Reverend Jonathan Waits
A Relational Pathway (Matthew 11:25-30)
Date: January 11, 2025
Several years ago, I went through a season in which I did a fair amount of woodworking. Now, I’ve long enjoyed woodworking ever since I took a woodworking class in junior high. I don’t know that it’s the woodworking itself so much as doing projects that have very clear instructions and which I can follow carefully to reproduce the results of the model. I enjoy it for the same reason I enjoy making the metal models that are all over my office. The difference between building metal models and woodworking, though, is that anybody can build those models. Woodworking is a developed skill. Having the right tools, but not knowing how to use them well will result in a lot of really bad woodworking.
Thankfully, I went through this season with a good and faithful guide in Rod Crocket. Every church needs a Rod Crockett. I was grateful—and especially for my boys—to have gotten to be a part of one. Rod had all the tools I needed, a really generous spirit, and the time to show me how to do whatever it was I wanted to do. It was a kind of apprenticeship, which has long been recognized as one of the best ways to learn a new skill. Learning alongside someone who already knows what they are doing makes the learning process much simpler. I was always most comfortable when he was in the shop, teaching me as I went. I occasionally did some work on my own, but that was usually when I made mistakes. Those mistakes usually came from doubt. I doubted the skills I did have, and whether I was using them properly, and the results spoke for themselves.
Well, this morning, we are finishing up our short series on doubt that is getting us started in this new year. The big idea here is that all of our lives are marked by doubt in some capacity. They may be minor doubts about fairly insignificant things, or they could be major doubts about critical ones. The doubt is there all the same. Doubt slows us down and forces us to take detours we don’t have time to deal with. Knowing how to deal with doubt is something a great many followers of Jesus have wanted at some point along the way of their journey. Jesus gives us some wisdom on this in Matthew 11.
Last week, we worked through the first two-thirds or so of the chapter together. We took in two different stories of doubts Jesus encountered during the course of His ministry. The first doubt came from Jesus’ own cousin, John the Baptist. John’s life had not turned out the way he likely expected it to go, and he was struggling because of it with whether or not Jesus really was the guy he’d been telling everyone He was. The second doubt came from the people who lived in some of the towns where Jesus had done a great deal of His ministry, including Capernaum, His home base of operation. The doubts of these folks were mostly not rooted in their circumstances, but in simply a lack of interest in what Jesus had to offer.
The contrast between how Jesus responded to these two different expressions of doubt could not have been sharper. Where Jesus was gentle and encouraging with John’s doubts, He took more of a scorched earth approach with the skeptical doubts of the people of Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum, comparing them unfavorably with the citizens of Sodom. The reason for this incredibly different reaction to the two expressions of doubt was the result of the origins of those doubts. John’s doubts came from a place of faith, while the other doubt came out of a kind of disinterested skepticism. What we said in response to all of this was that doubts are normal, but where they come from matters.
It matters whether your doubts are the result of wrestling with hard doctrines or hard circumstances, or if they come out of a place of not wanting it all to be true in the first place. It matters whether you are trying to move toward Jesus in spite of your doubts, or if you are merely looking for reasons not to believe in Him in the first place. I challenged you if you have or are wrestling with doubt of some kind to consider carefully the origins of your doubts, and then I left you hanging. We acknowledged the fact that knowing where our doubts come from is not the same thing as knowing how to actually deal with them in a positive, productive manner. But we were out of time, then, so I told you to come back this morning. And here you are!
And, as it turns out, Jesus gives us a powerful pathway out of doubt in the last part of Matthew 11. If you have a copy of the Scriptures with you this morning, find your way there with me, and let’s see what Jesus has to say.
While you find your way there with me, let me offer one more note of context. If we are going to loosen the power of doubt over our lives, we need to know what doubt is in the first place. Knowing where it comes from is good, but not enough on its own. We need to know what doubt actually is. A quick Google search reveals doubt to be mere a lack of certainty or conviction about something. And as with the case of most Google-furnished definitions—especially ones dealing with spiritual matters—that one’s okay, but not great. Let’s see if we can’t flesh that out just a bit more. Doubt is the result of our insisting on doing things by ourselves when we don’t know how or don’t have the power to make them possible.
Understood in this way, we can see that doubt is not merely some amorphous thing that exists independently of any other aspect of our lives. Doubt is inherently relational. Or, rather, it is the result of a relational disconnect in our lives. Think about it. When I was in that woodworking phase a few years ago, if I ran into something I wasn’t sure how to do on my own, but Rod was there in the shop with me, I didn’t have the first bit of doubt. We don’t experience doubt when we are willing to connect with and listen to someone who understands whatever it is we are dealing with in a given moment. It is when we disconnect from relationships that doubt becomes a problem. If this is the case, then the pathway out of doubt is going to involve relationships.
With that all in mind, let’s look at what Jesus has to say next in Matthew 11:25. “At that time Jesus said, ‘I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and revealed them to infants. Yes, Father, because this was your good pleasure. All things have been entrusted to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son desires to reveal him.’”
Okay, so what is this? What does this have to do with doubt? Well, put this in the context we just took a second to establish. Doubt is inherently relational. The easiest pathway out of my woodworking doubts was to trust in Rod’s wise counsel and direction. Doing that was necessarily going to involve my willingness to acknowledge that I didn’t know best on my own how to do something. Do you know what that is? It’s humility. And the same thing was true for you when you encountered some practical area or season of doubt in your life. It could have been when you were starting a new job, or moving to a new city, or starting a new relationship, or becoming a new parent, or entering a new season of life. Whatever it was, if you were willing to embrace a pathway of humility in which you owned up to your lack of knowledge and trusted in the wisdom of someone who had been there before you and already knew what they were doing, you weren’t nearly as gripped by doubt as you otherwise were. The best pathway out of doubt is always a relational one.
Well, think again about what Jesus is saying here. He is praising His Father for revealing “these things” to infants. What does this mean? What things? Knowledge of God. Faith in God. The way out of doubt and uncertainty in life. There are two approaches we can take to doubt. One is to declare: I can work my way out of this on my own. The other is to acknowledge: I need help navigating from here to where I’m trying to go.
Now, hear me well. There’s nothing wrong with working hard to solve a thorny problem that you’re not sure how to navigate on your own at first. With practice and repetition, I could have figured out how to skillfully use all the tools in Rod’s shop to build all sorts of things. That’s a fine thing. It was better to lean into the relationship I had available to me to accomplish the same end, but I could have taken that other path. But there are some problems that are bigger than we can handle on our own. There are some journeys that are harder and more complex than we have the wherewithal to tackle as solo adventures. The journey to get to God, to uncover objective meaning and purpose for our lives is one of them. In fact, it’s probably the biggest one of them.
There are self-proclaimed wise and intelligent people who boast that they understand all the mysteries of the world. And even if they aren’t willing to go quite that far, they are at least confident they understand them better and more accurately than any religious doctrine could ever offer. They are smart enough to produce all the techniques we need to bring ourselves to the place we’ve always known we should be. And yet a fairly quick survey of human history makes clear that they don’t really seem to be moving the needle. They haven’t solved any of the most significant problems and challenges we face. And even where they have found ways to make life a bit more comfortable and convenient, these advances, pursued as they are on the grounds of human wisdom and intelligence, have often come at the expense of making the problems they once boasted they would solve even worse. We can’t think or reason or work our way to righteousness and justice and the life we’ve always wanted. God has hidden these things from the “wise” and the “intelligent” (descriptions Jesus uses sarcastically here).
Instead, Jesus says, He has revealed them to infants. What’s an infant? A person who is in a place of total dependency on others to provide everything she needs to survive and thrive in life. Jesus uses the designation “infant” here as a stand in for a person who has embraced a path of humility. If we are going to walk the path out of doubt and to an unshakable faith, the path that leads to the life that is truly life, the path that gets us to God, we’re going to have to walk His path in His way. But we don’t know that way on our own! That’s precisely the point. God made it that way. He made it so that we cannot get all the way to Him on our own. If He had, we’d have never taken it. We’d have just kept relying on ourselves. There would have been no relationship to the thing, and He made us for relationships, most specifically a relationship with Himself.
So, He made it so that folks who are wise and intelligent in their own eyes will never be able to find it, but those who are willing to humbly walk His path can find it. Then, He sent us Jesus to show us the way. Jesus shows us both the path and how to walk it. Jesus, God the Son, reveals God the Father to us. The best pathway out of doubt is always a relational one.
That brings us to the last part of the chapter here. Check this out with me in v. 28 now: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take up my yoke and learn from me, because I am lowly and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
Now, for just a second, before we talk directly about what Jesus says here, put that in context. What did Jesus just say (because that impacts how we are going to understand this part)? He said that “no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son desires to reveal him.” And then, what’s the very next thing He says? “Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened.” Who does the Son desire to reveal the Father to? Anybody who wants to know Him. If you are somebody who doesn’t think you really need to know God, Jesus isn’t going to reveal Him to you. You’ll just keep pridefully stumbling around on your own, stricken by soul-deep doubt that you just can’t shake except to try to ignore it, and telling yourself and anyone who will listen that you have it all figured out. You may need Jesus, but if that’s the path you want to take, you’re not going to want Him.
But if you have reached that place that life tends to take us to whether we want to go there or not where you are weary and burdened, where you are tired of trying and failing, where you are exhausted and worn down by a seemingly endless parade of one-more-things, where you are sick of doubt controlling your narrative, Jesus says to you…to all of you…to all of us…come to me. Come to me, Jesus says, and I will give you rest.
Living with doubt is exhausting. Have you experienced that? When you know that making all the decisions is on you, that puts an extra weight on your shoulders that gets heavy after a while. When you know further that if the decision turns out to be the wrong one, that responsibility is all yours, that makes that weight even heavier. But when you know that you’ve got somebody walking with you who knows how to do whatever it is really well, who can help alert you to possible missteps and mistakes before they cause problems, and who you trust enough to actually heed their advice, things become so much lighter. You find that instead of being worn out all the time, you can actually rest a bit. And what led to this? Relationship. The best pathway out of doubt is always a relational one.
And what Jesus says next makes clear why this is. And I’ll tell you getting into this that I didn’t use to understand this imagery very well. I thought I did, but I was missing something important. When Jesus says, “Take up my yoke and learn from me, because I am lowly and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light,” I used to think what He was offering us was to essentially switch burdens with Him. Our burden is heavy. His burden is light. He does a little switcheroo since He’s so much stronger than us, and we don’t have to be weighed down by it anymore. All those doubts and fears and anxieties will be His to deal with from now on. Good news!
Except, I don’t think that’s what Jesus is saying here. Jesus does offer for us to take up His yoke, but not in exchange for ours. That’s not what a yoke is. A yoke is the runny, yellow stuff on the inside of an egg. I’m kidding. That’s a y-o-l-k yolk. Jesus is talking about a y-o-k-e yoke. That’s a wooden frame designed to go over the neck of a pair of animals—often oxen—so that they can work together to pull a heavy load. It was not uncommon for farmers to pair a stronger, more mature animal with one that was still growing and learning so that the older and wiser animal could teach the younger one how to do the hard work they were being called on to complete.
When Jesus invites us to take up His yoke, He is inviting us into His burden. That doesn’t seem like it would offer us much relief from what ails us, except for this: Jesus is stronger than us. He already knows how to do the job of life. What He’s offering us is not simply to give us a different burden of life that’s lighter than the one we are used to carrying. This is because the trouble we are facing is not simply the weight of our burden. The trouble we are facing is that we don’t know how to do life very well. We don’t know what to do to get it right very often, and even when we do, we don’t seem to have the power to make it happen. Remember what I said that particular combination of things causes? Doubt. What we need is for someone to teach us how to do life well. Once we know that, the weight or size of our burden doesn’t matter. But we can’t figure that out on our own because God has hidden it in Christ. He’s put it behind the offer of a relationship. Well, this is Jesus offering us a relationship. The best pathway out of doubt is always a relational one.
When we take up Jesus’ yoke, He’s already on the other side. And, because He’s so much stronger than we are, He does all of the hard work. We are there not to somehow help Him with the job of getting life right. He can do that just fine on His own. We are there to learn from Him. And indeed, that’s what He offers here. “Take up my yoke and learn from me.” Come, be in a relationship with me in which I am going to teach you everything you need to know about how to do life in a way that doesn’t leave you weary and burdened. His yoke is easy and light not because it is smaller than ours—after all, running the universe is kind of a big job—but because He knows how to carry it well. That’s knowledge He wants to share with us. Indeed, He has shared it with us in His word. When we pursue His word with a firm commitment to prayer and in the context of the church community, the pathway from doubt to an unshakable faith becomes one that is almost impossible not to walk. All of this because of our relationship with the one who teaches us how to walk in the first place. The best pathway out of doubt is always a relational one.
Okay, so then, let’s put a point on this: How do we get out of a place of doubt in our lives? I’ve just told you: the best pathway out of doubt is always a relational one. More directly, though, it depends on what kind of doubt we’re dealing with. If you aren’t sure how to do a particular task that’s smaller than life as a whole, your best bet is to find somebody who already knows how to do it, and to get some guidance from them. If it’s a new job, talk to somebody who has already been doing it for a while. If it’s raising a new baby, spend some time with seasoned parents. If it’s figuring out a new relationship, meet with a couple who’s been happily married for many years, or, if you need more help than that, sit down with a marriage counselor. That’s never a bad thing to do. If you’re repairing something around the house, you could watch a YouTube video…or you could invite somebody over who you know to be a handyman, and let them walk you through it. Personally, given the choice between trying to fix something on my own with a YouTube video, and waiting until my father-in-law who is a superb handyman comes in town to help me with it, I’m going with the latter every chance I get. You see the connection among all of these different examples, though, right? The solution to the doubt is always a relational one. The best pathway out of doubt is always a relational one.
Perhaps you’ve got some spiritual or religious doubts. As we talked about last week, that’s perfectly okay. The fact that you brought those with you here is a mark of humility and wisdom. You’re literally in the best place in the world to get help with those. And I don’t just mean this church. I mean the church. If you are struggling in your faith, the worst thing in the world you can do is to isolate yourself from other people. The best solution is precisely the opposite of that. You need to invest in the church. You need to be deeply, formally connected to a local body. I happen to think this is a great one, but the connection itself is what matters most. You need to be talking with and learning from other believers who have already been through the season you are in. You need to ask good and hard questions and let the community help you wrestle through those questions to the answers on the other side. You need to serve others alongside the community so that you can be reminded that your issues, whatever they happen to be, aren’t the biggest or hardest issues in the world. Sometimes the best solution to doubt is to serve someone else simply so that you stop fixating on yourself and your own issues. With a bit of perspective like that, some doubts resolve themselves. Whether receiving in a relationship or giving in one, it is in the context of a relationship that you’ll find relief from your doubting. The best pathway out of doubt is always a relational one.
The church, though—the body of Christ—is the key. Jesus told us to come to Him for the hope and help and relief we need. But how are we supposed to go to Him when He isn’t around physically anymore? We go to His body: the church. The church is how you can go to Jesus to take up His yoke and learn from Him. When you are actively engaged with the church while also being actively engaged with prayer and the Scriptures, you are going to move from doubt to faith. You just about won’t be able to help it. Doubt thrives in isolation, but dies in relationships. The best pathway out of doubt is always a relational one.
So, if you are struggling with doubt, let me ask you this: Do you have relationships in your life? Do you have strong, encouraging relationships with people who love you and are willing to patiently grow with you while you respectively hold each other accountable for pursuing the path of Christ? Do you have relationships with people who will let you ask good and hard questions and work with you toward their answers? Do you have a relationship with Jesus, the one who reveals the Father and the path to life to all those who are willing to embrace the humility to acknowledge their need and desire for it? If you do, lean into those a bit harder, and see what a difference they make. If you don’t, then what are you waiting for? The best pathway out of doubt is always a relational one. Walk that path, and enjoy the life that is truly life.