“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30). It is impossible to fully understand or appreciate the magnitude and the majesty and the magnanimity of what Jesus Christ has done for us by suffering and dying for our sins and bringing about the possibility of redemption through the power of His Atonement and Resurrection. When faced with such an impossible difference between the infinite contribution that Jesus Christ made towards bringing about our potential Salvation and Exaltation and the vanishingly small total that constitutes all we can do, we often make one of two mistakes. Either we throw up our hands and conclude that there is no sense in trying since our contribution makes up less than a rounding error so it doesn’t matter what we do or don’t do because Christ is just going to save us anyway. Or, we go in the complete opposite direction and conclude that not only is our best not worth mentioning, but we are also not worth saving, not least because we feel a great deal of pity for our Savior and all that He suffered and are especially sensitive to how much extra pain we alone have caused Him through all of our mistakes and sins. So, on one hand, we try to disavow any sense of agency or accountability and hope that saying Lord, Lord will get us a spot in the Kingdom of Heaven whether we work for it or not. And on the other hand, we try to negate the effects of the Atonement in our specific case, foolishly assuming that by opting out of the repentance process, we are somehow removing ourselves and our sins from the pool and lessening the burden that He had to bear. Neither of these approaches are anywhere near the truth. The Savior invites us to take upon us His yoke. It’s His yoke. He’s not asking us to let Him take upon Himself our yoke. He wants us to hitch ourselves up to His burden and start pulling. We were part of the problem, now let’s be part of the solution. The sooner we realize that our burden is the Savior’s burden and the Savior’s burden is our burden, the sooner we will understand that it’s all the same burden. Christ’s burden is light because we are taking upon ourselves His yoke and helping Him pull it. The whole reason that Christianity is such a proselytizing religion is because Christ wants as many people as possible - all of them ideally - to be yoked up to the same work and glory, the same burden, so that all of us are pulling together to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of all of God’s Children. If we have tried to coast through life without assuming any responsibility, then it’s time to get out of the cart and start pulling our weight. If we have been throwing ourselves under the cart so that we can be crushed by our own sense of self-loathing and martyrdom, then it’s time to get out from under the cart and pick ourselves up and start pulling our weight. When we repent and hold onto our covenants and lose ourselves in the service of others, we are taking upon us Christ’s yoke and we are making His burden lighter, which also makes our burden lighter, because it’s the same burden.
