Forget the Yoke, God…I Need a Shock Collar

Don’t get me wrong, I want my yoke…I love my yoke…

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:28-30 ESV

I’m just not very good at wearing it.  I need constant goading, and even that doesn’t seem to do much good.  I’m sure there are real oxen that take well to being yoked, but I haven’t meet many Christians who do.  This one certainly doesn’t.  We just don’t listen well enough…

Ye Royal Oxen by John Gevers, 3 April, 2005

Take a close look at this photo and you might notice a couple of interesting things…I mean, besides the obvious big brown bovines hogging the frame. First, that funny looking wooden contraption running across their necks…that’s a yoke.  The second is harder to pick out, because it’s something that isn’t there…reins.  Oxen are trained to obey the voice commands of their master.  No reins required.  But you do need the yoke if you want your oxen to do more than stand there and chew their cud.  Unyoked people are even more useless…

I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.   John 15:5 ESV 

So you’re probably thinking, ‘Hey, wait a minute…I thought I was an ox, now I’m a branch?  And what’s this got to do with a yoke?’  Okay, I might have got the cart before the ox…so to speak.  The point is, it doesn’t do much good to be yoked if you’re not going to listen to and obey the Master’s commands.  Which is all  well and good as long as you’re not qasheh (Hebrew) or sklerotrachelos (Greek)…which I am.

Translated, both words mean ‘stiff-necked’, a term that appears over a dozen times in the Bible.  The vast majority of those times God Himself uses it to describe the rebellious nation of Israel–His ‘oxen’ that continually fought the yoke.  While I think it’s in all of our natures to be qasheh at times, some of us excel at it so much that our yokes might as well have been left hanging in the barn.  I don’t mean to be qasheh, I really want obey my Master’s voice…I just don’t hear Him well enough most of the time.  That’s where the shock collar comes in. 

I got a new puppy a while back.  Her name is Abby and she brings me great joy.  She’s a good girl; smart, loving, devoted, and mostly obedient–when she remembers to be.  She does fine until a bug, or a bird, or a boy, or a girl, or a…well, you get the point.  When the world distracts her, she stops listening to her master.  And when that happens she tends to get into all kinds of mischief…huh, imagine that.  Frustrated with having to scold her all the time, I decided it was time to consult with an expert.  That day I went with Google over Siri or Alexa, and he had a number of promising suggestions, but the one that really caught my eye was a three-way training collar–and I found it on Amazon for a great price!   

Three days later I traded in yelling for button pushing and I have to tell you, it felt like I was witnessing a small miracle.  Like I said before, it was a three-way collar.  Three buttons, three different effects.  Press button one and you hear a chime (beep) like the sound of the microwave calling you to dinner.  Button two makes the collar vibrate (buzz), what my cellphone does in church when I remember to turn off the ringer.  Button three produces a shock (zap), think cattle prod, but with a lot less juice behind it.  I’m guessing on that last one–I haven’t got up the courage to test it on myself.  But I don’t use it on Abby either–I don’t have to!  

The collar is amazing, the moment Abby hears the beep, she immediately stops what she’s doing and turns to see what I want her to do, then does it–most times anyway.  In rare cases, usually involving children or chaseable objects, she seems to go deaf.  Then it’s time for button number two.  I haven’t had to use it much, but I did the other day.  We were at the park after church and came upon a group of kids playing kickball.  Its was just too great of a temptation for poor Abby.  She instantly transformed into a black and white blur of motion, leaving me in her dust, completely forgotten as she raced off to join in the festivities–I know, she should have been on a leash, but by then I’d become very reliant on the collar. 

BEEP…nothing.  BEEP, BEEP…more nothing.  She was about to plow right into the first unsuspecting kid–and he wasn’t much bigger than Abby, when my thumb mashed down on button number two…BUZZZZZZ.  It was like Abby hit a brick wall.  She slammed on the brakes and whirled around, then came hurdling back toward me so fast I had to jump out of the way to keep from being bowled over.  As I bent down and started praising her for being such a good girl, I found myself thinking that people–me, could really benefit from a little bit of button pushing now and again.  But as I write this, I have to confess…I think we already do.  To illustrate, let me tell you the story of Carol…

I don’t know Carol’s last name, or very much about her at all really–but that’s only because I don’t respond very well to God’s beeps, buzzes or zaps.  Carol wandered into our church one cold wet morning.  Her gray hair was matted from more than just the rain, her clothes were dirty, mismatched and all the wrong size for her emaciated frame, and…she was carrying a car battery (beep).  I reluctantly broke off the conversation I was having and walked over to see why the odd looking old lady was interrupting my nice comfy Sunday routine.

Confession time: you know the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37)?  I readily identify with the first two guys, but the Samaritan himself–I don’t get him at all!  So, when I went over to see what Carol needed, it was only out of a sense of duty.  What I really wanted was to figure out who I could pass her and her troubles off to as quickly as possible.  That shouldn’t have been too hard considering that our church is filled with people who just love bending over backwards to help out other people.  Keeping Carol at emotional arms-length, I quickly found out her name and why she had invaded my space.  It turned out her van had broke down behind the nearest Walmart and she and her dead battery had hitched a ride to the first church she could find looking for help (beep).

Of all the people in church that morning, only two of them lived anywhere near the aforementioned Walmart–the guy talking to Carol and his bend-over-backwards wife.  I blew off the second beep entirely and went over to explain Carol’s situation to one of my ‘car-guy’ buddies.  When I did, God beeped my wife and she leaped up and rushed over to do His bidding.  My car guy friend was sympathetic, but prior commitments kept him from offering more than mechanical advice.  Meanwhile, my wife finished talking with Carol and came over to tell me she was feeling led to help Carol through her trial (buzz).

There proceeded a relentless series of beeps and buzzes, all of them trying to get me on task, while I did everything in my power to ignore them–to pass Carol off to someone else, anyone else, to deal with.  At that point God finally hit button number three.  One of our single moms with a young daughter–and no mechanical experience leaned into her yoke and volunteered to take Carol and her battery back to her van and help her get it running again (zap).  Did I mention that the van was in a bad neighborhood, or that the reason it was broke down was that someone had broke into it and stolen a bunch of things including the original battery (I don’t know where Carol got the one she was lugging around, but I doubted it would even take a charge).  There was no way I could stand by and let that young mom and her daughter wade into something like that–but I did.  

My wife and I followed along behind them in our car, her trying to encourage me that we were doing the right thing, and me still hoping to sidestep what was coming.  Then we got to the van.  Carol’s situation was monumentally more desperate than any of us imaged.  The van looked like something you’d find in a wrecking yard–it would have taken a lot more than a battery to make it roadworthy–I wasn’t even sure it would be safe to drive if we could have gotten it started.  At that point I finally quite kicking against the goads and got busy obeying.  The van was obviously well beyond my ability to fix so I realized it must be Carol herself that God wanted me to focus on.  We thanked the mom and her daughter for all they’d done and they went on their way, then my wife and I took Carol out to lunch. 

At the restaurant we made sure Carol got a warm meal, and we tried the best we could to help her figure out a plan to get the van back on its feet.  But most importantly, we talked with her about God, and how much He loved her.  About the gift of grace that awaited her if she’d just accept it.  We even gave her a Bible–I’d bought it a few days before thinking it was for me, silly since I’d long before switched entirely to electronic versions.  After that we took her to the place she was staying (a mobile home in worse shape than her van), dropping her off while encouraging her to read her new Bible and to call us if the van repair plans fell through.  

I’ve never seen or heard from Carol again.  And that’s just one of thousands of reasons that I’d like a real shock collar.  I felt the yoke across my shoulders the second I looked up and saw Carol standing in the church foyer…long before God really started goading me.  But I was too qasheh to do anything but fight against my easy yoke and the light burden the Lord had set before me.  Surely I’d be better off with an electrified strap around my neck.  One that the Lord could hold the button down on, zapping me until all the fight was burned away?  Just imagine, what if I hadn’t stiffened my neck?  What if I’d embraced my yoke instead…started pulling it forward with all my heart, soul, mind and strength?  If that had happened would Carol just be a nearly forgotten stranger? I think it’s possible–even likely that instead she might have become a cherished friend, a sister in Christ!  I hope and pray that last part is true anyway, that the Lord was faithful in calling others to water and cultivate what my wife and I were privileged to sow.  But…as much as I think I want my collar, I trust that the Lord knows best.  He always does.  And besides, when it really comes down to it, I’m convinced that Carol’s coming into our church that day was no accident…the biggest reason God sent her there wasn’t for me to help her…it was the other way around. 

May your yoke be easy and your burden be light, 

Mike

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *