Main Text: Matthew 11:28-29
Main Point: We can offload our burdens on to God. He can definitely handle them.

Outline:
Knowing Where to Go
Knowing What to Do
Knowing What Is Yours

 
A truck driver passed a group of farmers carrying their heavy loads on their heads. As the truck driver looked closer, he realized that the loads of farm produce were extremely heavy. In fact, the driver noticed that some of the farmers had already died under the weight of such heavy loads. Feeling compassion for the farmers, the truck driver approached them to offer them the opportunity to place their loads on his truck, and he would gladly carry the farm produce the remainder of their journey free of charge. If you were one of the farmers carrying these heavy loads, what would you do? Who would not take the generous offer of the truck driver and let the truck carry the load?

In life, we all carry burdens. Sometimes those burdens are heavier than we can bear. Just like the truck driver did with the farmers, God comes and offers to carry our heavy burdens so that we no longer have to feel the weight of these problems and struggles in our lives. As God draws next to you and offers to take the load off of your head and carry it in His truck, what will your response be to Him? Will you let the Lord carry your burdens? Or, will you continue to carry the heavy load on your own head?
Today, we are going to see in Scripture that God wants to be our loving Father that takes our problems off of us as He offers to carry them for us. But, we must respond in faith to His offer. We must place our burdens on Him and trust that He can handle them. And, we must choose to not pick those burdens up again and put them back on our heads.

Matthew 11:28-29 says this:
28 “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 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. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Here is the promise that Jesus gives: We do not have to carry our burdens on our own anymore! How can that be? What do we do? How can I be find relief from the struggles and problems in my life?

First, We Must Know Where to Go.
The first key of offloading our burdens is knowing where to go. Who can help? Who is strong enough to take on our burdens? Who cares for us enough to help us with our problems? Who is able to do anything about our struggles?

Where do I go?
In Matthew 11:28, Jesus says: “Come to me….” We must go to Jesus. We must take them to the Lord. If we are going to find relief for the the incredible weight that we are carrying in our lives, we must go to Jesus Christ. This brings up some logical questions for us.

1) Can Jesus handle our burdens?
Jeremiah 32:26-27 says: Then the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah: “I am the Lord, the God of all mankind. Is anything too hard for me?”The Lord spoke to Jeremiah and asked the rhetorical question: Is anything too hard for me? The obvious answer is “no, nothing is too hard for you, God.” This exchange between Jeremiah and God occurred as the Lord was informing Jeremiah about some of the things that were going to transpire. Judgment was coming on God’s people. But, after judgment will come restoration as God will bring His people back to the land He promised them and the blessings He promised them. Can God do all of this? Can God make all of these unbelievable things happen? Is anything too hard for him? No. Nothing is too hard. If God says He will do it, He will do it. If Jesus says “Come to me” then He is promising that He can handle your burdens and struggles. If He says He can, He can. We must trust Him.

Next question…
2) How can I bring my burdens to God?
James 5:13 says:
Is anyone among you in trouble? Let them pray.
In the book of James, we have the instructions that if we are in trouble, if we have problems, if we are carrying burdens, we should pray. Prayer shows that we are trusting God to handle the struggles rather than carrying them on our own. Prayer shows faith. Prayer shows that we are going to depend on God from this moment forward to handle our difficulties for us. Prayer shows that I’m trusting God.

3) Will my prayers matter?
Psalms 50:15 says: Call on me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you will honor me.
God makes this incredible promise to His people: That you can call on Him when you are in the midst of tough times and He will deliver you. He will see you through. He will be working to carry the load for you. He is offering His truck to carry your load of produce that is too heavy for you to carry. God promises to carry it for you. Will you let Him?

4) What will the end result be if I come to Jesus with my burdens?
Ephesians 3:20-21 says: 20 Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, 21 to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen. If we will take God at His word, He will do “immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine.” He will handle our burdens in bigger and better ways than we could dream about. He can bring unbelievable joy in the midst of the struggle. He can do so much more than we ever thought possible. Not only can God handle your burdens, He can handle them in marvelous, miraculous, amazing ways. If you will come to him with your burdens, you will be overwhelmed with what God is able to do to see you through.

Are you coming to God with your burdens?
Some of you are turning to other places and other people when you have problems. Some go to fetish priests or to the occults for help and answers and assistance. When you turn to sources like that, rather than to God, you are turning to something that has no power to help you with your burdens. And, you are showing that you do not have the faith that God wants you to have in Him. You are depending on something else rather than depending on Him and His word. When Jesus was in the wilderness being tempted by Satan in Matthew 4, He turned to the Scriptures. Every time Satan confronted Him with a specific temptation, Jesus responded by quoting Scripture, trusting Scripture, and standing on Scripture. We should do the same thing. When we are confronted with a burden or a struggle or even a temptation, we should turn to and depend on God’s word to show us truth. Then, we should be obedient to what we read in Scripture. This is the faith that is required if we truly want to offload our burdens and not have to carry them anymore.

The first key to letting God handle our burdens is knowing where to go. “Come to Me,” Jesus said. Are you coming to God with your burdens? Second, We Must Know What to Do.
Again in Matthew 11:28-29, Jesus says: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”When we come to the Lord with our burdens, we have to know what to do when we get there. Jesus says that He will give us something: rest. But, first we must give Him something: our burdens and difficulties.

It will do the farmers no good to walk up to the truck who has offered to carry their heavy loads but to leave those loads up on their heads. The farmer must show faith by trusting the truck driver with the loads by actually placing the heavy loads on the truck. Have you approached God with your burdens? AND have you taken them off of your heart and placed them on Him? Psalms 55:22 says: Cast your cares on the Lord and he will sustain you; he will never let the righteous be shaken. These are clear instructions. God says to cast our cares on Him, on the Lord. 1 Peter 5:7 repeats this instruction but with a special clarification: Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.

Why is God so willing to take on your burdens? Why is He so willing to let you cast you cares on Him? Because He cares for you. He loves you so much. That love for us is seen most clearly by God sending His Son, Jesus, to be the perfect sacrifice for our sins. On the cross of Calvary, Jesus paid the penalty for our sins. He took on Himself the punishment that was rightfully ours. How much does God love you? He loves you so much He would make it possible through Jesus dying on the cross for you to cast your biggest burden on Jesus, the burden of sin. Romans 5:8 says that “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Jesus died for our sins so that we could be reconciled back to the Father. That is an incredible display of love. If He loves you that much, you can cast all your burdens on Him because He cares for you.

We must learn to cast our cares on the Lord, to place our burdens on Him, to leave our struggles and problems at the foot of the cross. How do we do that? Philippians 4:6-7: Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.We cast our cares on God by learning to pray about them rather than worry about them. To talk with God about what the situation is rather than being anxious and trying to solve everything on our own. Instead of trusting God with the burdens and struggles, many of us think that money will solve our problems. Faith in God, especially with our problems, is the only way to achieve that “peace which transcends all understanding.” When we are praying, we are exhibiting that faith. When we take these struggles to God and talk with Him about them, we are acknowledging that we cannot handle it, but we know He can. If we are depending on anything else, money, our own great ideas, our own strength, we will not get the peace that He promises to us when we trust in Him.

So, how do we cast our cares on the Lord? We pray about them rather than worry about them. And, according to Philippians 4:6 (above), we pray with thanksgiving. We recognize that God has blessed us in so many tremendous ways. We thank Him for the way He has brought us through in the past because that has grown our faith to be able to trust Him today. We thank Him because He has blessed us in so many ways on a daily basis as He continues to pour out His goodness into our lives. The burdens that we carry today, and are casting on Him today, do not hide the blessings of God from us. They highlight the blessings of God for us.

So, first we need to Know Where to Go, then we need to Know What to Do when we get there.
Third, We Must Know What Is Ours. Back in Matthew 11:28, our main passage, Jesus says: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”This is the promise. This is the result. This is what is ours: rest.If we will do what God has instructed us to do…Come to Him and cast all our cares on Him, He will do what He promises to do…give us rest.

Rest will come in various ways.
1) We can rest because His grace is sufficient.
2 Cor. 12:8-10 says:

8 Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. 9 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.
10 That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
Paul has asked God to remove a struggle in his life, something he calls a thorn in the flesh (2 Corinthians 12:7). God’s response to Paul is that He was not going to remove it, but He was going to give Paul the strength to handle it, live through it, press on in spite of it. God’s promise was: “My grace is sufficient for you.”So, we can rest in the fact that even if God does not choose to change our circumstances, He will provide us everything we will need to make it through the burden. We no longer have to carry the weight of the struggle because of God’s promise that we will be able to press on. Sometimes, in light of the burdens we bear, God does not save us from the struggles, but He saves us through the struggles. That is what He promised to Paul. That is what He promises to us. Even with our burdens, His grace will always be sufficient to get us through the problem.

2) We can rest because in light of eternity, this burden is short-lived.
2 Corinthians 4:16-18 says: 16 Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. 17 For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. 18 So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. As Paul describes how he has lived with burdens and struggles in his life, he points out that he can rest in the incredible assurance that in light of eternity, his problems are “light and momentary.” They are “light” because Paul knew how to give those burdens to the Lord. When God is the One carrying them, these burdens seem really light to us. And “momentary” because when we have an eternal perspective, anything we go through in this life will only last a little while. It will be short-lived. We can rest in knowing that we don’t have to live with this burden very long. Even if it is the rest of our lives, because we choose to give it over to God, to put it on his truck, we will not have to live with it long.

Plus, Paul says that the “eternal glory” that we will receive when we step into Heaven “far outweighs them all.” No burden will seem very heavy when we experience the greatness of Heaven, the joy of being in the very presence of Jesus and seeing Him face to face. Heaven will make all of the pain of our struggles melt away into almost nothing when compared to how awesome Heaven will be. We can rest in that. Put your burdens on God’s truck and look forward with joy to how excellent Heaven is going to be.

3) We can rest because we know God is up to something bigger.
Romans 5:3-5 says: 3 Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; 4 perseverance, character; and character, hope. 5 And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. We can find great comfort and rest in knowing that even the difficulties in our lives will be used by God to bring about positive and helpful things in us. Though it is sometimes hard to recognize, and though it is never any fun, the burdens of our lives teach us so much about God and His faithfulness. Paul in Romans 5 says (above): Perseverance, character, and hope all grow out of our sufferings. There are things that we will never learn apart from going through the struggles of life. We can find rest in the knowledge that God will bring about good things even through the tough things (Romans 8:28).
So, Matthew 11:28-29 teaches us some great truths about offloading our struggles:
We must know where to go – go to the Lord.We must know what to do – lay our burdens down and let Him take care of them. We must know what is ours – rest. Rest in Him and watch what He can do.

Application:
Offloading Burdens requires faith.
Just like the farmers had to have faith to let the truck carry their loads, we have to have faith to let God carry our burdens. Will you trust God today to carry your burdens? Will you give them to Him?
Offloading Burdens calls to action. Just because we are trusting God to carry our burdens does not mean that there are not things for us to do. If your burden is that you do not have a job, be praying for God to carry that burden but also take action by sending out application letters. If your struggle is you and your spouse are having trouble conceiving, be praying that God will handle that burden, but you be doing your part in order to conceive, being faithful to your spouse. When we have faith and show the action that is required, we can accept the results that God chooses to give as the best results for us. His timing is always right. Whatever we need at any particular moment is exactly what He provides.

Offloading Burdens brings thanksgiving.
We must not forget that as God brings us through our struggles and as He carries our burdens and as He does great and mighty works in our lives, we should be thankful to Him. Let everyone know that it is God who has seen you through the difficulties you have encountered. And, He will continue to do that. Be thankful to Him. And be pointing others to Him as the One providing the strength in the midst of the struggles you face. Today,  Jesus has driven God’s truck up to YOU. Will you take your heavy loads off of your head and let Him carry them? Will you take your heavy burdens off of your heart and let Him carry them? The Lord is offering that today. Will you choose to lay your burdens down and let Him carry them.

Written by Akesse Sanza

If you want to offload your burdens again, repeat this short prayer with me, Dear Jesus, Thank you for driving God’s truck up to me today to give me yet another opportunity to offload my heavy burdens, I invite you to continue to be my personal Lord and Savior, I give you my heavy loads, my burdens, my difficulities, and my problems and ask you to load them on God’s truck, change me Jesus, help me Jesus, fix me as God works to deal with and handle my heavy burdens, help me learn to be patient and not complain when stuff/things may not change or improve as quickly as I would like, give me something fun, something exciting, and something new or wonderful to see, do or have as I wait on my burdens to improve, it is in this way I will be able to survive it without having the fricking life choked out of me, it is in your name, I ask and pray, Amen!  Written by-Evangelist Wendy Evans  http://wendyevans.org/