“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, 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
During 2026, Peachtree Church is inviting everyone into Cultivate, a churchwide discipleship plan centered on the fruit of the Spirit and the kind of life God longs to grow in us. Throughout the year, we’ll explore how love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control take shape in everyday life through the Spirit’s work. Cultivate brings together worship, Scripture, group guides, and meaningful practices designed to meet you where you are and support growth in ways that fit your season. These twice-weekly devotionals are one way to stay connected, offering reflection and grounding for daily life with God. Whether you engage in many ways or just one, you’re invited to be part of this shared journey of becoming more rooted in who God has created and called you to be.
Devotional
One of the highlights of each week while I was in elementary school was when our class would trek up to the third floor of the building to spend an hour in the computer lab. When we had finished the lesson that Mrs. Ross was teaching us, we would be given the great reward of spending our remaining time playing “The Oregon Trail.” I can still remember the different strategies that people would take in our plans to get the highest scores, and mine tended to be to assume the persona of a farmer on the trek from Independence, Missouri to the Willamette Valley of Oregon. In the game, the players had the option of different professions that each had their own perks, but I always preferred to be the farmer, since the perk was to be able to care for the oxen who pulled the covered wagon along the trail.
As I’ve been reflecting on the passage from Matthew that we are examining this week, I keep thinking back to my time as a kid playing “The Oregon Trail.” Jesus invites us each to take his yoke upon us, to join with him in the great and grand adventure, not of following him, but of learning from him. What follows that invitation is not what most of us might expect when called to bear a yoke, for Jesus reminds us, “my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Jesus desires that we would walk beside him, but he wants us to know that this journey forward isn’t supposed to be onerous.
The key to truly understanding that fact for me comes in the realization that a yoke divides the weight. When we take on Jesus’ yoke, we do not add his burdens to our own. Instead, we share our burdens with him, a truth which always reminds me of the goal of Christ’s mission and ministry. It is here that my mind turns to Paul’s words from Romans, “If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us” (Roman 8:31a-34).
In Jesus’ death and resurrection, we have been offered grace that washes us clean, that completely removes the burden from our shoulders, even as Jesus invites us to place ourselves beside him in his easy yoke. Our burden has been fully removed from us through the actions of the one who has invited us to bear his yoke. The path forward is not one where we must pull a wagon load of settlers across the American frontier, but rather that we are invited to pull alongside of our God, who has already offered us the greatest freedom that we could ever begin to imagine. And all that he asks of us is that we would walk beside him.
For Reflection
- What burden do you pull onto your own shoulders?
- What holds you back from taking on Jesus’ invitation to carry his yoke?
Prayer
Lord God, help us to surrender ourselves to you, to not look at you as one who seeks to add to the weights that we must carry, but rather as the only one who is capable of taking it from us. In Jesus’ name we pray; amen.
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Devotionals