Burdensome?

If you’ve ever carried something heavy, you know it quickly becomes hard and tiring. For example, unloading flagstone from our truck was a burdensome and hard task. Carrying boxes up and down the attic or from the shed. Moving furniture. Etc. When you engage in that hard work, everything in your body is sore by the end and even your mind is screaming – what are you doing!? It is a burdensome task, so we avoid them. We procrastinate doing them. No one enjoys carry heavy things for a long time. No one.

A lot of people view God’s commandments that way. They see them as burdensom. Hard work. Mostly because they don’t want to do them. And because they allow people approach God’s commandments with this attitude, they procrastinate doing them and eventually just stop. Because no one wants to do something they do not enjoy and they view as hard.

But John tells us this is the wrong attitude toward God’s laws and expectations. He tells us if we truly love God we will keep His commandments because of that love. And that motivating factor releases us from the negative attitude and helps us see God’s laws as not burdensom but helpful. Loving God helps us to understand thst since God love us so much He sent Jesus to die for us – an incredibly burdensome and hard task – that the least we could do is show self control. We see that how God has ask us to live isn’t a burden. It is a blessing from God to help us. It is an easy task compared to what Jesus did for us. It puts it all in the proper prespective.

I’m not saying obeying God isn’t hard. It is. BUT. John tells us the key ingredient to make that hard task NOT become a burden…love. Many things in this life are hard but not all hard things are burdens. Why? Because of our attitude toward them. And our attitude toward God and His commandments should be love. If we have the right heart and the proper mindset, obeying God isn’t a burden. It is the least we could do for Him since Jesus, His only son, sacrificed everything for us.

Don’t see obeying God as a burden. See it as a worthy goal, a higher calling, a hard but necessary task…an act of love.