Welcome to the InTouch podcast with Charles Stanley for Wednesday, March 4th. Is stress wearing you down. Discover how Christ can replace your stress with calm confidence. True stress relief begins with letting God handle your burdens. >> Why is it that some people go through difficulty, hardship, pain, carry heavy burdens in their life, and somehow they just keep on smiling? Shoulders are up, smile on their face, joy in their heart.

not complaining, not moaning and groaning about the life that they have to live. On the other hand, here’s someone who has less challenges in life, and it just looks like they can’t handle it. They simply say, “I just don’t think I can handle much more.” Well, more than likely, they’re handling something God never intended for them to handle.

And ask yourself the question, when you have burdens that come into your life, how do you handle them? Do you handle them correctly, biblically, according to God’s word? Or do you find yourself just complaining and trying to escape them in some fashion? How are we to handle the burdens of our life? And I want you to turn, if you will, to Matthew 11 and look at three verses here.

Here is God’s answer, very crystal clear answer to how you and I are to handle the burdens in our life. And if you’ll remember uh this passage, he’s been talking to uh um some folks and telling them go about God’s judgment to cities and so forth. and what’s happening. And then he comes down to verse 28 and here’s what he says.

Listen carefully. Come to me all who are weary and heavy ladened and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I’m gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. You say now wait a minute. I don’t see any answer that it’s here.

Just listen carefully. Now let’s define what we mean by a burden. A burden is a heaviness of the heart, a heaviness of the spirit, a heaviness of the soul, something that weights you down emotionally or mentally or spiritually. You just know that there’s a weight upon you.

And often timesh, you may have felt those things and thought, well, I’m I’m I think I’m getting sick. Not sickness at all. It may be a burden. It may be for something as a result of something you have done. It may be a burden that God has sent. But let’s distinguish between these burdens. For example, there is a God-given burden. In the Old Testament, the burden, for example, you’ll read especially in the King James version, we’ll say the burden of the Lord came to Isaiah or Ezekiel or Jeremiah.