rest in Your ...

He invites us to leave our burdensome ways of heavy labor—especially the “religious” ones—and step into the yoke of training with him. This is a way of gentleness and lowliness, a way of soul rest. It...

You have noticed, I expect, that Christ Himself sometimes describes the Christian way as very hard, sometimes as very easy. He says, “Take up your Cross”—in other words, it is like going to be beaten ...

Gracious God of love–Father, Son and Holy Spirit: We are grateful that You’ve revealed yourself to us, telling us that each of us are loved by You as children, each precious in Your sight, each a refl...

In the days of the early church, believers affirmed their faith by saying, “Jesus is Lord.” We give lip-service to that same affirmation, but find it difficult to surrender control of our lives. Inste...

Grace is costly because it compels a person to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Lord: In our times of weakness and our hours of need, Yours is the strength that enables us to carry on, Yours the shoulder we rest our heads upon. When our load is heavy and too much to bear, Yours a...

Father of mercies, Your word is like a double-edged sword. When we read about the humility, the sacrifice of your son, in comparison with our own lives, we are convicted of our sin. We have not humbl...

Like me, maybe you set aside much of your normal work for the Christmas break and this week you have a lot to do! There’s a gravitational pull to “Hurry and catch up!” But that’s not the best way. ...

Paradoxically…healing means moving from your pain to the pain…When you keep focusing on the specific circumstances of your pain, you easily become angry, resentful, and even vindictive. You are inclin...

[Joy] is what comes to us when we are walking in the way of faith and obedience.

[W]hat makes the word koinonia untranslatable, and therefore a good candidate for direct appropriation into English (or any language where it may be needed), is the profound and singular connotation o...

O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the Lord our maker. For he is our God; and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand

Many churches today remind me of a laboring crew trying to gather in a harvest while they sit in the tool shed. They go to the tool shed every Sunday and they study bigger and better methods of agricu...

He who believes his doctrine to be perfectly right and true has only to lift his hands and touch his ears and discover they are the long furry ears of a donkey.

Joy is a net of love in which you can catch souls.

“You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell me why?" "I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it...

All words are pegs to hang ideas on.

We are always on the anvil; by trials God is shaping us for higher things.

While in seminary I did some research and editing work for a missiology professor, and I came across a story of a missionary who took Jesus’s illustration of sheep and goats quite literally when worki...

Awe ignites joy because it makes us bend the knee.

Today there's more fellowship among snakes than among mankind. Wild beasts spare those with similar markings. (for contrast).

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.

So then, whether their background was Roman or Jewish or both, the early enemies of Christianity lost no opportunity to ridicule the claim that God’s anointed and man’s Saviour ended his life on a cro...

Leader: How good and pleasant it is when we live together in unity! People: It is like precious oil on the head, running down on the beard, Leader: Running down on Aaron’s beard, down on the colla...

We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.

Joy, not grit, is the hallmark of holy obedience. We need to be light-hearted in what we do to avoid taking ourselves too seriously. It is a cheerful revolt against self and pride.

Among the sheep (I like a sheep have strayed) I watch the manger where my Lord is laid; Oh that my baa-ing nature would win thence Some woolly innocence!

Cross-bearing is the long lesson of our mortal life. It is a part of God’s salvation, called sanctification. It is a lesson set before us every moment of every day.” “If life were an art lesson…we cou...

We shake with joy, we shake with grief. What a time they have, these two housed as they are in the same body.