Two yokes sit before you.
One is silvery, shiny, and shimmering. It promises transcendence but leads to slavery. The other is subtly obscure. It seems a little odd to many, maybe rough-hewn and humbly fashioned. But under its weight is life.
God is love. He is love personified and embodied. What it means to love—to be loved—is contained within the essence of the Most High. I believe the best definition of love is “the intentional decision to be all for another.” Using that definition, love is a choice, a decision, rather than a feeling. Therefore, love requires agency, the ability to choose both the one we love and to actually be all for them. One person can’t make these decisions for another. Lovers must choose to love, and even those who are deeply loved must choose to love back.
To make these choices, we created with free will. Without freedom, will, or agency, we would be incapable of choosing and, therefore, incapable of loving. Yet, for all its glory, freedom is nothing more than the power to decide who you will serve. Whether you will serve is inevitable. Your purpose is to worship and serve. It’s in your nature, as sure as your body processes oxygen and your cells replicate.
Freedom can be a different form of enslavement when, with it, we serve things and people who don’t have eternal weight and ultimate value. We choose to serve them by giving our allegiance, time, energy, passion, and resources to their pursuit. Pursuing money, being desired, power, affirmation at work, a spouse, kids, someone else, a great golf game, or the perfect body brings all kinds of fear: What will happen to me if I don’t attain it? If I do, how will I keep it? What will become of me if it is lost?
Chasing down these fears creates all sorts of anxiety, which ultimately emotionally entraps and enslaves us. We are in bondage to our money, our hobby, our work, or that relationship. We aren’t really free; we’ve just chosen a bad master.
Since our needs are insatiable and our possessions are never enough, serving ourselves is the worst master. We will always suck more and more out of ourselves, finding less and less satisfaction in return. This is the lie of the demons. Ultimately, the devil doesn’t have to get you to serve him—he knows you probably won’t, at least not overtly. His goal is to turn you in on yourself, to enslave you to yourself—your fears, your traumas, your needs, your unbridled desires. You are your most destructive master, although it seems attractive. This is the shimmering yoke.
Alternatively, you could choose a master who loves you unconditionally in a way and to an extent that is not humanly possible—who is able to recognize what is good, beautiful, and true because he defines and encompasses these qualities in himself— and who desires these things for you. He not only is these things; he is sovereignly capable and predisposed to making them happen. It doesn’t seem at first like true freedom. It seems like a greater yoke than the first one. That’s the paradox. Because it’s the only way you can truly be free.
It doesn’t mean this yoke is pain-free. There will always be trials, difficulty, pain, and even persecution with this choice, because to be the servant of a willingly tortured master is to walk in his footsteps, and because, in a broken, fallen world there is no other way to attain the good, the beautiful, and the true to which all of us aspire, even for those who choose the shiny. Yet, in that same fallen world, trials, difficulty, pain, and persecution exist no matter who you choose as your master. It’s simply that there’s death at the end of one road and life at another.
The choice itself is not that difficult—life or death. The challenge remains in seeing through the lies that in one there is “true freedom,” meaning “no master,” and in actually doing those things necessary so that the cheap, temporary attractions of bondage to ourselves, the shiny, shimmering yoke, lose their hold on us.
It’s called “bondage” for a reason–sometimes the hooks are in so deep, substance abuse, sexual addiction, codependency or workaholism, or child worship. All these things are self-bondage because we strive to be loved, admired, and valued or numb our pain so much that it’s nearly impossible to be free. It’s not, though. Impossible. But it does require yoking yourself to the other master, surrendering in the power of the Holy Spirit to use the next difficult day doing the next hard thing.
Jesus came to free us from this bondage. One of his very first acts of public ministry was reading Isaiah 61 in his home synagogue:
The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor;
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to those who are bound…
His death on the cross and resurrection secured your freedom. He’s been freeing captives who turn to him for thousands of years. He can do it for you and me, too. But we have to make that choice. And even after we’ve surrendered once, and been saved, surrender is forever– turning again and again to his continued lordship over your life, not defaulting into being your own master but taking up the other yoke, the one he said was easy and light, not because it’s free from trouble or trial, but because it’s free from futility and fear. It’s a daily decision
The first hard thing is something our human nature hates and makes the cross offensive to us. As Emil Brunner claims, “the message of the cross proclaims to each one of us, even the best and most pious: You are a sinner, you are in a wrong relationship with God and hence with your neighbor also. You are seeking yourself. You wish to appear clean and to attain the highest by means of your own intrinsic powers.”
However, you are irreparably damaged, and if you choose the other shiny yoke—the one you would have chosen if it weren’t for Jesus—it will undoubtedly kill you unless you accept the only solution available to you—the Christ, who atoned for your sin at Calvary.
Two yokes sit before you. Who is your master? It’s your choice.
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