The Yoke

“Their [some Christians] real feeling is that Christ's service is an iron collar—an insufferably hard yoke. Hence, they work so hard to throw off some of this burden. They try to say that Christ does not require much, if any, self-denial; they say that Christ does not require much, if any, deviation from the course of worldliness and sin. Oh, if they could only get the standard of Christian duty quite down to a level with the fashions and customs of the world! How much easier it would then be to live a Christian lfe and to wear Christ's yoke!

“But Christ's yoke as it really is, in their view, becomes an iron collar. doing the will of Chris, instead of their own, is a hard business for them. Because doing His will is religion, they groan under the idea that they must be religious. Of these people I ask, “How much religion of this kind would it take to make hell?” Surely not much! When it give you no joy to do God's pleasure, and yet you are required to do His pleasure in order to be saved, then you are perpetually forced into doing what you hate as the only means of escaping hell. Would not this be itself a hell? Can you not see that in this state of mind you are not saved and cannot be?”—Charles Finney, God's Call, page 165