Increase Your Strength

17 July 2025  Matthew 11:28-30

“For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:30

Burdens become lighter in one of two ways – either you reduce the size of the burden, or you increase the strength of the person carrying it.

American adults in recent years have been engaged in a particularly insidious form of child abuse that is challenged by almost no one, but is making children and teens desperately unhappy. According to an Oxford study, the rate of teenage girls reporting persistent sadness, hopelessness, even suicidality jumped from 36% in 2011 (which was already an alarming number) to 57% in 2023 (red-zone high). Those figures have increased in direct proportion to the number of hours spent daily on social media.

You would think that these numbers, and others like them, would be motivation enough for adults to organize and protect children from what is clearly a menace to their well-being. Instead, adults seem to be acting to increase this sick addiction. Social media applications like X, Facebook, Instagram and others are introducing AI bots called “Companions” that talk to kids, and give them advice. If social media is already a kind of crack, “Companions” are fentanyl. Studies indicate that about 72% of teens have accessed Companions already.

The results are, and will increasingly be, catastrophic. Fewer children and teens are experiencing the ups and downs of actual relationships. According to Psychology Today (7 October 2017) the percentage of high school seniors who have ever gone on a date has decreased from 84% in 1990 to 63% in 2016. They don’t forge actual relationships to nearly the same degree as previous generations, and so, predictably, they are less able to form lasting relationships, which has led to cratering rates of marriage and childbirth. The rate of childbirth in the U.S. in 2022 was 1.66 children/woman, far below the rate of 2.1 which is necessary to keep the population what it is. The implications of this for the maintenance of society and culture are staggering, and there is nothing in the way to stop it.

We have told ourselves that social media makes safe spaces and a safe culture. What it has actually created is a weak and fractious space and an unsafe culture full of people too fragile and risk-averse to do anything about it.

Burdens become lighter in one of two ways – either you reduce the size of the burden, or you increase the strength of the person carrying it. The Bible proposes to increase strength: “But those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint” (Isaiah 40:31).

Jesus makes His yoke easy and His burden light not by trimming the yoke or the burden, but by making people stronger, sturdier morally, deeper spiritually and intellectually. To that end, He gives us His own life. Everything that makes Him who He is He gives to us, daily if we want, so that we become the perfect version of ourselves, for the perfect version of ourselves is “Emmanuel, God with us.” When St. Paul said, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20), it was not a metaphor. The reason he could travel 10,000 miles, most of it on foot, building the churches that would outthink, outsmart, outlive and out die the ancient world, churches that would create and save western civilization, was because he was the perfect version of Saul of Tarsus. He was “God with him.”

Burdens become lighter in one of two ways – either you reduce the size of the burden, or you increase the strength of the person carrying it.

“Come to me and I will make you the salt of the earth.” (Matthew 5:13)

“Come to me and I will make you the light of the world.” (Matthew 5:14)

“Come to me and I will make you fishers of men.” (Matthew 4:19)

“Come to me and I will make you my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” (Acts 1:8)

“Come to me and you will be with me in paradise.” (Luke 23:43)

That is strength enough for this world, and the next.